You and I and most of people we know are wealthier than the wealthiest people a hundred years ago.

Why? Because of oil. Because we can get oil, we can get it cheaper. Now, burning stuff in the ground has other problems, which is that it builds up carbon in the atmosphere. So what we're working on at Terraform is a way of making oil and gas synthetically. So there's no net new carbon going into the atmosphere from the ground. The math and the physics is extremely clear that the cheapest way of getting oil and gas

is by synthesizing it using solar power.

It might take us another three years or five years or ten years, but ultimately it's cheaper

than drilling mile-long holes in the ground and fracking the oil and gas out of them.

Gahey, humans.

Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. How about a slightly optimistic episode for you? If you're a doom scrolling, everything else that might be going on in the world,

this is a doozy. It's incredible when you talk to someone who has a real, practical,

but very wide-ranging vision of what is possible for humankind, what we could

do as a human civilization if we just took the tools that we had and actually deployed them.

If we overcame our petty squabbles about climate change and energy sources, and if we did away

with regulations that were written in the 1970s to impede development,

there is now the possibility of using solar arrays, which are now so cheap that you could

carpet them across the land and power, not only people's electricity in their homes,

not only factories, especially if you

deployed localized solar arrays on the site of a big factory or a mine or a smelter,

but also there is the possibility of using solar energy to extract carbon from the atmosphere

and turn it into hydrocarbons, which you can then use in aviation

and shipping and in the manufacturing of plastics and all the things that we actually need fossil fuels

for, but it would be carbon neutral because the carbon that they produce would then be being

sucked up by the process of producing those fossil fuels. It's an incredible field of research, not to mention the fact

that artificial intelligence data centers are going to be hoovering up massive amounts of electricity

...