Why did you aim the letter at the teenage audience?
I think this younger group has a lot of advantages. They will tend to take a long-term view of things. They're more scientific oriented and more interested in opportunities they can dream about where our generation hasn't solved the problem, and, therefore, they can take up and surprise everybody by what they are able to do.
With scientific innovation, you see that people in their 20s get a depth of knowledge and a willingness to look at things in a different way. So, I would say it's likely that if an energy miracle comes in the next 15 years, key participants will be the teenagers of today.
Why are you confident that there will be a breakthrough?
What we need to get that probability up to be very high is to take 12 or so paths to get there. Like carbon capture and sequestration is a path. Nuclear fission is a path. Nuclear fusion is a path. Solar fuels are a path. For every one of those paths, you need about five very diverse groups of scientists who think the other four groups are wrong and crazy.
Throughout history, it seems like we've turned to war and competitions with massive prizes to bring about major advances in a field. Where is the motivation to come up with this energy miracle going to come from?
Scientific problems don't generally just yield at the time someone comes up with a prize or something equivalent. It is true in war that if one country funds research and gets ahead of the other on ballistic targeting or machine guns, they get an advantage. So you will take whatever is on the scientific frontier and try to get an edge by financing that.
In the energy space, there is no equivalent of when JFK said, "Let's go to the Moon." At that time, people understood they needed a certain kind of rocket, recovery system and landing system. There was a very straightforward path where the probability of success, given all the new technologies, was like 95 percent. They needed to integrate everything together in a super reliable way.
This is more like the invention of the automobile. You had risk takers working on steam-powered cars and electric cars. Then, there was this dark horse where they were exploding things in these metal boxes called internal combustion. They kept blowing things up, but because of the energy density of gasoline, the private market weighed the relative merits, and two out of three approaches are footnotes in history.
There is a $3 trillion market per year for buying energy that is bigger than any prize anyone can come up with. But the time it takes to develop this technology means you need slightly more patient capital. The normal venture capitalist model that has worked for biotech and worked for software is not quite right here.