Finally, some new transcripts!

Industrial decarbonization, Canadian carbon taxes, and DOE loans.

Dearest readers — those of you who prefer to read rather than listen to podcasts — I apologize: I have fallen behind on bringing you transcripts. Part of it has to do with my recent difficulties typing. Part of it has to do with my entirely irrational insistence on polishing the transcripts until they are maximally readable, a degree of effort that goes well beyond what anyone really needs or has requested. And part of it is just [waves hands] everything else.

Regardless, I’ve got some good ones for you today. As always, if you click through there is also a PDF version available. Below are links, along with a few juicy quotes.

Using DOE loan guarantees to accelerate clean energy, with Jigar Shah

When you talk about solving climate change, you're generally talking about trillion-dollar scale, and trillion-dollar scale only exists in infrastructure. In venture capital, we had a banner year last year; it was about $60 billion. That's not trillion-dollar scale. What does it take for the trillion-dollar-scale people to get comfortable with a technology? That's a commercial debt conversation.

We did about $35 billion worth of deals; we've had roughly $1.02 billion of losses, inclusive of Solyndra. That track record is something you would put up against any commercial bank in the space, let alone one that focuses on hard-to-finance deals. There are a lot of people who suggest we're not taking enough risk.

The way that the president and the secretary have been talking about it is that this is the single largest wealth-creation opportunity America has in front of it. If we do it correctly, not only do we get to use our technology that we have ourselves invented through our dollars that we put in out of DOE, and we manufacture the products here, and we create the jobs here — but we also help hundreds of countries around the world decarbonize through the export markets for our technology companies.

Rebecca Dell on decarbonizing heavy industry

I don't like to think of any of them as difficult [to decarbonize]. I find that framing both unhelpful and inaccurate, because people just started noticing the importance of the industrial sector about a year ago. I often tell people that where we are in our decarbonization progress in these sectors is similar to where the power sector was in the late 90s. … The situation in the industrial sector is not that it's somehow inherently harder. We're just at a much earlier stage in our decarbonization journey.

The real political and economic problem here is not, “how do we afford to pay for decarbonization?” We can 100 percent afford to pay for decarbonization of steel and all of these other industries. The problem is, how do we pass the costs efficiently through the supply chain so that the place they land, the final consumer, is the person in the supply chain who can actually afford to pay.

Even if we decide that we don't want to use CCS in any other part of our economy, the place that we are most likely to end up relying on CCS as our primary decarbonization pathway is in the cement industry.

Gerald Butts and Catherine McKenna on Canada's carbon tax

When we designed our program, there were lots of people within the party who thought we should stay a million miles away from it, because they were convinced that they lost the election in 2008 because of carbon taxes. We were very careful to make sure that any of the revenue collected went back to the province from which it originated. That, I think, was what unlocked the political constituency for carbon pricing in Canada.

We had to enlist people, and not just environmentalists. Of course we had environmentalists putting out the message. But we got young people, and it was good because at that time you had Greta and young people marching in the streets. We got doctors, there was a whole campaign of doctors to support us. I got Arnold Schwarzenegger to do a video — as a Republican, he brought this in in a bipartisan way. We were just doing whatever we could so that Canadians could hear the message.

Everybody wanted to get rid of Stephen Harper in 2015, and there was a debate over whether it was going to be us or the NDP. We put a more progressive policy platform together than they had, and climate was a huge part of that. I have no doubt that it helped consolidate the progressive community and has kept it there through some difficult times.

Mabel apologizes on behalf of management for the slow pace.

This face though. (Photo: Jennifer Roberts)