Good morning. Woo! It's bright up here. Happy SF Climate Week. Thank you all for joining us at the Commonwealth Club. My name is Jenny Park. I am Climate One's executive director and I'm so excited to have you join us for this special event with John Doerr, Ryan Panchatsaram, and three special guests as we take a deep dive into the forces shaping the future of energy and climate.
We are gathered this morning in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is the land of the Ohlone and other indigenous people who have stewarded these unceded lands for 10,000 years. Indigenous people are still very much here today and we are committed to keep honoring their existence and to tread on their land with deep respect and a light foot. We are recording today for our radio show that is heard on over 90 NPR stations across the country and we are also on a podcast.
New episodes drop every Friday and you can subscribe wherever you listen to your pods, including now on YouTube. And there should be a QR code behind me. Yep. This is going to be one of those few times where I give you permission to pull out your phones. You can subscribe to our podcast right now. And we record here in person several times throughout the year. If you haven't done so already, you can sign up for our newsletter at climateone.org and you can find out about the next event coming up. Speaking of which, we have a lot going on this week for SF Climate Week.
Later on in this stage at noon, we'll have the one and only Annie Leonard. She was a former head of Greenpeace USA and then of the Jane Fonda Climate Pack. She has a new book out about climate protests and she'll be here with Danielle Lee, the founder of the Climate Action Club, and James Coleman, South San Francisco city council member, and they'll be talking about all the different ways in which you can be active on climate. And that will be followed by an experiential workshop on climate wayfinding with Katharine Wilkinson, the founder of the All We Can Save project.
Now, for those of you that are sticking around for the whole day, I hope you'll appreciate the necessity of embracing all kinds of climate conversations, the ones that speak to both our brain and our hearts. This morning's session will keep us grounded in numbers, in facts, in logic, and in policy. And our afternoon programs will keep us motivated to stay engaged in climate even when everything just feels downright impossible. It's this kind of range that make Climate One programs so special and I'm grateful to all of our speakers, to all of our audience, and our donors who make this possible.
So, that's for today. Tomorrow evening at 6 p.m., we'll have two winners of this year's Goldman Environmental Prize. You may have heard some of the announcements coming out in the news this morning about who this year's prize winners are. And I'm so excited to welcome Aurora Tonui, a bat researcher from Nigeria who is successfully leveraging habitat conservation work with preventing human-caused wildfires. And we'll have Sarah Finch from the UK, an activist whose namesake Finch rule now requires the government to consider the downstream impacts of climate change when issuing permits for fossil fuel extraction.
And then on Wednesday, our last program for SF Climate Week, we'll be hosting two of the leading candidates vying for Nancy Pelosi's seat in Congress. Scott Wiener and Shyam Tuscano. There are still a few tickets left for each of these events, so get them while they last by going to our website, climateone.org/attend.
All right, let's get to what's happening today. Back in 2021, Climate One hosted legendary venture capital investor John Doerr right here on this stage to unpack his plan to solve climate change. And today, we're so excited to host his return to this stage with the Speed and Scale team and get an update on how they and the world are doing. And with that, it's my great pleasure to invite to the stage Climate One co-host Kusha Navdar and the author of Speed and Scale, John Doerr.
Good morning everyone. I like that. I'm happy it stopped raining. Thank you so much for being here. It's such a pleasure to see a live audience. Thank you so much. John, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Yeah. Wonderful. Five years ago you were back on this stage. What I want to do, we got 10 minutes with John. So what I want to do is look back and I want to look a little forward. All right. So, let's talk about Speed and Scale. It outlines 10 objectives. You've got electrifying transportation. You've got saving nature. You've got increasing investment. And it's a clear plan. You've got the poster there. Some great material. I think everybody's getting one.
There are a lot of plans, John. There is a plan from Project Drawdown. The International Energy Agency has a plan. My third cousin probably has a plan. I don't know. I haven't asked him. I probably should. But I want to know what makes your plan different.
Well, there ought to be a lot of plans because the problem is incredibly important. And so, we want to see a competition of ideas and approaches. What makes Speed and Scale different is not the six objectives. Everybody will broadly agree on these, but it's the key results. For every one of those objectives, there are three to five measurable, specific, timebound goals that we can track our progress against over time. I'd like to say if Andy Grove, who invented this system, I did not, Andy Grove did, were alive today, he'd be smiling at the rigor in the detail that's in this plan.
You were here 5 years ago, 2021, when the plan Speed and Scale first released. It's been 5 years, a lot has happened. How do you feel about the speed and scale of climate progress 5 years out?
We've made progress but we're not on track yet to solve this problem. So I feel the plan is more important than ever before. We've refined many of the key results and importantly we've taken into account three disruptive forces. The first of those forces is the soaring demand for electrical power. No one anticipated that when we did the first version of the plan. The second disruptive force is geopolitics. Look at Iran. Look at what's going on with Russia and all the dependent nations. The third force which I think is the most powerful of all these are market forces. And that is it's quite clear that we've got to erase the green premium. We have to drive our dependence on fossil fuels towards renewables because renewable solutions will be durable solutions. There's a lot of talk about abundance. That's an inspiring idea. But what we need are abundant sources of power that will be sustainable.
I can appreciate how you're trying to pivot the plan. Sounds like there's three forces that you're looking at as the next phase of it. And it's funny to hear you say that Andy would be smiling. I used to work at Google, so I know OKRs pretty well. I went through a lot of promo cycles where I was looking at OKRs. OKRs in the private sector are great. Here's a part where I kind of have a difficulty with OKRs in climate because if somebody doesn't match their key result, OKRs are great for saying, 'Okay, this business person, this CEO is responsible.' But what does that look like for climate? I mean, you're talking about three market forces. Who is responsible if those OKRs aren't met?
Well, one of the features of an OKR system well implemented, well executed, is that individuals, and that could be an individual nation, that could be an individual political agenda within a nation, they self-declare. They're not handed down top down. But in a healthy OKR system, 60% or more of these will bubble up from your individual team at Google.
I might ask, do you think your team at Google was more successful because they saw the OKRs of other teams? Did you get a cross product there?
The key thing about... Yes, I would say so. I think having the key result connected to the goal was very helpful. Always having the thing, the north star. I would say the fact that that allows you to focus, be aligned, to make commitments that your peers see, to track your progress against those commitments and then that you'll embrace stretch goals. Now, any organization can have its own risk tolerance. What I mean by that is, is a good grade 70% accomplishment? Is a good grade getting all greens? Sergey Brin would say no, that that Googler was probably sandbagging and I want them to stretch further. Larry Page would say, 'I'd much rather have a team sign up to go to Mars and know that if they'll fall short, they'll at least get to the moon.' And so those five benefits, focus, alignment, commitment, tracking, stretching, are just the facts of what people get out of a good goal setting system.
You know what's another aspect of that that I wanted to dive into is the difference between an OKR in a private sector setting versus a political sector. And it sounds like that resonates with you.
It's very important and I found much to my surprise that nonprofit organizations are adopting OKRs faster than are the for-profit ones.
The boards want more clarity and the people who are passionate about the cause of a nonprofit want to demonstrate achievement in their results. So, Grove gave the world a great gift when he invented this system, which was simply to get tens of thousands of people to get lines 1 millionth of a meter, one micron wide, exactly right, or nothing would work at all in a semiconductor fab. One of my favorite adopters of OKRs is the current Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. 6,000 people who are dedicated to trying to improve the health, the equity, the affordability of health care for our country. I was first asked about this by Seema Verma, who was Trump's lead executive for this. Seema Verma and now Dr. Oz have more purchasing authority than anyone in the government. $3 trillion a year of taxpayer money flows through their organization. When Oz took over, he called me up and he said, 'John, would you do a course in OKRs so that we can renew the commitment of our organization to delivering results?' I dropped everything to do that and they are using them to great advantage today.
You know, you're talking about kind of an engineering solution to a political problem which I think is very valuable. There's also a lot of heart in this and we're talking about people and how it all draws down both the planet and the people. And in preparing for this interview I was really struck by a TED talk that you gave. I mean 5 years ago you were on this stage and you were talking about this story where you had gathered a group of people to watch An Inconvenient Truth back in 2006 and you talked about your daughter Mary because Mary was 15 at the time and she watched the video. You asked her how people felt and she was really mad at you. She said, 'Your generation has put us in this problem.' And you said back then, this is back in 2006, 20 years later, you wanted to be able to talk to her and tell a better story. Right. It's 20 years on, I see you getting emotional. Where's that emotion coming from for you?
She... She's still angry. What's clear is that my generation is not... we will solve the problem with her generation. Not on our own.
Not on your generation's own, right?
When she's mad, does her talking change at all than it used to be? Is it the same forever as it used to be? She's very... She's very articulate. She's very smart. She'll be angry and then she'll be optimistic.
She and her generation are the reason I think we can have hope that...
What do you tell her today?
I tell her and her generation they can do any of these things. It's within their power to do that. I tell them to pick two, not just one. I tell them to do something, for example, in the political domain in addition to the social domain or the technical domain. Her interest is in veterinary medicine for endangered species and wildlife. But everywhere you turn, there's an opportunity to tackle the climate crisis. And one thing I know is that if you have a plan, you're more likely to get it done.
John Doerr is chair of Kleiner Perkins and author of Speed and Scale. John, thank you so much.
John, thank you so much. I just want to say before we move on, it's really a pleasure to be able to ask you questions and have you share both head and heart. And I hope that's how today goes because the stakes are high and I really appreciate you being up here. So, thank you very much.
All right, we got a PowerPoint for you next, but it's a good one, I promise. All right, so going up next, I would love to take a deeper look at the updated Speed and Scale tracker, and I'd like to invite Ryan Panchatsaram up to the stage. Ryan is an engineer and an investor focused on solving systemic societal challenges. At Kleiner Perkins, you serve as the technical adviser to John Doerr and he is the co-author of Speed and Scale. Ryan, come on up.
So, 5 years ago, we published an action plan to solve the climate crisis. And since then, global emissions have risen 5%. And yet, I'm here to tell you today that we can still preserve a livable planet. I'm Ryan Panchatsaram and this is the updated Speed and Scale action plan. Three forces are converging for the first time in history that's going to reshape the global energy landscape. We've got first electrical power. That insatiable demand for electricity is creating an enormous opportunity for clean energy. We've got geopolitical power. Those shifting alliances and wars in Ukraine and Iran have exposed the fragility of our dependence on oil and gas. Countries choosing clean domestic energy for their national security have a clear advantage. Third, you've got the power of markets which are propelling record deployment of solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles at a scale we've never seen before.
Together, these forces provide us a better path forward. Only clean energy can meet the surging demand for affordable, durable, and sustainable energy. Only clean energy can deliver abundance that lasts. We cannot cut our fossil fuel usage without delivering on the alternative. And so, we've got to build clean energy to displace fossil fuels.
Today, we emit about 74 billion tons of carbon pollution. I want you to sit with this number for a second because it's likely higher than the numbers you're seeing in the headlines. And that's because the new source of data we use in our plan, Climate TRACE, uses satellites to catch what countries can't. What's become clear is that we can now see from these new data sources the effect of wildfires, crop fires, as well as industries under-reporting of methane emissions. And so, while this number is large and daunting, it's honest and it's our target. So when you break it down, the bulk of our emissions come from the grid, followed by industry, then nature, transportation, and food. These are our targets.
So what's the plan? It's simple enough to fit on a napkin what we have to do and how we get there quicker. The first six are the solutions. We've got to electrify transportation. We've got to decarbonize the grid, fix food, protect nature, clean up industry, and then remove carbon. To accelerate us, we've got to win the policy and politics. We've got to turn movements into action. We've got to innovate and we have to invest. The plan uses a goal setting tool called OKRs, objectives and key results. And the charge is now calibrated for this new world, one where we're pushing the power economies, the US, Europe, and China to reach net zero by 2050. The emerging economies, they get till 2060. And one thing we really believe is that if the major economies hit their targets, they're going to drive down the cost of decarbonization for everybody else.
Every key result in the plan is tied to a Climate TRACE emission source. When we were first doing this work, the plan was heavy on percentages. Cut this by 95%, reduce this by 50%. And percentages matter, but for leaders and doers, they want to know what to build. 2 billion EVs, 13 times as much solar, 4,600 clean cement and steel facilities, and 1 gigaton of carbon removal. That's part of the assignment.
So, how are we doing? Well, each circle is a solution, and the size equals the gigaton opportunity for reduction. And the colors tell us how we're doing. So, let's dig into a few of these. We're going to start with code red. And these are the objectives where more than 3 gigatons of emissions are at stake. The world's hunger for meat, especially beef, continues to grow. There's about 1.5 billion cows, and each of them burp 220 pounds of methane each year. And on food waste, we're throwing away over a third of what we grow. We've got to do better.
Methane from fossil fuel operations is also code red. These are the methane leaks that we could stop today. We've got the technology and for many of these leaks, it's profitable for these companies to stop. More importantly, reducing methane will help cool our planet within our children's lifetime. We then got steel and cement, which amount to over 5 gigatons of emission. And yet, globally, if you do the count, there's just one net zero cement facility and no primary steel facility yet. We've got lots of work to do here.
So the key word on this slide is progress. And in these areas, progress is happening, just not quickly enough. And I know this is yellow, but this is the part of the presentation where the news starts to get better. So watch this. Boom, boom, boom. Look at how incredible the drop of the price of batteries has been. These small volumes drive down the cost and then when it becomes cheap enough, deployment soars.
In buses and trucking, the deployment's a bit more uneven. You know, in the US, you're going to rarely see an electric truck, and on occasion, you might see an electric bus. But if you go to Europe or China, almost every other bus sold is electric. And India is not too far behind. And if you want to see the future of trucking, you got to go to China.
So, remember that same... Oh, yeah. This is the definitive good news. That's right. This is the places that the pace of building is accelerating so fast that these are the things that are on track. And so remember that chart before specifically the cost of batteries dropping. Here it is one more time. And now look at how this propelled the deployment and adoption of electric cars. When we first wrote the plan, we said that EVs need to hit price parity in the US by 2025 and China by 2030. China hit that target before the United States. And now 50% of the cars sold there are electric vehicles and they're the number one car exporter in the world.
When we talk about gigaton level impact, we can feel it here. The deployment of solar over just the past 6 years helps the world avoid 1.4 billion tons of emissions each year. We're going to need 13 times more solar in the next 25 years. Sounds like a lot, but you know, in the 20 years since An Inconvenient Truth came out, we have collectively scaled solar 100-fold. So 13x isn't a stretch. It's completely possible.
You know, solar, wind, batteries, they did not get this cheap by accident. It took forward-thinking policy makers, committed activists, innovative engineers, and bold first movers to drive down these costs. We've got to run this playbook again for the next set of technologies. I think John says it best when he says we've got to make the right outcome the profitable outcome because then it'll become the probable outcome. The right outcome, profitable outcome, the probable outcome.
2025 was difficult. The world crossed 1.5 degrees of warming. Federal progress in the United States was stalled and set backwards. But we looked really hard at the data. We met with experts and we ran the numbers and we recut this plan and we believe a clean future under two degrees is still possible. Speed and Scale is a trajectory bending plan, but it's going to require collective action and it's going to require the leader in all of us to go for the gigatons because every tenth of a degree matters. Our job is to work together and leave behind a planet that we can be proud of. Thank you.
That was great. Thank you. So, you switched data and you're getting emissions data from Climate TRACE now. Is that right? Okay. So, help me unpackage that in two ways. Number one, why is that significant? And then number two, where are the surprising sources of emissions that Climate TRACE revealed that others missed? Of course, because for folks in the room, you know the saying, you can't manage what you don't measure. And so the prior estimates were ones that the UN did a wonderful job of doing. But the secret trick that Climate TRACE has, they have satellites. And so in that data set, they could identify landfills directly. They could identify crop fires. They could identify deforestation at a scale. And so with that, we were able to actually then go KR by KR, Kusha, and say this is how much could get drawn down from them.
So it's like more granular. You're saying it's more granular, more targetable, like more actionable.
Got it. Okay. It's a big change, right? Tell me a little bit more why it's significant.
