Transcription
This whole concept, music, that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions. Why? Well, it's BS, right? Music. We outsourced it to them. Completely. There's no renewable energy. There's no such thing as renewable energy. No, that's a myth. Music.
You have to have these collection systems, and those come from the earth. They're mined. For 20 years, Europe has been flat economically. You have to look at that and say, intentions, music, outcomes. If your industries are closing, your people are leaving, it's not going to help the climate. Music. You're hurting the environment. Because wealthy nations can afford to invest, music, in the environment.
In the interim, though, the planet will get warmer, and we're going to have, music, to adapt. Yes. That's inevitable. We are adapting. And what allows you to do that? Wealth.
Scott Tinker, welcome to TRIGGERnometry. Thank you. Uh, it's great, it's great to have you here. Uh, we want to talk about energy. It's a really important conversation. It's one we've covered from different angles, but you're someone who's got a very sensible, pragmatic, rational approach there, which is why it's great to have you on. Before we get into all of that, tell us a little bit about who you are, your background, how you've come to be, uh, sitting here with us.
Sure. Well, I'm a geologist by training. And studied that and worked in the technical side of the oil and gas industry for 17 years. Built 3D reservoir models and hung off of big cliffs around the world, did fieldwork and that kind of stuff. And then 25, 6 years ago, I went to university, University of Texas at Austin, to run a research unit that I built into a pretty big thing, 250 people, global energy, environmental economics, blending research around the world. And in that role, came to begin to appreciate kind of the interplay between energy and the economy and the environment and how those balance around the world. And then along the way, started making films with a filmmaker. We can get into all that, but that eventually ended up in 60 countries around the world, not in airports, actually deep, clears throat, into them and seeing how the whole world lived. And that's kind of influenced the way I am today and what I do. So, I, I've transitioned. Well, Arthur Brooks, he had a great book, right? He talked about the two curves, from strength to strength. That first curve for me was a technical scientist. The second curve is an educator. And that's carried me along for a while.
All right. Well, educate us. What I wanted to ask you is, first of all, to break down the reality of energy patterns and consumption around the world. Like, what is going on? Because if you live in a Western country, if you live in the city in a Western country, it's every second car is electric. We're making this great energy transition. Everything's wonderful. Renewable energy everywhere. You know, you see solar panels and all of this stuff. But that's not quite the reality of the world, is it?
Not the whole world.
No.
Yeah. Two of my favorite words, transition and renewable. You know, but, uh, we're not, and they aren't. And, and, and I, I said, I said that in a TED Talk, actually, to 1,100 kids. I went through what we started with, food, cow and kale, to understand energy density and took them through different forms of energy and how some, you just get a lot more bang for the buck. But all of them come from the earth. A solar panel comes from the earth. A wind turbine comes from the earth. A battery comes from the earth. It's mined. And then it's manufactured in these collection systems. Collects sunlight, heat, and motion of the wind, and it's converted into electricity. But those wear out. And then we dump them into landfills, and we do it over and over. So, there's no renewable energy.
There's no such thing as renewable energy.
No, that's a myth we've carried forward in our schools. And, and the sun and the wind are there, but you can't put sun in your car.
Laughter.
So, you have to have these collection systems, and those come from the earth. They're mined. Other kinds of energy are denser. Coal came along. At first, it was wood, and then the sun was the first form of energy. It grew the hay that our vehicles of the day used, oxen and horses. And then we killed whales to get their oils for lighting our homes. And then coal came along. 1805, the first coal train in Wales, actually, commercial coal-powered train. You burn coal, which nature took carbon, plants, and made it really dense for us. So, you get a lot of energy when you burn that coal, heat. Boil water, make steam, turn a turbine, run a generator. Light. And that changed the modern world. Then oil, hydrocarbons, carbon and hydrogen, not just carbon and coal. Even denser. Refine that, put it in our vehicles. That's why we can travel so far. The horse and the oxen had to eat a lot of hay. A lot of hay to go 500 miles. A good tank of gas will get you that far. Then methane, natural gas came along, CH4, more hydrogen than carbon. It'll sound weird, but methane is denser than oil by weight. So, it's a much denser form of energy, more hydrogen in it. And then finally, uranium and thorium, the nuclear. So, this, this energy density transition has been happening naturally for a couple of centuries now. And that's where energy in the world is headed. Okay. It's, uh, it's tough to negotiate with physics.
Laughter.
And we try all the time politically, but it, but physics eventually wins, and so does economics. So, that's this, if there's a transition, it's toward that. Okay. Now, globally, you asked. Um, the wealthy world. Let's just break the world into three parts: the emerging economies, about half the world, 4 billion people; the the developing economies, another 3 billion; and then the lucky one-plus billion of us who were born, won the lottery. Right? And, and so we have moved through our, our mix of energy has changed from dominated by coal. Less coal now in most of the modern world. Oil is actually percentage-wise decreasing. Natural gas and nuclear increasing in the modern world, then solar and wind. And I'm, I'm fine with those, by the way. I'm not anti-solar and wind. It's a, a diverse portfolio is a good thing. You know, optionality, like stocks or real estate. Options in that portfolio matter, but they're not going to replace the dense forms of energy. So, the rich world has this set of options now.
Can I interrupt you there? I want to come back to you to you tracing all the three, but you said something that to a lot of people who are not aware of any of this will sound, um, it almost unbelievable. It's like renew, what we call renewables, which you, you said, I mean, it's not renewable.
I call them solar and wind.
Solar and wind. Good.
Yeah.
They will not replace for denser form of energy.
No.
Why not?
Um, you simply can't. Two reasons, two big reasons. There's a lot of reasons, but two big ones. You can't mine enough to create the collection systems of solar panels and wind turbines, which wear out in 15 to 20 years, and have to keep building them because we don't recycle them. You just can't mine enough to do that because the sun and the wind are so low density, it takes a tremendous amount to collect the energy we need to power the modern world. So, uh, Vaclav Smil is a very bright energy guy out of Canada, and he created a, I would, when I'm talking about density before, I was talking about, you know, per unit weight, how much energy in an ounce or a pound of something.
Snorts.
You can't weigh the sun and the wind. So, he came up with something called surface power density, which is, uh, area. Watts per meter squared. So, the, the wind has a very low surface power density, very low. It takes a lot of area to collect energy from the wind. The sun is a little better. But I'm talking about 1 watt per meter squared or 6, not hundreds to 500 to approaching a thousand, which you get from the dense forms of energy. So, you, you, you literally can't mine and replace enough of that stuff. That's the one reason. The second big reason is there's this weird thing called night.
Clears throat and laughter.
And, and it happens every day. Um, when night happens or clouds, you have to have something else there because we like our electricity 24/7. And when the wind goes away, you have to have something else there. That's called intermittent. So, the something else there is either a redundant system of natural gas power plants to fire up or now ever-increasing giant batteries, which have a lower density by weight than dung. Okay, dung, cow dung is about 40 times denser than lithium-ion battery by weight. So, we're charging these giant batteries which have very little energy density, very low. That's why it takes 1,000 pounds of battery to run a nice Tesla S. Let me say that again, a Tesla S, 1,000 pounds of battery are in that floor bed. 7,000 cell phones in one car. Okay. So, that's the density. It's the physics, it's not judgment. It's just physics. So, you, you're not going to be able to power the whole world, particularly as the, the emerging and developing world come into, hopefully, wealth like we have. They're going to require more energy. More and more energy, and that's a good thing. Not a bad thing. Lift the world up. You just can't do it. So, they'll be a part of a portfolio. And look, I've installed solar in Gun Chucua, Colombia, in the Arhuaco village of Gun Chucua, indigenous people. That's all they could have. There's no wires, there's no roads, there's no pipes. First electricity to them was a 3 and a half kW solar array. And we put light bulbs in mud huts and ceiling fans and a refrigerator freezer for some medicines. Okay. That's great. That gets them started. But, it's light bulbs in a mud hut. We would call that a brownout. It's not electrified. It's light bulbs. So, that, it, this progression constant and has to happen, and that requires very dense energy. Okay. And that's where you're headed toward methane, hydrogen, and nuclear, both fission and fusion. That's dense. In fact, if you look at it by weight, I'm going to say this. Uranium and thorium, which run a fission reactor. Okay. That radioactive breakdown creates a bunch of heat. A lot of heat. And that boils water, makes steam, turn a turbine, run a generator. It's the exact same process as burning coal or gas. It's a thermal process. When you think about the density of a uranium pellet, and we, I visited many nuclear reactors and stuff them into these fuel rods, fuel assemblies. A uranium pellet about 1 cm tall and a half cm wide has as much energy in it, it'd be enough to drive a car from New York to LA and back to Dallas, Texas. One pellet. That's how much energy is in there. You know how much gasoline that would take? A lot.
Yeah.
And gasoline, you know how much hay it would take?
Laughter.
So, this is why the density wins. This is, this is why to power 8.3 billion people and growing to some point, you're going to take a remarkable amount of dense energy to do that, and it's always on. A nuclear reactor is always running. It doesn't shut down at night or when the wind stops blowing. So, the two reasons are density, it takes too much stuff, and intermittency.
All right. And I interrupted you. So, come back to the story about the three portions of the world.
Right. And you're thinking, man, this guy can't answer a question like this.
Cuz I know, only cuz I keep interrupting him.
No, please do.
Yeah.
Um, so, in the world today, you've seen a very slow transition, if there is one. The transition is in the mix of energy that we're using. The percentage of each fuel each year. It's called primary energy. 60 years ago, in 1965, that was mostly coal, some oil, and a little bit of gas. Some dams and a few other things, but dominated by those. Today in the world, it's, it's 80% coal, oil, and gas. And coal has gone down in that mix as a percentage, oil is going down as a percentage, gas has increased. And you got 20% of everything else, mostly nuclear and hydro, some solar, wind, and biofuels. So, there's a transition globally in the mix of energy we're using each year, and it's very slow. Very driven by physics and economics. It's nice. We're, we have more optionality today than we did in the past. That's a good thing. But if you get rid of coal, oil, and gas, and nuclear, you're down to less than 20% or less of everything else. Fewer options, and they're intermittent, some of them. So, that's not a good thing. So, that's the global transition that's happening. Now, I want to be real clear. That doesn't mean coal and oil and gas have gone down in our consumption. That's the percentage each year. In actual units, because the population grows and we're industrializing, coal is still increasing. Yeah, oil is still increasing. Natural gas is increasing a lot. Nuclear has hung in there, but it's going to take off again. And everything else is growing, too. So, you see this increase. One is, uh, is kind of a transition, the percent, and one is an addition in the fuels that we're using. We're adding more forms of energy to power the world. And that's important to understand. You know, when kids, young people who've been taught other things, see this graph of everything increasing, they just, you know, they just can't believe it. They think people are telling them a myth or something. They can't believe we still have so much coal, oil, and gas in the world. And it's not going down. And by the way, that's a bad, that's not a bad thing. That's what's lifting up the world. Now, that's global. If you look where those are geopolitically or geographically, very different mixes around the world. Asia now dominates in coal. They are the largest consumer of coal, Asia, by a lot. And my, they consume more coal than the rest of the world combined times X. It's very affordable and it's very reliable to them. And what are they doing with that? They're making electricity to make our crap. Okay. I promise you, if I look in here, it's made somewhere in Asia. I promise. So, this whole concept that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions. Okay. Why?
Well, it's BS, right? We outsourced it to them.
Completely. We have just said, "Hey, you make our crap and we'll be green." It's a shell game.
Right.
Cuz there's only one atmosphere. It's very efficient at moving greenhouse gases around the world, way more efficient than oceans, which is kind of the next big circulatory thing in the world. So, we're, if, if Asia is emitting, especially China and now others, CO2 to make our crap, we're not addressing climate change. We're just exporting the problem and pretending to be green. And countries are doing this, companies are doing this, they're buying offsets from who? They're not even real. States do this, California's doing this big time, you know. We've reduced our CO2 emissions because you don't make anything anymore. Texas makes your stuff. Every. So, this is, this is really a very, really important concept if you're, if you're concerned about climate, is the reality of the energy mix in the world. Asia dominated by coal, Africa, and then in terms of amounts, Asia consumes, that's in primary energy again, Asia consumes half of the world's primary energy today, half in Asia alone. Dominated by China, India's starting to grow. They're a quarter of China today. Half the world's energy because they make our stuff. They make the world's stuff. And then the rest of the world, you just look at Africa, which is 1.2 to 3 billion people, very little energy consumption. It's just getting started. Europe and the US, we consume about a third of the world's energy. We only have 16% of the world's people. 16% of the population, a third of the energy, we make half the global GDP. Energy creates wealth. Africa and, and Asia combined are three quarters of the world's population. Three quarters. They only consume half the world's energy and they make a third of the world's GDP. That's poverty. Three quarters of the people, half the energy, a third of the GDP. They don't have the energy to power their own civilizations in the way that we do. And this is a really important dynamic. So, 7 billion people are living in some state of energy poverty today. From nothing to not reliable and not affordable to them. 7 billion people.
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We've touched on it a little bit about the green movement and virtue signaling about, you know, we only consume this amount of energy, etc., etc. What do you think of Britain's net zero policy?
Yeah. So, when the IEA put out their net zero report 5 years ago this summer, and it was a road map for global energy and it, it led to Glasgow, the, the COP in Glasgow, I think it was COP 26. A road map for, um, I put out a piece that right then that said, "The road to Glasgow is paved with bad assumptions."
Laughter.
You know, it was, I think around in The Hill or something in the US. They made a tre-, a huge number of bad assumptions in that, but the biggest one, the most egregious, the most disingenuous, actually, because Fatih Birol, who runs the IEA, is a smart economist, and he knew. He knows. The most egregious of that report was that global energy consumption would decrease.
Mhm.
Mhm.
This was 2021. Global energy consumption would go down. In what world? It's our, it's not, it's way off already. And then within that, they took coal, oil, and gas down to nothing and grew biofuels and bioenergies and solar wind to these wild numbers by 2050. None of it is happening.
Stuart, can I just, and we'll come back to that. The question I'm thinking is why? If he's such a smart guy, if he knows it's such an obvious lie, he knows he's going to get found out. He's obviously smart. Why would he lie about something so basic and obvious?
Now you're asking me to understand human nature.
Laughter.
I tend to, snorts, deal with data and facts. I, I do the best I can. There are a lot of opinions about that, but there were a tremendous amount of pressure at that time. If you go back to that time, to push for climate, climate change. We have to, we have to, we have to. And the IEA is paid by several countries, mostly Europe and the US. And so, his bosses, if you will, were European leaders. And there was an interesting circle going on. He meets with them all the time, and they put out reports about their progress towards net zero. Paris happened. The Paris Accords, which haven't happened. You know, those, they're promises. So, uh, maybe political pressure, maybe it was aspirational. They say it was a scenario. You know, and, and there's instead of a forecast. Well, everybody took it as a bloody forecast. You know, you can call it a scenario, and it is a scenario. It's not underpinned necessarily by rigorous information and data and understanding. Otherwise, you wouldn't decrease global energy consumption. So, this is what it would have taken to get to net zero. But people used it as a road map, and many countries here started going down that road. And you asked about the UK, Francis. So, you know, what is, why is the UK continue to follow that? I mean, what is Ed Miliband thinking? I don't know. I don't know because most of the world today, well, a big chunk of the world, if you were to list the top 10 challenges in, in the world, go around the world and do it, and I've visited a lot of the world. The climate wasn't high on the list. Food, shelter, education, water, health care, rights of women, yeah, a lot of, a lot of important issues on there. Climate didn't make that high up on the list. Western Europe and the US is where it seemed to have gotten overweight, if you will. Given that, um, people started functioning in a way, some call it greenwashing, some call it virtue signaling. I think, I don't judge the intentions. Maybe the intentions are very real. To do your part, but you do have to look at the outcomes. And when the outcomes show Germany, who led with, I won't pronounce it right, but Energiewende, their new energy in 2007, and Europe followed. When you start going down that path, you start looking at the impacts of that, economic impacts. Starting in 2008, the US continued to grow our GDP. China was on a steeper slope. Europe went flat for 20 years. Europe has been flat economically. You have to look at that and say, intentions, outcomes. If your industries are closing, your people are leaving, and they're going places where they can afford to operate, it's not going to help the climate. Let me say that again. If your industries aren't functioning and your wealth is decreasing, you're hurting the environment. Because wealthy nations can afford to invest in the environment. This is a very important. It's a very, I'll talk about this tomorrow and I, when I close the conference here. You can't just have this binary, are you for the environment or you for energy? Or there's something else in there, the economy. Energy underpins healthy economies. Healthy economies can afford to clean up the environment, and we do. The cleanest air in the world is where it's rich. The cleanest water in the world is where it's rich. And, and we have the biggest economies. We're not hurting the environment. We're, we're protecting the environment through wealth. So, if you're imploding your own economies, you're actually running counter to what your intentions were. And this is, this is not trivial. This is one of the most important things that I think the citizenry is not understanding about the policies that are intending to be green. Whatever that word means. This is, you know, energy, the environ-, the economy, the environment. And it flows that way. You have to have this energy security, abundant, affordable, loud energy to have a healthy economy to clean up the environment. The worst environments in the world I've ever seen are where it's poor. I mean, the land, the soils, the water, the local air, awful. Because you can't literally, they, they have other priorities.
Scott, there's going to be a lot of people watching this, particularly young people. And I think it's really important to address their concerns.
Yes.
Because when people kind of mock them, I, I don't think, particularly my generation and your generation, the younger generations are terrified. Yeah. They talk about climate change, and to be fair to them, every time I seem to switch on, like my laptop or I read the news and I see what's happening in the UK, record summer, hottest June on record. Are they right to be worried about the climate?
Yeah. And again, this isn't, this is not a binary answer. Yes. Climate, the world is warming overall, slowly, about a, a little over a degree C in a century, and it's continuing to warm, and humans are influencing that. We're putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've gone from 270 parts per million to 420 parts per million, and that's increasing. And it will for a while. So, it is getting warmer globally. It doesn't mean you're going to have not have cold winters, but the aggregate warmth is happening. So, that's a concern, and it should, it's real. Okay? Now, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the big climate confab of the top climate scientists in the world with the UN, it's stood up by the UN, has met 30 times, and they put out reports. They're called AR reports. AR6 was the last major report they wrote. Let's separate warming from the impacts of that warming. Let's think about what can hurt both humans and the environment. The extreme weather events. So, when you start to look at the data on those, and the IPCC report is very honest about it. AR6, okay, Working Group One, Chapter 12, Table 12.12. I'll say that again for the young people. Go look at that. AR6 is public. AR6 Working Group One, Chapter 12, Table 12.12 is a summary table of all the extreme weather impacts that we can concern ourselves with. Storms, major storms, frequency and intensity. Fires and fire weather. Drought and drought intensity. Ocean acidification. Rates of sea level rise. Etc. Okay? When you look at the table, they run it, they run today's impacts, and they look at the historical past, and they say, "What has emerged from history?" From statistical history. With what they're showing is, is what hasn't emerged with, with confidence. So, the white in that table says, "This has not emerged from the historical norms with confidence." Most of the table's white. And then they run it on their most extreme at the time scenario. Okay? The 8.5 RCP 8.5 is called. That's the most extreme warming scenario, which, by the way, the IPCC itself has said now won't happen. A brand new paper out this year saying that's much lower. That's not going to happen. Okay? But, they ran these, this table in that most extreme scenario. What would happen in 2050? And what would happen in 2100 with these weather events if we keep just getting hotter? Almost the whole table stays white. With confidence, they don't emerge from historical norms. Those things I just talked about. It gets warmer. The oceans get a little more acidic. And you see a little bit more rainfall. Okay? So, when the summaries of those, and particularly the political and media summaries of those, come out with the drama and say it's the worst storm on record. Uh, no. It's not. It's not. It, those storm, it's hot as hell in London right now. Even for a Texan, you know, or a Michigan guy. Uh, that's an unusual warm for the end of, near the end of June, right? It's been this warm in June before. I promise. I haven't looked it up, but I could go back and find your records, and you've had this kind of heat before in June. Sometime. And probably sometime before that. Okay. They haven't emerged from the past. So, when I talk, I speak at a lot of universities, and I have young people come to me often, very concerned. Their biggest concern is, why haven't I heard what you're telling me? I don't know. Why haven't you? I'm upset by it. I understand. It's upsetting if all you've heard is one component of this. But we've got to be not just completely factual, we've got to try to be factually complete. I said that to Senator Manchin's climate hearing 5 years ago. Factually complete is hard. So, they're hearing factual completeness now, and it, it worries them. And a lot of them say, their, their conversations typically go, "I'm upset. What can I do?" "Where can I see more of this?" And then they start asking, "What would, what should I do? What, what would you do for a job?" You know, I say, "What, what's your biggest concern?" And they'll say something.
Snorts.
"Go work for that company then." Huh? "Go work for a big power company or ExxonMobil?" Are you kidding? Yeah, if you want to make real change, go and work there and change it from within. You'll have a lot more influence from within, and you'll, you'll learn a lot, too, because there's a lot of data, information. So, there's a lot. And they do. Some of them go do that, and they come back years later and say, "Thanks for the advice. It was very powerful. Now I'm going to go work for an NGO. I'm armed with information, better information." So, I think the young people have been indoctrinated. I was, I'm old. Okay, been around a while. I was trained to be terrified of. I was, I was raised in the Cold War. Trained to be terrified of nuclear. In kindergarten, we would do drills where we would get under our kindergarten desk preparing for nuclear attack. Very scientific. It's because I knew that desk would protect me from, even at six, I knew.
Laughter.
Maybe not, you know. I'm going to be real safe here. But that's what I was trained. I was trained. Young people today have been trained to be terrified of climate change. And when you, and, and I'll, I'll pull a class. How many? It happened. A young man said, "Why does any of this matter? We're all gone in 15 years anyway." I said, "What do you mean we're all gone?" He said, "Humans. We're gone. We're toast." He goes, "It's an existential threat to humanity." I said, "You think in 15 years the human race is gone?" He goes, "Yes." Not supposed to do this. I said, "How many think that?" Half of the hands in the room went up.
Wow.
I went home so depressed because this was 9 years ago in a big university. We're all still here. Okay. So, the, the language matters a lot, and the training matters a lot. But that's a very real fear. So, when you have that kind of fear, you have to, you have to start looking at the information. And again, not, not some group that's paid to tell you something else. Go look at the IPCC report itself and their summary table. AR7 is going to come out soon. My guess is that table won't be in it. Because it's getting ever more focused on a narrative, but that narrative, that extreme event narrative, is going, it's getting less and less noisy. Less and less and less noisy. In fact, it really isn't even making the radar of some of the big political conversations in Western Europe and the US today. It shouldn't go away. It's one issue, but so is the land, the air, and the water. The pillars of the environment, the land, the air, the water, and the atmosphere, they all are important. And you have to balance those things. You can't have it all. There are tradeoffs between these things. You literally, if you want all solar, you hurt the land. All right? There are tradeoffs as we go around. So, it's an optimization problem. We're trying to optimize the different parameters depending on what resources you have, what your educational levels are like, what your political system is like. Every part of the world is different when it comes to dealing with its energy portfolio.
Um.
Yeah.
There's going to be young people. I really hope there's young people watching this, Scott.
It's Constantin, they will be watching.
Laughter.
You must have really overestimated my.
I'm counting on you. Your kids are the age of my grandkids, man.
Laughter.
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Snorts.
What would you say to them? Because I, I took, I talked to someone and I have friends who are now, you know, in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. And they say to me, "Francis, my, my kids don't want to have kids because they're worried about the environment. They don't want to bring up kids." What would you say to young people in their 20s or in their 30s who are terrified of climate and as a result, it's they don't, they're not going to have children, they're not going to do this, they're not going to do that.
Again, I'm not a counselor. Um, I want to, let's talk about population just for a second. And then I'll come back and try to answer that succinctly.
Yeah.
I host this PBS show with two guests, and we did one on population after I read a piece in the New York Times, which just blew me away. So, we had these two, a Canadian and a university professor from UT, actually, Austin. The fertility rates globally are plummeting. Okay? India went below replacement fertility rate 2 years ago. 2.1 is replacement, 2.1 kids per woman. The only place that's still increasing their fertility rates is Africa, and that's coming down quickly, and a few other countries. South Korea below one. Et cetera. So, population demographics are interesting. We were headed toward 11 billion people. We're at 8.3 today. I'll do it this way. And now we're headed toward 10 billion. And then it was 9 billion. It keeps getting lower and closer. The latest demographics say we're going to peak. The global population is going to peak around 9 billion people in 50 years or less. 2075. Okay. Peak. And then it doesn't plateau. We don't go to 9 billion and chill out for hundreds and hundreds of years. It plummets. The math of that fertility rates plummets. And we go back to 2 billion people on Earth in less than 200 years. Okay. Took 200 years to go from a billion to eight. Back to two. This is a choice. Some wonderful books on this. It's happening globally because of choice. Women, couples, are choosing not to have kids. And there are a whole variety of reasons. Okay? It's not summer climate fear or what they're bringing their kids into in the world. That's more the wealthy world. Some are, it's expensive to have kids and raise them. Some are, I don't need as many kids. We used to need them for agriculture. Kids died. In the village I described where we put solar, the indigenous village of Wonchuko, the Arhuaco people. Half of those kids will die before they become 18 today's world from a tooth infection or dysentery. Something that wouldn't kill us or breathing indoor smoke. Pneumonia, cancer. Okay. So, they need the kids. They, they die. That's not happening in a lot of the world anymore. And there are other reasons, too. So, as, as this wonderful books march around the world looking at this, we're choosing not to do that. I can't tell you not to choose to, to choose not to have kids because of climate fear. If that's real in you, that's in you. All I can do is share the information with you and say, "The impacts of climate change." When I asked that young man who said that dead in 15 years, I said, "Well, what's going to kill you?" "Huh? Climate is." No, no, no. Climate doesn't kill. Climate is a 30-year moving average of weather. That doesn't kill.
Snorts.
What's going to kill you? What's going to kill the human race? Storms. Not really. It, storms, the deaths from climate have gone way down, by the way. That's the data. But storms kill a few people, especially in poor countries, who don't have the protection. Heat. Cold kills a lot more than heat. That's just the reality. Um, those who can control their climate don't die from heat. Those who can't have learned to live with it, and a degree more isn't going to kill them. It's already 40° C, 41. Drought. Extreme drought could harm big regions, but it's not going to kill, it's not going to wipe out humanity. I mean, we just went through these, a step at a, and they're kind of, you could kind of see the tensions coming down. Okay. Here's a guy that's not BS-ing me with the data. Here's the data. And these are important issues. And there are some really other important issues, too. So, all we can do is try to be as factually complete as we can and have young people arm themselves with information. Right. And take the, take the time to do that a little bit. It's all there. And maybe, maybe mitigate your own fears. If I have a fear of flying, some people terrified of flying, or spiders, or heights, or public speaking. We all go, if I have to do that thing, I have to live with the spiders, or fly a lot, or public speak, I'm going to go probably learn how to mitigate my fear around that because it may not be rational. People do die from plane accidents, but it's a lot fewer than driving or bicycling. People do fall off cliffs, but it's not very many. And very few people ever died from public speaking, but it's the largest fear. Some people would choose death in the polls over public speaking. Literally. As their largest fear. Public speaking over death. So, we go, take the, we, we educate ourselves, and we need to do that with other things as well, including climate. It's very important. And that way we can have, um, dialogues that will address these issues proportional to their impacts.
Well, this is what you're describing is a, correct me on any of this if I get it wrong, but I think what I'm hearing is the way that generations now successively have been taught to look at this issue is very one-dimensional. There's only one variable that we're optimizing for, which is saving the planet, uh, "and" "unquote." Uh, the level of fear that's been attached to that is vastly disproportionate to the nature of the threat.
Correct.
And on top of that, you know, one of the things that I want to try to ask you about in the interest of being factually complete, is you talk about how Asia's consuming so much energy now, which of course they have to because they have most of the population. But one of the things you talked about in the, in one of your speeches here at Arc was the fact that India is only a quarter as rich as China.
Mhm.
And if I was the Indian Prime Minister, I'm not, but I can only imagine that his number one mission is to get India as rich as China and beyond as quickly as possible.
Yes.
Right? That being the case, you, you've talked about the fact that the world still consumes more coal than it ever did, more oil than it ever did, more gas than it ever did. And I don't imagine the Indians are covering India in solar panels and wind turbines. I imagine they're desperate to get their hands on the good stuff, on the dense stuff that you're talking about, and nuclear as well, of course.
Yes.
So, this idea that that we are going to reduce our CO2 emissions as a globe in the next 50 to 100 years just seems completely ridiculous to me.
Yeah.
Based on that alone, the fact that India will want to catch up. That alone.
Right.
Would make make it impossible to reduce our CO2. Is that fair, first of all?
That's a great summary.
Okay.
Yeah, very fair. And then I found Narendra Modi absolutely. In fact, Narendra Narendra Modi with his 1.4 billion people, more population than China now, consumes a quarter of the energy because their economy is a quarter. It's right where China was about 28 years ago on slope, and then China went boom with the energy consumption and economy. Literally, if you slide into your left three decades, it looks just like China did. So, they're going to do that.
Right. So, we're about to witness an explosion in energy consumption.
In India.
In India and therefore the globe because India is so much of it, right?
Yeah.
That being the case, it's interesting to me you talk. Look, there are people who say, you know what? Climate change is just, it's happening. It's got nothing to do with human activity. You don't say that. You say human activity contributes.
To warming.
To warming.
Yeah.
Uh, contributes or causes the different things.
No, it, our emissions are causing more warming.
More warming.
Yes.
Do you, do you have a percentage estimate on the, how much of the warming comes from human activity?
Not my own research. So. Yeah, but of that degree C, degree, degree and a half.
Yeah.
That we've warmed in the last century, a significant part is from human emissions.
Okay. So, taking those two things together, A, we're about to witness an explosion in energy consumption, and B, human energy consumption contributes to warming. We're going to see warming.
Yes.
The planet will keep warming.
Yes.
Over time.
But the, the best estimates, Constantin, are about another degree and a half.
Before the decline in population starts to mitigate the problem.
And the mix of energy goes towards methane, hydrogen, and nuclear, which is much lower emissions. So, we're seeing, we're leaving the carbon world naturally. We're decarbonizing naturally. Wood, hay, coal, oil, less carbon, methane, less carbon, uranium, thorium, and eventually fusion, which is hydrogen, isotopes of hydrogen, no carbon. So, we're doing that naturally when we get dense. And India is building nuclear reactors, and they should. I would love for India to build a lot of nuclear electricity because they could decarbonize much faster, like France did. Then going the coal route.
Right.
Some coal because they have it.
Yeah.
But go, you know, they can, they can skip that long cycle. If they just accelerate their methane and their nuclear.
Okay. So, this is a very good point. I wish to talk about nuclear then because I think with nuclear, um, from all the evidence that I've seen, nuclear on an average down basis is the safest form of energy that we currently have. More people have been killed in one dam collapse in China than have been killed by all the nuclear accidents in human history, right? However, the big concern with nuclear is, um, you get a situation where an entire area of land is just like the area around Chernobyl, for example. You can't, you can't go in there. And then people won't, won't be able to live there for thousands of years. And you have a few of those, and you know, you've got a real, real problem.
Interesting though on that, just real quick.
Uh-huh.
Nature moved back to the region around Chernobyl because of no humans.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the safest place for animals in the world.
And they don't have seven heads and nine legs, or they're just normal. So, I think humans actually will be back in there much sooner.
Okay.
Yes.
Nonetheless, I, I think to most people, the idea of, you know, we build a nuclear reactor in our country and it explodes, understandably scary. Part. And part of it is, you know, we're not very good at visually seeing the impact of burning coal and how many people that kills, and it kills a lot of people. Or a dam collapse in China, which we've never heard about, versus big boom.
Gasps.
Visually powerful. But also, it's like.
And tying that to nuclear weapons.
Yeah.
There's this irrational tie between nuclear electricity and using the plutonium that comes out of the fusion products from that and enriching it and making it better for nuclear weapons. So, there's this sort of.
Yeah.
Weaponry, nuclear power link.
It's not irrational, is it? Because I mean, nuclear.
Reactors can be used to produce. They do produce plutonium. Yeah, it's a byproduct of the process. It's still a lot has to happen to that plutonium before it comes weapon grade and then to get to where you can make a weapon. It's not irrational.
No. There's a chain there that could happen. Right. But it nuclear power plants aren't making nuclear weapons.
No. No, no, no, of course not. Yeah, yeah. I guess what I'm getting at is with nuclear, um, there is a high-low probability, high-risk, uh, no, low probability, high impact event that's that is in people's minds a lot. Take a country like Britain. In the US, there's parts of Texas you could blow up a nuclear reactor, nobody would notice, right? [laughter] It's so vast and so not densely populated in parts, right?
Right. In the UK, very different conversation, right?
Right. So, what can you tell us about nuclear, what it might be like in the future? And also the other forms of of technology, particularly hydrogen that you mentioned. Where are we with all of that?
Progressing towards those. Uh, start with hydrogen. Hydrogen is element number one on the periodic table. It's lighter than helium, so it's a it's a tough little booger to keep track of. But and you have to make it. Now, there's some natural hydrogen, but we haven't explored for it much. To use it, you have to make it, but it's a remarkable fuel. Uh, and it can be used as a electricity carrier. So a fuel cell is run on hydrogen and that's basically electricity carrier, run like a battery. Or you can burn hydrogen. I mean, the Hindenburg was hydrogen. Okay, so you have to make it. And the two easiest ways to make it are to split the methane molecule, CH4, or the water molecule, H2O. And then you get your hydrogen.
Um, so, you do something to natural gas or to water and you get the hydrogen.
Put energy into them, split it, and you get the hydrogen. But, there's energy in.
Are we doing this already?
Yeah, you can do it. One's called hydrolysis and one is called steam reforming of methane. We do it. Uh, we don't do it to get large-scale fuels from them, but we have to have hydrogen for a lot of processes in the world. So, we those.
So, why don't we use it for energy yet?
It's expensive.
Okay, so it's not cheap enough.
No, yeah, it's not It can't compete yet. It's not cheap enough.
And why do you think it will?
Um, it the dynamics of of energy when always Here's when transitions happen, when something better comes along.
Right. Okay, what's better? Well, a fuel cell might be better than a battery if it's cost-competitive. We literally It's always the economics that the economics that kick in. We don't recycle cuz it's too expensive to recycle, so we just make new stuff and it's always the cost that drives these transitions at the end of the day and at scale. Oh, a few local people can afford solar panels and wind turbines, maybe hydrogen fuel cells, but not at scale. So, this is the driver of that. It needs to come down to about a buck, buck 50 a kilogram hydrogen to compete with other things in most places. We're not there. And that's why people are starting to look for natural hydrogen now. So, there's hydrogen that That's a nice thing with methane, hydrogen, and then nuclear. Two processes to make electricity from nuclear. One is fission, splitting, and one is fusion, you know, colliding. Um, very different inputs to that, uranium, thorium, hydrogen, other isotopes. We already have fission. That's a well-known. It's been around 70, 80 years. We put nuclear reactors on battleships and in submarines. We float them around the oceans. They're running on nuclear reactors, little ones, relatively little. So, very safe, known process. It's a the fear Yes, the boom is scary. Um, the technologies now have gotten almost inherently safe. They literally shut themselves down if the heating starts to happen. Warfare, I mean, Russia went after Ukraine's reactor. I said, this is kind of an energy war in some ways. Uh, you know, you can weaponize natural gas with Europe, etc. So, all wars have some energy component to them. So, that's that's real. Nothing There's nothing perfect. You can wipe out a solar array too pretty easily or a wind farm and take everything down. So, uh, you know, that's kind of nuclear is coming. China is leading, of course. They're building more nuclear reactors now than any other country combined. Take China's nuclear reactors under construction, they're more than the next 20 countries combined. Russia's third. India's second. The US isn't even on the top 20 list. We will be again cuz it's it it's bipartisan. Young people are not scared of nuclear. You ask young people, "No emissions, dense electricity, how about nuclear? Go for it." They weren't trained to be scared of nuclear like I was. They're good with it. And they should be. So, I see a nuclear, let's call it a renaissance. It's coming again and it's being led by China and e- The Middle East even has reactors now. The UAE has four working nuclear reactors, large-scale gigawatt nuclear reactors today. It's It's coming. And I think the West needs to get on board and get back after it. Fusion, which is a different technology, um, is getting closer. I Most of us used to laugh and say, "Ah, it's 30 years away and always will be." You know. But it's not now.
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What is nuclear fusion?
What is it?
Yeah.
It's the it's the colliding of of radioactive isotopes. So it it instead of splitting something to make heat, it's fusing something to make heat. The sun is the best fusion reactor we know.
Oh, wow.
Okay. And so it is literally fusing these things and creating a tremendous amount of heat. The challenge is constraining the heat. For those really interested, I did we did a PBS show, one of our episodes was on fusion. Two really smart people. See, the challenge there is containing the heat. How do you contain the reaction and the heat? And there's two big approaches to that, I will.
Uh, and that heat is used to do what?
Boil water, make steam, turn a turbine, run a generator, and make electricity. So it's just a different way to create heat. But the cool part about it is there it's completely inherently safe. You're not splitting things, you're fusing them. So it literally shuts itself down. Okay. It it it's almost the perfect energy. If there's going to if if I had to pick one of everything we've talked about, it's the closest to being the answer to unlimited heat, make electricity, and heat for other processes. The challenge, and really important I think, if you look at the end use energy we talked about earlier, only 20% of the energy in the world end use is electricity today and it's grown to 20%. 80% is other things, heat, molecules for industrial processes, making cement and steel and fertilizers and plastic and all the stuff we do. So, as that electricity grows, nuclear fission and fusion can be part of that, but it takes so much heat to make cement and steel, you can't do it with solar and wind. You have to burn something. 6 7 800 900 1100° to make some of these things that modern societies run on. So, nuclear fusion has the potential if you arc it to make that much heat. So, you literally transition away from carbon. That's the ultimate decarbonization transition is to those very dense, always on sources of heat, which is a nuclear fission or fusion reactions and it's high-tech.
What about nuclear waste, Scott?
Yeah. So, this doesn't have waste, the fusion. It's it's steam. Um, fission does have two sorts of ways the the big towers you see, these conical towers, that's just steam. That's just the steam off the boiling water. That's not CO2 or any other particulate emissions like from a coal plant. The waste out of fission is called fission products. They're they're various forms of radioactive things. Uh, about 95% of the energy is used and about 5% of these fission products. Uh, a little piece of plutonium, but the rest of them you have to manage. You have to what they typically do is they uh, they solidify those.
What does that mean?
Uh, they blend them with silica. Okay, so they become an a molecule that's locked up. Still very hot and radioactive. And then they put it in canisters. And those canisters are then put into dry casks. Which you see mostly on the surface in the US. Or they're put into 30-40 ft thick concrete slabs today in France. And our first film, we take you inside the nuclear reactor and show you that the dry cask going down into the concrete slabs where they're hot and radioactive and they're stored forever. And now they're looking at geologic solutions. So putting them down in the earth into shale and other kinds of rocks and holding them there forever. Um, I say forever, they're radioactive for 20-30,000 years. They're not hot for that long, they're hot for a couple hundred years before they wouldn't melt themselves and they'd be safe. So I'm I'm not making light of that. There's a real You got to manage that waste. But the amount of waste is very small for the amount of energy that comes out. I think in the film we show that one human's use of nuclear power is like the size of a coin. That's the waste that comes out of a human's lifetime use. The size of a coin. A lot of humans, but compared to coal ash and particulates or or CO2 from from burning gasoline and and other products and methane or or the amount of of batteries we're going to be dumping into the earth which are toxic from our cars and our backing up our solar and wind solar panels that are being dumped in the earth and they have toxic components and then we don't recycle them, we dump them in the earth. Wind turbine blades, gigantic, we bury them. We don't recycle them.
Really?
Yeah.
Why not?
They're not made of recyclable material, one. They're starting to be. But it's the economics again, Constantine. It it costs more money to grab the key things out of a battery and dump the rest, the key things out of a solar panel and dump the rest. There's There's an energy and cost to all that process. It's just cheaper to make them new. But it's just cheaper. I mean, big box stores are dumping new TVs from last year's model because it's cheaper to dump them and they're not going to sell them than to make them new. It's nuts. This is a human waste thing that we should get our heads around. I'm I'm all for recycling, reuse, and reprocessing. But we got to get it affordable. That's why we don't do it for the most part. So, you're sitting here, you know, the nuclear has those fission products, fusion It's just sounds too good to be true almost. You got to contain the heat of that reaction. It is a little It's a little teeny sun. You know, and and you got to contain that heat. Um You know, those are That's technology. And other things that geothermal we haven't talked about. That's a big deal. The earth is hot. The further you go down in the earth, the hotter it gets. So, a lot of new things are coming. This administration, the Trump administration, is really big on geothermal. So was the prior administration, the Biden administration. Jennifer Granholm, Chris Wright, good friend. Big on geothermal. Two kinds. Uh, one, if you get enough thermal gradient, you can literally use that hot water to make electricity. Shallow geothermal. Think of a heat pump in your home. You can circulate 50, 60° water and it will cool your home in the summer.
[snorts]
Or you can add a little heat to it to warm your home home in the winter, but you don't have to add very much. So, geothermal is a wonderful form of climate control in homes. A little bit more expensive in most places than other things today, but it won't always be. So, geothermal is coming, too.
Yeah. And in the interim, though, the planet will get warmer, and we're going to have to adapt.
Yes.
That's inevitable.
We are adapting. We've been I mean, humans have been adapting since we were knuckle dragging 2 million years ago. Human-like things, you know. We've been adapting. I mean, it's really important little geologic moment. About every 100,000 years, there's a glacial interglacial cycle. In fact, a Serbian physicist named Milankovitch worked this out in house arrest for 20 years by hand. He figured out why. The the It's kind of fun. The The Earth's orbit around the sun changes in shape, and the Earth wobbles on its axis and tilts on its axis. When you conflate those three things, the Earth gets closer to and farther from the sun. When it's a little farther, ice age happens. We literally see ice come down from the North Pole, and it covers in the US Michigan and New York City and Minnesota and Montana in 1 to 2,000 ft of ice. Canada's gone. That lasts about 80,000 years. And then for about 20,000 years, that ice retreats, and we get more arable land, and that So, that's a glacial interglacial. We're in an interglacial period now. It started about 18,000 years ago. It started to warm. The ice retreated. And by the way, when the ice is locked up up there in the poles, up here, sea level drops about 300 ft globally, vertically. The Gulf of Mexico used to be a way lower than it was just 90, you know, just 20,000 years ago, 25,000. The ice melts, the seas rise. Ice retreats. Arable land. That's what we have today. We're in a beautiful interglacial cycle today. It takes for those first 7,000 years sea levels were really rising. Cuz it It's rising about a centimeter a year. And now it rises like a millimeter or less a year kind of for the next 8, 9,000 years. So, here we are. Everything that we talk about, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, Industrial Revolution has happened in these last 8, 9,000 years. Beautiful interglacial. You can't stop that Milankovitch cyclicity. The ice will come back. Or within a few thousand years of it statistically. Here comes the ice. And we're going to have a whole different challenge. More humans die when it's cold.
going to say, if you want to be concerned about the climate changing, the ice being over New York, that's when I'd start to get actually worried, right?
That's a big one.
That's when you're like, "Oh, this is real climate change."
That's when it That's a big one. And it's It'll happen.
Right.
This will happen. You can't stop it. Now, you might be able to put greenhouse gases in I'm being This will sound facetious. It's not. But I'm just playing sci- Put some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, you know, trap some heat. Do other things to keep the war keep it warmer and try to hold that back. And we'll see what people do then, but.
What about this the real the reason I think smart people are concerned about climate change is this idea of runaway climate change. The idea that if you make things warmer that causes other changes in the environment. It affects this ocean, it affects this. So,
Yeah.
the the the rate at which it gets warmer, accelerates, and you never get to to the decline and or the slow down in in temperature increase that you talked about.
Um, I think it's runaway impacts of that warming. So, the rate of warming won't necessarily increase steeply. Keeps getting warmer, but it's it's what does that do? Does it Does a big ice sheet calve off of Greenland and plonk into the ocean like an ice cube in our water? So, what happens then? Cuz right now it's locked up on land. Okay? And if it plonks into the ocean, that can cause more dramatic rates of sea level change, for example. Um, do you get some feedback loops? There's something called snowball Earth that's happened twice in Earth's history where it literally the Earth was covered in ice. The whole Earth. Snowball Earth. The thing I'm talking about, those 100,000 years, those are higher frequency glacial interglacials. 10 of those have happened in the last million years. Okay, 10. We can see them. And human-like things have been around for all 10 of them. Mhm. You know, we didn't have modern technology, but they would come closer to the pole or to the equator in cold times, and then they would go back and as land opened up again. They migrate across from Russia, the Aleutians to the you know, it is this all Humans like to survive. Most species do, so we tend to adapt to these changing things. Um, we're not going to stand there as the seas rise. Now, small islands, small island nations, that's hard. If they're poor, they can't adapt. If they're wealthy, they can do like Holland has done or New New Orleans, build walls and keep the ocean back. Uh, you can afford to do those sorts of things. The small island nations, if seas continue to rise and they will at some rate and they have been for 18,000 years and we're accelerating that a little bit, not much by the way. The acceleration of rise isn't much. So, they got to adapt to that. Adapt to storms, to droughts, to things and And what allows you to do that? Wealth. Okay, this is where the inequity truly exists in the world today. The emerging economies, 4 billion people. Developing economies, 3 billion. They can't adapt like the lucky billion can. They don't have the wealth to do that and they should. This is the inequity If there's a global inequity, it's that that the wealthy people can afford to make these kinds of adaptive changes.
So, we got to get them wealthy.
We got to get them wealthy. We have to accelerate economic growth. That'll be the conclusion of my talk tomorrow. The irony in all this is you in order to go from energy to the economy, accelerate growth not in population necessarily, in wealth so that everybody can afford the kinds of things that that we have. And everybody knows about them. The first thing you get, I dropped a solar panel in Masai country in Kenya, 40-W panel. Cell phone.
Mhm.
It's in our film. Yeah, they have to have it cuz it's called M-Pesa. That's how they pay for their 1 hour of electricity that day. But, they're connected to the world now and a little TV on a battery. I just.
[laughter]
I mean, we're literally putting this solar panel in comes this little thing and there's the cell phone and a little TV, and the first film that came on was one of the more modern Kong versus Godzilla. And these two monsters were doing battle on the TV screen, and these little kids on the couch who probably had never seen this, their their eyes got real big. And I was saying through double translation, "Tell them it's not real." Cuz a giraffe had just walked by where we were literally. There goes a giraffe. And here's Kong and Godzilla Godzilla doing battle. And I tell them it's not real, you know, cuz they're like You haven't seen those here. Can you imagine that?
Right.
Your first exposure.
Right.
is something like that, and and that's where I'm very passionate about energy poverty.
Mhm.
I made a film about it called Switch On. And we went around and looked at all that circumstance and how you lift people up with energy and their and their economies to where they have the kinds of things the good things and some of the bad that we do constantly Francis. So, I think it's very important to not Some of the our intentions and our proposals are holding people down instead of bringing them up. The way to make this change, and it's a continuum from poverty severe to wealth, isn't to stretch it more. It's to bring this to this, and everybody move together. Let's go. We can do that.
That seems a perfect place to end the interview. What a pleasure it's been. The final question is always the same. Scott, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
Before Scott answers the final question at the end of the interview, make sure you go to triggerpod.co.uk, where you'll be able to see this.
What will go first, net zero or Europe?
If you were stood in front of parliament in the UK or any other European country, what would be the simplest bit of data or anecdote you would use to convince them about investing in nuclear energy?
What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
Hm.
Yeah, my mind always goes to my own interests and biases, which is education. I think we're really not talking about how to improve our critically thinking complete education even in the wealthy world. I think we've left some of that behind. And we need to find a way to have civil dialogues again. To as Aristotle said, be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. That's what That's what it's all about. We have to be able to have these conversations even if I don't agree. Entertain, don't agree. So that we can advance and learn. Um, if we create situations in where some ideas are not welcomed, we've we're going backwards. Um, and that's especially important as AI comes into the picture. We haven't talked about AI. It's going to play a big role in the energy world, the economics and environment world, and but we have to continue the I part of that. Okay. We can't go all A, artificial. Humans have to be involved with with all of that. Cuz we're the only ones who really understand if it's putting out nonsense. And it will put out nonsense. So, I would say, as we think about AI, just keep the human component uh very close to that. Accelerate what we do, make it better, but never replace it.
Scott, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk, where we put some of your questions to Scott.
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Is oil actually derived from years of squashed vegetation from 200 million years ago? We were told this at school, and it was often repeated, but I've never had someone explain it to me in a way that makes sense.