Focusing on 2030 climate goals the wrong approach

SEATTLE – Vinod Khosla, founder of venture capital firm in Silicon Valley Khosla Venturessaid 2040 is a more important milestone in combating climate change than 2030.

Khosla, who is currently worth more than 5 billion dollars according to Forbesmade the statement at the inaugural Breakthrough Energy Summit in Seattle last week.

Khosla told an audience at the conference: “If we try and reduce our carbon footprint by 2030, we will be much worse off than if we set a target to reduce it by 2040.

That’s because Khosla, who co-founded computer hardware company Sun Microsystems in 1982 and spent 18 years at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, interested in the big bets. Relevant, in July 2020, Khosla published a post on Medium asserting that a dozen ambitious, catalytic leaders will transform the climate space more than a hundred less transformative leaders.

Khosla was on stage with John Doerr, another investor who, like Khosla, was an early investor in climate technology starting in the early 2000s and has since seen a massive influx of companies. called Clean Tech 1.0 outbreak. Collectively, venture capital firms have invested more than $25 billion in climate technology companies between 2006 and 2011 and then lose more than half of their money, according to an article from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The investment crash has frustrated investors and the entire sector has dried up in a few years.

Doerr is more optimistic about the potential for iterative change than Khosla. “We need more economic technologies now implementation now“, Doerr said on stage.

But Khosla agreed with his view that 2040 is a more consequential deadline.

“People who think we have the technology are fantasizing. We can implement existing technologies. I’m not saying slow down, but we need disruption,” Khosla said. “And if we set the short-term window for all the breakthroughs and focus on 2030, we’re going to be worse off in reality, though I wish that weren’t true… What what we need and what we are capable of getting are different, and 2040 is the right target to set.

Khosla’s point of view is iconic in the climate space.

In April 2021, President Joe Biden announced that The United States is moving towards reduce net greenhouse gas pollution by 2030 by 50 to 52 percent above 2005 levelswith the ultimate goal of having a net zero-emissions economy by 2050.

“We are planning both for a short-term sprint through 2030 that will hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius and for a marathon that will take us to the finish line and turn the world’s largest economy into a thriving economy, innovation, equity, and just the clean energy engine of net-zero – for a net-zero world,” Biden said in Glasgow, Scotland, in November at the COP26 summit.

United Nations ‘nominal’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change release in April stated that in order to have any hope of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the level of global warming codified in the Paris Climate Agreement, greenhouse gases must peak by 2025 and decrease by 43 % by 2030. Methane will need to be reduced by a third, the report said.

Nuclear fusion is an example of the kind of disruptive technology that Khosla considers important, but will not be commercialized by 2030. Khosla Ventures has invested In Commonwealth Unified Systema fusion startup spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the frontrunners in space fusion.

Fusion is how the sun produces energy and is a consequence of nuclear fission, which is how conventional and existing nuclear power reactors generate energy. Fusion has not yet been replicated at scale on Earth, but if possible, it offers benefits over nuclear fission, including the absence of long-term radioactive waste.

Khosla told CNBC is an interesting example. “It’s much better than nuclear fission. It’s certainly much better than coal and fossil fuels. But it’s not ready yet. And we need to get ready and build it.” (Khosla is not alone: ​​The private sector aggregate industry has seen nearly 5 billion dollars in private investmentfollow Combined Industry Association.)

Khosla is 67 years old and he said “maybe while I’m still working – and I plan to work for a while, if health allows – to see every coal and natural gas plant in this country. to be replaced by a fusion boiler. One plant at a time. That’s the goal. During my working life.”

Another transformative example is advanced, deep geothermal energy, which comes from the earth’s natural heat underground.

“But I don’t care about geothermal today, because it’s a niche market — it doesn’t scale,” Khosla told CNBC.

“We focused on the wrong problem, which is to take existing geothermal and make it a bit more efficient, instead of saying create 100 times more places where geothermal can,” Khosla said. mined” by drilling much deeper into the earth where the temperature is much hotter. .

For example, Khosla just went to the deep geothermal company to work Quaise doing. (Khosla was the company’s first financial backer.)

“A super-hot rock well, like 500 degrees, will produce 10 times more power than a 200-degree well. And that’s what we need,” says Khosla. “If we can drill deep enough, we can get to that temperature – a lot – the entire West of the United States could be powered by just geothermal wells, because there’s geothermal everywhere.” everywhere if you go 15 kilometers, 10 miles.”