Quotes about Technology

Nuclear power kills far, far fewer people than cars do. For that matter, it kills far fewer people than any fossil fuel.

The United States gets around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants; France has the highest share in the world, getting 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear. Remember that by comparison solar and wind together provide about 7 percent worldwide.

High-profile accidents at Three Mile Island in the United States, Chernobyl in the former U.S.S.R., and Fukushima in Japan put a spotlight on all these risks. There are real problems that led to those disasters, but instead of getting to work on solving those problems, we just stopped trying to advance the field.

Natural gas followed a similar trajectory. In 1900, it accounted for 1 percent of the world's energy. It took seventy years to reach 20 percent. Nuclear fission went faster, going from 0 to 10 percent in 27 years.

We already know the emissions number; it's 51 billion tons each year. As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn't been firmly established, but it's at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that's the number I'll use. That gives us the following equation: 51 billion tons per year x $100 per ton = $5.1 trillion per year

Making Carbon-Free Electricity Nuclear fission. Here's the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale.

Technology is only one reason that the energy industry can't change as quickly as the computer industry. There's also size. The energy industry is simply enormous—at around $5 trillion a year, one of the biggest businesses on the planet. Anything that big and complex will resist change.

With the price of today's batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.

The Information Highway intrigues me because I have always been a newshound; I have always been curious about why people believe what they believe.

I've gotten into doing electronic books and audiobooks, so I have an iPad. I still love reading a real book, but when you travel, it's better than carrying around a bunch of books.

You may have an older audience in front of you holding the Bible and a younger audience holding an iPhone. You don't want to lose either audience.

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.