When I want to know what the future is going to be like, I go ask Ramez Naam. Over the years, his spyglass has seemed to peer just a little farther into the future than other people’s.

My favorite example: In 2011 he wrote a guest post for Scientific American entitled “Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells?” that alerted the world the startling, consistent, and seemingly unstoppable cost declines for solar energy. This came at a time when almost everyone in public discourse still thought of solar as an unworkably expensive pipe dream. But Ramez (or “Mez”, to his friends) was right. Over the next decade, his prediction became conventional wisdom, not just for solar but for batteries as well. The resulting explosion in solar installation and electric vehicles has utterly changed scientists’ outlook for climate change — catastrophe may still strike, but the most apocalyptic scenarios now look distinctly unlikely. This isn’t Mez’ doing, of course, but he saw it before others did.

Why is Mez so good at predicting the future of technology? Part of it is his personal experience — as a Microsoft engineer, he led the teams working on a number of core software products. But he’s a dreamer as well as a doer — his science fiction series, the Nexus trilogy, deserves to be among the classics of the cyberpunk genre. He has also written two nonfiction futurist books, More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement and The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. Readers of my blog will notice that biological enhancement and sustainable/renewable technology are two of the things I’m most excited about. Well, it’s because I read Ramez Naam.

In this email interview, Mez and I discuss a lot of things related to the future of technology — how to get off oil and gas and weaken Vladimir Putin’s regime, how to decarbonize the U.S. rapidly, what technologies to be optimistic about, and how to get involved building the techno-optimist future. As always, I learned a lot.

N.S.: Lots of people, including yourself, have talked about the need to get off oil and gas quickly in order to starve Russia of income, as part of the Ukraine war assistance effort and the new cold war with Russia. How exactly do we do that? What are the important steps?

R.N.: Noah, great to be here. My view is that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is going to substantially accelerate the clean energy transition. I say this as someone who invests in clean energy and climate tech startups, and keenly watches the pace of innovation in these technologies.

In particular, the war in Europe is going to accelerate the development, deployment, and price decline of the technologies needed to replace natural gas. Natural gas is the cleanest of the three major fossil fuels. Burning it causes half the carbon emissions of burning coal, and two thirds of the carbon emissions of burning oil. (Though leaks are a problem, since un-burnt methane released into the atmosphere is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas.) 

Natural gas – really methane – is interesting to me in this situation for a few reasons.

First, while natural gas is a relatively small portion of Putin’s revenue from selling fossil fuels, it’s an enormous amount of his leverage over Europe. If you look at this chart of Russia’s exports, from Nikos Tsafos, you see that oil and gas together are roughly half of all of Russia’s exports. But within that oil and gas segment (the stacked blue bars on the left) oil is much bigger.

So oil is where Putin makes his money. Russia makes about three times as much money from sales of oi and oil products as it does from the sale of natural gas.  Why is natural gas interesting?

Because natural gas (methane) keeps the lights on. And because it’s a regionally traded commodity.  You see, oil is a global commodity. Oil is moved extensively in tanker ships around the world. Europe could stop buying Russian oil and buy oil (or refined oil products, like gasoline or diesel) from somebody else. There’s differences, but in general it’s a pretty fungible market.

Natural gas is different.  The world has relatively little shipping capacity. To move gas over oceans you have to chill it to -160 degrees C, and turn it into a liquid. That’s doable. But it’s relatively expensive. And so most gas is moved by pipeline. That means that if the gas link between Europe and Russia were shut down for any reason – political, economic, or physical – that you have a much harder time replacing that supply.

Now, this natural gas doesn’t really make all that much money for Putin. I mean, it’s on the order of $80B / year (before this crisis), which is a third of the amount Putin makes from oil. Yet gas is actually more important in terms of his leverage over Europe.  That’s because of the problems shipping gas around that I mention above, and also because gas is used to keep the lights on and houses warm.

If you look at where Europe uses methane gas, one third of it goes to buildings. That means building heat. Literally keeping your home or office warm.  Another third is “heat and power” – that’s electricity. That’s keeping the lights on.  Another third is “industry”. And that’s a mix of using natural gas to make ammonia, a key ingredient in fertilizer, which massively affects crop yields and thus food prices, and other industrial uses such as refineries, making plastics, and so on.  You can see this breakdown in this chart from Eurostat:

The combination of natural gas’s greater difficulty of transportation vs oil, along with its mission critical role in keeping buildings warm, the lights on, and making fertilizer to apply to fields, means that, even though it earns Putin less money than oil, it’s incredible leverage that he has over Europe.  

Gas is where he has Europe over a barrel. Or where he thinks he does. And reducing or eliminating the need for Russian natural gas is going to be and incredible driver of innovation.

N.S.: OK, so how can Europe get off of Russian gas? What are the policy steps for doing this as quickly as possible, with as little harm to the economy as possible?

R.N.: There will be short term steps, and long term steps. The EU published a plan in March on how to get Europe off of Russian fossil gas, and it clearly distinguishes between the two. In the short term, it’s going to require something that environmentalists and climate activists don’t want to hear. Europe is going to need to bring in natural gas from elsewhere. Some of it can come via pipeline, but most of it will come as LNG – liquified natural gas moved by ship. While the short term plan has many other aspects – more solar and wind; keeping existing nuclear reactors running longer, turning down thermostats and otherwise being more energy efficient – the biggest single chunk, and the majority of the replacement of Russian natural gas, comes purely by importing natural gas from somewhere else. That will mean Qatar. And it will mean natural gas exports from the US as LNG.  This doesn’t make me happy. But, speaking as a vocal long-time clean energy advocate, there is no other realistic way to eliminate Europe’s dependence on Russia’s natural gas this year. And I believe strongly that we must do so, to eliminate his leverage over Europe, and thus to embolden Europe to take the actions necessary to save Ukrainian lives, stop this war of aggression, and arm Ukraine sufficiently to fully and completely defeat Putin’s army.

What’s most exciting about the chart above, though, is the long term, running out to 2030. That long-term chart is on a different vertical axis than the short term, 2022 chart. It goes more than twice as high. And what it shows is that accelerated build-out of solar and wind, alone, can more than make up for all imported Russian natural gas. And on top of that, it plans for increase deployment of electric heat pumps – which heat buildings though almost-magically-efficient use of electricity, rather than burning natural gas – along with increased energy efficiency, and deployment of new technologies like green hydrogen, made by using solar and wind electricity to electrolyze water.

What’s really exciting about this is that, as I’ve written about for years, deploying more clean energy makes future clean energy cheaper.  Clean energy is a technology, not a raw material. Its long term price isn’t so much dictated by the law of supply and demand as it is driven by the virtuous cycle of increased demand leading to reduction of cost via Wright’s Law / the learning curve, and those lower prices leading to increased demand. And that’s a global phenomenon. Deploying more clean energy technology in Europe makes clean energy cheaper in the US, in China, in India, in Africa, and everywhere. I’ve written about this extensively in the past. In How to Decarbonize America, and the World, I argued that the most effective climate policy of all time was Germany’s early subsidies of solar power, when that was a tiny, ludicrously expensive industry, because that scaling of industry made solar cheaper for everyone on the planet. In Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap I documented how every major data set of solar cost shows that increased scaling leads to exponential price decline, in a way that can be measured and forecasted using Wright’s Law / learning rates.

Okay. Why does that matter now? Because natural gas was going to be the last fossil fuel we got rid of. Coal would go first. Then oil. Then finally gas.  But because Europe has to reduce its dependence on Russian gas, it’s going to scale the technologies to do so, making them cheaper for everyone, and accelerating the pace at which the whole world can get off of Russian gas.

Specifically, hidden inside those bar charts of the 2030 plan are some details that Europe has to figure out, that aren’t made clear:

1. Energy storage, especially long-duration energy storage. Natural gas is useful in a wind and solar dominated grid because it’s flexible. It can ramp up and down quickly, unlike coal, and economically, unlike nuclear. To do with less natural gas, Europe is going to have to deploy a lot more energy storage, to handle those times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Including more super-long-duration storage, that can store multiple days of energy, for the long periods in winter when you don’t have sun and you may have a wind lull for days at a time. Those technologies are nascent. Scaling them is going to have a massive impact on driving down their cost, with global ripple effects.

2. Electricity transmission and the grid. The very cheapest way to get more renewables onto the grid is to build a bigger, smarter grid. That’s been held up as much by politics and NIMBY as anything else. Well, Europe now has a reason to push past those obstacles.

3. Electrifying building heat. As we’ve already covered, this is still a young area, with lots of room for improvement. I expect a rush across northern Europe, especially Germany, to switch to electric heat pumps, and a fair bit of innovation alongside that.

4. Offshore wind and floating offshore wind. Europe’s natural gas demand spikes in winter. As we electrify building heat, even more of the electricity peak of Europe will be in winter. Solar is a summer-peaking resource. To provide winter power, Europe is going to look at long duration storage, yes, and possibly nuclear fission and geothermal. But the bulk of the winter heavy lifting will be done by wind power. And given Europe’s population density, that’s going to mean a lot more offshore wind, and also a lot of floating offshore wind, an even younger technology with huge upside potential. Floating offshore wind alone could power the world several times over. It can also be placed further from shore, where it can’t be seen, reducing NIMBY objections. Today it’s expensive, but there’s no reason it has to stay that way. Floating offshore wind is already blowing past most projections. I’ve long been bullish on this tech. I expected it to be much more important, cost effective, and pervasive than industry expected already. The war will just push it forward faster.

5. Green hydrogen. A third of natural gas usage is for “industrial” uses such as making fertilizer and chemicals, or high temperature heat. That “hydrogen” chunk in the plan is the deployment of electrolyzers that use solar and wind electricity to electrolyze water into oxygen and “green” hydrogen, which you can then use to replace natural gas in these applications. That’s another young technology that was already surging. It will surge faster now.

6. Nuclear fusion, geothermal anywhere, and other next generation “clean firm” resources. Finally, there will be more enthusiasm than ever to develop and deploy next generation “clean, firm” resources (as Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins likes to say) that can produce power any time of day, any day of the year, 24/7/365. One of those is “geothermal anywhere”, a broad set of technologies that could enable geothermal power across much more of the planet. Another if nuclear fusion. Fusion isn’t going to be commercialized by 2030. But I already see a surge in interest. The White House held a Fusion Summit, which my colleague Dr