New Yorker: "Why the Time Has Finally Come for Geothermal Energy"
by Rivka Galchen
“Geothermal is the least moral hazard-y of the clean-energy technologies,” Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, said. “And we are still subsidizing nuclear a thousand times more than geothermal.”
An energy future without hydrocarbons will require working flexibly with the many variables of resources, geography, and politics. “We can get maybe ninety per cent of the way with solar, batteries, wind,” Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. “But geothermal is one of the things that can fill that gap.” Investment follows fashion—and geothermal has become fashionable—but it’s not only investors who appear confident about geothermal. Wagner called this “the moment when Ph.D.s meet M.B.A.s.”
