Johannes Ackva

1/10 What if philanthropy worked more like thoughtful investing—making bets based on evidence, not emotion? @HeatmapNews chronicles how this approach unlocked $100M+ in climate funding: heatmap.news/climate/founde…🧵

Space based data centers are a hedge against failure to achieve permitting reform

I'm sad to say that we've reached the "classic liberal democracy is woke and deeply leftist ideology" point in the discourse... 🙄

NEW! Drawing on @CFR_org Global Energy Innovation Index (GEII), super-intern Akkshath Subrahmanian shows China surging past US on many indicators. For instance, China publishes 45% of all highly-cited publications in fields linked to energy innovation

There's too much criticism of Europe and European leaders on this site. They are not perfect, but they are now the key force for good in the world. Those who support and have voted for this man should be ashamed of themselves.

The single thing most likely to make me tune someone out is realising their conclusions are all driven by one big ideology, while the specifics of individual cases barely register. Common examples: 1. The root cause is capitalism 2. Government is to blame 3. Something something power imbalances 4. Decentralisation always good, centralisation always bad 5. Woke or anti-woke as lens for everything 6. "Elites are bad / corrupt / liars" 7. Everything's a coordination problem / Moloch 8. Cynicism about motives, e.g. they're just status-seeking 9. Seeing everything as about cultural decay, screens, algorithms, misinformation, etc All of these ideas are reasonable. Sometimes capitalism or government is the problem, sometimes 'elites' are self-serving, sometimes people are just status-seeking, etc etc. But people with a strong reflect to apply one framework to every situation are wrong much more often, boring to talk to, and have low information density output. (I think this monomaniacal-ideology thing is actually fairly rare in the broader world, like <10% of people think this way, but it's very overrepresented on Twitter.)

A profoundly silly move by @Meta choosing a vaporware, pre revenue nuclear startup @oklo for 16 so called “advanced” 75 MWe sodium fast reactors, a rehashed 1960s technology that has never proven itself commercially. This with a comically compressed timeline that outruns @gvhnuclear four unit BWRX 300 project in Ontario, a project already under construction after years of site preparation, licensing engagement, and characterization. Sodium fast reactors have a long, well documented history of operational problems. The United States, France, Japan, and Russia all pursued them at the height of their nuclear engineering capacity. None succeeded in making them reliable competitors to water cooled, water moderated reactors. Even if these first of a kind units are built, they will spend years working through basic reliability issues. That is tolerable for a national lab. It is disastrous for artificial intelligence data centers that require continuous, predictable, high availability power. The Silicon Valley attraction to “advanced” nuclear is driven by a familiar worldview. Energy is treated as the master bottleneck behind growth, abundance, and artificial intelligence scale, so any technology that promises dense, always on power acquires a moral urgency that overwhelms skepticism. That worldview pairs badly with venture capital power law thinking. Y Combinator culture prizes asymmetric upside, founder ambition, and speed to prototype. Nuclear power is the inverse. It is capital intensive, site specific, and dominated by downside risk management rather than upside capture. This produces a psychological mismatch. Software investors are trained to treat friction as a signal that incumbents are slow or corrupt. In nuclear, friction usually means unresolved safety analysis, unproven materials behavior, or missing operational evidence. The instinct is to fight the regulator rather than satisfy it. There is also domain transfer overconfidence. People who watched scrappy teams out execute legacy firms in software, payments, or logistics assume the same playbook applies to reactors. They underestimate how much of nuclear competence lives in operations, maintenance culture, and decades of boring iteration. The minimal viable product mindset is especially corrosive here. In software, shipping early and patching later is rational. In nuclear, the safety case must be complete before operation begins, because failure modes carry system wide consequences that cannot be beta tested away. Finally, artificial intelligence data centers act as a narrative accelerant. They create a buyer story that sounds urgent, modern, and technically sophisticated. But AI workloads demand extreme reliability, not heroic engineering experiments. Betting core compute infrastructure on first of a kind reactors is reckless.

No one thought a conservative would ever be on this list. I’m proud to bring our values of innovation, stewardship, and common sense to the climate conversation, because affordable, reliable, and clean energy should unite us, not divide us. time.com/collections/ti…

Brutal breakdown by @mattyglesias of how the energy policy views of the climate group with arguably the most direct influence on the Democratic Party remain shockingly calcified in 2019: -No nuclear -No DAC or enhanced rock weathering for CO2 removal -No NEPA reform -No conventional geothermal (sorry Ormat and Zanskar) only the kind that hasn't yet been built at scale yet. -Defer to unions on what raises the cost of renewables but not what unions actually like (such as nuclear)

@mattyglesias It's a bit of a false dichotomy -- a lot of activism/advocacy in the broad sense is crucially needed to defend and expand the American energy innovation system. Plenty of things activists and advocates can and need to do to realize the innovation bets from IIJA + CHIPS + IRA.

2/2 I. Nuclear philanthropy starts from a very low base, nuclear philanthropy is neglected for all the wrong reasons. II. While government and finance step up, philanthropy hasn't -- under-resourcing the civil society effort to support nuclear expansion. III. Nuclear mobilizes constituencies that are not traditional climate allies, providing an opening to make progress with broader coalitions.

1/2 What should climate philanthropy do to meet the new momentum around nuclear? Last week I had the honor of discussing this with @energybants, @isodope & @StephenComello at @AtlanticCouncil. My reflections : founderspledge.com/news/tripling-… TL,DR: Three reasons for tripling:

5/5 Similarly, the conservative pendant to the hairshirt activists receives very little support with continued underinvestment right-of-center: thenextmove.org/p/this-politic… The meager success of the climate movement is not surprising and is largely self-inflicted.

4/5 Unfortunately, this is not where most of the climate community is, e.g. even in this moment nuclear receives scant philanthropic attention. founderspledge.com/news/tripling-…

1/5 Great post from @mattyglesias w/ important lessons for the climate movement and advocacy community in this moment of reckoning. slowboring.com/p/climate-advo…

Three simple reasons why we think pro-nuclear climate philanthropy should (at least) triple founderspledge.com/news/tripling-… @J_Ackva @FoundersPledge thank you for the leadership!

It has been a week of productive discussions at @ClimateGroup’s Climate Week NYC. Across numerous events and locations, @EFIFoundation’s team shared our work to advance pragmatic solutions to today's energy challenges. Explore our work here: efifoundation.org/foundation-rep…

Watch as @EFIFoundation's Stephen Comello joins @isabelleboemeke and @J_Ackva on a panel moderated by @energybants, to discuss the role of philanthropy in supporting nuclear energy at @AtlanticCouncil's Nuclear Energy Policy Summit during #NYCW. #ACEnergy twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

🌍⚡ We’re proud to be the 1st major philanthropic community to sign the Tripling Nuclear Philanthropy Pledge. Our Climate Lead @J_Ackva joins #NuclearEnergyPolicySummit to share how bold giving can accelerate nuclear as a critical climate solution. #Climate #Philanthropy