Name: How to decarbonize the grid and electrify everything | John Doerr and Hal Harvey
Uploaded: 2020-11-20T18:10:20.000Z
Duration: 20 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transcriber: TED Translators Admin Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs

We need to get carbon out of the atmosphere.

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.

we're going to have to reduce annual emissions

And we've never reduced annual emissions in any year

come from the 20 largest emitting countries.

And the fourth from industrial activities.

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

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

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.

So here we have a problem that you cannot solve

within the national boundaries of one country,

and yet international institutions are notoriously weak.

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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?

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,

The energy world is governed by much more mundane laws,

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How to decarbonize the grid and electrify everything | John Doerr and Hal Harvey

individual

commitment

realize

climate