—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Mark Z. Jacobson is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy. He is also the Director at the Atmosphere/Energy Program and co-Founder, The Solutions Project, 100.org, and the 100% Clean, Renewable Energy Movement.
His career has focused on better understanding air pollution and global warming problems and developing large-scale clean, renewable energy solutions to them. Toward that end, he has developed and applied three-dimensional atmosphere-biosphere-ocean computer models and solvers to simulate air pollution, weather, climate, and renewable energy. He has also developed roadmaps to transition states and countries to 100% clean, renewable energy for all purposes and computer models to examine grid stability in the presence of high penetrations of renewable energy.
After I shared episodes on the hazards of solar and wind, as well as my experiment disconnecting my apartment from the electric grid in Manhattan (in month 8 as I type these words), a listener pointed me to Mark Jacobs. I can't believe I hadn't found him yet. I dove into Mark's prolific research and writing. He makes plenty free on his site. As a professor of engineering at Stanford with great passion, he researches what he's talking about and makes it all available. He's not just talking or hoping for the best. His research helps form the Green New Deal. He contributed to the IPCC work that won the Nobel Prize. Coincidentally, he criticized podcast guest Mark P. Mills article I linked to in More Hopeful Calculations for the Energy Transition. We talked about his roadmaps for transitioning the world, countries, states, cities, and towns to 100% clean, renewable wind, water, and sunlight in all energy sectors and his books, 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything (2020) and No Miracles Needed (2023).