Amy Myers Jaffe > Quotes

“In the mid-2000s, the IEA estimated that OPEC’s share of total world oil supply would rise from 38 percent in 2000 to 48 percent by 2020.5 In 2019, OPEC’s share of total world oil supply had fallen to under 30 percent, threatening its entire enterprise of influencing world oil prices. To regain sufficient market power, especially in light of the changes in the elasticity of both oil supply and demand, it needed to add a major non-OPEC producer to its ranks—hence its changed attitude about cooperation with Russia. Moscow is now a necessity for OPEC, and for Saudi Arabia, if it is going to able to salvage any semblance of influence over the price of oil.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“Chinese leaders plan to shift support for EVs by encouraging the installation of charging stations. According to the China EV Charging Infrastructure Promotion Association, China already had 1.174 million charging stations at the end of 2019, operated by eight new Chinese charging companies.19 China also has battery-swapping stations, where drivers can replace discharged batteries on certain brands of cars.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“By 1902, Americans had taken more than 4.8 billion trips on electric streetcars.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The first U.S. speeding ticket went to an electric taxi driver who got a ticket in May 1899 in New York City (12 mph in an 8-mph zone). A police officer who pulled the driver over was on a bicycle.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“In the new geopolitics of clean energy, the powerful nations might be those best able to withstand cyber disruptions to their digital energy and transportation systems or, alternatively, those with the most credible ability to threaten to take down the systems of others.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“Geography was destiny in the geopolitical race for oil, with oil reserves distributed unevenly throughout the world and, with that disparity, geopolitical concerns about access and transport routes. In the new world of clean energy, chances are that ingenuity and industrial capability will play an outsize role, potentially giving a new set of players energy advantages they have previously not enjoyed. The geopolitics of clean energy may be more about technology, patents, and workforce than controlling access to raw materials.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“shadow carbon price is an internal corporate accounting figure that allows companies to incorporate the cost of an additional ton of carbon emissions that will result from some investment. Shadow carbon prices are used across the financial accounting world, from investment and procurement to risk management and strategic long-term planning. As of 2017, more than 1,400 global corporations factored an internal carbon price into business plans and investment decision making.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The United States needs to do more than wring its hands over this new reality. It needs to make the same commitments to digital energy, but in a manner that safeguards democratic institutions and values.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The reality that China planned to make itself the center of the digital energy universe has increasingly come to be seen as a new challenge for U.S. national security and economic well-being. China is building an industrial complex that could give it asymmetric military advantages while simultaneously bolstering Chinese companies as tough global competitors.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“Smalley’s vision was that electricity should become the ubiquitous fuel of the twenty-first century, based on a decentralized, local energy storage model where everyone on the grid would have a personal storage appliance that could ensure delivery of uninterrupted power. This distributed system would be supplemented by rewiring the electric grid with superconductors that could enable cross-continent and even worldwide electrical transmission, taking advantage of time zones, climate variations, and large-scale sources of power such as nuclear energy. Smalley was ahead of his time.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The logic of a Cold War with China is more complex. Not only are China’s digital products intertwined with the environmental and economic development goals of many countries around the world, but Beijing, with its Belt and Road Initiative, is also well placed to promote trade into strategic infrastructure alliances. China has become the top trading partner for more than two-thirds of the world’s nations.1 It has a broad industrial plan to dominate emerging digital technologies in renewable energy, advanced vehicle and mobility network services, and additive manufacturing, and it has shown a willingness to do so by taking undue advantage of the openness to the U.S. education, investment, and export control systems. To build its globalist image, China’s government has declared its intention to reach net zero emissions by 2060.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The possibility of a seamless network of electrified robo-taxis, self-driving delivery vehicles, and public transit linked to smartphone applications might seem like science fiction, but the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in 2020 gave a flavor of what is to come. In China’s pandemic epicenter of Wuhan, unmanned, autonomous electric vehicles, monitored remotely from a computer screen in a different location, were used to deliver hospital supplies, to disinfect isolation areas, and to deliver meals to quarantined people.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“In today’s market, consumers often buy the largest car they might need for a family vacation and use it for all purposes, regardless of whether a smaller car might be advantageous for shorter trips or where parking is limited. In a digital shared-ride system, more fuel-efficient vehicles, including electric and hydrogen vehicles, might become the preferred-choice winners for short trips. In this case, a transition to alternative fuels could be accomplished with the construction of fewer fueling stations.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“As concentration levels rise, scientists warn we could get to the point where so much CO2 has accumulated in the atmosphere that we will need to achieve “negative” emissions; that is, we will need processes or technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a permanent way. One such process is pyrolysis of biofuels, whereby a biomaterial, such as algae or crop residues, is heated in the absence of oxygen resulting in a pure form of carbon known as biochar, as well as bio-oil that can be a diesel substitute and syngas that can be used to generate electricity. Biochar can be used as a soil additive, which holds the carbon sequestered in the ground.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“As China was increasing its GDP fortyfold between 1980 and 2010, it did so by making historically unprecedented improvements in limiting the amount of energy used. The energy intensity of China’s economy was reduced by two-thirds between 1980 and 2009.8 Today, the oil intensity of China’s economy is only 26 percent of what it was in the year 2000.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“In a freely competitive market, one might have expected the lowest-cost oil supplies to be developed first to the highest degree possible while higher-cost resources would be abandoned until depletion of cheap oil made room for them at a higher price point. Under this kind of competitive structure, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the other Gulf producers, whose lowest-cost reserves represent two-thirds of proven world reserves, could have increased their levels of investment and produced a vastly higher amount of oil. Instead, OPEC generally tried to hold oil prices up to maximize revenues over two years. In effect, OPEC had to choose between higher prices or higher market share. They chose the former. The New York University energy economist Dermot Gately noted in a 2004 paper that it was not in OPEC’s collective interests to meet rising demand for oil. He calculated that it made no sense for the cartel to add oil supplies into the market because the marginal gain in revenue from more output would be negative.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“I have been there, in the world of no electricity, on many occasions—in the aftermath of hurricanes in Houston, in the face of faulty equipment in northern California, after an ice storm in New England. You learn to cope, eating food out of a can and using the water you hopefully stored in your bathtub once you realized a problem was coming. My Houston neighbors maintained one analog phone, which was handy if you wanted to call an airline to see if you could fly somewhere else until electricity was restored—that is, if you had sufficient gasoline to get to the airport, because gasoline pumps need electricity to dispense fuel.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The share of Europe’s energy mix moving to renewable energy has soared in recent years to 30 percent of electricity generation, up from 12 percent in 2000. Almost all new power generation capacity installed in Europe in recent years has been renewable power. Renewables also power more than 8 percent of transport energy in Europe, and the European Union expects to reach its target that renewables will constitute a fifth of all energy use by 2020.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“Additionally, remaining fossil fuel facilities will serve as backup for a long time. As the MIT economist Sergey Paltsev notes, aging traditional fossil fuel energy infrastructure and new installations of renewable energy could coexist for a long time into the future, reducing the leverage that either will have on consumers.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“Jenn notes that in California, the number of Chevrolet Bolt vehicles rented by Uber and Lyft drivers skyrocketed under GM’s business model that leases the cars to drivers who save on ownership and fuel costs.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“More than eight hundred million Chinese actively use the internet. The size of China’s online shopping industry has been growing rapidly and now totals over $1 trillion.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“The examples of Russia and Iran offer a more dismal prospect to the consequences of the loss of petro-power by key states via the advent of digital transformations of the energy world. A declining need for oil might lead to more, not less, geopolitical disorder. One possibility is that oil states that were previously powerful will not be willing to go quietly into the night as their oil power diminishes, but rather will assert themselves in different ways. In the case of Russia and Iran, to date, that assertiveness has included increased exercise of hard power through cyber and military means. Another outcome, perhaps even more troubling, would be if powerful oil producers felt the need to destroy the oil sectors of their rivals, in hopes of ensuring that their own oil assets are not the ones that get stranded.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“China’s annual production of automobiles exceeds that of the United States and Japan combined and represents more than 25 percent of global production.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“Today almost 60 percent of China’s population lives in cities, roughly triple the fraction that did in 1978.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“We are paying for these externalities one way or another, in the form of higher health costs or the damage or impairments we experience in our natural surroundings.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“In May 1901, Edison formed the Edison Storage Battery Company. Edison had big plans for his new battery, which he thought could be used by trolley companies and others. To extend the viability of his invention into the countryside, Edison even proposed that small windmills be attached to electrical generators. Together, they would be used to recharge batteries in cars while homeowners were asleep in a manner that would be cheaper than gasoline.25 This model of decentralized household distributed energy plus electric car is being revisited today in the Honda House of the Future on the University of California, Davis, campus, again raising the prospect that we lost what could have been an opportunity to do things differently one hundred years ago.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“City congestion has a large influence on fuel consumption. In the United States, for example, traffic in 2014 caused upwards of 3.1 billion gallons of wasted fuel, Texas A & M’s Transportation Institute calculates.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“This is not about having the government “pick winners,” an idea often met with derision by libertarians and others who have more faith in free markets than in politicians to allocate resources. The goal of regulation is not to hurt profits. Regulation is about guiding market design so that businesses choose the solutions that deliver what we, as a society, want and do not leave us, the taxpayers and other members of the public, with the cost of cleaning up any and all messes—even unintended ones—that businesses and their new technologies unleash.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“In 2017, China represented 45 percent of the global total of investment in renewable energy.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security

“China’s crude oil imports now average more than thirteen million barrels a day. That’s up from just five hundred thousand in 1997 and substantially more than the U.S oil purchases from abroad, which have leveled off at six million barrels a day, mostly from Canada and Mexico. U.S. crude oil imports were offset on a trade basis by exports of about three million barrels a day of U.S. domestically produced crude oil to Asia and Europe prior to the COVID crisis.”
― Amy Myers Jaffe, Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security