Andrew Revkin

And the baseline is so low for this that it's a super bargain.

We were...

During the energy crisis, the first energy crisis in the 70s before the current one, our annual spending in the United States and constant dollars on R&D, research and development for energy, was about $5 billion.

And then it's just dribbled away since then.

And recently now, there's a big burst of new money coming through these new bills that got passed.

But what I was told over and over again by people in that arena is you can't just have these little bubbles of investment.

You don't get young people away from thinking about Wall Street for jobs toward thinking about energy innovation if there isn't a future there.

And in the United States and Europe, the presumption was the wage of that future was taxing carbon.

Yeah.

make that so punitive that you're basically even in the landscape for cleaner stuff that's more expensive.

That has failed completely.

There are little examples in Europe where it's working.

And what's happened now is, well, the United States, this big chunk of money is designed to take us over a finish line

that was started with not just innovation, but with the production efficiency too.

This is one thing I got wrong, I think, a little bit in my reporting.

I was so fixated on the innovation part, just because I love science too.

I saw this untapped possibility.

that others were saying, no, no, production efficiency, the more people are producing batteries, the cheaper they'll get.

This is Elon Musk's path and many others.

And it really is both.