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Bruce Usher

lines on the record: 80
first: 2024-07-07
most recent: 2024-07-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Because this stuff's fungible and someone else buys it and they may buy at a discount, but they still buy it. So, what does all that mean? It means that if you want to, if you want to speed the transition from fossil fuels to non-polluting, we need to create substitutes. That's what people react to. When I say substitute, it means you need to give the ultimate end user of the product. Another product, and ideally a better product. That's the only thing that the oil and gas companies stop drilling for oil is when they see their customer base going away. And frankly, the IEA, which represents the International Energy Companies, really the fossil fuel companies, they do see that coming. They're predicting declining supply because they're seeing these substitutes. So, for example, electricity generation, we will start to use less natural gas and power electricity because we're renewables in transportation. We're going to start using less gasoline. We're still using fossil fuels for petrochemicals and other issues.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We shouldn't finance these companies. Both of those are pretty ineffective. First of all, moral argument, companies are designed to make profit. That's the way the market works. And so trying to convince them to do the right thing, that margin helps, but it's not going to complete costs someone to abandon the industry. And the second reason is, you know, trying to sort of turn off the capital tabs to fossil fuels, it's not likely to work because, first of all, 90% of fossil fuels in the world, the supply is controlled by nation states. So, you know, that's not going to work. And secondly, we tried it just recently with a big experiment, a horrible experiment, which was to turn off the chaps in a rusher because of the war in Ukraine. So we have a real-life example where after the invasion of Ukraine, the US government and the European governments have tried to essentially stop Russia from selling oil and gas to finance the war. And by and large, it doesn't work.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, I agree, we are hugely dependent and not dependent as in, you know, if we just did the right thing, we wouldn't use this anymore. No. I mean, there's very few alternatives to flying today in terms of fuels, a little bit. It's the same lady's fuel as tiny. Most automobiles still are powered by gasoline and so on. We suddenly just stop using fossil fuels, we deback and Lydian caves. And even just putting aside the ethical consideration is just totally impront to him. So what does that mean? It first of all means yes. We use a lot of fossil fuels and we will continue in some years ahead. The family is more importantly what should we be doing about it. And my belief in the analysis that I've done is that pressuring companies either through a moral argument, it's the wrong thing to do or even through financial divestment arguments.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really hard to do. And it's really hard to do because we do not have a building-friendly environment. The rules and regulations, whether those are federal regulations, felt much more often sometimes at the state level and even at local community or county level or city level make it incredibly difficult to build. So a big problem with solar and wind and everything is transmission lines. Connecting to the grid. It's not, you know, okay, keeping the grid in balance into Min Sea, that's a challenge. But you can't even connect to a grid. That's a much bigger challenge because try to build a transmission line in the country. It'll get blocked and sued every which way. And that's my much bigger concern here is that we know what we need to do. We have the money in the products. We can't physically, I mean, when I say can't, we can't do in a reasonable period of time. You can build a sword project in six months. I'm telling you about a big solar project, hundreds of megawatts. You can physically do it in a matter of months.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've got these energy storage devices that will soon be all over the country, all over the roads that can be part of this solution to balance the grid. Now, it's not a simple thing to do, and there's certain drawbacks and complexities. You need to account for in vehicle the grid, but it's just one example of how this intravency issue, which is a real issue, is likely to get resolved. And there are a lot of other technologies coming along that will help balance it. So I think it's a valid concern. I'm not that concerned about whether or not we'll be able to take care of it going forward. Let me tell you what I am concerned about much more than those articles. And I'd really concern about it. Again, a conversation we talked about, we've got to rebuild the economy. Well, it turns out that building stuff, technical word stuff. Yeah, it really needs, you know, building anything in America.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On average, in America, use 48 minutes a day, 23 hours a day plus it's insol. And of course, while it's sitting idle, you could charge it if it needs more power. But you can also discharge it. That's called vehicle to”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In other words, it's a good problem to have, but it's a problem. So that's where I say that this criticism is both correct. It's a problem. It's becoming a problem because we have such a good power generation source. So now we've got this super cheap source that we can scale. And yes, the more you start to add to the grid, you start to run into some intermittency problems, sometimes called the dot curve problem, which is a longer conversation. But here's the interesting point. There's a lot of ways to solve that problem. It doesn't necessarily mean we got to spend trillions of dollars building a lot of batteries. And let me give you one simple, no, not simple, but one example. So at the same time, we're growing rental energy, we're also rapidly growing the number of electric vehicles that are on the road. So what's an electric vehicle? Electric vehicle is an energy storage device on wheels. That's essentially a large battery on wheels. Well, it turns out that energy storage device”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got to bed at night. Our electricity needs drop, right? And depending on any moment, any time, our demands and our supply have to get in balance. And so, for example, there are hundreds of what we call peaker plants all over the country. These are natural gas fired facilities produced electricity that spend almost the entire year turned off. We don't use them. You think, what kind of crazy asset is that? If you only get used on those rare days when demand is so high, we call it peaks. You turn on the peaker plants. So let's start from the fact that the model we got right now is not a perfect imbalance. Oh, it's so simple and so cheap to run. It's actually already a really difficult thing we're doing. And now we're adding these intermittent sources of power, wind and solar. Well, up to about 20% of power generation, this doesn't really change the storage issue at all. In other words, you can add more intermittent power to the grid and you balance it just as we do today. So up until now, it's been kind of a non-issue. It's becoming an issue because solar and wind are so cheap and attractive.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How we manage electricity going forward. The second point I would make is there's sort of this and those points that are made, this idea that we're going from power sources that are perfectly stable and very easy to manage to power source as intermittent, which is true. And therefore, you know, super complex and very expensive. The reality is that grid today before there was renewable energy was already a very difficult thing to manage because even constant sources of power like coal and the light, they're not 100% reliable. Coal plants run something like two-thirds of the time on average. And more importantly, the demand size is never constant. It's called the load profile. You know, think about it during the, you know, our conversation here in the afternoon. We're using a lot of leads some parts of the country, very warm, so air conditions are on or the winter gets very cold, so heating goes on and so on. We draw a lot of electricity in the afternoons.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that concern regarding renewable energy is a valid concern but oversimplifies the situation and it is complex. So again, let's start with the big picture. The big picture is we're going from a world of what we call centralized power generation where big power plants, coal, natural gas, nuclear, produce electricity and push it out to the grid to our homes, our businesses, right? millions of sites, home solar panels and wind projects and so on and so forth all over the place and stored in many different sites whether it's through batteries or other ways which I get to in a minute and so we've got a centralized and decentralized model has a lot of complexity to the”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I put them in a different bucket because they're not yet competitive. You produce those technologies and it's going to cost you more than the current technologies you're trying to, you know, the polluting technologies you've got right now. Now with government subseason alike, you can compete, but that's not, you can't rely on government subsequent forever. And so those technologies got to drive down the cost curve in the next couple decades. Otherwise, they're not going to, they're not going to be there for the long term.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I guess most of your decarbonization gets you the majority of the way that you might need to get to. But I would sort of break those into two groups. The first group being renewables, electric vehicles, and storage, those industries are already competitive with incumbent products, the fossil fuels or other polluting products that are out there, and they're already at scale, right? These are multi-100 billion dollar industries already. So it's not a question of is this stuff going to work? It's just a question of how fast can we get to 100% with those technologies. And based on the current, how fast those sectors are growing, I think in the next well within the 20 to 30 years we have those sectors will be 100% renewable pretty much. They're very close to it, 100% electric vehicle on automobiles, not necessarily on heavy trucks. Then the other group of technologies, you mentioned green hydrogen, carbon capture, and some other technologies.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The ability to decarbonize what we call it. Which, when I got this 20 years ago, sure, we had more time to address climate change back then, and time is our big challenge here. But we actually didn't have the solutions we have today. And that's a fundamental difference.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just take that and we scaled all that globally. By the way, it is scaling globally at this point, but if we go 100% on our latch, which we will, that will reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by about 50%. That alone takes us about halfway to addressing this problem, which is amazing. And then when we come with innovation, the other half, we don't have scalable solutions yet, but we've got thousands of technologies and thousands of business models under development and company innovation to get to the other half. And I can't tell you with certainty which of those technologies will succeed. I think there's some pretty interesting ones out there that I've been looking at. But I have some confidence that those technologies will also be developed just as we saw Solar and others in the last couple of decades. So to me, the biggest trend or most important one, I should say, is this trend in innovation.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's declined by more than 99% in cost. Then there's electric vehicles. I got into this field called Like there was no electric vehicles, like golf carts. Nothing that was practical. Today, the entire automobile industry is going electric. And why is that? Well, it's good for the environment. It's good for climate. But the main people, the main reason people who drive AVs is because it's a better vehicle. It's more fun to drive. It accelerates faster. It handles better. And over lifetime, a lot of the running costs are much, much lower. So we're coming out with these better products that literally 20 years ago didn't exist or were just completely uncompetitive. That's the innovation that's happened in the last 20 years. And that's the big stuff. And we actually take just those two categories, renewable energy, wind, solar, electric vehicles, and energy storage. It's essentially mostly lithium-ion batteries.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's just a great product. It's the cheapest product to produce electricity. That has challenges around intermittency and other issues, but that's an incredible change. There's a product that's come down since it was first used a couple decades.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, honestly, it's unbelievable what has happened that a little more than two decades have been involved from Islam. Let me give you some data to bring that to light. So the first is when I got along this field, we had solar power. It existed, some wind power. But if you added up all the solar panels in the world, you collected them all together and you said, how much electricity they generate, it was equivalent to about one coal-fired plant. Nothing. And the reason why it was very expensive and there was no scale. Fast forward to today, we'll construct in this year globally when I say week, globally somewhere between 200 to 300 coal plants worth of solar will be built. I mean, it's going to replace hundreds of coal-fired facilities this year in solar alone without even getting to other renewable technologies. Why? Because today it is the cheapest form of new power generation in much of the world. It's not just good for the environment.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And I think that's the most important thing here. The way at the end of the day, and I know people read my book who come back to me and said, wow, you're an optimist about climate change. I'm not an optimist. I'm not a pessimist either. I'm a realist. And what we see is this pretty massive challenge, it's a very serious challenge and it's a complex challenge. But I think we'll discuss this in a few minutes. We also have the capital and most of the technologies we need to address the challenge. And I'm pretty optimistic, but it's much more optimistic than I was a decade or two ago when I began working in this area because we've made a lot of really tremendous advancements. So it's not a question of fear modeling for sure. I don't think that's helpful, by the way. Or being optimistic specimens, I think it's just about understanding where are we and where we're headed. And to your point, there's unbelievable misunderstanding. I think the media tends to report extreme situations. That's what gets people's attention. I think politicians don't help.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's affected by government action. It's not really a proper free market. But eventually, insurance rates go up, or even worse, you cannot get insurance. Now, if you can't get insurance in your home, you can't get a mortgage on all. If you can't get a mortgage on your home, go to like selling your home. And by the way, the community that you live in, if you're not the only one, it's highly unlikely. It's just one home that's going to be whole communities. That community tax base starts to collapse. And when the tax base collapses, you know, goodbye to the good school system and the healthcare and so on. So what you see is the transition risk associated with climate change is actually the one that you really need to think about. What's going to change through this in the next couple of decades as we deal with climate change and decarbonize? And what does that mean for me and my assets? That's really the concern.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, yes, or at least be diversified around it. In other words, I mean, all your asked to perennial flooding, chronic flooding, or potentially disaster storms isn't too smart. Now, the greatest risks are not necessarily the physical ones. And when people think about climate change and risks, they're thinking about, you know, physical risks to your assets. But in fact, a lot of that risk is what we call transition risk as markets change and as business changes. And what's happening in insurance is a good example of that. So just because you say, well, I'll take the risk of a storm coming and or I can deal with the rising cost of this. At some point, your insurance rate starts to go up. Now, assurance in this country, particularly flood insurance had been that the markets have been”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Invest in it and adjust this. And this is whether or not you quote unquote believe in the climate of science, climate science of climate change, excuse me, in sort of irrelevant. You know, I don't believe in gravity or not believe in gravity. It's physics, it's basic physics. And climate change is also basically physics. You're basically forcing more energy from the atmosphere to remain on Earth as opposed to being reflected back in his face. So you can believe in physics, not believe in physics. They're not relevant to this discussion. What's relevant is these changes are happening and there's going to be as a result of that one will have to, we will have to invest differently in the future.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the question is how does one think about this in an economy like the US or much of the world, these changes that are coming, how are you going to adjust us? What does it mean? What it means is that these physical changes are ending us now and they're just going to keep getting worse until we decarbonize. That's the first thing to understand. The second thing that I understand is we will, to a certain extent, adapt to us. We will use market conditioning. We will be moving people away from coasts where there's constant flooding and the like. We will have to fight more wildfires. What happened in Canada this summer was pretty interesting. It was 10 times as much wildfires they've ever experienced before in places like New York City here. We got in dated with smoke, which is not just annoying, but actually very bad for your health and so on and so on. So I want to see a lot more of that be healing a lot more with that. And from a financial investment or business perspective, we're going to see that we will have to.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, first of all, let's put these in context here, right? I do not believe or agree with those who predict this is existential crisis. It's the end of humanity. We're all going to die. It's a hopeless situation, what some people call, refer to climate defeatism. We're done for as a species. Humans are incredibly adaptable, more incredibly innovative, and we're very good at dealing with challenges when we set our minds to it. So the World Bank Report for India is very worrisome because when temperatures get above a certain level, particularly combined humidity, what they call wet bulb temperature, the human body can no longer sweat and you will die, in fact, in the circumstances. Now, of course, in many economies, we have air conditioning. That's what keeps us alive when it's that.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happening today and is almost certain to get worse. So it's getting people's attention. And that is starting to change things. That's the first of the big trends I identify.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So, one of the challenges in addressing climate change, it's always been a problem of the future. Scientists are telling us, you know, if we keep going this way, it's going to be a very serious problem, a potential catastrophe. And work, it's hard to take action, particularly, you know, really challenging changes and big investments for something that's so far in the future. And frankly, something that until very recently, none of us experienced. Yeah, you couldn't see or taste or feel climate change. And so that kind of risk is a really hard one to deal with. We're not good as humans dealing with that kind of risk. And what has changed very recently, as I wrote, is a physical manifestation of this risk. In other words, we're starting to experience climate change. Now, this is not a good thing. This is a very bad thing. But there's a solar lining. The silver lining is getting people's attention and they're starting to realize that this thing that was talked about that would be years or decades in the future is how”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was another massive wave in our investment into decarbonization of global economy. The number you quoted is BCG number. I don't know if that number is right or wrong. Nobody knows for sure. I think it's a pretty decent guess. It's a huge number, but it's also important to put it in context. It's also a doable number. In other words, if we sort of in my book, I look at how much capital is there available in a capital markets, a fixed income markets, equity markets, and so on, venture capital and the like. And that capital exists and a lot of it actually close to half of it that we need is already moving in this direction with a caveat and the caveat being that investments in low carbon solutions in developing country or emerging economies is really lacking. And there's no clear path to how that's going to change anytime soon. That's a whole special challenge. But big picture a lot of capital needs to move. A lot of capital already is moving and the capital is available.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And like, first of all, any grade change, this is going to create opportunity. It's also going to create companies, investors who are going to do very poorly or in some cases companies are going to go away. So this change is going to be very disruptive, right? An analogy to that is the change that we've seen with the digital revolution the last couple of decades. And let's take it from 300 years down to like the last 30 years. And if sort of think about the last 30 years, roughly the time since I graduated from business school to where we are today. I'm dating myself here away. We've seen global economy change dramatically because of digital technologies. There's not a single business in the world today that's not affected in some way by digital technologies and has created a lot of new winners in business investment and a lot of firms that have stopped running and gone out of business. And there was a wave of investment behind it, which continues to this day, including things like AI that's not going no way. What we're going to see now in the next 30 years or so.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also an enormous opportunity from both a business and investment perspective because it is going to take trillions of dollars to reinvest and to rebuild that economy.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have about 30 years to entirely rebuild our global economy. Level of prosperity, ideally for all, but does not make greenhouse gas emissions. And with the climate scientists tell us, and I had a lot of trust in the science, I've looked at closely and I've followed for a long time, is that we need to reduce emissions, not just a little, not a lot. We actually need to reduce our emissions essentially to zero, or what they call net zero. So this is going to require a massive literally rebuilding of the economy. When I say rebuilding, it's not going to piece of software. It's going to solve this problem for us or an app that's going to solve this problem for us. It's literally mostly physical infrastructure because most of the things that emit greenhouse gases, whether it's production of electricity or transportation, cars and airplanes, buildings and the greenhouse gases, our agriculture and greenhouse gases, these are physical things. And these physical things are going to change. And that creates both enormous challenge to do this in a short period of time.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let me sort of begin with the big picture, right? The big picture is since the Industrial Revolution and the agricultural revolution that followed it. William, we've spent 300 years building a global economy, mostly a market-based economy. That by many measures is extraordinarily successful. The average human being today is 50 times as well off in real terms than they were pre-industrial revolution. We have food production. We have transportation. We have housing. We have things that are unimaginable not that long ago. But there's a cash, right? And the catch is that global economy emits massive amounts of greenhouse gases. And we know very well at this point that that is truly unsustainable. We keep doing that and that will be the end of the global economy and more. So after 300 years of building, this what I think is a pretty incredible thing we created as humans.”
2024-07-07 · We Study Billionaires · RWH047: Investing In The Era of Climate Change w/ Bruce Usher · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT