I thought this was a pretty good overview, but I didn’t come away with ideas that seemed especially notable.

Quotes

If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you to.

It’s not clear that we could store hundreds of billions of tons of carbon safely.

When you cover land with water, if there’s a lot of carbon in the soil, the carbon eventually turns into methane and escapes into the atmosphere—which is why studies show that depending on where it’s built, a dam can actually be a worse emitter than coal for 50 to 100 years before it makes up for all the methane it’s responsible for.

But consider that the last time the United States raised the federal gas tax—imposed any increase at all—was more than a quarter century ago, in 1993. I don’t think Americans are eager to pay more for gas.

This has come up over and over again, in my urban planning classes, in conversations, and now here. We really just need to raise the gas tax to make the cost of driving reflect its environmental externalities.

We should encourage more alternative modes, like walking, biking, and carpooling, and it’s great that some cities are using smart urban plans to do just that.

In fact I would argue that this deserves much more than an aside, and seems like it should be one of our biggest climate priorities. But that would require changing the way that we do things.