Dissecting the "Scale Monster" Stalking the Energy Transition

Here’s the podcast version of my “Watchwords” conversation with Mekala Krishnan, the lead author of a recent McKinsey Global Institute report, “The hard stuff: Navigating the physical realities of the energy transition.” I use the term watchwords to highlight terms or phrases that too often confuse more than clarify.

We were joined halfway through by Jessica Lovering, the co-founder and exective director of Good Energy Collective, which has a its mission “building the progressive case for nuclear energy as an essential part of the broader climate change agenda and working to align the clean energy space with environmental justice and sustainability goals.”

My curtain-raiser post has other ways to watch and share it:

Julio Friedmann

, a friend and past colleague (at Columbia), has also written a fine post on this study and his own analysis. As he writes, there’s “a reluctance by many to confront the realities of The Hard Stuff: the parts of The Work that are costly, challenging, poorly framed, and utterly necessary.”

Here’s the Scale Monster image I deploy on social media off and on. Free free to share it!