John Doerr: Hello, Hal!

Hal Harvey: John, nice to see you.

JD: Nice to see you too.

HH: So John, we've got a big challenge.

We need to get carbon out of the atmosphere.

We need to stop emitting carbon,

drive it to zero by 2050.

And we need to be halfway there by 2030.

Where are we now?

JD: As you know, we're dumping 55 billion tons

of carbon pollution in our precious atmosphere every year,

as if it's some kind of free and open sewer.

To get halfway to zero by 2030,

we're going to have to reduce annual emissions

by about 10 percent a year.

And we've never reduced annual emissions in any year

in the history of the planet.

So let's break this down.

Seventy-five percent of the emissions

come from the 20 largest emitting countries.

And from four sectors of their economy.

The first is grid.

Second, transportation.

The third from the buildings.

And the fourth from industrial activities.

We've got to fix all those, at speed and at scale.

HH: We do.

And matters are in some ways worse than we think and some ways better.

Let me start with the worse.

Climate change is a wicked problem.

And what do I mean by wicked problem?

It means it's a problem that transcends geographic boundaries.

The sources are everywhere, and the impacts are everywhere.

Although obviously some nations have contributed much more than others.

In fact, one of the terrible things about climate change

is those who contributed least to it will be hurt the most.

It's a great inequity machine.

So here we have a problem that you cannot solve

within the national boundaries of one country,

and yet international institutions are notoriously weak.

So that's part of the wicked problem.

The second element of the wicked problem is it transcends normal timescales.

We're used to news day by day,

or quarterly reports for business enterprises,

or an election cycle -- that's about the longest we think anymore of.

Climate change essentially lasts forever.

When you put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,

it's there, or its impacts are there, for 1,000 years.

It's a gift we keep on giving for our children, our grandchildren

and dozens and dozens of generations beyond there.

JD: It sounds like a tax we keep on paying.

HH: Yeah, it is. It is.

You sin once, you pay forever.

And then the third element of it being a wicked problem

is that carbon dioxide is embedded in every aspect of our industrial economy.

Every car, and every truck, and every airplane, and every house,

and every electrical socket, and every industrial processes

now emits carbon dioxide.

JD: So what's the recipe?

HH: Well, here's the shortcut.

If you decarbonize the grid, the electrical grid,

and then run everything on electricity --

decarbonize the grid and electrify everything --

if you do those two things, you have a zero carbon economy.

Now, that would seem like a pipe dream just a few years ago

because it was expensive to create a zero-carbon grid.

But the prices of solar and wind have plummeted.

Solar's now the cheapest form of electricity on planet earth

and wind is second.

It means now that you can convert the grid to zero-carbon rapidly

and save consumers money along the way.

So there's leverage.

JD: Well, I think a key question, Hal, is do we have the technology that we need

to replace fossil fuels to get this job done?

And my answer is no.

I think we're about 70, maybe 80 percent of the way there.

For example, we urgently need a breakthrough in batteries.

Our batteries need to be higher energy density.

They need to have enhanced safety, faster charging.

They need to take less space and less weight,

and above all else, they need to cost a lot less.

In fact, we need new chemistries that don't rely on scarce cobalt.

And we're going to need lots of these batteries.

We desperately need much more research in clean energy technology.

The US invests about 2.5 billion dollars a year.

Do you know how much Americans spend on potato chips?

HH: No.

JD: The answer is 4 billion dollars.

Now, what do you think of that?

HH: Upside down.

But let me press a little further

on a question that's fascinated me about the Silicon Valley.

So the Silicon Valley is governed by Moore's law,

where performance doubles every 18 months.

It's not really a law, it's an observation,

but be that as it may.

The energy world is governed by much more mundane laws,

the laws of thermodynamics, right?

It's physical stuff in the economy.

Cement, trucks, factories, power plants.

JD: Atoms, not bits.

HH: Atoms, not bits. Perfect.

And the transformation of big physical things is slower,

and the margins are worse, and often the commodities are generic.

How do we stimulate the kind of innovation in those worlds

that we actually need in order to save this planet earth?

JD: Well, that's a really great question.

The innovation starts with basic science in research and development.

And the American commitment to that, while advanced on a global sense,

is still paltry.

It needs to be 10 times higher

than the, say, 2.5 billion per year that we spend on clean energy R and D.

But we need to go beyond R and D as well.

There needs to be a kind of development, a kind of pre-commercialization,

which in the US is done by a group called ARPA-E.

Then there's the matter of forming new companies.

HH: Yes.

JD: And I think entrepreneurial energy is shifting back into that field.

It's clear that it takes longer and more capital,

but you can build a really substantial and valuable enterprise or company.

HH: Yes.

JD: Tesla's a prime example. Beyond Meat is another one.

And that's inspiring entrepreneurs globally.

But that's not enough.

I think you need also a demand signal, in the form of policies and purchases,

from nations, like Germany did with solar, to go make these markets happen.

And so I'm, at heart, a capitalist.

I think this energy crisis is the mother of all markets.

And it will take longer.

But the market for electric vehicle batteries -- 500 billion dollars a year.

It's probably another 500 billion dollars if you go to stationary batteries.

I want to tell you another story that involves policy,

but importantly, plans.

Now, Shenzhen is a city of 15 million people,

an innovative city, in China.

And they decided that they were going to move to electric buses.

And so they required all buses be electric.

In fact, they required parking spots have chargers associated with them.

So today, Shenzhen has 18,000 electric buses.

It has 21,000 electric taxis.

And this goodness didn't just happen.

It was the result of a thoughtful, written, five-year plan

that isn't just a kind of campaign promise.

Executing against these plans is how mayors get promoted, or fired.

And so it's really deadly serious.

It has to do with carbon, and it has to do with health, with jobs,

and with overall economic strength.

The bottom line is that China today has 420,000 electric buses.

America has less than 1,000.

So what other national projects are there that you'd like to see?

HH: So this is a global effort,

but not everybody's going to do the same thing,

or should do the same thing.

Let me start with Norway.

A country that happens to be brilliant at offshore oil,

but also understands the consequences of burning more oil.

They realized they could deploy their skills

from their offshore oil development into offshore wind.

It's a big deal to put wind turbines out in the ocean.

The ocean, the winds are much stronger,

and the winds are much more constant, not only stronger.

So it balances the grid beautifully.

But it's really hard to build things in the deep ocean.

Norway's good at it.

So let them take that on.

JD: Are they taking it on?

HH: They are actually.

Yeah. It's pretty brilliant.

Another example: India.

There are hundreds of millions of people in India

that don't have access to electricity.

With the advances in solar and advances in batteries,

there's no reason they have to build the grid

to all those villages that don't have a grid.

Skip the steps.

Skip the dirty steps. Leapfrog to clean.

But this all comes together, in my opinion, in the realm of policy.

We need dramatic accelerants, is what you're saying.

Accelerants in R and D, but also accelerants in deployment.

Deployment is innovation because deployment drives prices down.

The right policy can turn things around,

and we've seen it happen already in the electricity sector.

So electricity regulators have asked for ever cleaner sources of electricity:

more renewables, less coal, less natural gas.

And it's working.

It's working pretty brilliantly, actually.

But it's not enough.

So the German government recognized the possibility

of driving down the price of clean energy.

And so they put in orders on the books.

They agreed to pay an extra price for early phases of solar energy,

presuming the price would drop.

They created the demand signal using policy.

The Chinese created a supply signal, also using policy.

They decided that solar was a strategic part of their future economy.

So you had this unwritten agreement between the two countries,

one buying a lot, the other producing a lot,

that helped drive the price down 80 percent.

We should be doing that with 10 technologies, or a dozen,

around the world.

We need policy as the magic sauce

to go through those four sectors in the biggest countries,

in all countries.

And one of the things that animates me

is that this requires people who are concerned about climate change,

which should be everybody,

those folks have to apply their energies on the policies that matter

with the decision-makers who matter.

If you don't know who the decision-maker is

to decarbonize the grid,

or to produce electric vehicles in the policy world,

you're really not in the game.

JD: Hal, you're an expert in policy.

I know this because I've read your book --

HH: Thanks, John.

JD: Designing Climate Solutions.

What makes for good policy?

HH: There are some secrets here,

and they're really important if we want to solve climate change.

Let me give you two of the secrets.

First, you have to go where the tons are.

JD: Follow the tons.

HH: Follow the tons.

And this is such an obvious idea,

but it's amazing how many policies tinker around the edges.

I call it green paint.

We don't need green paint. We need green substance.

The second thing is when you set a policy, insist on continuous improvement.

So what does that mean?

Back in 1978, Jerry Brown was the youngest governor in California's history,

and he implemented a thermal building code,

which means when you build a building, it has to have insulation in it.

Pretty simple idea.

But he put a trick into that law.

He said every three years, the code gets tighter, and tighter, and tighter.

And how do you know how much tighter?

Anything that pays for itself in energy savings gets thrown into the code.

So in the intervening years, we got better insulation,