Jeremy Grantham: commitment

Transcript context

…Nuclear fusion — will it work? I rather suspect it will. There are about 30 or so new second-generation fusion. I think there’s some chance that the big bureaucratic fusion efforts will work — maybe one in four — that they’ll be commercial, some chance anyway, but I think there’s a bigger chance than that that one or more of the 30 newbies, where they’re basing their research on brilliant new ideas. The original establishment is a bit like the Concorde. You’re building on a technology that very quickly is 30 years out of date, which is a huge handicap. The new second generation are availing themselves of math and science of all kinds that has progressed. I suspect that one or more of them will work. I would say, better than 50/50, that we will indeed have — from an engineering point of view and science point of view — successful fusion. There is a pretty decent risk that it will not be economic, that we will have had major breakthroughs in storage and that the marginal cost of wind and solar will continue to fall towards zero, so that it simply will not be necessary. But it may well be necessary, and it’s, in any case, imperative — given the risks involved here — that we try everything, including perhaps old-fashioned nuclear. More general forms of geothermal energy — will they work?…

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