Thank you very much
When I was a boy, My parents sometimes
would take me camping in California.
We would camp in the beaches,
in the forests, in the deserts.
some people think that deserts are
empty of life.
But my parents taught me to see
the wild life all around us,
The hawks, the eagles, the tortoises.
One time when we were staying up at camp,
We found a baby scorpion with its sting around,
And I remember thinking how cool it was
that something could be both so cute
and also so dangerous.
After college, I moved to California,
And I started working on a number of
environmental campaigns.
I got involved in hoping to save
the state's last ancient redwood forest.
And blocking a proposed radioactive waste
repository set for the desert.
And surely after I turned 30,
I decided that I wanted to dedicate
a significant amount of life to solving
climate change.
I was worried that global warming would
end up destroying many of the natural
environments that people had worked
so hard to protect.
I thought the technical solution were
pretty straight forward,
solar panels on every roof,
electric cars in the drive way,
that the main obstacles were political.
And so I hoped to organize a coalition
of the countries biggest labor unions
and biggest environmental groups.
Our proposal was for a 300 billion dollar
in renewables.
And the idea was not only we would prevent
climate change but, we would also create
millions of new jobs in a very fast
growing high tech sector.
Our efforts really paid off in 2007,
when then presidential candidate
Barack Obama embraced our vision.
And between 2009 and 2015,
the US invested a 150 billion dollars
in renewables and other kinds of clean tac.
But right away, we started to encounter
some problems.
So first of all, the electricity from
solar roof tops in some costs about twice
as much as the electricity from solar farms.
And both solar farms and wind farms
require a cover of pretty significant
amount of land with
solar panels and wind turbines,
And also building very big transmission lines
to bring all that electricity from the
country side into the city.
Both of those things were often very
strongly resisted by local communities,
as well as by conservation biologists who
were concerned about the impacts on
wild birds species and other animals.
Now, there was a lot of other people
working on technical solutions at the time
One of the big challenges of course is
just the intermediacy of solar and wind.
They only generate electricity about
10 - 30 % of the time during most of the year
But, Some of the solutions that were
being proposed were to convert hydroelectric
dams into gigantic batteries.
The idea was that when the sun was shining
and the wind was blowing, you would pump
the water uphill, stored for later and
then when you needed electricity you run
it over the turbines.
In terms of wild life, some of these
problems just didn't seem like
a significant concern.
So, when I learned that house cats
killed billions of birds every year.
it put into perspective that hundreds of
thousands of birds that are rather killed
by wind turbines.
Basically seemed to me at the time that
most if not all of the problems of
scaling up solar and wind could be solved
through more technological innovation.
But as the years went by, these problems
persisted, and in many cases grew worse.
So, California is a state that is really
committed to renewable energy.
But we still haven't converted many of our
hydroelectric dams into big batteries.
Some of the problems are just geographic,
It is just, you have to have a very
particular kind of formation to build
and do that.
And even in those cases, it's quite
expensive to make those conversions.
Other challenges are just that, there is
other uses for water like irrigation,
And maybe this is the most significant
problem is just that, In California,
The water in our rivers and reservoirs
is growing increasingly scarce and
unreliable due to climate change.
In term of the situation of reliability,
As a consequence of it, we have actually
had to stop the electricity coming from
the solar farms into the cities because
there are just have been too much of it
at times, or, We have been starting to
pay out neighboring states as Arizona to
take that solar electricity, The
alternative is to suffer from blowouts of
the grid.
And in turns out that,
when it comes to birds and cats,
Cats don't kill eagles, Eagles kill cats.
What cats kill are the small common
sparrows and jays and robins,
Birds that are not endangered and not at
risk of going to extinct.
What do kill eagles and another big birds
like the skite, as well as owls, and condors.
And other threatened endangered species
are wind turbines.
In fact, they are one of the most
significant threats to those big birds
species that we have.
We just haven't been introducing the air
space with many other objects like we have
wind turbines over the last several years.
And in terms of solar, you know,
building a solar farm is not like building
any other kind of farm, you have to clear
the whole area of wild life.
so, this is a picture of one third of
one of the biggest solar farms in
California called ivanpah.
In order to build this, they had to clear
the whole area of desert tortoises.
literally, pulling desert tortoises and
their babies out of borrows,
putting them on the back of pickup trucks
and transporting them to captivity where
many of them ended up dying.
And currently, the current estimates are
that about 6 thousand birds are
killed every year.
Actually, catching on fire above the
solar farms and bulging to their death.
Over time, it gradually struck me that,
there was really no amount of technological
innovation that was gonna make the sun
shine more regularly or wind blow more
reliably.
In fact, you could make solar panel
cheaper, you can make wind turbines bigger
But, sunlight and wind are just really
dilute fuels, and in order to produce
significant amount of electricity,
you just have to cover a very large land
mass with them.
In other words, all of the major problems
with renewables aren't technical,
They are natural.
Well, dealing with all of this unreliability
and the big environmental impacts obviously
comes that a pretty high economic cost.
You know, we have been hearing a lot
about how solar panels and wind turbines
have come down in cost in recent years.
But that cost has been significantly
out waid by just the challenges of
immigrating all of that unreliable power
on to the grid.
Just take fringe since what happened
in California.
At the period in which solar panels have
come down in price very significantly
and same with the wind.
We have seen our electricity crisis go up
5 times more than the rest of the country
and it is not unique to us.
You can see the same phenomenon
happen in Germany.
Which is really the world's leader in
solar, wind and other renewable technologies
their price has increased 50 percent
during their big renewable energy push.
Now,You might think.. well
dealing with climate changes just gonna
require that we all pay more for energy,
That's what I used to think.
But, consider the case of France,
France actually gets twice as much if its
electricity from clean zero emissions
sources than does Germany.
And yet, France pays half as much..
almost half as much for its electricity.
How can that be?
We might have already anticipated the
answer, France gets most of its electricity
from nuclear power, That's 75 percent
in total, and nuclear just ends up being
a lot more reliable, generating power,
24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
for about 90% of the year.
We see this phenomenon
show up at global level.
So, for example, there has been a natural
experiment over the last 40 years,
or even more than that.
And in terms of the deployment of nuclear
and the deployment of solar,
You can see that, at a little bit higher
cost, we got about half as much electricity
from solar and wind than we
did from nuclear.
Well, What does all this
mean for going forward.
I think one of the most significant
findings today is this one.
Had Germany spend 580 billion dollars
on nuclear instead of renewables?
It would already be getting a 100% of its
electricity from clean energy sources and
all of its transportation energy.
Now I think, you might be wondering and
it is quite reasonable to ask,
Is nuclear power safe?
And what do you do with the waste?
Well those are very reasonable questions,
Turns out that there has been scientific
studies of this going for over 40 years.
This is just the most recent study that
was done by the prestigious british
medical journal and says find the nuclear
power is the safest.
It is easy to understand why, according
to the world's health organization,
About 7 million people die annually
from air pollution and nuclear
plants don't emit that.
As a result, the climate scientist
James Hansen looked out and he calculated
that nuclear power has already saved
almost 2 million lives today.
Turns out that even wind energy is
more deadly than nucleur.
This is a photograph taken of two
workers in the Netherlands.
shortly before one of them fell to
his death to avoid the fire.
And the other one was engulfed in flames.
Now, what about environmental inmpact?
Well, I think a really easy way to think
about it is that uranium fuel which is
what we use to power nuclear plants
is just really energy dense.
About the same amount of uranium as this
Rubik's cube can power all of the energy
that you need in your entire life.
As a consequence, you just don't need that
much land in order to produce the
significant amount of electricity.
Here we can compare the solar farm I just
described ivanpah to California's last
nuclear plant diablo canyon.
It takes 450 times more land to generate
the same amount of electricity as
it does from nuclear.
You would need 17 more solar farms like
ivanpah in order to generate the same
output as diablo canyon and of course,
it would then be unreliable.
Well, what about the mining and the waste
and the materials that you put?
Well, this has been studied pretty closely
as well and it just turns out that
solar requires 17 times more materials
than nuclear plants do.
In the form of cement, glass, concrete,
steel and that includes all the fuel used
for those nuclear plants.
The consequences that what comes out at
the end, since that materials through put
is just not a lot of waste from nuclear.
All of the waste from the Swiss nuclear
program fits into this room.
Nuclear waste is actually the only waste
from electricity production that safely
contained and internalized.
Every other way of making electricity emits
the waste into the natural environment
either as pollution or as material waste.
We tend to think of solar panels as clean,
but the truth is that there is no plan to
deal with solar panels at the end of their
20 or 25 year life.
A lot of experts are very concerned that
solar panels are just gonna be shipped to
Poor countries in Africa or Asia with the
rest of our electronic wastes frame to be
disassembled often exposing people to
really high levels of toxic elements
including lead, cadmium and chromium.
Elements that...
Because these elements their toxicity
never declines over time.
I think we have an intuitive sense nuclear
is a really powerful strong energy source
and that sunlight is really dilute and
diffuse and weak which is why you have to
spread solar collectors and wind collectors
over such a large amount of land.
Maybe that's why nobody was surprised when
in the recent science fiction remake of
blade runner, the film opens a very dark
dystopian scene where California deserts
have been entirely paved with solar farms.
All of which I think raises a really
uncomfortable question.
In the effort to try to save the climate,
are we destroying the environment?
Well, the interesting thing is that over
the last several hundred years, human
beings been actually trying to move away
from what you considered matter- dense fuels
towards energy- dense ones.
That means really from wood towards coal,
oil, natural gas and uranium.
This is a phenomenon that has been going
on for a long time.
poor countries around the world are in the
process and still are moving away from wood
as their primary energies.
And for the most part, this is a positive thing
as you stop using wood as your major
source of fuel.
It allows the forest to grow back, and
the wild life to return.
As you stop burning wood in your home,
you no longer need to breathe that toxic smoke
And as you go from coal to natural gas
and uranium as your main sources of energy
it holds up the possibility of basically
eliminating air pollution all together.
There is just this problem with nuclear it
has been very popular to move from dirtier
to cleaner energy sources from energy
diffuse to energy dense sources.
Nuclear is just really unpopular for a
bunch of historical reasons.
and as a consequence, in the past I
and I think of a lot of others have sort
of said well, in order to deal with
climate change, we are just gonna need
all of the different kinds of clean energy
that we have.
the problem is that is just turns out not
to be true, you remember I discussed
France a little bit ago, France gets most
of its electricity from nuclear.
if France were to try the significantly
scale of solar and wind, it would also
have to significantly reduce how much
electricity it gets from nuclear.
that's because an order to handle the huge
very ability of solar and wind on the grid
they would need to burn more natural gas.
think of it this way, it is just really
hard to ramp up and down a nuclear plant
they were all pretty familiar with turning
the natural gas up and down on our stove
a similar process works in managing the
grid. of course, cause without saying that
oil and gas companies understand this
pretty well which is why we have seen them
invest millions of dollars in recent years
in promoting solar and wind.