Climate and energy: Innovation at every level

Talks and writing from Progress Conference 2025

As Jason Crawford puts it, “We should install a thermostat on the Earth.”

We didn’t originally plan to have tracks about energy or climate at this year’s Progress Conference. But once there were several excellent speakers lined up to talk about climate and energy topics, we knew it would be worth it to highlight their expertise together. Here are select talks from the conference and related writing.

Track dispatch

Powering progress: The quest for energy abundance by Grant Mulligan

In this essay for Big Think’s special issue The Engine of Progress, RPI Fellow Grant Mulligan writes about exploring the barriers to clean, abundant power.

Progress runs on power. There is no progress without energy. Our ability to harness energy has enabled enormous strides in agriculture, industry, manufacturing, transportation, and medicine. The more energy available to a society, the wealthier it becomes.

There’s a reason that Lewis Strauss’ famous line about “energy too cheap to meter” — delivered in 1954, when he was chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission — has stuck in the public consciousness for more than 70 years.

[…]

Strauss’ vision of a future where energy is so cheap that it isn’t worth the effort to measure individual usage looks a lot like the visions of progress shared at the conference.

Talk videos

Next Nature: Engineering the Biosphere

From investor and author Ramez Naam: “Climate change is altering the conditions that wild ecosystems—forests, oceans, reefs, and more—are adapted to. Even in a best case climate scenario, conditions are changing faster than evolution can keep up. To keep a vibrant “wild” biosphere, humanity’s only choice is to intervene to accelerate the adaptation and evolution of these ecosystems. This talk will cover both the why and the how of engineering the biosphere for a new climate reality, starting with the most critically endangered ecosystem: coral reefs.”

The Hard Stuff: Navigating the Physical Realities of the Energy Transition

Mekala Krishnan (McKinsey Global Institute) covers research on the energy transition: “While the energy transition has seen meaningful momentum in the last years, it remains in its early stages. Only about 10% of the low-emissions technologies needed by 2050 to meet global commitments have been deployed. This session unpacks the 25 most critical, interlinked hurdles in the physical world that need to be overcome for the transition to succeed—from scaling variable renewables and building hydrogen networks to decarbonizing industry and deploying carbon capture. Drawing on McKinsey Global Institute research, this session will explore the hard realities of technology and infrastructure, physics and engineering, innovation and execution, that underpin the energy transition today, and how leaders can accelerate progress to turn commitments to action.”

Table Stakes

Luke Iseman, co-founder of geoengineering startup Make Sunsets, says: “There are 10 things we must do for the 22nd century to be way better than the 21st. What, why, and how.”

How Do We Get SAI Right?: Risks, Research, and the Route Forward

Dakota Gruener, CEO of Reflective, talks about another perspective on SAI: “Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) could, in theory, cool the planet within years, buying time to cut emissions and remove CO₂. The big question isn’t whether we could do it—it’s whether we should. And if so, how to do it in ways that minimize risks and protect people and ecosystems. This is why bans on research are shortsighted: it’s imperative that we understand the global impacts to make more informed decisions. We need to be clear on what we know—and what we don’t—and generate the data we need, fast, to guide the decisions we can’t avoid. That’s the responsible path: reducing risks and protecting people and ecosystems, without gambling the planet.”

Building a Rad Future

Isabelle Boemeke and Madison Hilly led a pro nuclear movement which included extending the life of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. Isabelle’s book, RAD FUTURE, brings nuclear to the mainstream. In this talk, Isabelle and Madison discuss how to lead a successful grassroots movement, as well as issue some words of caution about the current nuclear renaissance.

Other writing

We should install a thermostat on the Earth by Jason Crawford

In Chapter 5 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford writes about applying solutionism to the climate:

Every solution creates new problems, and solving any problem of control creates a new problem of governance. If we install a thermostat on the Earth, what should we set it to—and how could we ever agree? Regional communities have dealt with such challenges before, such as the governance of water systems, but this would be the first one at planetary scale. I’m not going to solve those political problems in this essay. I’m also not going to address exactly how fast we should build a climate control system, or how much we should be willing to spend on it; Nobel-laureate economists who have been modeling this for decades do not agree. My purpose here is only to show that we can solve the problems of climate change by moving forward with technology and industry—not by rolling them back.

Sunscreen for the planet by Daniele Visioni & Dakota Gruener

In this essay for Works in Progress, Daniele and Dakota discuss the possibility of cooling the earth by reflecting sunlight.

The evidence that sulfur emissions cool the world is overwhelming. It is now uncontroversial that we do this unintentionally, and that, if we wished, we could do it deliberately. What we don’t yet know is exactly how much a given injection would cool the world, how uniform that cooling would be, how long the effects would last, and whether it might produce dangerous interactions with other processes we don’t yet understand.

---

We are publishing videos of conference talks over the next several weeks. We’ll post videos on the RPI YouTube channel. 2025 talks will all be added to this specific playlist here.

Thanks to Big Think our conference media partner, for producing all these videos and The Engine of Progress, a special issue of Big Think exploring the people and ideas driving humanity forward.