A Tale of Two Nanettes

The device is a unit of time. His grandmother Nanette Stearns Katz, called Nancy, lived over ninety years, which he names One Nanette, and her life spanned the great majority of all carbon dioxide humans have ever emitted. He is emphatic that the emissions bought something real. Her parents arrived as poor immigrants by boat, and by the end of her life she flew to visit grandchildren while far more of the world was starting to live as she had. So the transition cannot assume that demand for the good things energy provides will shrink; it should assume the opposite, and he offers projected growth in cooling demand alone as the example. His daughter Eliza Nanette, called Nuni, gets the mirror image of that curve, and a steeper one, which is what puts a date on everything that follows: by the time she is an adult we will know whether this worked, and to be safe civilization should be carbon negative for most of her life.

The consequence he draws is about technology development rather than about emissions. Anything now in a university lab or a garage has to be ready for global rollout by roughly the time Nuni leaves home, which means crossing two valleys of death in record time. The first is technical, proving the science and engineering to the point of a demonstrable product. The second, which he considers the harder, is commercial: technology that works well enough but never enters the flywheel of deployment, validation and manufacturing scale that produces competitiveness and bankability. Solar is his warning about how long a good idea can sit on the shelf, with the physics established before Nancy was born and the first cell built when she was already a young mother. Fracking is his counterexample, an energy technology that reached mass adoption at the speed of a consumer product, with wind not far behind it.

Most of the piece then walks the clocks that bind. Transmission is the slowest link, both in the years one project takes and in the gap between the build rate that least-cost net-zero scenarios call for and the rate the country is on track for. If transmission falls short then renewables almost certainly fall short, so at least one more zero-carbon primary energy source is required; nuclear is the usual candidate, and the American construction record is against it. He is pointed that this is self-inflicted rather than intrinsic, since other countries that kept building have held timelines and costs near the American experience of the 1960s, and attributes the difference to an onerous regulatory regime grown out of unusually negative public sentiment. Electric vehicles bring a materials clock, with copper the constraint he picks, and coal brings a retrospective one: much of the world’s coal fleet is young, largely Chinese and Indian, and will run for decades unless it is retrofitted or replaced.

From the clocks he derives three priorities, the ones he credits for fracking’s and wind’s speed: adapt proven technology rather than starting from scratch, find no-brainer value propositions, and prioritize dropping into infrastructure that already exists. The mantra is that easy and fast beats best. He then concedes that this cannot be the whole answer, because some problems on the road to net zero have no easy and fast solution and rely on technology that would otherwise take decades or centuries. That is what makes his closing question the real one: how do you compress decades into years? His answer is historical precedent, Florence and the American founding and the Manhattan project and the space race, followed by a list of the ingredients such periods share. Assembling the list is what convinced him, by his own account, that the ingredients are all present now and a climate tech renaissance is already running. The part he leaves unresolved is the commercial valley, which he says venture capital is poorly suited to crossing; whether it gets crossed depends on infrastructure investors, owners, operators and large energy buyers, and he ends with a challenge to that audience to be prudently and responsibly bold, and to fail fast enough to learn.