Speed and Scale
A venture capitalist's objectives-and-key-results framing of the same problem.
Summary
John Doerr, the venture capitalist who popularised objectives and key results in Measure What Matters, applies the same framework to climate change. The book states a plan to reach net zero emissions by 2050, structured as ten objectives with quantified key results and dates.
The six emission-reduction objectives cover electrifying transport, decarbonising the grid, fixing food including agriculture and land use, protecting nature, cleaning up industry including steel and cement, and removing carbon. The four accelerator objectives cover winning politics and policy, turning movements into action, innovating, and investing. Each objective is broken into numbered key results with specific targets, for example a stated gigatonne reduction by a stated year, and Doerr assigns quantities to each so that the plan sums to the required total.
The book includes contributions and interviews from people working on each area, including Christiana Figueres, Jim Farley, Mary Barra, Al Gore and Hal Harvey. Its strength is that it insists on arithmetic: any climate plan must add up to the required emission reduction, and most do not. Its weakness is that the framework treats political and social change as manageable through the same goal-setting method as corporate execution, which they are not, and that the key results are stated without a mechanism for who is accountable. Doerr is also an investor in several of the technologies he advocates. Read it for the quantified structure rather than for the analysis.
Key takeaways 7
- Any credible climate plan must sum to the required emission reduction, and Doerr assigns specific gigatonne targets to each intervention.
- Electrifying transport and decarbonising the grid together account for the largest share of achievable near-term reduction.
- Food and land use emissions are a larger share of the total than public attention suggests and have fewer available technologies.
- Industrial emissions from steel, cement and chemicals require new processes rather than efficiency improvements.
- Carbon removal is necessary in Doerr's arithmetic because some emissions cannot be eliminated on the timescale required.
- Policy and politics are treated as accelerators without which the technical objectives cannot be met on any timeline.
- Doerr argues that goal-setting with numbered key results and named owners is what converts climate intentions into execution.
Who should read it
Investors and operators in climate technology who want a quantified structure for where emissions reductions must come from and on what timeline.
About John Doerr
Chairman of the venture firm Kleiner Perkins, where he led investments in Google, Amazon, Intuit and Sun Microsystems.
Measure What Matters documents the objectives-and-key-results system Andy Grove built at Intel and Doerr carried into Google, with the mechanics that make it work - how objectives are set, how key results are graded, and why they are kept separate from compensation. Speed and Scale applies the same goal structure to decarbonisation targets and to the climate companies venture investors now fund.
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