Climate Change

[On climate change and the U.S. presidential election] The Democratic base is fired up and fed up.

[On Coronavirus and climate change] I actually worry about environmentalists getting too happy and worked up about the fact that emissions are going down, because this is really not the way you want to decrease emissions.

[On renewable energy siting and land use] Zoning has always been a local issue. If the state comes in and says, 'For this issue, we can't let you govern your own land use,' that's going to be ugly.

[On the future prospects for electric planes for short-distance flights] There is no question that this will be unbelievably complex and costly. The only reason to do it is if we think that opening niches in the U.S. (and in other countries) will be the starting point to a broader application — eventually to medium-haul flights and beyond. One does this only if we need to make deep cuts in emissions. If we do shallow decarbonization there are other options that are cheaper — more natural gas, more renewables. But shallow decarbonization doesn’t fix the climate. Only deep decarbonization fixes the climate.

The world’s diplomats have spent 30 years talking about the climate problem. That hasn’t achieved much. Global emissions of warming gases keep rising. Electric planes could be part of the solution. It’s possible that we’ll see people using them to take flights between cities like San Diego and San Francisco.