MIT professor & researcher Jessika Trancik talks with Jim about the dynamics & state of renewable energy tech & policies, decarbonization, carbon taxes, climate despair, and much more...

MIT professor & researcher Jessika Trancik talks with Jim about energy return on investment (EROI), the power of learning curves, the feasibility of an all-electric society, base vs intermittent renewable energy, ‘energy storage plus’, the role & power of soft technologies, ‘soft costs’ of energy production, less known clean energy tech, the challenge of energy distribution & diversification, our collective action problem, discussion of carbon taxes, Jessika’s research priorities, the decarbonization-first perspective & achievable policy targets, how renewable tech innovation could impact the developing world, climate despair, the state & future of solar, wind, storage, nuclear, carbon removal & more.

Episode Transcript

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Jessika Trancik is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She received her B.S. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her research group studies the dynamic costs and environmental impacts of energy technologies to inform technology design and policy.