Book
More Energy, Clean Planet
Cheap Power Will Solve the Climate Crisis Within a Century
Forbes Books · January 19, 2027
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Hardcover · On sale January 19, 2027 · Forbes Books, distributed by Simon & Schuster
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Back-cover copy
“The cheapest energy in human history is here. We can repair the climate in one lifetime.”
One hundred years is not ancient history. It is one lifetime plus a little margin. Within one, we can return the atmosphere to pre-industrial carbon levels and repair the damage industrial civilization has done to the planet.
The case rests on a shift that has already happened. Clean electricity is now the cheapest electricity in the history of human civilization, and it is still getting cheaper. That changes the math on every environmental problem we have.
Water scarcity is an energy problem. Atmospheric carbon is an energy problem. So are soil degradation, food insecurity, and the toxic forever chemicals in every American’s bloodstream. Follow any of these crises far enough and you hit the same constraint: the energy required to fix them has always cost more than we could afford.
The world has changed. The hyperscalers building out AI infrastructure are funding fission and fusion R&D to the absorptive capacity of the field, restarting nuclear plants, and signing power purchase agreements at a scale the Department of Energy could only dream of. The same demand just pushed Fervo Energy, an enhanced geothermal company built on directional drilling adapted from the shale industry, onto the public markets in an offering that demand kept upsizing. None of this is happening for climate reasons. The second-order effects will repair it anyway.
More Energy, Clean Planet maps the High-Energy Repair program: ride the AI buildout into transmission to households and the collapsing cost of carbon removal, build new clean capacity at full supply-chain speed and let price retire fossil generation, draw down the two thousand gigatons of legacy carbon already in the atmosphere, and retrofit our infrastructure for the climate we now have. The book sequences this work decade by decade with the ruthless specificity of an engineering argument rather than a policy wish. The founders, scientists, and investors in these pages are already building pieces of it, often for reasons that have nothing to do with climate.
The path forward is more.
Table of contents
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Introduction: The Hundred-Year Repair
One lifetime is enough time to return the atmosphere to pre-industrial carbon. Why the math finally works.
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Chapter 1: Prosperity Beats Austerity
Cleaning the biosphere is entropy-reducing work, and work requires energy. The four pillars of High-Energy Repair.
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Chapter 2: The Accidental Inflection
The AI buildout and the shale toolkit are paying down the clean-energy cost curves, none of it for climate reasons.
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Chapter 3: The Electrification Cascade
Turning off the carbon faucet, sector by sector, as the falling price of electricity pulls heavy industry down an economic gradient.
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Chapter 4: The Two-Thousand-Gigaton Cleanup
The carbon-removal portfolio, from biology to geology to direct air capture, and the order in which each comes online.
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Chapter 5: The Illusion of Water Scarcity
There is no water shortage. There is an energy-and-logistics problem wearing a water disguise.
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Chapter 6: The Second Grid
Doubling the largest machine ever built, and the distributed generation racing to fill the gap it cannot close in time.
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Chapter 7: Half the Earth
Food is the load that compounds across every pillar, and the land it occupies is the surface area the repair needs back.
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Chapter 8: The End of “Away”
There is no away. The economics of unmaking waste at the molecular level.
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Chapter 9: The Actuary and the Admiral
The two institutions that stopped debating climate change and started pricing it.
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Chapter 10: Economic Gravity
Why markets, not mandates, retire fossil fuels, and how founders find the buyer, not the beneficiary.
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Chapter 11: The Girl Born in 2070
One life lived across the restoration, from a hospital window in 2070 to a rebuilt porch in 2150.
Endorsements
Endorsements forthcoming.