Speaker unverified: recommendation

Transcript context

…bon jet fuel and then you can fly as much as you want in a closed system that is not emitting net new carbon. Yeah, I mean would you disagree that flying is awesome? No, but I'm probably not unbiased. Yeah. One school of thought here would hold that flying aircraft accounts for about 2% of emissions and it's almost all relatively wealthy people who are doing it. And therefore it's like this moral valence to it in that we're screwing up the planet on behalf of the 10 million richest people on earth. And so what we should do in order to disincentivize this behavior is tax aviation fuel and then feed the money into something to try and solve that social problem. And that will make aviation more expensive and less accessible. That's actually super regressive because people like you and I will still be able to afford to fly. We're not super price sensitive when it comes to flying United, but actually it's the people on the margin who could… It makes a difference between them flying, say once in their life and five times in their life. It makes a big difference to have access to those opportunities and those privileges. So my radical point of view is, I want to find ways to make aviation fuel cheaper and to build hypersonic magnesium aircraft that use liquified natural gas as their fuel and go much faster. And I want to expand the access to this privilege to everyone, not just the 10 or 15 million richest people on earth. If you say you want to avoid carbon emitting use cases, and so you want to avoid having carbon emitting flights or carbon emitting cars, there are two ways we can achieve that. One is we substitute a lot of internal combustion cars with battery-powered cars. And that's one way where you just stop—you eliminate the hydrocarbons altogether, or you could start using zero-carbon, zero net new carbon— Synthetics. Yeah, exactly. Synthetic fuels. Where do you think the world goes? Which things go towards electrification and just removing the hydrocarbons altogether and which things do we go to using clean hydrocarbons? Yeah, I mean I have opinions on this. At the end of the day, the market will decide. Sure, but what are your predictions? My predictions? You watch this market. Electric cars are really great and that— We just had RJ from Rivian and it's a great product. Yeah, exactly. And that over time we will see more other successful, hopefully Western, electric car manufacturers that can compete with Tesla, and Tesla can continue to grow its market share and so on. And it would not surprise me if when we are like crusty old men sitting here, let's say in our late eighties, that pretty much all the cars and all the trucks were electric, all the ground-based transport was electric. But at the same time, wouldn't it be amazing if aviation by that point had grown by 20x or 50x and so instead of 50 million people flying planes more or less, occasionally it was 500 million or a billion people flying planes, getting to fly in planes. And just that by itself would more than use all the oil that humanity currently uses. So I think the really energy-intense, high-speed transportation stuff will stay fuel. Rockets, obviously, will stay fuel. t that by itself would more than use all the oil that humanity currently uses. So I think the really energy-intense, high-speed transportation stuff will stay fuel. Rockets, obviously, will stay fuel. Yeah, to give people an intuition for this. Isn't it the case that versus current battery chemistry, jet fuel I think is two orders of magnitude—it's 100x more energy-dense by unit weight than batteries. And so it could be a while before you could build the battery power of 777. At the end of the day, we have a planet that has a certain size and a certain gravity, and if you want to fly from one side to the other, then you have to go 20,000 miles. That's actually a little far. 10,000 miles. 10,000 miles. If you think like, well, what could a battery chemistry look like that would have the energy density comparable to LNG? It's 55 megajoules a kilogram. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I would be surprised. I would be very surprised if that occurred. That said, I would not be surprised to see some really high-performance, electric-powered aviation in the future, particularly power densities are great. So you can do I think potentially much cheaper, much more safe electric VTOL. Yeah, there's clearly a bunch of exciting stuff. Short range, supersonic— Beta, Joby, all these guys. Yeah, exactly. But sorry, you're going back to dividing up the world. So you think big aircraft stay on hydrocarbons aircraft— Fast aircraft, big aircraft, long-range aircraft—hydrocarbons. Probably long-range shipping would stay that way. LNG, it's just so cheap. It's going to stay that way for a long time. Paints are going to stay hydrocarbon-based. Chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, all that stuff. Plastics. Industrial gas turbines are really backlogged right now. I think people don't realize this, but one of the easiest ways to bring new power online, if you're building an AI data center for example, is you get an industrial gas turbine, which is basically pretty similar to a jet engine. In your vision of the world, shouldn’t those data centers be powered by solar arrays and batteries? That isn't happening yet, to the best of my knowledge. Why not? It is a very small scale, but I think we're just at the beginning stages of the market working this puzzle out. It doesn't happen instantaneously. So it seemed pretty clear to me, I think two years ago—I've got a blog post on this—that we're going to have to go to solar and batteries for AI data centers at scale. And back then everyone was still talking about building SMRs. And I love SMRs as much as the next guy. I used to teach nuclear physics. Small nuclear reactors. Of course, they're great for submarines. But you and I talked about this years and years ago, like, okay, what's it going to take to get a hundred gigawatts of SMRs up and running? It's not going to happen overnight. re great for submarines. But you and I talked about this years and years ago, like, okay, what's it going to take to get a hundred gigawatts of SMRs up and running? It's not going to happen overnight. And we're getting into the thrust of the—as I think about “the Casey worldview.” You're a solar maximalist and you think that people have not internalized the cost improvements and the learning rate of solar enough and realized just how radically different the world will be as a result. And you're building Terraform as one bet on this, but you think just more broadly speaking, people should fully update their worldviews that solar is going to beat out everything. And then you're also a techno-hardware optimist that you think we should just be doing more hard things. We should be willing to make improvements. People should start hardware companies. Is that a good summary of your worldview? Well, I mean people in general maybe shouldn't start hardware companies. It's kind of cursed in a way. But if you have the right skillset and the right mindset and you're determined to just do the most ambitious thing you could possibly achieve, you should do it. Henry Kaiser could have had a grand career doing road building for his whole career, but he saw an opportunity and he saw that the American West needed water and he's like, “I should be part of this.” It didn't take Einstein to figure that out. What is the rate of panel cost, of solar cost improvement? It's like 40-something percent per doubling of production and currently production's doubling roughly every two years. So you could say 20% a year. That's the panel by itself, right? That's not necessarily the cost that you end up seeing at the wall. Right, and that's the objection people make to this line of argumentation. They say, panels are a pretty small component of the overall installed costs, and so costs are not improving that quickly anymore. So that’s true, but what tends to happen is the fundamental commodity at the base of your tech stack like de-costs and then other things kind of fall in behind it. So it is, for example, the case that the cost per transistor for a computer chip has fallen astonishingly quickly over time, and yet a Microsoft Windows license will still cost you a hundred bucks. Why is that the case? And it's true that actually Windows has gotten cheaper over time, especially when taking into account inflation, but it hasn't tracked the same cost curve. And that's the same sort of thing you're seeing here. But if you're able to build systems that sit on top of the fundamental technology with fewer intermediating layers, then you can take advantage of those cost savings. And then essentially you're trading the headaches of integrating with the raw technology and then pass those savings onto your customers. That's absolutely essential for synthetic fuels. There's no two ways about it. You cannot run synthetic fuels unless you have the cheapest possible electricity you can get.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.