Prescriptions for the global climate crisis can inspire but they rarely impress with precision, so John Doerr’s “Speed & Scale: A Global Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now” is a timely, brilliantly conceived and superbly written treat. Doerr, who helms Kleiner Perkins, one of the world’s most successful venture capital firms, is one of my kind of folks, a paragon of planning and monitoring. His underpinning OKR methodology, the acryonym standing for Objectives tied to measurable Key Results, might seem better suited to a widget startup, but in Speed & Scale he manages to embrace the entire challenge of zeroing 59 gigawatts of carbon emissions by 2050, and to break it up into sectors and ancillary targets, in a way that even I, a climate action neophyte, could follow. Indeed the book offers wonderful coherence and understandability. I feared that Doerr would, like Bill Gates recently, focus excessively on the role of innovation, but he is balanced throughout, covering quite aptly the political actions needed to shut down all fossil fuel burning, the advocacy to motivate the huge changes required, and global equity, as well as, of course, the key roles of investment and invention. Speed & Scale is a must-read for every climate emergency activist keen for an action blueprint.
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