Glossary.
Terms used throughout More Energy, Clean Planet and across this site.
24 terms
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The Accidental Inflection
The argument that the climate transition's defining inflection arrived as an unintended consequence of hyperscaler AI demand, not as a result of climate policy.
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The Anthropocene Bottleneck
The narrow historical window during which civilization must complete the energy transition and remove legacy carbon before climate damages compound beyond the system's capacity.
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The Bathtub Metaphor
A framing for atmospheric CO₂. Stopping emissions closes the faucet; only removing legacy carbon drains the bathtub.
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Buffalo Commons
A reference to Frank and Deborah Popper's 1987 proposal for restoring depopulating Great Plains to grassland. The book uses it to evoke the scale of land use change possible once farmable land is no longer needed for food.
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Bypassers
Founders building energy infrastructure that treats the grid as optional. Aalo Atomics, plug-in solar, and Base are cited examples. They sell independence rather than time.
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Crossover Threshold
The price point at which a clean substitute becomes cheaper than its fossil incumbent. The Electrification Cascade is the sequence in which sectors cross their thresholds.
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Economic Gravity
The thesis that once clean energy becomes structurally cheaper than fossil alternatives, deployment becomes inevitable regardless of moral persuasion or political consensus.
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The Electrification Cascade
The sequenced process by which combustion-based sectors (cement, steel, ammonia, shipping, aviation, heating, transport) are pulled across to clean electricity as cost thresholds fall.
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Engineered Optimism
The book's editorial register and umbrella brand. Optimism grounded in cost curves and manufactured systems rather than moral appeals or political consensus.
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Fairchild Pattern
The historical pattern by which a credit-worthy anchor customer purchasing at premium prices finances the manufacturing learning curve of a strategic new industry, ultimately producing commodity-scale costs. Named for Fairchild Semiconductor, whose early integrated circuits were bought by NASA and the Department of Defense at prices no commercial market would yet pay, financing the supply chain investments that later put calculators on desks and chips in every car.
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The Four Bets
The four falsifiable claims the Hundred-Year Repair timeline depends on: fusion or fission/solar scaling, DAC cost decline, global coordination, and the fuel rent dividend flowing to removal.
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Fuel Rent Dividend
The roughly $7 to $8 trillion the world pays annually for fossil fuels. The Fuel Rent Dividend names the surplus that gets liberated as manufactured energy substitutes for extractive energy.
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Henry's Law
The chemistry principle that gas dissolved in a liquid is proportional to the partial pressure of that gas above the liquid. The book applies it to ocean CO₂ rebalancing during the removal era.
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High-Energy Repair
The book's framework for solving climate change through abundance rather than austerity, organized around four pillars: energy production, net-zero emissions, carbon removal, and infrastructure resilience.
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Hundred-Year Repair
The book's hundred-year timeline running from 2027 to roughly 2130, structured around emissions reaching zero by 2050 and 2,000 gigatons of legacy carbon removed by 2130.
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Hyperscaler Compact
An idea that hyperscale data center operators and the jurisdictions hosting them should formalize a reciprocal bargain: predictable siting and firm clean power in exchange for industry-funded atmospheric repair, grid investment, and host community benefit. Applies the Fairchild Pattern to direct air capture, with hyperscaler offtake providing the anchor demand that finances the Second Grid.
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Manufactured vs. Extractive Energy
The book's central distinction in energy production. Manufactured energy (solar, batteries, modular reactors) falls in cost over time; extractive energy (oil, gas, coal) rises.
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MRV
Measurement, Reporting, and Verification. The infrastructure for confirming that claimed carbon removal actually occurred and stays removed. MRV maturity is a precondition for several CDR pathways to operate at gigaton scale.
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The Second Grid
The reorganization of electrical infrastructure around manufactured generation and distributed storage, replacing the twentieth-century model of centralized fossil generation.
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The Slow Exhale
The multi-decade rebound phase (roughly 2060 to 2090) during which the ocean releases stored CO₂ as atmospheric levels fall. Net decline is slower than gross removal during this period.
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The Surplus Rider
Founders building energy-intensive systems (DAC, rock grinding, plasma gasification) designed to run on surplus electricity from the manufactured energy build-out, co-located with generation.
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Wealth as Organized Complexity
The proposition that wealth equals organized complexity, and that available energy determines how much complexity a civilization can sustain.
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Wright's Law
The empirical law that manufactured products fall in cost by a consistent percentage with each doubling of cumulative production. The book uses it to argue that manufactured energy will keep getting cheaper while extractive energy will not.