You're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host, and I've got Dr. David Kirsch, professor at University of Maryland on the show today. Professor, great to have you on the program.

Nice to be with you.

Okay. Tell us a little bit about your journey and what has led you to, you know, studying areas related to the environment, and what kind of got you looking in that direction.

Sure, happy to talk a little bit about it, I was actually trained as a historian of technology at Stanford, way back and in the mid 90s, and I wrote a book based on my dissertation on the history of the electric car, which at the time, seemed like it was a history of failure. And I chose to look at the history of electric vehicles through a lens of a kind of discipline called Industrial Ecology, sort of thinking about how industries have their own kind of inputs and outputs and energy flows in and out.

And, you know, the electric vehicle always was this kind of very attractive possibility is one of my colleagues, who also wrote a book about the history of electric car called it, you know, the, the car of tomorrow, the electric vehicle is always the car of tomorrow. And in fact, it really had been discovered it had been the car of tomorrow, since the 1890s.

And you know, that it really to some, it was quite surprising that electric vehicles had existed in a way back at the dawn of the auto age, and competed with internal combustion, or gasoline cars at that time, on the burden of history, and had this sort of kind of double entendre, the, the burden of history in the sense that the electric vehicle lost that first battle, and therefore was forever, kind of disadvantaged in competition with internal combustion, but also the burden of the battery and kind of the weight of the battery that may never never seem to quite lift.

And so that book came out now, about 20 years ago. It's surprisingly, it's kind of been this evergreen story where we're, here we are. And I've been working on the history of electric cars for almost coming up on 30 years. And the history is still unfolding, I think I got lucky, I'd be be the first to say I got lucky to choose a topic that I was interested in. And that has remained relevant over this long period of time.

But it’s a fascinating topic. And I was kind of surprised to learn a few years back, when I saw pictures of these old electric cars back from the 1890s. And how that was really a thing. And it wasn't something that was kind of common knowledge. I don't think as a kid growing up that, hey, we had lots of electric vehicle options back in the 1890s, early 20th century, and that, for whatever reason, or confluence of reasons, we kind of shifted in another direction.

I'd probably say the oil industry had probably a big part in it. But as you said, the battery technology probably was a limiting factor as well. You know, given all that? Well, let's let's start with the history question, because that's your historian. Why is it that the electric car lost out to the internal combustion energy engine back in the early 20th century? Was it big oil? Or was it just a technology limitation related to the battery?

That's a great, it's a great question. And it's a question I've been really trying to answer for a long time. And the best answer I can come up with, I can give you sort of three reasons why the electric vehicle laws so the first reason is that actually consumers preferred internal combustion. And by this I mean that not that people there weren't people who liked electric vehicles, but the people who mattered that the deciders if you will tended to be wealthy white man.

And they wanted a gasoline powered car because it was more manly, more exciting, more, you know, the roar of the engine, the, as one of my colleagues describe it, it was more of an Adventure Machine, the electric vehicle was actually kind of, even in 1900 was kind of docile, and a little more kind of attractive. It's like a phone booth on wheels, you know, was great. They called it the electric opera car. So, you know, women might use it to go out to the opera in their, you know, credit or in skirts and whatnot.

But it wasn't, it wasn't very, it didn't make that your didn't get your kind of juices going. So I think that was one reason is that the people who mattered preferred internal combustion, were excited by it. And I think that has some ramifications. If you think about the Tesla Roadster and that kind of rebirth of interest in the electric vehicle. That was kind of a sexy car that that Elon Musk and and the Tesla guys put together, that really kind of got people going.

So I'd say that's issue. One is consumer preferences, Issue two is what I would call technological expectation. So it's not really the battery per se. But you know, if you were to ask experts, in 1900, which technology is going to kind of get better faster? I think people would have said, the battery, that electric vehicle that electric systems kind of primed to go sort of off the rails, you know, we'd had electric light and then electric traction, transportation in cities that sort of streetcars. Everyone figured, oh, the next decade, it's just going to be electricity off the rails, here it comes.

And internal combustion was this kind of weird, exotic technology that people thought, well, maybe. But that's like decades away. And I think the expectations actually reversed. So what happened is kind of the battery stagnated, none completely got better, but not nearly as quickly as internal combustion. So that internal combustion all sudden, like power to weight ratio, just like took off, you got all these, you know, multi cylinder engines, things just like electric, the internal combustion technology just really gotten better, super fast, and kind of so expectations were they were not met in that sense.

And the ice internal combustion got better faster. And then the third factor that I like to talk about is, and this does connect to the your question about the oil industry is about infrastructure. So really, if you if the thing you wanted to do was go from point A to point B, city to city, things like that, roads were pretty crappy. And electricity was non existent in rural settings.

So the only place the only fuel you could acquire was, was gasoline, and you couldn't get it wasn't like pumped from, you know, a fuel station, you'd go to the general store where they sold it for home, cooking. And they would you run it through cheesecloth to filter it. And but at least you could get gasoline in most towns and, and sort of, you know, damp down to pretty small Hamlet's you could, if there was a general store, you could generally find gasoline, so that the availability the infrastructure really favored the internal combustion.

Yeah, it's fascinating. I was wondering if there was some pushed by the oil companies, when they saw this potential, huge use of oil products, whether they made a substantial push in that direction, or whether this was kind of niche and they didn't really see this as the big boon that it ended up being for them.

I think, you know, the, the, the history of the oil industry is, is fascinating in this regard. It took them a while to sort of get confident that there was sufficient supply to meet an emerging demand. So really, you know, there's the famous discovery of, of oil in Texas in 1901, the Spindletop there's the kind of consolidation of the oil industry under the Rockefeller interests.

So It was, I think the oil industry was so still sort of trying to get get itself sorted out at that time. I don't think they had a lot of political power. They, they really, were still kind of coming into their own in some ways. One of the interesting footnotes is that the the rubber industry was really transformed by the rise of the automobile.

Because up before, you know, the mid, say 1905, something like that. Rubber was just this kind of nice product you'd use for like pencils, and erasers and things like that. And all of a sudden, they had to really scale production. So rubber was completely kind of caught blindsided by the rise of, of internal combustion.

That's a fascinating set of economic history issues that are intertwined in the story of the electric car and the internal combustion engine, you're listening to A Climate Change. We've got Professor David Kirsch on the program from the University of Maryland, who's a historian in this area, we'll be back in just one minute, we'll talk about what the future looks like for the electric car industry.

You're listening to A Climate Change. This is Matt Matern, your host. I've got Professor David Kirschner, University of Maryland on the program. And Professor, you know, we were talking offline about, you know, what happened next with the EVS.

And maybe you could talk us through that, you know, kind of, it seemed as though for about 60 plus years after the turn of the 20th century, there really wasn't much of an Eevee market at all by 1960. And then maybe things started to happen, and why did they start to happen? And, and why did it take that long to kind of have this renaissance?

Sure, I think one of the things you have to kind of tip your hat to the internal combustion industry is that it internal combustion was magic, it really worked. And that industry was able to scale in ways that were completely unprecedented. It's not I don't think it's an exaggeration to say the 20th century really was defined in many ways by the rise of internal combustion, the hundreds of millions of, of internal combustion engines and vehicles and the entire network of of highways and infrastructure in distribution and global extraction and processing.

I mean, you know, this, it's a huge accomplishment. And obviously, we're now dealing with the consequences of our sort of over reliance on that system. And some very, you know, that's generated some real problems. But I think, you know, it really wasn't until the 1960s, that we started to encounter the limits to growth of that system. And I think those came in a couple of different forms, the most, kind of visible and first was smog.

So you know, you've had these, the kind of the Ford Galaxy of, of the early 1960s was spewing out so much and combusted hydrocarbon and its exhaust, you literally, you know, you see those pictures from Los Angeles in the 1960s, where you could barely see, you know, the mountains. And so I think that that kind of environmental costs, it took a while for internal for the environmental costs of internal combustion to be visible to kind of catch up to us, but eventually they did.

And so that kind of generated interest in alternatives. And then I think that the energy shocks of the early 70s, as gas prices started skyrocketing, and there was the Arab oil embargo, and the whole idea of kind of energy independence, that kind of was at a second layer on top of that. And then I think the third issue was around economic growth and the challenge of overseas vehicle producers.

So there's there was this hope, and there was legislation drafted in the mid 1970s around trying to generate A domestic electric vehicle industry, the idea that, you know, Ford and GM, and Chrysler should, you know, kind of could somehow regain their luster by and generate jobs, domestic jobs by producing electric vehicles so that that sort of environment, energy independence and economic growth kind of came together, finally, in the mid 1970s, and there was a lot of interest in electric vehicles, but it didn't really kind of catch on.

So that this is again, sort of false rebirth. You know, there was this kind of false start a series of false starts really from about the late 1960s. Until the 1990s.

Now was President Reagan in part responsible to kind of he he kind of decommissioned I guess, some of the alternative energy research and development and dollars that were going into the Department of Energy around the Carter administration, which Carter had been more of a proponent of, of alternative energy. And and then Reagan kind of pulled the plug on all that right.

Yeah, there, it certainly was the case that electric vehicle policy or sort of alternative energy policy got caught up in in the politics of the day. But the sort of dirty little secret, from my perspective, is that in the late 70s, that that technology wasn't really ready to go.

It's kind of convenient to blame Reagan, and I think, you know, certainly his his administration came in with an agenda that was very much opposed to those kinds of strategic investments in technology, industrial policy, but I don't think that the rest, it's not like, oh, in the absence of Reagan, we'd have all been driving electric vehicles 20 years earlier, or 30 years earlier, I don't think I still don't think that the industry was really ready, at that point to make these changes.

Do you think that the investments in those things like solar, at that point in time would have catapulted us further faster? Or was it just a requirement that we kind of take this slower path? Because technology wouldn't have? We couldn't have pushed it much faster?

Yeah, I think we could have pushed a little faster. And I do think, you know, for sure that basic science, we needed a lot of, of learning still, you know, the, I mean, you look at the cost curves on solar, and you just see how they've come down or, you know, the if large scale efficient wind and all these other kinds of alternative energies, um, pathways have really matured in the last 40 years.

But I think one thing, and this may be a little bit idiosyncratic to my view, is, you know, and maybe this is also partly from studying, being a business school professor and looking at organizations and, and how firms manage themselves. But, you know, I think the hybrid path was available. So there were some early folks in the mid 1970s, talking about, oh, well, we could use hybrid technology that's going to kind of bridge established that kind of crosswalk the path to electrification.

And nobody wanted to talk about hybrids, the electric vehicle, folks, were sort of these deep green purists for whom internal combustion was internal combustion, they wanted to have nothing to do with it. And the industry folks were sort of like, we make great internal combustion cars, why would we muck them up with an electric electric system? That's just creating more complexity and, and that kind of a little bit outside our, our kind of baileywick

You know, so the, I kind of characterize that early hybrid as like an ugly duckling. You know, nobody wanted that ugly duckling. But I think that ugly duckling could have taken us in some very interesting directions, and might have actually been the middle road, if you will, that that could have gotten us through the 80s and 90s. He's gotten us maybe to electrification a little faster. Yeah,

that that's a good point. And I think from a public policy standpoint, states like California that have that have set now mandates for having kind of no more sales of an internal combustion engine powered cars, if they had started a bit earlier, even with modest targets, say in the 70s, or 80s, might have gotten us kind of on that path sooner.

And we've gotten an end. And this probably the Feds having higher Kapha standards for higher mileage might have helped as well, to to jumpstart that industry. And in that way, I think government can play a very useful role of setting some targets and letting industry figure out how they're going to get there.

Right. And well, I think the, you know, the zero emission vehicle mandate from, from California has played a huge part in ultimately restarting the electric vehicle industry. But that, you know, they had to then define what was a zero emission vehicle, and it actually took some time, and there were these credits, you know, this kind of credit trading system, a credit trading system, which by the way, ended up sort of saving Tesla's bacon at several points in the 2010s, where they were selling credits to other manufacturers.

So it took time, I think, for the regulatory system to figure out how to make it How does encourage change, if you will, most regulatory systems aren't really designed to do that. They're just designed to kind of take what is and, and kind of manage it, not shape it. And so I think those like the, for instance, the the hybrids and plug in hybrids initially didn't count under the zero emission vehicle mandate, they were sort of outside of the scope of that, of that plan.

And then they had the regulators had to kind of update their scheme to say, oh, okay, now this these are actually good. Now, we're gonna give you some credits for those or, you know, if it's got a, you know, a slightly more advanced battery, you get more credits and sort of figuring out that little Two Step turned out to be quite a complicated process.

Well, you're listening to A Climate Change, I've got Professor David Kirsch on the program, University of Maryland, school business historian as well as a specialist in management studies. We'll be right back in just one minute to talk to him about what the future was like for the electric car industry.

You're listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I've got Professor David Kirsch on the program today, Professor at the University of Maryland. Dr. had a question for you in terms of from 1990 Going forward, what kind of mistakes were made from maybe a policy point of view as well as from the industry point of view, in terms of developing electric cars?

And maybe what are maybe lessons we can learn going forward to do a better job at it? From a public policy standpoint, and maybe if you were giving coaching to the car manufacturers? What what do you think you tell them as far as focusing their energy and attention on?

Oh, I think, you know, here we are, and, you know, 2023, I'll just say, as an aside, I used to get a call, like every December, for years, I would get get calls from from reporters. And they'd say, Professor Curtis, you wrote a book about the history of electric car. Tell us is this is you know, next year is 2010, the year of the electric that the electric vehicle goes mainstream, you know, and I, I would dutifully give the story, the history of the electric vehicle and kind of how we got to where we were, and, you know, I'd say, you know, I'm going to historians don't make predictions.

I'm just going to tell you how we got here and what might happen. And you know, for year after year after year, I think people were waiting for that real kind of breakthrough to happen. And I think what's happened.

Now, you know, no one called me and asked, at the end of 2022 2023 be the year of the electric vehicle, because it's happened, it's here, you know, I think we really do now finally, see electric vehicles from not a number of different manufacturers, who lots of different kinds of product offerings, you know, different little Evie buzz from, from Volkswagen, or, you know, a electric pickup truck from the F 150.

Or, you know, the rivian, or if it's the incumbents, and new entrants, and the, the Germans and the Chinese and it kind of everybody's now playing ball. So I think that's, that's the good news that everyone is kind of not taking the electric vehicle opportunity more or less seriously. And I think, you know, consumers are are getting on board to, I'll be with the support of some subsidies and needing a little hand holding along the way.

But I think, you know, that I've been telling my, my students, if you want to see that, you know, there's this famous venture incubator, Y Combinator, and you guys probably have heard of it, you know, they started Dropbox, and Airbnb, and all these other kind of accelerated all these, you know, super successful startups.

And Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, has a saying, move to the future and build something interesting you see there. So you know, when I tell my, my students, if you want to understand the future of electric vehicle, you have to go to Norway, because the electric vehicle market share in Norway, in 2022, was 80%. So 80% of all new vehicles sold in Norway, were all electrics.

So if you want to see kind of what a transportation system looks like, that it's, you know, almost fully electrified. Take a look at what's happening there. How are they hooking up people who live in apartment buildings? How are they organizing charging clubs? How are they are using reusing batteries that are coming out of old vehicles?

So, you know, I think there's a whole set of of changes that. And in a by contrast, by comparison, rather, I think, in the US, we were maybe six or 8%, something like that, which was a huge advance, in 2022, over where we were in 21, or 20, or 19, etc. But we still have such a long way to go. Until we really start seeing what this electrified system looks like, what the challenges are, oh, well, how do you hook up? Here in the US? The challenge is, can I get one charger into my, into my garage?

Well, in Norway? You know, if a family has two cars, chances are both of them are electrics. And so they actually need to put two chargers in? Well, that's a different, you know, do you again, double the capacity of the circuits? Or do you have put two chargers and have them share one circuit and like all these kinds of practical kind of issues around kind of accommodating our, our lives to this different kind of technological system, or are kind of taking place there in that where the future is in Norway.

So Norway has all sorts of other unique features, it's, they're super rich, and, you know, all kinds of, you know, they've got a lot and a lot of the money came from North Sea oil. But anyway, we can put that aside. I think those are the kinds of questions, you know, it may be, for instance, you know, in the Bay Area for it.

That's where the electric future really kind of takes shape in the US where, you know, you've got all the kind of forward looking folks and a lot of discretionary income and people kind of, you know, maybe we get to 20% electric vehicles in, in, you know, Santa Clara County or the Bay Area, or, you know, I don't know, maybe it's Orlando, or I don't know exactly where that's going to happen in Phoenix. But, you know, so I think that's what we have to think about now is like, where are these?

Where is the future going to kind of take hold in the US and then how are we going to kind of organize both the US Given the kind of policy environment for it, but also get the made sure that people are happy with it, we don't want unhappy people, you know, we don't want to force people to buy technology they don't want.

Well, I guess the question is, how much value are we getting decarbonizing from going to electric? And has this been calculated? Have you been a part of that? Have you studied it? What is what is the net net benefit from doing this, because obviously, building new cars has, even if they're Electric has a carbon component to it, and generating electricity, even from windmills and solar have a carbon component to it, because creating solar cells and windmills takes, you know, energy and carbon to produce them, right?

Sure. No, so I think this is, you know, I think I started talking initially about this idea of industrial ecology, thinking about sort of how our industrial systems metabolize materials and energy. And I think, you know, that's really the perspective we need to bring to our thinking about transportation. Now. The electric vehicle has a big advantage over internal combustion, because that, that internal combustion efficiency of a typical internal combustion engine is quite low.

So, you know, it's maybe 20, mid 20s, in terms of kind of theoretical energy efficiency. So for an electric vehicle, which can take energy in and, and a typical battery can operate in mid 90%, efficiency, input and output. So there's a lot of it can be much more efficient, but we do still have to think about what what does it cost to mine those crazy, you know, rare earth minerals in, in Central Africa, and what does it cost to bring them around the world?

And how much energy do we spend in smelting the ore and building these, these batteries, so if we don't design our system, so that we, you know, both reuse and recycle, these these materials were going to end up doing, we could be doing more harm than good.

So these are, these are really important questions to keep in mind. And then I also think, you know, some of these huge electric pickup trucks, the, you know, GM has that Hummer, I don't know if people have seen that. The one that's the one that like crab walks with Lebron James and the ad, you know, it's sort of goofy. It's huge. And it's got this gigantic battery, that's, you know, four or five times the size of my little like city car and my that's parked in my garage, that my little city car will only go 100 miles on a charge, but that's all I need.

And it's kind of you know, it works. I just think the electric proposition of like a four ton, pickup truck is feels a little crazy to me, I was a little I was actually happier thinking about hybridizing those. So the, like a plug in hybrid pickup truck that might only have a 12 or 15 or 20 mile range, you might get a lot of environmental benefit from that without having to put, you know, a gigantic battery pack in there that's, you know, comes with all these other environmental externalities.

So I think these are again, these are the kinds of questions we're going to have to get to. I'm sort of hopeful that part of this conversation helps us step away from our, our love of trucks and pickups and all that stuff. But, you know, again, we can't force people to buy vehicles they don't want not everyone likes that little electric vehicle that you know, my little city car that makes me happy. It's not gonna make everybody else happy.

You're listening to A Climate Change, Professor David Kirsch on the program from the University of Maryland. We'll be back in just one minute we'll talk about what the future looks like for the electric car industry.

You’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt is Matern. And I've got David Kirsch, professor at University of Maryland on the program and Professor were just talking before about kind of electric pickup trucks in general and my thought there is Wouldn't it be wise to adjust our tax policy to give maybe less of a credit to doing an electric pickup truck than maybe a smaller vehicle that is truly using less energy.

Because at the end of the day, we want to be using less energy and less materials, because that all affects the carbon footprint, and merely getting a big electric truck.

And driving around solo without even using it for truck like purposes, just as a transportation car is not particularly energy efficient, and maybe might be slightly more efficient than an internal combustion big truck, but certainly not optimal from a let's save energy standpoint, right?

Sure, no, it's a really good point. And I think, figuring out, you know, Americans have a long standing love of light trucks, you know, the sport utility vehicles that got categorized as drugs, and were part of a different kind of regulatory scheme that allowed the, that excluded some of the foreign manufacturers from competing in those segments, you know, so there's, there's all sorts of kind of quirks to the American kind of light duty vehicle market.

And the more we can figure out how to right price these different vehicles and generate incentives that do encourage the sorts of behaviors we we want to see more of, the better. But we don't have a great track record. In that regard. You know, the light trucks and sport utility vehicles are over half the market, and have been now for over a decade or more.

So I think, you know, we may just have to deal with people's preferences as they are and try and figure out well, what can we do and, you know, one, one defense of those big vehicles, and I don't want to be to kind of my to apologetic for them. But, you know, any internal combustion engine is cleanest the day it rolls off the you know, the day you drive it off the dealer's lot, right, it gets, it only gets dirtier. By contrast, any electric vehicle can get cleaner is as clean as the grid that fuels it.

So, in that sense, if, if we put a lot more electric vehicles out into the world, and continue to invest in a smart grid and continue to invest in greener supply, then over time, in principle, that vehicle can get cleaner. Whereas that internal combustion vehicle only gets dirtier.

So maybe that's some kind of consolation that at least if we put a bunch of these big, you know, kind of electric pickup trucks out there maybe over time, that then gives us the challenge of like, kind of cleaning the grid that powers them, and then maybe it's at least not as bad.

Right? That's kind of the silver lining or potential. What are your thoughts about hydrogen cars? I this on my second hydrogen car? And, you know, what are your thoughts there?

I think it's the long term for sure. We're, you know, we're heading toward a hydrogen economy, the process of decarbonisation has been going on for millennia. You know, we used to burn wood, and then we went to coal, and then oil. And then finally, natural gas. So we keep, you know, kind of reducing the number of carbon atoms to, to hydrogen atoms, and, you know, h2 is zero carbon. So I think it's the natural endpoint for our energy system.

And I think hydrogen and electricity kind of go hand in hand, in the sense that we can use electricity to generate hydrogen. And hydrogen can be a store a great store of energy for places we can't get electricity to, or where it doesn't make sense to have electricity stored. So I'm a big hydrogen fan. I think my only question would be a wrap around timing, I guess, do we go straight to hydrogen Make some people want or is the electrification that kind of crosswalk to that hydrogen future.

And I'm open to I don't have a strong view which way it should be. I think we want to support both. And so I worry sometimes when the hydrogen people are attacking the like, you know, the lithium ion battery, people in the battery, people are attacking the hydrogen people, I sort of, I just stepped back from that, because my view is, both are preferable to kind of wallowing in more internal combustion kind of stuff,

I guess I look at and think we should be laying more of the infrastructure for hydrogen economy, because obviously, that's a long term play, and putting down whatever those things are, that are necessary, whether it's pipelines or things of that nature, investing as much as we can in in creating cheap electricity, cheap, clean electricity, which would fuel kind of the hydrogen economy.

But also, obviously, as you said, it's in parallel to probably having better battery systems and better electric cars, too. So it's probably true that in the short term, the electric, battery powered cars are more doable.

But I guess I, I'm concerned that if the further we go down that path, the harder will be to switch to hydrogen, just like there was this huge barrier to get us to switch to electric. What do you think?

Well, I think it's a reasonable concern. And I think it's we're at a stage now where I think, you know, if I go back to my kind of analogy of move to the future and build something interesting there. You know, let's see how Norway handles this. Right, like, let's see how some of these more advanced, more electrified contexts, start thinking about that transition to hydrogen, or, you know, whether that where might hydrogen work in?

You know, if we think about, oh, well, where's the electric electrification really going to take hold first, say in the US is that in California, or, you know, as we're talking about different regions, then maybe within that, then we say, Oh, well, here's a hydrogen kind of hotspot where we can really start building out that infrastructure. Because, you know, I think, either you probably don't have quite as many fueling stations, as there are points to plug in an electric car or, you know, yeah, that's saline.

That's absolutely true. That hydrogen, there are limited stations, but it's enough to get around I can I can drive from here to San Francisco, though you have to hit one station, and you hope that it has hydrogen when you get there.

But I was I was thinking about going to the future, you look at Denmark, and they are producing a tremendous amount of wind energy, essentially, 100% of their grid is powered by wind energy, and on on many days, and then they're thinking because they're building so much more capacity, that they will be creating a lot of green hydrogen with all this wind energy, which they will then pump to Germany, and will become kind of the new Saudi Arabia of, of hydrogen.

We could do the same in the US because there are a lot of the great plains states that are having, you know, Texas, I think it's up to 40% of their energy is coming from wind. So So couldn't we be doing that same thing of kind of creating a lot of good green? hydrogen energy?

Sure. I think that's, that's definitely on the horizon. And I think the question is sort of the sequence, do we go right there? Or do we kind of need is there some threshold of electrification that we need to get to first, so that we'll have a robust market for, you know, sort of alternatives.

And I think that there's some, I think reasonable people can disagree about whether we go sort of internal combustion straight to hydrogen or electrify, and then have hydrogen kind of be part of the electrified transportation system. I think, you know, I don't have a strong view on that. I Do think, you know the the car industry has sort of gone all in on lithium ion at this point.

So they're, you know, if you everybody's just building to lithium ion and, and maybe except the Japanese because they were sort of very slow to come to to electric electric vehicles but almost everybody else is just all in on lithium ion and that may be in red that may turn out to have been a kind of over commitment that these, you know, billions and billions of dollars that are being thrown at lithium ion battery production may turn out, we may end up with over capacity.

Well, it's it's a fascinating set of challenges and our speed of history is continuing to accelerate. It's been great having you on the program. I look forward to talking with you more lots of other questions remain unanswered. We were going to talk about Tesla and its market cap being equivalent to all other car companies. But we may have to save that for another day.

You've been listening to climate change I've got Professor David Kirsch on the program. Thank you again for being on the show and love to talk to you again going forward.

Thanks, Matt, a real pleasure.