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I am going to do something that is dumb and try to add nuance to a twitter debate. This is surely going to fail but hey it's been a hell of a week for me so might as well get it all out. 1/godknows https://twitter.com/BenFranta/status/1339468764530634757
I used to work at Princeton with this team. I liked it there very much, and I was treated very well by the energy group there. I learned a lot from them. I know most of the authors of the report very well. I know they are honest, smart & have the courage of their convictions. 2/n
I agree with @BenFranta that this needs to be carefully and critically read. I wish it wasn't 350 pages of PPT (I find it hard to extract narrative from this form), and I have trouble parsing the summary, but if I wanted to have input I shouldn't have left Princeton. My bad. 3/n
I went to Princeton to work on storage on the grid with the asymptotic goal of not "net emissions free" but "no emissions periodt." I was allowed, encouraged and ultimately tenured to pursue this and the resources provided to do it were awesome. 4/n
But I had vigorous and productive debates with a some of the authors of this work (and their peers at the time) that had very different experiences that led them to think that non-fuel technologies wouldn't move fast enough to have the required impact. 5/n
The biggest problem IMHO with hydrocarbons is that despite the massive environmental and social costs there are just very, very, very good at what they do. Smil and MacKay made this point more eloquently than I ever could. 6/n
One of the collaborators of the Princeton folks (not associated with the document) is Stephen Wilson, taught me his Trilemma framework. https://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/18450 Oversimplifying, all energy policy has to consider cost, security and environmental impact. 7/n
IIRC, Wilson taught me that that the balance in the trilemma isn't static, but rather it can be thrown into chaos if policy swings too vigorously between the vertices. 8/n
Knowing these researchers, reading this report, the experience in the oil/gas world and the dedication to _smooth_ transitions seems to be an underlying theme. The number of pages spent on syn-type fuels tracks with the strong research this team has executed over _decades_. 9/n
This team has worked _tirelessly_ to get the oil/gas majors to recognize and accept climate change. I learned a ton from them on how to have hairy conversations with people that world rather not hear what you want to say. 10/n
Do I want this report to have a more aggressive technology perspective? Yes. Do I wish they spilled more ink on efforts that had fewer tailpipes and more heat sinks? Absolutely. One of my priors is that thermal entropy is better to deal with than mass entropy. 11/n
But it's with that lens that (I think) this report should be read. It paints a picture that assumes non-fuel pathways will be harder. They will be. But I think this is a JFK moment for Biden and for us, and I think we should be more aggressive. 12/n
So I agree 100% that this report needs to be read carefully and critically, and its assumptions questioned, and I know the authors well enough that they would love nothing more than to debate the details. This is not dogma, it is an opening 13/n
And if in parsing this document directly, and between the lines, we find a pathway to _even fewer_ fuel loops, then it has served a great purpose. So read it carefully. Question its priors. But _engage_ with its authors. Don't end and dismiss. They want a better world. n/n
