Until very recently, the prevailing wisdom cautioned that transitioning to a clean energy economy would be extremely expensive, and therefore only possible if undertaken slowly. New research upends that thinking—when it comes to going green, the faster we go, the cheaper it will be. University of Oxford professors Eric Beinhocker and Doyne Farmer talk with Nick about a new strategy for clean technology that could transform the climate fight.
Eric Beinhocker is a Professor of Public Policy Practice at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Executive Director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford’s Martin School. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow in Economics at Oriel College, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Twitter: @EricBeinhocker
Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He is Baillie Gifford Professor in the Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
Website: http://www.doynefarmer.com/
Going big and fast on renewables could save trillions in energy costs: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/going-big-and-fast-on-renewables-would-save-trillions-in-energy-costs/
A new strategy for climate: make the clean stuff cheap – https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/a-new-strategy-for-climate-make-the-clean-stuff-cheap/
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures. I’m incredibly excited today to get to talk to two good friends of mine, both professors at the Institute of New Economics at Oxford University. My writing partner, Eric Beinhocker, and his colleague, Doyne Farmer, who’s a mathematician and an economist. And in particular, we’re going to talk to them about the economics of climate change, and the way that technology is upending our orthodox understanding of that. Both are brilliant and amazing and doing some really, really interesting cutting edge research in this field, and I think you’re going to really enjoy hearing from them. This is at the bleeding edge of some of the best thinking about climate change and the future. So enjoy.
Eric Beinhocker:
I’m Eric Beinhocker, I’m a professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking also at Oxford.
Doyne Farmer:
I’m Doyne Farmer, I’m the Baillie Gifford Professor of Mathematics. And I’m also the director of Complexity Economics at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.
Nick Hanauer:
Eric and Doyne, so great to have you on, and you guys have been doing some fascinating thinking and collaborating on the economics of climate change, and the ways in which the reality of that are so different from the conventional thinking. And so for our listeners, I think it’d be fantastic to sort of set the stage by describing the conventional thinking, the sort of orthodox neoliberal or neoclassical thinking probably best anchored by William Nordhaus.
Eric Beinhocker:
Many listeners will be aware that the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow just finished up the other week and may have been very disappointed with the progress or lack of progress at that conference. And we believe that part of the reason why progress has been so slow is that we’ve had the wrong economic ideas about this problem, about how climate change is framed. As you alluded to Nick, we’ve been thinking about this problem since the 1970s, since some pioneering work by Yale economist William Nordhaus, for which he won the Nobel prize. It says that basically climate change is a giant cost/benefit problem. That it’s going to be very expensive and costly to transition from our fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy. But those costs have to be weighed against the benefits of avoiding an ecological collapse and potential mass extinction event.
And so the whole idea is we need to add up those costs, look at those future benefits of avoided disaster, and kind of chart a path between the two. Now the answer that comes out of that way of thinking in modeling the problem is basically go slow, delay and wait as long as you can, stretch the costs out as long as you can, and try to get more information about what’s going to happen in the future. But that go slow approach as we’ve seen in the COP26 in Glasgow has put us in a position where we’re now already very close to the tipping point in terms of dangers to our system.
Doyne Farmer:
Maybe just to chime in one thing, Eric is that Nordhaus has had various, he puts a number on the sort of target temperature rising that strikes the right balance between the cost and the benefits. And his early number was quite high. The new number is around 3.1 degrees centigrade. So that’s five and a half degrees Fahrenheit, or so. That’s a lot of warming.
Nick Hanauer:
So how do you price civilizational collapse? How do you, I’m being both glib and honest in the question, how do you calculate that?
Eric Beinhocker:
Well, and that shows the huge disconnect between the way economists have been thinking about the problem and the way physical scientists have been thinking about it. So as Doyne just noted Nordhaus’s optimal warming is well above three degrees, but the vast majority of climate scientists agree that would be just a complete catastrophe with irreversible changes to the climate system and major threats to ecologies and even to human civilization. And there is no way to put a price on that is the short answer.
Doyne Farmer:
Let me say though, that even among the mainstream economist, Nordhaus has been criticized quite a bit for underestimating the damage function. I mean, because really the temperature you’re going to get at the end depends on how costly you think it’ll be to make the transition, and how severe the damage will be as a function of the temperature that we land on. And so I think most people think that Nordhaus significantly, dramatically underestimated how much destruction would happen as the temperature goes up. So of course that has to take into account all this stuff that’s going to happen and I don’t think he did that properly.
Nick Hanauer:
Right, right. But in addition to getting the fundamental economics probably wrong, I mean I guess what I find you guys arguing in your various pieces, and you’ve got this fantastic new piece out in the Democracy Journal and you’ve had a piece out in Bloomberg and Washington Post. I mean, you’re arguing that he even got the fundamental economics upside down, that in fact it’s cheaper, not to say better.
Doyne Farmer:
Yeah. We’re arguing that he got the sign of the effect wrong as we would say in physics. He got the opposite sign to the one that we think is correct. We think that converting to renewables, and doing so reasonably quickly within a span of about 20 years is going to save the world money. It’s going to make energy cheaper for us as well as evading climate change.
Nick Hanauer:
Tell us more about that. Tell us why it’s going to be cheaper and how the last decades have demonstrated that.
Doyne Farmer:
Yeah. So this goes back to some work that my group has done here at Oxford. And Chris McGee and collaborators have done at MIT where we just collected data on technologies. You would think that we would know the history of technologies and their performance quite well. But actually that data’s quite hard to come by, and is sort of scattered all over the place. So we collected some, they collected some. And so we plot over the course of time, what did it cost to perform a given function? So energy is a nice technology because the function’s pretty clear, how many dollars does it cost to make a kilowatt of useful energy? And so you can look at how that’s changed through time. And the answer is that technologies are very persistent. That’s the first thing you see, that is their rates of improvement are very persistent.
The technology’s improving it 10% per year. And one decade it’s likely to improve between five and 15% in the next decade and on and on and on. And so the persistence is really measured in decades and often goes quite steadily for as long as a century. So what you see is that many technologies, most technologies actually improve quite slowly. So they might improve a little bit over the course of the century, but not dramatically. But some technologies, the one we’re all quite familiar with, computers and Moore’s law can improve extremely quickly. Computers have been improving at something like 40% per year. Depends on exactly how you measure it. And interestingly, it’s not just Moore’s law in that case, it’s also things like hard disks have improved at 40 or 50% per year. So computers are one of the outliers.
Another technology that’s been improving at a fairly steady rate is solar energy. That is photovoltaic solar energy, solar cells. And since their advent in 1958, where solar cells were first used for the Vanguard satellite, they’ve been improving at roughly that rate ever since. Meanwhile, other energy technologies like fossil fuels have hardly changed over the course of 140 years. That is, prices go up and down. So they’re volatile, but the overall long range trend is pretty flat. And similarly, nuclear power, since it’s advent, actually almost exactly at the same time as solar energy, nuclear power has only gone up in price. Although, it’s slightly complicated in Korea, it’s gone down, but an extremely slow rate, maybe 1% per year, which is quite slow. And so there’s very low likelihood that nuclear power will go down in the future. But the main point being that because we see these persistent trends, it’s a pretty good bet that they’ll keep going.
Now, one thing that they depend on is deployment. This is somewhat controversial, but the more we make of something, the better we understand how to make it, and the cheaper it gets. And the relationship that governs that is something called Wright’s Law by Theodore Wright, who, quite an interesting figure was head of US aviation production during, at least for part of World War II. But before that in 1936, he observed that if you take a given type of plane in a given factory, that the cost to produce the plane goes down by 20% every time cumulative production of that plane doubles. So that law turns out to hold for many other technologies as well, although with varying percentages, and it holds quite well for solar energy. And so our prediction is that if we continue on the rapid rate of deployment, we have for solar energy, it’s been going up for 40% per year for many decades now.
Then if we continue on that rate of deployment, that within 10 years, solar energy, wind, another technology that’s been increasing in deployment at an exponential rate and going down at a similar rate as a function of deployment, wind, batteries, similar track record, and hydrogen-based fuels like ammonia, that those four technologies are the key technologies that are going to be players in the green energy transition. And if they continue to behave as they have in the past, and if we can just keep them on their same deployment rates for another 10 to 20 years, actually for 10 years for the first two, because that’s all it takes for them to become dominant, then we’re going to see energy cheaper than it’s ever been.
Nick Hanauer:
Just to clarify a couple of things. So despite the fact that coal and oil have been around for a hundred years, right? Maybe longer.
Doyne Farmer:
Longer.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I mean, for a long time, for many, many, many, many decades, they effectively cost the same amount per kilowatt hour today as they did 50 years ago or a hundred years ago.
Doyne Farmer:
Yes. Once you account for inflation, then the price of oil is about what it was a hundred years ago, similarly with coal. And of course it fluctuates by factors of two or three. There are periods where oil goes up and there’s periods where it goes down, but the long range trend is pretty flat.
Eric Beinhocker:
We should note that this is not to say there hasn’t been technology improvements in those areas. There has been a lot of technology advance in oil, gas, coal mining, et cetera. But data seems to indicate those advances have gone more into developing new sources of supply. Going from easy onshore oil to tight oil offshore, Siberian oil, so on, rather than delivering sustained cost declines. Whereas the technology advances in wind, solar, batteries have resulted in more efficiencies and cost declines have been passed on to consumers.
Nick Hanauer:
And it is true that today, utility-scale solar is as cheaper, cheaper than all of the fossil fuel alternatives, isn’t it?
Eric Beinhocker:
Well, it depends a bit on your geographic location. But certainly in plenty of places now it’s cheaper. And as the cost continue to come down, our, our, our rule of thumb is if you, that the locations that are in the 95th percentile of solar, meaning it’s most expensive, they’re going to be, and after a decade, they should be roughly where the fifth percentile places are. Now, it depends on where you live. What’s more expensive, but in another decade it’s going to be pretty uniformly cheaper.
We should be clear that we’re approaching this tipping point where renewables plus storage from batteries and from liquid fuels. It becomes cheaper and better than the fossil fuel economy. And we’re kind of approaching that tipping point now. We still have a long way to go. Only about 20% of global energy is from non-fossil fuels today, 80% from fossil fuels. But the growth has been extraordinary. Renewable capacity was up 45% in 2020. The only energy sources to actually grow during the pandemic, and 90% of new power additions in the world now in the electrical sector are from renewables. So this is all good news, but it’s still not happening fast enough to get us on the pathway to Net Zero and contained warming according to the Paris targets. And there are many barriers to getting this stuff out faster. We need more investment flows, we need policy support, there’s issues with developing the grids and ensuring there’s enough storage capacity and so on. So there’s a huge amount of good news in these cost declines that Doyne was talking about. But it’s a race against the clock.
Doyne Farmer:
I’d like to interject a little bit of a correction, in that actually, if we can just stay on the improvement rates that we’ve been on for solar and wind, we’re going to get there in a decade and we are going to hit the Paris agreement. The question is, can we do that? Or are there going to be blockages that will keep us from doing that like resistance from fossil fuel companies? I think the key place where we have to really put our pedal to the floor is in storage technologies, long term storage. So the weakest track record of the four technologies that I mentioned that is solar wind batteries and hydrogen based fuels are the hydrogen based fuels. So we need to get those costs down and we need to keep them on the 60% per year deployment rate that they’re on and they need to stay on that for another 15 years or so to get us where we need to go. So if we can just do that, we’re there.
Nick Hanauer:
And this is where policy in politics starts to make a big difference, doesn’t it? Because if we were not in a race for time, then we would have nothing to worry about. Because the fundamental dynamics of these technological improvements are going to put the oil companies out of business eventually. Effectively can’t not happen. But the truth is we are in a race for time, we have to get there quick. And that’s where policy and politics comes in. And, and I’d love for you guys to discuss this, this new strategy for climate, which is making the clean stuff cheap. Yeah,
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah, no, exactly. It is a race of against time. And, again, despite the good news trends in terms of cost and deployment that Doyne was talking about, there’s a huge amount of momentum and existing installed capacity and political power in the existing fossil fuel system. So this tipping point won’t happen fast enough without a significant push from policy. And, and we should also note, some of the barriers are things like issues with how the grid is run and operated that fall squarely in the purview of governments or common infrastructure, like charging points for electric vehicles and things like that.
Doyne Farmer:
We need to convert pipelines from oil to ammonia. We need, as Eric said, we need to have a build out. We estimate the grid needs to be built out by a factor of four over the next 30 years. So we need to really dramatically expand the grid. And it’s all doable, but it is going to require policy and coordinated government action to make those things happen.
Eric Beinhocker:
Can I ask a clarifying question? And I feel stupid asking it, but I suspect that some of our listeners will also have it, which is what do you mean by among this is something new to me.
Doyne Farmer:
Yeah. So ammonia is the stuff that people use to clean things, but it also burns. And it’s a fuel that without carbon is a fuel that you can easily make from electricity and water. And unlike hydrogen, which is an extremely light and very volatile gas, so it’s hard to handle and tough to store. If you just put hydrogen out in the air, it just evaporates and goes off and outer space. It’s a light. Yeah, gravity doesn’t hold it down. But ammonia, it’s a liquid kind of like petroleum. Ammonia is a convenient fuel, and ammonia is not the only possibility. I mean, you can make several other fuels that are hydrogen-based that can be made in a carbon neutral way.
Eric Beinhocker:
While solar and wind are great at generating electricity, there’s many applications that need liquid fuels, that also need heating. And also you need to be able to store the electricity generated by wind and solar because the sun and wind don’t blow all the time. So we’ll need a combination of storage technologies, including utilities, scale batteries, but also these liquid fuel capabilities.
Nick Hanauer:
So with electricity and water, you can make ammonia, correct?
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
And with ammonia you could run a car?
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah. For vehicles, it’s looking for most passenger vehicles, it’s looking most likely electric, that electric cars with battery technologies work very well, but certain kinds of large scale heavy machinery, factory operations, industrial processes.
Nick Hanauer:
Airplanes?
Eric Beinhocker:
Lots of other-
Doyne Farmer:
Tankers.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah. Ships, and we’re going to need renewable liquid fuels for aircraft and things like that. So electricity and the batteries can get a big chunk of the problem, but not all the problem.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay. So let’s talk about making the clean stuff cheaper rather than the bad stuff more expensive.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah. So for about the past 30 years, again, initiated by Nordhaus’s work, the strategy that economists focused on was well, climate change is what economists call an externality, a form of pollution where somebody is creating a cost that they aren’t bearing, but society as a whole is bearing. And the textbook economics answer to that is to put a price on it, to tax it, create a pollution tax or a market where you can trade permits to pollute. And that approach was tried in other areas of environmentalism, most famously for reducing acid rain, sulfur dioxide emissions in the US. And it was actually very successful. So many economists thought this was the logical approach for climate change, that we should have a carbon tax or what’s called a cap and trade market where you have permits to emit carbon that are then reduced over time and you trade them, creating a price for it.
And it’s a very elegant answer in theory, but it hasn’t really worked in reality. We’ve been trying to implement carbon prices around the world for the last 30 years, and the world bank estimates that today, after all this effort, only about 0.8% of global emissions are under any kind of effective carbon tax. And this is despite the fact that actually a growing number of countries have carbon prices, about 60 countries in the world do today. But the big problem with them is political, that when carbon taxes or carbon prices are proposed or implemented, there’s huge pushback from fossil fuel and industrial interest, as we put it, the dirty stuff doesn’t want to be made more expensive. So it fights back and those interests have a lot of political power.
Nick Hanauer:
And if I could just say, and consumers.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah, and consumers.
Nick Hanauer:
The majority of consumers hate it too.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah. And politically, it’s a very powerful argument. You tell people, oh, your energy bill is going to go up or you’re going to pay more for gas for your car. And listeners may be familiar with what were called the Gilets Jaune protests in France. It was people all wearing yellow vests who came out in the streets in their tens of thousands because they were going to increase gas taxes to pay for climate initiatives. So that makes it very, very hard politically to implement these schemes. And then even if they do, Europe has had its emissions trading scheme for over a decade now. What tends to happen is the lobbyists get ahold of it and they just ensure the carbon price is so low that it has almost no effect. So the European trading scheme, for example, only studies estimate-reduced emissions by about 3%. Again, despite all this effort and political capital invested.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. It’s definitely a long slog to do that. And politically, it couldn’t be a harder thing to accomplish.
Eric Beinhocker:
Exactly. Now if someone were going to implement a $75 a ton carbon tax in the US tomorrow, we’d be the first people to cheer. But again-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, not going to happen.
Eric Beinhocker:
It is not going to happen. And interestingly, some listeners may have heard that an Exxon lobbyist was caught on secret videotape by an environmental group confessing to the fact that the fossil fuel companies actually support proposals for carbon taxes because they know how politically toxic they are. So it’s a very cynical strategy. So instead, we propose a pivot to a strategy we call make the clean stuff cheap and widely available. And use policies that can drive the deployment of more renewable technologies to accelerate the cost to clients that we talked about, and also to make the investments in infrastructure that are required to make a high renewable system work, and also to remove the other barriers that stand in the way for deploying these clean technologies.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. And so just playing this back to you in sort of political talk, it’s just way easier to give people a new cheaper thing than it is to make the existing thing that they are using more expensive. One is a relatively easy political sell. And the other is a nightmare. And I’ve watched the sort of the climate change political community hit their heads against this brick wall again and again and again and again, and fail. Because they’re expecting the majority of citizens, most of whom are hanging on economically by their fingernails to subordinate their own near term economic self interest to save the polar bears. Which people will not do. They just will not do it.
Eric Beinhocker:
Exactly. While polls show that people increasingly do care a lot about climate change and the environment, the latest Yale study shows something like 70% in the US do. But when it comes down to the kitchen table issues telling someone that their commute to work is going to get more expensive. They don’t like that. But if instead, anyone who’s driven one of these wonderful, modern electric cars knows they’re better cars. They’re just great cars. And if you tell people and said, “We’re going to give you cheaper, better electric cars, and we’re going to give you plenty of places around where you can easily charge them”, and so on, and you’ll never have to spend money on gasoline again, you’ll never have to get oil change. Your maintenance costs will be lower, and these things go really fast. People will like that.
Or likewise, if we can get these very high levels of deployment of renewables and drive the cost down, people will see their electric utility bills drop. Which is a good thing. And people have already started to see some of these benefits. LED lighting for example has become very cheap now. And it’s just better lighting. Who likes to change light bulbs all the time? Plus you can make them different colors and things like that. So it’s better for consumers. And it also creates new economic and political interest because the companies making the electric vehicles, making the solar turbines, making the LED lights, their voice starts to get heard in the political system.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And their money can start to be deployed politically too, against the fossil fuel industries.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah. Stepping back a bit, the way we think about this whole problem, again, very different from where we started with the conventional economics and Nordhaus’s, it’s not a big cost/benefit problem. It’s a problem of economic transformation. So the transition to the clean energy economy is more like the industrial revolution. You’re changing the technologies, changing the energy systems, changing the the way we live. And we know from history that we do have these regime changes. There’s not a lot of companies making whale oil anymore. Or Buggy whips. And if these new technologies do get cheaper and better and widely deployed, our future generations will be reading about oil companies in their history books. They won’t exist anymore. But again, we have to drive this industrial technological transformation faster than it would happen just on its own.
Nick Hanauer:
I don’t know how much the best utility-grade solar costs per kilowatt today, but in 10 years at the current course in speed, how much cheaper will it be than it is today?
Eric Beinhocker:
Well, just as a reference point, in about 15 years, between 2005 and 2020, solar dropped, 22-fold.
Nick Hanauer:
Incredible. And what does that imply 20 years out? I mean, it would be 90% cheaper than it is today 20 years out.
Doyne Farmer:
Yeah. Well, the curve is likely to flatten. This is debated, but the reason the curve would flatten is that in about 10 years, solar becomes a dominant technology. So right now it can improve. It can increase at 40% per year, because it’s knocking other technologies, it’s taking over their territory. And it’s still a relatively small fraction of the total. But in 10 years it starts to become a substantial fraction, like 50% of the total. And then it has to flatten out, and the rate of growth of energy in general, total energy, useful energy is around 2% per year. So the growth will eventually flatten to around 2% per year. And when that happens, we will likely move down the learning curve more slowly than we are now. And so it won’t drop in price as fast as it has been dropping, although we’ll see.
Nick Hanauer:
But we are looking at, I mean, if we don’t annihilate ourselves in between here and there, a future with an astonishing amount of abundant clean energy.
Doyne Farmer:
And cheap energy.
Nick Hanauer:
To do a lot of really cool things with.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah, no, our team estimates that if we go through what we call a decisive transition, where we have a big push to accelerate the deployment that Doyne was talking about, that that save the world about 27 trillion in energy costs versus the costs of the fossil fuel economy that we have today. So we would have both abundant and cheaper energy. Now one thing that many listeners may wonder about is we talk about getting to higher and higher levels of renewables. Again, everyone knows that sun doesn’t always shine. The wind doesn’t blow, how reliable would that kind of an electricity system be? Would we still need nuclear or some fossil fuel on the grid? And yeah, this is an area of debate, but around the world, different utilities are getting more experience with higher and higher levels of renewables.
And we’re finding that as the engineers get working on these issues, that combinations of storage and renewables and and other sources of power, hydro and geothermal and so on, can combine to create very reliable grids that can get to zero carbon. And nuclear, our view is where it exists today, it should be run as long as it’s safe and economical to do so, but as Doyne noted earlier, the costs of nuclear have been increasing over time, and are now substantially more expensive than renewables. So in terms of adding new nuclear capacity, unless there’s some real major technological breakthrough that changes that equation, it doesn’t make sense to be adding large amounts of new nuclear capacity.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Cool. So we always ask this question at the end of our podcast, if you guys were benevolent dictators, and could just decide what the world should do to address these problems, what would you do?
Eric Beinhocker:
If I was a benevolent dictator, the policy I’d like to see implemented globally is what I call carbon abolition, a sunset clause for fossil fuels that by a fixed date, say 2035 in the developed world, and 2050 in the developing world, that we’re just not going to allow the burning of fossil fuels in a way that has emissions, fossil fuels that have some carbon capture in storage would still be allowed, but nothing that would be emitting. And having that as a fixed date and fixed in law would be a huge signal to the rest of the economy, you’ve got to get your skates on and start this transition now. And it would be a huge spur to drive the deployments of clean energy technologies and innovation that we’ve been talking about. And it would give huge certainty to the capital markets that that’s where you want your money to go.
Nick Hanauer:
How about you Doyne?
Doyne Farmer:
Well, I would agree with that. I would do the same thing. I think the only thing I would add is I would also provide substantial support for methods of storing energy. They’re called actually P2X fuels like ammonia that you can make from hydrogen to try and get the cost of that down as quickly as possible. Put in place the infrastructure for storing it, for moving it around the planet where it’s needed, and moving energy around as well as building really good grid technology so that we can move energy around the planet and not form. So I put both the carrot and the stick. Eric gave the stick. I’d also put out some carrots.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I love it. I love it. And finally, Doyne, you go first and then you, Eric, why do you do this work?
Doyne Farmer:
Well, I do it because I love it, but I want to do something good for the world. Actually, 15 years ago, when I was at the Santa Fe Institute, we had some people come up from the NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. And to help them think out of the box about what to do, and I could see that the main thing that all this depended on was how the cost of technologies are going to change in time. And so I have been doggedly researching that question since then. And it’s very nice to see that paying off in terms of an understanding of technological change that’ll benefit not just the green energy transition, but lots of other areas as well. And of course, it’s always nice when you can predict things.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. That’s fantastic. How about you, Eric?
Eric Beinhocker:
For me, it’s pretty simple. I’d like future generations to be able to flourish on and enjoy this beautiful blue planet that we’re the stewards of.
Doyne Farmer:
Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.
Eric Beinhocker:
So Eric and Doyne, thank you so much for being with us. This is so fantastic. And thank you for your work. It’s both important and fascinating.
Doyne Farmer:
Thanks so much, Nick. It’s been a real pleasure.
Eric Beinhocker:
Yeah. Thanks from me and appreciate you getting the word out there.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook @civicaction and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on medium @civicskunkworks, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.