Climate-focused investor, advisor and innovator. Dad. Founder @GreatCircleCap. Co-founder Venture Climate Alliance & Tertiary Impact Capital.
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Joined December 2010
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Daniel Firger retweeted
We behave as if Thou Shall Quantify Emissions Effects is the 11th Commandment so we can’t simply say “I Don’t Know” even when it’s clearly the right answer and would gain us credibility for other situations when we can reasonably quantify effects
Daniel Firger retweeted
Great thread responding to some of the confusion over the bipartisan permitting bill's "project certainty" provisions. Related points:
1. Even without the new provisions **existing law** (primarily the APA) limits what the executive branch can do to stop work on, slow-walk, or revoke permits.
2. This administration's actions targeting renewables, particularly wind, show this to be the case -- they have lost every legal challenge to those actions.
3. The executive branch is meant to "take care that the laws are faithfully executed." That includes the laws Congress has passed providing for, e.g., oil and gas leasing, AND renewables leasing.
4. Any plan for decarbonization (or any other goal) that rests on the President NOT faithfully executing the laws is a bad plan both practically -- ie, not likely to succeed in court -- and from the standpoint of our democratic and constitutional norms.
5. The executive branch has many totally legal tools (including loans, federal purchasing, research etc etc) to coduct industrial policy that are far more effective than trying to halt or slow the permits of disfavored projects.
With folks like Andreessen Horowitz & Chamath so bullish on renewables and new energy markets it’s time for climate policy experts, green groups and OG “climate tech” investors to update their priors. Let’s pass #BAAJA and build out the clean energy economy we all know we need!
Solar and batteries are not only becoming the biggest energy sources, they are also becoming hugely lucrative markets.
We will see a consolidation in solar and batteries that will be similar to how Nat Gas consolidated in the late 2010s.
Many new big energy companies will be birthed over the next several years.
lol 80 percent of all #NYCW discourse in 4 words:
Many climate advocates seem to be desperate for real world evidence the #BAAJA permitting reform legislation will make it easier to build clean and thus drive down emissions, not just lock in more fossil infrastructure. Behold! Please look at example of crazy CREZ-friendly Texas!
Daniel Firger retweeted
The idea that Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate’s most passionate climate champion and someone who has been railing against corporate money in politics for as long as I can remember, is corrupt, is beyond ludicrous.
Wreckers like this guy have to stop with this poisonous bullshit.
Ramez is right, but it’s not helpful to paint broad swaths of the enviro movement with a quasi-derogatory “degrowther” brush. I’d say these are mostly well-intentioned people who either haven’t fully thought through their political strategy or don’t think it’s their job to care?
There's a degrowther meme that making it easier to build new clean energy, mobility, etc.. doesn't work, because it just adds to the global energy pie. That the only thing that works is directly limiting the supply of fossil.
This is false on the merits, as Zeke explains with real data below.
It's also close to a practical impossibility, and politicially counterproductive:
1. Fossil supply (especially for oil and coal, a bit less so for gas) is effectively unlimited and geographically diverse, with much of it coming from countries that depend on it for their primary income. Stop oil drilling in the US, and you'll get more in other places. It's whack-a-mole.
2. The only lasting way to reduce emissions is to reduce *demand* for fossil fuels, by making clean energy, transport, and industry cheaper and better options. Scaling cleantech does this. Removing permitting barriers helps clean energy more than fossil energy.
3. If you put too many barriers in place for using fossil fuels, without making it possible to build clean alternatives, the price of energy goes up. Voters hate that. You get a backlash. Price of living is a much more politically salient issue than climate. I say this as a climate activists for the last 15 years.
The only scalable and lasting way to reduce fossil fuels emissions is to make the clean alternative, cheaper, better, and at least as easy to build.
Permitting reform in the US does that. If you want to win on climate, this is an essential.
This week’s online #BAAJA discourse has revealed that US climate groups need to work much harder to articulate a *global* theory of change for domestic energy transition policy advocacy. Reflexively defaulting to “will this bill cut domestic emissions, Y or N?” is not good enough
I am far from having any well-vetted ideas to share, but I know for sure we need to think far more expansively and creatively about the role of US technology innovation and diffusion, trade and investment, supply chains and more. Yes we will need to cut domestic emissions too!
But for a start I’d love to see more activists and analysts in the well-resourced climate NGO community really grappling w/the global dimensions of climate when they nitpick #BAAJA. It’s nearsighted bordering on counterproductive to ask for emissions math and just call it a day.
This thread sums up much of my own thinking on BAAJA specifically and US climate policy more generally. Like David, I’ve been an energy transition advocate for way longer than many of the loudest voices on here. Climate absolutism is a dead end. Let’s take the win!
