The Eight Deadly Sins of Analyzing the Energy Transition

Plus my private stash of climate podcasts

You may have noticed that it has been five months since my last post. As I mentioned a while back:

I’ve recently started another blog, on the topic of AI, and in particular the potential risks associated with advanced AIs. The goal of the AI blog is the same as for Climateer: to dive into a complex subject and attempt to explain it in a jargon-free fashion. ... Posts here on Climateer will be sporadic for the foreseeable future, though I have at least one more in the pipeline right now.

Readers of this blog might be interested in a post where I make an analogy between climate change and AI risks: To Address AI Risks, Draw Lessons From Climate Change.

While I’ve continued to focus on AI, progress on climate change mitigation has certainly not been standing still, and I thought it might be worthwhile for me to occasionally post links to good articles. I recently read a post on the Renewable Revolution blog, The Eight Deadly Sins of Analyzing the Energy Transition, that Climateer readers might enjoy. It reviews the reasons that projections of how quickly we will transition to clean technologies so often fall short of actual progress.

And as long as I’m posting links, I’ll share my favorite sources of climate news. For some reason, all of them are podcasts:

• Volts: if you listen to one climate podcast, make it this one. Host David Roberts is a highly engaging interviewer, covers a wide variety of topics, finds great guests, and asks them all the questions you’d like to hear asked.

• Catalyst: climatetech investor Shayle Kann covers a range of topics. Episodes are a bit shorter than the other podcasts listed here, and do a good job at teasing out the key concepts on topics ranging from rare earth minerals to electricity interconnection queues, without getting bogged down in technical details.

• Cleaning Up: British host Michael Leibreich gets good guests and isn’t afraid to go for challenging questions, making the show fun to listen to.

• The Energy Transition Show: the only non-free podcast on this list, and far and away the geekiest most technical. Very deep dives on everything relating to the transition away from fossil fuels. To try it out, you can listen to the first part of each episode for free.

• My Climate Journey: softball, but informative, interviews. Emphasis on interviewing startup founders, as well as people involved in climate finance (e.g. VCs) and workers in climate-relevant trades.

For a quick introduction to two of these podcasts, you could try the recent Volts / Catalyst crossover episode.

In the comments, please let me know if you’d like to see me send occasional linkposts of this sort (and what topics you’d be most interested in).