100% RENEWABLE: An Action Plan for US Energy Independence
INTRODUCTION
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
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Introduction
A few months ago, SNS CEO Mark Anderson (who happens to be my father) and I were having dinner when he asked me a question:
“What is your biggest life priority?”
Often when I ask other people this question, they hesitate. They’re not sure of what they want or how to get it. Society tells them they should want specific things that don’t always match what’s really important to them, how they would actually prefer to live, or what really brings them joy.
My answer to Mark was immediate: Reversing climate change.
For me, that sense of purpose developed, in no small part, as a result of growing up around the SNS community. In 2009, when I was a senior in college, I attended one of my first SNS Future in Review conferences. During our opening-night dinner, I listened in horror as Ram Ramanathan, director of C4 and distinguished professor of Climate Sciences at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, gave a terrifyingly dismal assessment of what we could expect from the climate emergency in the next 30-50 years.
By the end of the week, a group of extremely focused CTOs had come up with a plan for reducing emissions that Ram, one of the panelists tasked with judging their efforts, begrudgingly admitted would actually, most likely, probably work.
Faced with a future that I was assured would be marred by climate emergency, I felt only marginally more hopeful.
But then life happened, as it does. I set out on the impossible path of trying to find a job as a new graduate in 2009, another year went by before our next FiRe conference, and the FiRe community didn’t really look much at that plan again.
It was a learning moment for me, a young woman who wasn’t sure what the future of her generation would look like. Whether we would have enough food or water. Whether our children would have enough food or water.
