Scaling Solutions to Climate Change -- A review of John Doerr's "Speed and Scale"

When I first started sharing the concept of blitzscaling, then later wrote a book about it, I was primarily focused on a very specific business context. For start-ups looking to achieve leadership positions in emerging and highly competitive global markets, it makes sense to prioritize speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty.

Over the last few years, I've also come to realize there are much broader applications for a blitzscaling approach. For example, blitzscaling can be used in public health efforts. The decision to ramp up pre-approval production on multiple COVID-19 vaccines so they'd be ready to distribute if proven effective was a classic blitzscaling tactic. Then, there's climate change. At this point, it's clear that we must take a blitzscaling approach to funding, developing, and scaling both the existing technologies and new innovations that will allow us to cut greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to avert looming planetary disaster. 

Even as the consequences of climate change grow more tangible, the question of how to address this incredibly complex challenge can be paralyzing. With time for effective intervention running out, where should we focus our efforts for maximum impact? How do we achieve cooperation amongst a diverse range of governments, industries, and communities, all of whom have different and often competing interests? Can we innovate fast enough to make a difference?

Amidst such uncertainty and doubt, John Doerr lays out a focused plan for how to move forward in his new book, Speed and Scale. As John lays out chapter after chapter of clear-cut goals and recommendations, taking on climate change begins to seem attemptable – and thus achievable. 

Like Bill Gates' book from earlier this year, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster, Speed and Scale is an inspiring call to action rooted in pragmatism. During his long career in the venture capital industry, John, who invested in Amazon, Google, and Intuit, amongst others, became known for the emphasis he places on Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs, which he wrote about in depth in his 2017 best-seller,  Measure What Matters. 

OKRs provide a template for defining any goal with a succinct "what" and "how." The "what" lays out the objective you hope to accomplish. The "how" provides a measurable and verifiable key result that you will use to show you've achieved your goal.

John's top-line OKR in Speed and Scale is to contain global warming to no more than an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which scientists say is the threshold we must not cross if we want to avert irreversible climate catastrophe. To achieve that goal, we must "reach net-zero emissions by 2050 -- and get halfway there by 2030." 

Currently, we collectively produce 59 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. To reduce that by half in just nine years -- and to get to net-zero in 30 years --  is a massively challenging goal that's made even harder by two key factors. 

First, the planet’s population is growing both bigger and richer, and that means our overall energy consumption will increase along with it, as we grow more food, build more cities, and otherwise accommodate 2 billion more people over the next 30 years. 

Second, both the solutions to climate change, and also the setbacks that may occur if we don’t move fast enough, will create new challenges along the way. For example, John notes that while the world currently generates 27,000 terawatt-hours of electricity per year now, we’ll likely need at least 50,000 terawatt-hours per year in 2050 for just electric cars alone. Meanwhile, if our mitigation efforts proceed too slowly and the Arctic's permafrost thaws completely, that "could flip the Arctic from a greenhouse gas sink to a massive source of emissions." So the daunting goal of reducing 59 gigatons of emissions per year is even more daunting than it seems. 

That's why both John and Bill place such emphasis on innovation and investment. Our current technologies alone won’t take us where we need to get by 2050, nor can we rely on simply reducing usage, increasing conservation, and constraining consumption. 

Along with a lot more  innovation, we also need massive scale, to make these new innovations so affordable that even developing countries can quickly adopt them. While government must play a major in this scaling process, creating the right incentives and subsidies to spur innovation and strategically imposing regulations that will curtail fossil fuel usage, both Speed and Scale and How to Avoid A Climate Disaster make it clear that economic realities will ultimately drive adoption curves on a global level. 

This is especially true in developing countries where "green premiums" – the higher cost of choosing, say, an electric car over one with a combustion engine – are substantial. "If you want to get to the middle-income countries [like India and Nigeria] to go green," John writes, "The sum of the green premiums across all sectors has to be brought down over 90 percent." So achieving scale quickly is paramount to our climate change efforts, because scale is what can bring down prices enough to make them competitive. 

Because we have so little time to get to net-zero, we'll also need to take intelligent risks. To find the innovations that will truly make a difference, we need massive infusions of capital for research and development. In John's estimation, that means increasing the U.S. government's climate-related R&D funding from $7.8 billion a year to $40 billion a year; venture capital funding from $13.6 billion to $50 billion a year; and philanthropic funding from $10 billion to $30 billion a year. And of course not every project will pan out. As Bill puts it in his book, "We can't be afraid to bet on some crazy ideas. It's the only way to guarantee at least a few breakthroughs."

The idea that high-tech innovation must play a critical role in climate-saving efforts has always struck some people as a convenient way to maintain unsustainable levels of energy consumption: Instead of getting serious about cutting emissions in the here and now, you simply make blustery promises of carbon-sucking deus ex machinas down the road. 

Others believe there's no way that 21st century technological innovation can repair the damages of 20th century technological innovation without creating a new set of problems that our descendants in the 22nd century will have to deal with.

But as Bill notes in his book, even the steep declines in overall economic activity, daily commuting, and air travel that came with widespread pandemic lockdowns did not move the needle as much as is needed. "What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little," he writes. "This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply -- or even mostly -- by flying and driving less."

That's why it's time to radically ramp up climate-related investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship, along with the right government policies that can accelerate and amplify the impact of these efforts. As John exclaims, "Fundamental changes don't happen because they're virtuous. They happen because they make economic sense. We've got to make the right outcome the profitable outcome, and therefore the likely outcome."

Generally speaking, fundamental changes don't happen quickly either. In this instance, that's especially true. "Energy technology has mass, which means it doesn't scale like Google or Facebook," John writes. "Building out capacity can take decades."

So even with extraordinary technological breakthroughs and entrepreneurial innovation, there won't be any quick fixes or magical solutions. While targeting outcomes to 2050 may make it sound like we've got plenty of time to address the challenges we face, what Speed and Scale especially demonstrates, with its deeply informed roadmaps and timetables for how to get to where we want to go, is that the opposite is true.

The reality is that we've deferred taking the actions we need to take to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions for too long already. So now our best hope is to think big and move quickly, to blitzscale effective solutions by dramatically increasing the resources we're devoting to this effort. In John's estimation, we'll "need to go full throttle for twenty years or more." As Bill puts it, "We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar." 

Of course, one other key aspect of the climate change challenge is that any increasing commitments to take it more seriously -- especially at the government level -- will in turn be met by increasing efforts on the part of climate-change deniers to spread fear, uncertainty, doubt, and divisiveness. That's why I'm so grateful for the leadership both John and Bill have shown for years in this realm, and why Speed and Scale and How to Avoid A Climate Disaster make for such essential reading. Their sense of urgency is galvanizing. Their clear-eyed, highly specific, and actionable plans for how to effectively move forward in the face of potential disaster is indispensable.