Stopping the Climate Crisis: Doerr Calls for “Speed & Scale”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, next, we explore the role of green innovation and the fight against climate change. John Doerr is a key figure of Silicon Valley’s Clean Tech movement, investing in start-ups at the forefront of this revolution. The “New York Times” bestselling author has just a new book called “Speed & Scale: Comprehensive Plan to Achieve Net Zero by 2050.” Walter Isaacson spoke with Doerr to understand one of the most vexing challenges in human history.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Bianna. And, John Doerr, welcome to the show.

JOHN DOERR, AUTHOR, “SPEED & SCALE”: Well, thank you, Walter. It’s a privilege to be here.

ISAACSON: You say that the young shall lead us. And there’s a wonderful tale in the book about how your daughter inspired you to write this book. Tell me about that.

DOERR: This all started for me in 2006 when my family and friends went to see Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” We returned back home for dinner and I asked everyone what they thought. When the conversation turned to my daughter, Mary, she said, dad, I’m scared and I’m angry. Your generation created this problem. You better fix it. And, Walter, I didn’t know what to say. So, I set out to learn as much as I could about the climate crisis, to work in that field, to invest from several funds, a total of a billion dollars and 70 ventures. And it was rough going. It was really hard to build companies that would have impact. And at one point, it looked like we’d lose all those investments that they’d all fail. But we stood by the entrepreneurs. And today, those investments, that billion dollars is worth $3 billion. And more importantly, it’s led to companies that are really pioneering things like smart grids or plant-based meat like beyond meat. And it’s stimulated a lot more innovative and entrepreneurial activity. So, I wrote this book for the leader inside people of all walks of life.

ISAACSON: You wrote a wonderful book a few years ago called “Measure What Matters.” In which you took a great sort of algorithm that (INAUDIBLE) pad called OKR, Objective and Key Results. Tell me about that and how you’ve applied it now to climate?

DOERR: Our speed and scale action plan to solve the climate crisis contains 10 objectives backed up, each of them, by three to five key results. And the top objective is to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. So, there’s three numbers to bear in mind there. We currently emit 59 gigatons of greenhouse gases every year into our atmosphere as if it’s some kind of free and open sewer. We’ve got to get number down to net zero so that we emit no more carbon than what we’re able to remove. And then, finally, we’ve got to do this quickly. We’re fast running out of time. We’ve got to get that job done by 2050. And even more urgently, we’ve got to remove half of the emissions by the end of this decade, by 2030. That’s the heart of the objectives.

ISAACSON: So, on the wonderful poster who have with the book on how you’re going to achieve these objectives. The first one is to electrify transport. Explain that to me.

DOERR: Well, simply, electrified transport means drive our vehicles, power our vehicles. Our cars, our buses, our trucks with electricity instead of with gas and with diesel oil. That’s the largest source of emissions in the U.S. transportation.

ISAACSON: And you talked to Mary Barra who is the head of General Motors. She’s one of the heroes in your book. You’ve interviewed her. Tell me how she’s pursuing that and what you learned from her.

DOERR: Well, what I learned from her is that she’s determined to end the production of internal combustion vehicles at General Motors and replace them with all electric vehicles. So, that’s a very bold pledge. She also is keen to do this not for the second car in someone’s home but for their primary transportation. So, she’s a leader who’s very much in touch with both the speed and the scale by which this change must occur.

ISAACSON: Well, the electrical vehicles are going to help save us. We have to be able to plug them in and not using dirty energy fueling our electricity grid. So, how — I think your next step is figuring out how we’re going to make the grid cleaner, right?

DOERR: Decarbonizing the grid is the largest opportunity for the globe. And there’s some 29 gigatons used in generating electricity today. We need to really drive that to nearly zero and the speed and scale plan will do that. That simply means we’re going to replace coal and natural with wind, solar and safe nuclear.

ISAACSON: And don’t you need batteries to make that work?

DOERR: We need a lot of batteries. Actually, we’re going to need not only batteries, but other means of long-term inexpensive storage because solar and wind won’t not work when sun not shining and the wind’s not blowing.

ISAACSON: So, what’s the next step after decarbonizing the grid in your plan?

DOERR: The next big step, the third big objection, Walter, is to fix our food systems. And there are three major steps to achieve that. The first is to eat less beef and dairy. And I don’t mean cut it all out, but voluntarily eat plant-based proteins for perhaps half of our consumption of dairy and meat. Parenthetically, the production of meat and dairy from cows is an enormous source of greenhouse gas emissions if — I write in the book, if the cows on the earth were a country, they’d be, all billion of them, the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases. But we can do more than just shift from meat and dairy to plant-based proteins. We can also get after food waste. 30 percent of the food on the planet is wasted and our plan calls for that number to be reduced to some 10 percent. Very important as the world’s demand for food grows. Finally, we use nitrous oxide as a key ingredient. Well, that’s a gas emitted from our use of nitrogen as a fertilizer. And so, the plan calls us to be smarter about that, to be more efficient in the way we grow our food. There’s about eight gigatons of savings available from that objective.

ISAACSON: If we’re going to decarbonize the grid, it’s going to mean working with utility companies in the United States? Do you think the utility company model in the U.S. is fundamentally flawed?

DOERR: I don’t think the U.S. utility model is fundamentally flawed. Our utilities tend to be state-regulated or in some cases, state-owned enterprises, and they respond very finely to what their public utility commissions ask them to do. We’ve been sending the wrong signals to these utilities. But I think the greater flaw for the U.S. and decarbonizing the grid is, in fact, in the grid, it’s the transmission wires. It’s the fragile out of date way that we move renewable energy from sources like in the middle of the country to the edges of the country where it’s needed.

ISAACSON: You’re pretty good friends with Bill Gates. You’ve worked with him. He’s in your book. And he’s helping to create something called terra power which uses nuclear energy, new types of nuclear power plants. Do you think that’s important in getting to carbon reduction?

DOERR: It’s very important. And terra power is a next generation nuclear fission power plant. And the importance of nuclear is it is the only technology that’s been proven at scale to deliver clean electricity 7 by 24 no matter what the weather is and it can be located anywhere around the world. So, we’ve starved the nuclear industry until now for research and development. Bill’s been a very dedicated and determined investor. And with the latest rounds of federal activity, we’re going to see and we need nuclear to be part of our solution.

ISAACSON: But isn’t there a legitimate concern about the safety of nuclear after the three-mile island and other incidents?

DOERR: There are certainly concerns about the safety of nuclear, but the data says otherwise. In fact, nuclear is safer than coal and other fossil fuel-based forms of electricity.

ISAACSON: You’ve been great at finding new forms of technology throughout your career as a venture capitalist. Do you think we can engineer our way out of this with our new types of technology that will actually capture carbon in a fast enough rate that we can say, all right, we can now focus on just fixing this directly with carbon capture?

DOERR: Yes and no, Walter. We’re going to need both to deploy a lot more of the now, the solutions we have today that we know work, and also, invent like crazy new solutions to stubborn problems. What do I mean by this? We have now solar and wind energy that’s cheaper than fossil fuel energy. And so, we should be deploying that around the world like our lives depended on it because they do. But there will remain in our plan of the 59 gigatons some 10 gigatons of I call stubborn carbon. These are emissions that will be due to long distance air travel, for example, or rogue nations. And so, to have a plan to really works, we’re going to need to do carbon removal. The plan calls for 10 gigatons per year of carbon removal. Half of that coming from natural means like planting more trees or growing kelp forests in the seas and another half from what I’ll same mechanical trees or it’s known as direct air capture where you can have large fans and chemical systems that use clean energy to pull this dilute carbon out of the air and sequester it to pump it underground. Today, this costs about $700 a ton, Walter. And we need to drive the cost of that down to $100 a ton or less, and that will not be easy to do.

ISAACSON: You have a lot of famous people in the book you’ve talked to. One of them is Jeff Bezos. You’re an early investor in Amazon. He’s really been talking about an environmental cause now. But Amazon’s carbon footprint went up 20 percent last year. Is he really walking the walk as well as talking the talk?

DOERR: Yes, he is. And let me tell you three ways in which I think he’s doing that. First of all, he’s committed Amazon and its supply chain by net zero by 2040. That’s 10 years ahead of Paris. For an organization large and complex as Amazon, that’s incredible. One example of what he’s doing there is the Rivian electric truck company where Amazon owns 20 percent of it and has ordered 100,000 of their trucks. That company recently completed an initial public offering raising billions of dollars of more capital. So, it can make and deliver these trucks. But two big efforts under way, thanks to Jeff Bezos, is Amazon understands they can’t do this on their own. So, they’ve rallied more than 200 companies together to something called the Climate Pledge, which is to get to net zero by 2040.

ISAACSON: A lot of companies, a lot of people use carbon offset. In other words, when they emit carbon, they say, OK, but I’m going to buy an offset that will somehow or another to make up for that. And sometimes that involves maybe planting trees or doing things. I’ve heard a lot of people say a lot of those are just fraud almost, that they really are not going to do anything.

DOERR: Like a green wash.

ISAACSON: Yes, green washing. Tell me, are these carbon offsets for real or is it a lot of green washing?

DOERR: Some of them are for real and some of them are green washing. And so, it’s very important that these offsets be high quality. That means that they be truly additional, they wouldn’t happen without funding. That they’d be durable. That they’d be long-lasting. And then, that they’d be monitored. That they’d be measured along the way. And so, what I’d like to say, as a rubric to take a step back is, the most important thing we must do is slash emissions. Make real measurable cuts. And at the same time, conserve. Don’t waste energy. Don’t use any more energy than we need to. Amory Lovins is a brilliant advocate for reducing our energy demands. In fact, if the rest of the United States performed as California has, our energy emissions would be 25 percent lower. The third thing though is to do high quality removal of carbon through offsets. We’ve got to do all three at once.

ISAACSON: In the year 2007, you warned us, we weren’t going fast enough. It’s now 14 years later and you’re still making that same warning. You talk about leadership. Do we have a real dearth of leadership in our generation, John?

DOERR: We do have a death of leadership. And the leadership is most stressed and challenged among our policy makers. I think the political leaders are not going to get very far ahead of the bodied politic. In the U.S., if I can speak there for a moment, climate is still not a top two voting issue. And so, the plan calls for the climate crisis to be that top two voting issue in all top 20 emitting countries around the world by 2025. That’s a measure of a key result. We’ve got to ask this question, Walter. We’ve witnessed wildfires and hurricanes and devastating storms and drought and climate migrants. There’s some 10 million climate refugees today. In China, the floods already this year have cost $30 billion. In Europe, $35 billion. Hurricane Ida in the U.S., $100 billion of estimated damages. How much more devastation are we going to have to endure before we realize it’s cheaper to save this planet than to ruin it? That’s the question.

ISAACSON: John Doerr, thank you so much for being with us.

DOERR: Thank you, Walter.