Bloomberg Energy Quotes

Bloomberg predicts that wind energy will be the lowest-cost energy globally by 2030.

too little—and complex, because the manufacturing and marketing of food products has changed dramatically. Dr. David Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has extensively documented how food manufacturers and restaurant and fast food chains carefully combine fats, sugar, and salt in precise ratios that reach the “bliss point”—which means they trigger brain systems that increase the desire to eat more, even after our stomachs are full. On a global basis, the World Health Organization has found a pattern of increased consumption of “energy-dense foods that are high in fat, salt and sugars but low in vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients.” Hyper-urbanization has separated more people from reliable sources of fresh fruit and vegetables. Quality calories in fruits and vegetables now cost ten times as much as calories per gram in sweets and foods abundant in starch. In a report for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Arielle Traub documented the increase from 1985 to 2000 in the price of fresh fruits and vegetables by 40 percent, while prices of fats declined by 15 percent and sugared soft drinks by 25 percent.

both Tesla and GM think battery prices will come down fast enough for electric cars to be more affordable than equivalent gasoline cars by the early 2020s. The Chevy Bolt sells for less than $35,000, after subsidies. Tesla plans to be producing Model 3s at a rate of hundreds of thousands a year by 2019. Other electric car companies, new and old, are developing competitive strategies. It is still difficult to predict how quickly the sales of electric cars will overtake those of gasoline vehicles. Even assuming all goes well for Tesla and their electric competitors, it could take years, or decades. Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s study estimated that electric cars will account for 35 percent of new car sales by 2040. That’s based on battery prices decreasing at a slower rate than Tesla and GM anticipate. But, as noted earlier, gasoline cars will face the difficult task of competing with electric cars that are both cheaper and better.

I didn’t know it yet, but this new priority would mean enormous changes in the way I saw the world and environmentalism. Previously environmentalists worked to stop bad things—pollution, clear-cutting, overfishing—but we more or less accepted the big-picture American economy, with the established industries that made it up. Not anymore. Now we were about to find ourselves in a different business: helping to foster a different kind of economic development, one based on knowledge and technology rather than fossil fuels. After thirty-five years of working to clean up after twentieth-century industrialism, environmentalists were about to plunge into creating its twenty-first-century replacement. But before we could go full tilt toward the new, we had to stop the last spasms of the old—an energy future crafted during George W. Bush’s first term by Vice President Cheney.

Hydraulic fracturing has been used safely in over a million wells, resulting in America’s rise as a global energy superpower, growth in energy investments, wages, and new jobs," added Mr. Milito in the statement. Environmental groups have countered that the isolated incidents of contamination confirm their fears about the environmental impacts of hydraulic fracturing. John Noël, of the group Clean Water Action, said in a statement that the report "smashes the myth that there can be oil and gas development without impacts to drinking water." Amy Mall, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the EPA study, "while limited, shows fracking can and has impacted drinking water sources in many different ways," according to the Beacon Journal. The EPA report acknowledges that the findings may be due to a lack of data collected, inaccessible information, a scarcity of long-term systematic and base-line studies, and other factors. Bloomberg reported that EPA couldn't come to terms with energy companies including Range Resources Corp. and Chesapeake Energy to conduct water tests near their wells before and after they were fracked, meaning if the agency did find instances of contamination, it was harder to prove that fracking was the cause. "These elements significantly limit EPA’s ability to determine the actual frequency of impacts," the agency said in a fact sheet released with the report.

The technology for electrification of larger commercial fleets is moving fastest for buses. Global electric bus sales increased by 32 percent in 2018, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. China is the largest producer of electric buses, with close to 20 percent of its buses currently electrified. The European Union has a target of 75 percent of new bus sales in European cities to be electric by 2030. New York City has pledged to achieve a 100 percent electric bus fleet by 2040. Shanghai will achieve 100 percent electrified buses by 2020.

Research and development conducted by private companies in the United States has grown enormously over the past four decades. We have substantially replaced the publicly funded science that drove our growth after World War II with private research efforts. Such private R&D has shown some impressive results, including high average returns for the corporate sector. However, despite their enormous impact, these private R&D investments are much too small from a broader perspective. This is not a criticism of any individuals; rather, it is simply a feature of the system. Private companies do not capture the spillovers that their R&D efforts create for other corporations, so private sector executives in established firms underinvest in invention. The venture capital industry, which provides admirable support to some start-ups, is focused on fast-impact industries, such as information technology, and not generally on longer-run and capital-intensive investments like clean energy or new cell and gene therapies. Leading entrepreneur-philanthropists get this. In recent years, there have been impressive investments in science funded by publicly minded individuals, including Eric Schmidt, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Bill and Melinda Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Meade Huntsman Sr., Eli and Edythe Broad, David H. Koch, Laurene Powell Jobs, and others (including numerous private foundations). The good news is that these people, with a wide variety of political views on other matters, share the assessment that science—including basic research—is of fundamental importance for the future of the United States. The less good news is that even the wealthiest people on the planet can barely move the needle relative to what the United States previously invested in science. America is, roughly speaking, a $20 trillion economy; 2 percent of our GDP is nearly $400 billion per year. Even the richest person in the world has a total stock of wealth of only around $100 billion—a mark broken in early 2018 by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in close pursuit. If the richest Americans put much of their wealth immediately into science, it would have some impact for a few years, but over the longer run, this would hardly move the needle. Publicly funded investment in research and development is the only “approach that could potentially return us to the days when technology-led growth lifted all boats. However, we should be careful. Private failure is not enough to justify government intervention. Just because the private sector is underinvesting does not necessarily imply that the government will make the right investments.