 This is the third of six presentations. Real briefly, the last one, we talked about human brain and behavior. We seek status. We have cognitive biases. We easily become hijacked and addicted and lots of other aspects of the human phenotype. I will bring that back again in the conclusion. Today, I'm going to talk about energy, the economy, technology, money. I am not going to get into prescriptions or values or what to do or anything like that. My goal today is to have you understand the importance of how all this fits together. And on Tuesday next, we will talk about the environment, including climate change, ocean issues, plastics, endocrine disruptors, biodiversity, planetary boundaries and such. Next Saturday, there will be a grand synthesis of what this means, how it compares to conventional stories in our world, what are some of the possible futures that we face. And then the following Tuesday will be my contribution of the various lenses of what to do, from a global perspective, from a national perspective, from a local perspective, and in your own lives and your families. This will be the longest of all the presentations. I have over 140 slides. I've never done this presentation before, ever. I've combined a bunch of things in the past and added some new things. I just finished an hour ago. So we'll see how it goes, and hopefully we'll leave time for questions on this stuff. But I really don't want to get into futuristic speculation until we get to the later things. So we are part of a human ecosystem. And the other time, we talked about the brain and behavior, and now we're going to talk about the economy and how energy fits with materials and technology and money into the global human ecosystem. Again, I will talk a little bit about India, but mostly this is a global story, and I'm used to presenting two audiences in Europe and the United States, not in India, but I will add a little bit about that. So there was a famous cultural anthropologist named Marvin Harris, and he developed a large study of prior cultures. And his theory was called cultural materialism, where he said at the top of this pyramid is something called superstructure, which is our ideas, our beliefs, our stories in a culture. Then there was the social structure or the political economy, which is our rules, our laws, our institutions. And underpinning all that is something he called infrastructure, which was our energy, our environment, our waste, inflows, outflows, our inflows of energy and materials. And he said that of all the prior cultures he studied, this was the most important thing that dictated what was possible and where that culture would head. So most of today's presentation is going to be on this infrastructure component. So it's going to be about energy and the economy. Here are the categories that I'm going to talk about. So first of all, energy and nature. And I don't know about in India, but in the United States, we don't have ecology courses so much until you get to college. But there are trophic pyramids in nature, also called energy pyramids, where every layer enables the layer above it with a 10% loss. So the sun grows plants, the plants feed herbivores, the herbivores feed carnivores. And at each stage, you only process 10% of the incoming energy. So a line is 1,000th of the solar energy that got to his stage. If you think about a human, this is an old stat but reasonably accurate, takes 300 trout to support one man for one year. The trout consumes 90,000 frogs that consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off 1,000 tons of grass. So all of the things in nature's ecosystem follow this sort of trajectory. So if you were a fish and you were hungry, which you always are, there's a seat over there, a couple of them, hi, welcome. Where would you want to be in this stream if you were a fish and you were hungry? Gautam? Upstream. Upstream? Gautam? You would want to be here because this is an eddy that doesn't have a lot of movement. And so you don't have to expend a lot of your energy to get energy in the form of bugs and other things that are coming downstream. So the same way that grizzly bears stand here because they have to expend a very little amount of energy to get a big caloric payback. So animals were the first investors. They go through life seeking calories and to get calories, they have to expend calories. In this relationship, this ratio is central in the natural world. There's a revenue, which is the gazelle and there's an expense, which is the chasing. And you could miss 10 in a row. And then if you get the 11th gazelle, you have enough for cellular maintenance, reproduction, raising your young, et cetera. This is in biology called energy return over energy investment or EROI. I wrote my PhD thesis on this topic, measuring the costs of things in the human world, but not in dollar or rupee terms, but in energy and material terms. So could you imagine that a cheetah gets a 200 to one payoff when it catches a gazelle? And then all of a sudden on the savannah, there are less gazelles. So it has to chase mice. Might be easier to catch a mice, I mean, sorry, a rabbit, but a rabbit is much smaller. So its payoff from each of its endeavors is 50 to one. Or if you're out of rabbits, you have to chase mice. You don't have to spend a lot of energy, but you get very little energy. A cheetah would have to eat a lot of mice. So this biophysical concept of energy return is very important in the natural world and also the human world. One more concept in energy. There's something called the fourth law of thermodynamics, which is called the maximum power principle, which states that organisms and ecosystems in nature self-organize, so as to be better able to access an energy gradient. So if you think of a tree, maybe a banyan tree in Oroville, it doesn't have one leaf and it doesn't have a billion leaves. It has some intermediate amount of leaves that maximize the surface area that it can degrade incoming sunlight. And by the way, if you have a banyan tree and one of the paths or a cement road next to it, which one, if you're standing by it, will be cooler? Under the tree, because the ground is absorbing the sun and refracting it back, whereas if you're under a tree, the sun is being turned into more tree. So there's energy everywhere in nature and we don't usually see it. Okay, moving on, energy in humans. This biophysical ratio applies to human societies too. In our ancestral times, there was a revenue and an expense, ancestor style. Around 10,000 years ago, the climate warmed and stabilized and in seven areas all around the world, humans stopped hunting and gathering and started farming, started agriculture and they started to accumulate surplus and we never had that before. And so once we had surplus and we had a stored thing of grain, then we wouldn't have to, we would have things to store for a long time. So we stopped moving around, then we started to trade and we started to build hierarchies and we hired warriors and accountants and shaman and other things that we never had before because our surplus, our energy surplus had all of a sudden started to grow and we use that energy surplus in the form of human labor for to do lots of things. So imagine in medieval times, we got our surplus from grain and so there was a revenue of what we grew versus an expense of the human labor and sometimes animal labor that went into it and the ratio between those enabled artists and transportation and music and blacksmiths and all other things that weren't needed directly in the food system. And so now the rest of my talk is gonna be about the energy surplus in today's society, which is massive on a global basis. So what are the benefits we get from energy, particularly fossil energy? So human history is a story of solving problems by inventing new innovations and adding complexity to a system. That complexity requires more energy. So a couple hundred years ago, instead of hand weaving clothing, they developed the spinning Jenny or the industrial loom where a few people could run the equivalent of thousands of individual weaving looms because we had coal that was firing these industrial looms. Then we had steam engines, which were able to originally pump out the water from coal mines, but then eventually used for transportation. If you fast forward to today, there are some incredibly energy intensive processes that use thousands of times more energy than humans and animals used to use themselves, like aircraft travel or smelting of aluminum or things like that. What this has done, it is supercharged our economies. So I live in Wisconsin, USA, which is the dairy state. And back in the day, we had manual milking of cows, still in some places that exist. Again, this is US dollar rates, just do the equivalent rupee translation to make it, make more sense. If you manually milk a cow, it takes about 30 minutes to do that. And you'll make around $5 an hour. If you have a parlor milking machine where the cow walks through and gets milked by these machines, you need a 180 times more energy that's embedded in the machinery. And in the electricity that powers it. And you only need like five minutes for a human per cow. Your wages go almost up to $20 an hour. Or if you're the owner of the factory, the profits go up. Or if you're just someone going to the grocery store, the price of milk goes way down. Any combination of those three things. Then there's a fully automated milking that only requires two minutes per human. And the cows walk through and the machines like do everything. And that really requires a lot of energy, 400 times more energy than manual milking. And it again raises your wages or profits or reduces the price of milk to $25. This story underpins most of industrial civilization where we've replaced tasks that humans used to do manually with machines. And the machines are mostly powered by fossil energy, coal, oil, and gas. So this is me on my farm. On a good day, I will do the work of one tenth of a horse. This is my actual horse Inga. And if actually motivated with treats and other things, she could do the work of one horse on a good day. This is my utility vehicle with a little bit of gasoline. It can do the work of 45 horses. And this is my truck with a little bit of diesel fuel. It can do the work equivalent of 300 horses in a much more flexible way. And on the plane over here from the United States, and the next time you all are in a plane, imagine 100,000 invisible horses pulling that jet across the sky. That's the power density of what's happening with that airplane. So we don't think about this, but we have armies of fossil helpers supporting the global economy. So the average human laborer makes $57 a day, average over the 8 billion people in the world. So how many human days of work can you get on an average global daily wage of $57? Exactly, one. Now, since in the United States, people make more than that, you could only get two tenths of a day worth of work for $57. When oil is at $80 a barrel, you get 5,900 days of work with $57. When oil is at its historical average of $20 a barrel, you get 21,000 days of human work for $57. So if you have $57, you could give it to a human to do a day of work, or you could buy oil and have a machine do 21,000 days of work. It's that dramatic. So imagine riding your car with your four buddies to Chennai, filling it up with gas and then running out of gas and having to push it back to Orville. Like literally, we don't think about the magic and the power that exists in these ancient carbon fuels that we use. So here, I was not even here and I made a joke about him, but if you add up the coal, oil, and gas in the world, we use 100 billion barrel of oil equivalents every year of oil, coal, and gas. So the labor equivalent of that is around 400 billion human workers relative to around five billion real human workers who are not children or retired people. This has resulted in higher wages, higher profits, lower price things, and a massive expansion in the size and scale of the human endeavor. The goods and services times the population of the human endeavor is 1,000 times bigger than it was in the year 1500. So this is a chart from the Bank of England's recent report where they talk about productivity and wealth. And it shows global GDP per capita since for the last 3,000 years. And you can see it was flat, flat, flat, flat, moonshot, described by technology and productivity. The average human is 13 times as wealthy as measured by goods and services than the average human was in the year 1800. The average American is almost 50 times as wealthy as the average human was 200 years ago. But what I find fascinating about this graph that I took from the central bank governor of England, it was a 75 page report. The word energy was never mentioned if you do a word search. 75 pages, the word energy was never mentioned once. It was all about progress and human ingenuity and I'm gonna keep talking about that. So the story of industrialization is adding large amounts of energy to replace manual tasks. But since we add thousands or in some cases, 10,000 units of energy to do what our ancestors did by themselves, that means that a doubling or tripling in energy costs has a huge impact on the profitability of a process. So the blue is the same graph as I just showed you. The orange is if you double the cost of energy, you get a slight decline in profitability on the intermediate parlor milking technology and you get a big drop in profitability when you triple energy prices to 15 cents. But, sorry, on the heavy automated milking one, you get a big drop. But when you triple prices, there's no impact if you're manually milking a cow because you're not using external energy except for your own muscles and time. You get a bigger drop here, but on the advanced technology that needs 400 times more energy, it is now operating at a huge loss because you've built machines and infrastructure that were predicated on energy remaining cheap. There's another aspect of this that energy is needed for every industrial process in the world. So this graph shows the blue, the red is the consumption of energy in the country of Chile in order to mine copper. Chile is the number one country in the world to get copper, which is needed for renewable energy and pipes and all kinds of things. The blue is how much copper production they get. So we're having to mine deeper and deeper and deeper to get ores that used to be really concentrated and now are less concentrated. So there's an issue with the copper itself, but it's also an energy issue because we need to use energy to create all that overburden and process it. So you see increasing energy consumption and a flat-ish output of copper. I coined the word energetic remoteness, which is that everything we do will become more expensive if we cannot reduce the energy consumption of processes using efficiency, et cetera, faster than prices grow. I can't speak to India, but last year in Europe, there was massive closures of industrial chemical facilities that were really energy intensive because the Ukraine-Russia war spiked natural gas prices beyond what their business models had expected. Then it was a mild winter and they negotiated with Qatar and other places to get LNG. The United States sent them a lot of LNG, so the crisis has averted for now. But if you think about this graph, this is gonna happen many places in the future as energy prices go up, and I'm gonna explain why that's gonna happen. Energy primacy. So if you're like me and most people in my spheres, or most people that read the news and watch Netflix, you think that our progress is largely due to technology, money, and human ingenuity. But I will argue that energy is primary. Energy primacy means that every single good and service in the world requires energy to discover, to mine, to process, to manufacture, to package, to deliver, to maintain, to repair, to dispose of. Every step of that process has an energy because energy enables us to move things. So every good that we have started somewhere in the world with a small fire. And we take that for granted because energy has been really cheap. So GDP is a measure of the size of our economies, gross domestic product. GWP would be gross world product, the product of the world. And the purple line, or the orange line is global GDP for the last 50 years. The purple line is the material footprint or how much energy and materials like copper and aluminum and timber and glass that we needed. Energy and GDP are 99% correlated. Energy and materials are 100% correlated. This is globally. Now some of you may say, ah, the US and the UK have gotten more energy efficient and we're actually growing our GDP while using less energy and materials and that is true because we are service economies and we have China and other places do the heavy lifting where the coal and natural gas is burned in China and then they send us a product that we buy, but the energy was burned in another country. So from a climate change perspective, from a global sustainability perspective, it's the relationship between the purple and orange lines that matter. Their very GDP and energy and materials are incredibly tightly linked. This shows GDP here with the percent electricity availability index and all of these diamonds are countries. And you can see that if you have a lot of intermittent like blackouts and brownouts, that has a huge negative impact on your GDP. And it's only the countries that have almost 100% reliability that have a very high GDP because a lot of factories have, you have to shut them down if they get turned off for a few hours, there's clean rooms that have dust and other things. And so it's really important to have 24 seven access to electricity in today's economy, big asterisk. And we'll talk more about that in a couple of days. So I have a business degree in undergrad and I have a master's in finance with honors from one of the best business schools in the country. They never mentioned energy in the whole two years I was there. So the economists and the business students in the world are taught that $1,000 worth of energy is the same as $1,000 worth of cupcakes or lentils or kombucha or bike helmets or whatever. But $1,000 worth of energy has orders of magnitude more economic impact than those other things. So this is a graphic that is shown in econ 101 classes. It shows that people, households demand things and then firms get the signals and they buy things. And it's this virtuous cycle between corporations and consumers that drives everything. This model neglects the source of all this, which is the energy materials that were drawing down millions of times faster than it was put down by mother nature. And it also neglects the sync, which we're gonna talk about on Tuesday, which is the pollution that's not included in the prices of our things. So our entire economic system, we have conflated the dollar value or the rupee value of energy with the work value that it provides us and our economies. And for the most part, not included the cost of pollution. So we are energy blind as a culture. And the reason that is is because with the exception of recent recessions and some energy crisis in the 1970s, a couple of World Wars and a Great Depression 100 years ago, every single year, the human economy has had more energy availability than the year before. My work suggests that that is about to change. Okay, you might be asking, what about technology? So this was a two years ago, I did an Earth Day talk and one of my former students is an artist and she made 85 tarot cards to represent these concepts. It's online if you wanna watch it. But the trinity here represents that every unit of GDP requires three things, for sure, energy, materials and information or technology. So there are two types of technology. The first type, which we'll call type one is finding new sources of energy or finding ways to make existing energy technology more efficient. For instance, coal power plant might be running at 30% efficiency and we have some new inventions and people figure out a way to make it 35% efficient. Or we make new solar panels that don't use as much materials as the old ones. This is one type of technology, very important. The other type of technology is inventing things to replace tasks that humans used to do manually or with draft labor like a car or a lawn mower or something like that. And new inventions that humans never had in the past for novelty and whatever. So the vast majority of technology in our world is of this type two technology. So most technology ends up acting as a vector for more primary energy demand in the economy the following year. In the United States, the average household and being in India, this almost sounds gross for me to say but the average household has 65 items plugged in, charging all the time. Well, I mean like a refrigerator or a dryer. The dryer is plugged in even if you're not using it. The TV is plugged in even if you're not watching it. There's 65 items, a toothbrush or whatever. So this is why, oh, technology is gonna solve this while technology is so far just growing our demand for more energy. And part of the reason is something called Jeven's Paradox which it's a paradox because you would think that energy efficiency. So humans in the last 200 years, we are smart. We have good, not good, we have incentives for people to invent processes that are cheaper. And we have gotten 1% more energy efficient every single year on average for the last 200 years. That's a lot. And you would think, oh, we've gotten so efficient that we're gonna use less energy but that's not what happens because we end up taking the savings from getting more efficient and funneling that back into another trip to hers or into Pondicherry for dinner or something like that. So if we could invent an air conditioner that costs $10, think about that. What an invention, an energy saving invention. How many more air conditioners would be purchased in the world if they were $10 as one example? So this shows what I was just indicating that this shows the energy intensity of GDP. So it means that over time we use less and less energy to generate the same amount of GDP, okay? That's good. This is overlaid with biomass, coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric power, nuclear power, solar and wind. This is the amount of energy of all sorts that humans have used the last 200 years. So we have increased our energy efficiency over 35% since 1990 but during that same time our energy consumption has increased 63%. That's the proof of what I'm just saying. Very briefly on, I didn't know where to put this slide but I wanna mention it. There is a, because of climate change there is a large push towards going to renewable energy which I'm gonna talk about in a minute. But to decarbonize our energy will lead to a massive rematerialization of energy because we will need copper and nickel and lithium and cobalt. The red, and this is the logarithmic chart, one, 10, 100, a thousand. The red is the total metal required to produce one generation of a technology to phase out fossil fuels. The blue is the same but with a smaller buffer. The yellow is the reported global reserves we have and the black is the metal production recently. So for lithium, for example, it's in the thousands of times more will be needed. And if we go that route, that has a huge impact on the global south because most of these metals and minerals are located in regions that already are experiencing higher wet bulb temperatures, have social crises, political instability, et cetera. And I'll talk more about this on Tuesday. Okay, what about money? What is money? I briefly mentioned this the other day. Money is a store of accounts, a unit of value. There are standard economic definitions. My definition is money is a claim on energy because the rupees or the Orville card or the dollars in your wallet or in your bank account are digits just sitting there. And when you go and buy a motorcycle or a dinner or an airplane flight or pay your electric bill, you are anything that you spend money on uses energy. So money is ultimately a claim on energy. Economic textbooks teach us that money is lent out from a bank from existing capital. And the reality is quite different. That the majority of modern money comes into existence. Banks don't lend money, they create it. And from a monetary perspective, this makes sense because as long as the country and the corporation and the bank and the individual are all credit worthy and trustworthy and the economy is growing, from a monetary perspective, this all balances out. But if Madhu wanted to start a business and she got a million rupee loan, she would get a million rupees. The bank would all of a sudden be out a million rupees but the bank would have an IOU sitting on its ledger and Madhu would have the cash but she would also have a liability. So from a monetary perspective and what an economist would say is the whole world is good, everything balances. There's a IOU and you have this and everything is right. From a biophysical perspective, which is what the work that I've been doing for the last 20 years, the same amount of oil and copper and timber and dolphins and mongooses existed in five minutes before. There are more monetary claims on the same amount of biophysical resources. So let me graphically show how this is. This is the sustainable flows of the earth over time. The sun, the wind, the soil grew a certain amount of things and humans expanded and there was a maximum on what we could produce from the flows of the earth. This is a different sort of graph. This is where we find a non-runeable resource and start to extract it. And you'll get better at it and holy cow, this is really good stuff. And then you'll reach a maximum and there'll still be a lot left, but at a declining amount. A lot of the things underpinning our economy right now are this sort of thing. And then there's money. Money we create effectively from thin air based on the productivity of the past. So if you put all these things together with this incredibly powerful fossil energy, our system grew so fast and large that the economists from the old days who measured our success in terms of land and land productivity, those terms got left by the wayside and we started to measure things only by capital and labor. And so now our whole world explains our reality in terms of money. We've not only financialized the human experience but also the explanation of it. And we've created debt faster in every single year since the late 1960s in the United States and in the world faster than we've grown our economy. Debt is, if money is a claim on energy, debt is a claim on future energy. And so we're just accelerating our claims on future energy in something that might look like this. Here's our energy and high quality ores which is our real capital and our ecosystems by the way and the health of our oceans. And these are gradually declining but our monetary claims keep accelerating. So ultimately though, what is money? Money is just a marker. Money is a form of capital and power that represents the things that we really care about which is natural capital. This is my backyard in Wisconsin which is our healthy soil and the banyan trees and the earth and the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium in our soils. Social capital which is our friends in our network in this case two of my dogs which are my family. Built capital, this is my house and chainsaws and solar panels and an aloe vera plant and human capital. This is my father who's a doctor and he knows how to grow vegetables even though he complains a lot about it. And this is me when I found edible mushroom. Human capital is our skills, our knowledge, et cetera. So money ultimately is just a marker for those things. Okay, getting to the meat of the presentation, the carbon pulse. Who knows what these things are? Close. These are diatoms which are tiny little phytoplankton from the ocean. And when they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and over lots of time, millions and tens of millions of years they get covered up and heat and pressure turns them into oil and gas. Oil and gas is not dead dinosaurs. Oil and gas is from marine productivity in areas around the world that used to be shallow oceans. So resource extraction follows this Gaussian curve that I showed you before. This is a curve showing whale oil and whale bone from the 19th century which we used in a massive ways to support the global economy. Here is a cartoon from Vanity Fair from 1861, grand ball given by the whales in honor of the discovery of the oil wells in Pennsylvania. Didn't really work out that way, but that literally, this isn't a joke today. That was from 160 years ago. So we don't think about it much, but we are all alive during what might be considered the carbon pulse. Our species has been in its modern anatomical form for 300,000 years and this is what this carbon pulse looks like over such a time scale or maybe a 20,000 year time scale. And here is a 1,000 year time scale that all the coal, oil and natural gas, we're drawing it out of the earth 10 million, well, millions of times faster than it was trickle charged by daily photosynthesis and by these diatoms that went to the bottom of the ocean. We're all alive somewhere between the yellow star and the red star on this graph. And the yellow star would be good news because there's more growth and more cheap armies of fossil helpers to boost our convenience and comfort, et cetera, going forward. But that would be bad for climate and oceans. The red star would be better for climate and oceans and the natural world with a bunch of asterisks, which I'll talk about next week. But the red star would be worse for human economic goals and aspirations, which is all of our economic institutions right now are preparing for more growth. So economic growth has been fueled primarily by prehistoric solar energy. If we talk about going to 100% renewables, we were 100% renewable energy not that long ago. So the entire economy is, was that funny? Oh, okay. I'm too close to this story. I don't know if any of it's funny, but thank you for laughing. Everything is solar flows except for tidal and some of the ocean things and maybe nuclear, but geothermal, yeah, maybe that too. Solar flows, prehistoric solar flows. Okay, so for now, oil is uber special because it is liquid at room temperature, it's transportable, it's incredibly energy dense. This is a logarithmic chart showing oil consumption on a logarithmic basis on the bottom and gross domestic product here. And there is a very high correlation between an economy's size and how much oil it uses. So how much oil is there? This red represents how much we've produced and consumed to date. This is how much we've proved that we know where it is and this is the amount that we could technically, economically get out of the ground at a profit. This is stuff that's technically recoverable but would cost too much. And this stuff is oil that we will never get out because it's just too diffuse. Right now we only get out around 10% of the oil because it's just so spread out and diffuse. So it would, getting back to the cheetah example, it would take more energy to get out than it exists within the energy. All right, so in the United States, there's two stories. There's a story that oil is important and we need to drill baby drill and we had a peak in 1970 and then for 40 years we declined in oil production but then ingenuity solved it. We drill baby drilled and we made all-time new highs and we solved the depletion problem because we were so clever. Well, that same graph is broken out by province here which is this green was the lower 48 states, the conventional oil. The yellow is the North Slope in Alaska which is part of the United States but it's not even contiguous. It's almost by Russia. The blue is not on land, it's under the ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, miles under the ocean and the red is what's called tight oil or shale oil. Shale oil is now 60% of the oil production in the United States. Shale oil is the source rock. It's where all the other oil in the other places migrated from. There is nothing left after shale oil. Shale oil is the bottom of the barrel. So, no, it's not necessarily the dirtiest. It's just there's nothing left after shale oil. It's the hardest to get to and we're drilling down and having these horizontal nipples that pull it. It's basically what technology has done has given us a larger straw so our mouths feel like, whoa, we're still getting, we're even getting more liquid but we're much closer to that slurping sound you hear at the end of a milkshake. Okay, so here's how to describe this. Here's all the wells drilled in the United States before 2014 and here's how much they decline. Like they'll go from four million barrels a day down to one million barrels a day from prior years to 2022. That wasn't deliberate, that wasn't a consciousness. Well, you get most of the oil out in the first 18 months and then you need to drill another well and that's what we do. We keep drilling more and more wells faster and faster. There's more wells drilled in the United States than the rest of the world combined. So these are the wells that were drilled in 2014 and this shows their decline profile, 2015, 2016, 2017. So the wells drilled in 2020, they're declining much, much faster in 2021 and the same thing happened in 22 and 23. I just don't have the data. So if for any reason the United States stopped drilling for oil for environmental reasons, for political reasons, for lack of capital reasons, our oil amount would decline by 37% in the first year and another 20 some percent in the next year. We have to keep drilling to maintain this plateau and we're not gonna maintain it for long. So when I talk about all this tight oil which is in the United States, this has accounted for most of the growth in world oil production in the last 15 years. So this is all the countries in the world. This is conventional oil. This is a deep water in the ocean plus the tar sands and the blue is completely United States. So we, I believe that November, 2018 will turn out to be peak oil for the world and if it isn't, there's about a 5% chance it'll be 2024 according to my work and cause right now we're about 4 million barrels below where we were in 2018 and we had a huge drop in 2020 because of COVID. So of course that's just me. There's a lot of estimates out there. Here is a low scenario, a base case scenario and a high scenario of coal, oil and natural gas, the pulse of what we will ultimately see. This is a peer reviewed kind of middle of the road prediction. So the low scenarios we're peaking right now and here we'll be in 2015 by the year 2100 it'll be all gone. The base scenario is we peak 2030-ish by 2050 we have half left and we're still producing some 200 years from now. And then the high scenario is we don't peak on these things until 2050, 2060 and it declines in that way. Of course there's the geology of things and then there's the geopolitics and the finance and the complexity and the above ground factors. They're two separate things. You could just say what is the best case based on how much oil is in the ground and our technology and ignore everything else going on in the world and that will give you an answer. But there's lots of things that contribute to this. How does the United States get along with Saudi Arabia and Russia would be one thing. So real briefly you have to find oil before you can use it and the discoveries of oil peaked 60 years ago these are the discoveries and they've been declining and then this line here is our consumption of oil. So globally we're using five times more oil than we're finding so that kind of gives you a clue. This is a friend of mine and myself have worked on this. By the way another thing that's been obfuscated in the news is a large part of what we call oil is not oil at all. It's natural gas liquids which can't be used to run motorcycles and cars and things like that. We make plastic bags from it and it's mostly ethane. It's a byproduct of natural gas drilling which is a liquid but it has different uses. So here is kind of one way to look at what I think is a reasonable projection of oil. So getting back to the cheetah example if we go from gazelles to rabbits to mice it's the same thing with oil. We originally had these things that you just poked a hole in the ground and there were gushers coming out and then we had to use complicated technology and drill under the oceans and now we're having to actually process sand and heat it to extract the oil out of the sand and we can do that but it's environmentally costly and energetically costly. By the way if you're been watching world events over half of the world's remaining oil is in this light shaded area. So this graph shows that there's a lot of countries that produce oil and produce gas but there's a fewer amount of countries that export it after they've used what they need internally and they still have some left over so they export it. So these are the countries that export natural gas. Russia is number one. These are the countries as a percentage of world oil exports that export oil. Notice the United States is not on there because we consume more oil than we produce. So Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the BRICS which includes India are now account for over 50% of the world's oil exports. So the balance of power is shifting from what it used to be. So Brazil, Russia, India, China and then the new nations that were just added the UAE and Iran. For the oil that's available for purchase in the world over 50% of that is from the BRICS, the new BRICS. Okay energy properties. We're talking about oil depletion and the carbon pulse which we're all alive in the middle of. What about renewable energy? Well this is a complicated story. So a jewel of energy is not equal to another jewel of energy and what it can accomplish. A hummingbird evolved to be able to get nectar from flowers. There are more calories in this grasshopper than they are in this flower but the hummingbird couldn't access the grasshopper because that's not the sort of structure that it has even though the calories exist. So there's something called energy properties which distinguish between energy types. One is the carbon intensity. So coal has a very high carbon intensity and wind also produces electricity. It has a low carbon intensity. That's one energy property. Another energy property is spatial distribution. This shows the country of Denmark and the different color dots are the different wind regimes that are present. So all these light color blue there's not much wind at all. The really high wind the black dots and the red ones are only in these areas. So both with solar and wind and other intermittent sources there is a spatial distribution around the world where these resources exist. They're intermittent and variable. Coal and natural gas you turn on a switch and it's there when you need it. Sometimes we have clouds for a long time sometimes we don't have wind for a long time. So because the fact that these energy sources are intermittent and variable you either need to work like our ancestors did when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Let's go out because we have some electricity or you need to build backup. It's not windy today. Let's turn on the natural gas plan or you need to buy batteries that when it's not windy or sunny you can draw off a battery. All that stuff has costs. Energy quality. Different societies depend on different types of energy. This was Saudi Arabia a hundred years ago. This was the energy that they valued, camels. Now they're one of the richest countries in the world because they're sitting on black gold but that's because our culture moved to valuing oil and machines. So electricity right now is the highest value type of energy because we so versatile we can do so many things. Look at this room, how electricity is being used at many different processes. We don't know what energy quality will be most valued in the future. Another type of energy property is energy density. How much energy is in the same amount of volume or size? And diesel and kerosene have huge amounts of energy per a small little amount of volume. And that's why some things like hydrogen are very low volume density and some of these batteries are incredibly low. So to power a big truck that transports goods, like a third of the truck has to be a battery because it's the density of how many sparks it can create per unit size are much smaller than some of these things. Now of course nuclear is off the chart here but nuclear is a special story which we can talk about in the Q and A. So all jewels are not equal in what they can accomplish and our society has been built on just in time delivery using diesel and oil and gasoline powered vehicles around the world. Just look at Pondicherry and all the cycles going around. And by the way, buying petrol in Tamil Nadu is much more expensive than it is where I live in the United States. I think it's because of taxes and other things but I mean, think about that. That's bizarre. Energy transitions. So we talk about let's get off of the bad energy, the fossil carbon and let's go to the good energy which is solar and wind, the renewable energy. Well, first of all, solar and wind are not renewable. They are rebuildable. So this is the foundation of a wind turbine which uses huge amounts of iron and steel pipe, et cetera. This is a complicated silicone, polysilicon manufacturing plant. A chicken is renewable, an oak tree is renewable as long as you find another chicken or a acorn. Solar panels and wind turbines are no more renewable than a pickup truck. We can rebuild them every 20 or 25 years using complicated machinery and supply chains and PhDs and polysilicon manufacturing, et cetera. So the sun and the wind are renewable but solar panels and wind turbines are manufactured and have to be rebuilt. That's point number one. Point number two is that a lot of renewable energy, so-called renewable energy in the world, solar, wind, geothermal, all these things create electricity but right now electricity is only 20% of the global energy use. 80% is transportation, heat, other things that some of that can be switched into electricity at a higher cost. Some of it though can't be, like these giant bunker fuel ships that travel across the ocean can't easily be switched to electricity. And if you remember the cow milking example, you hear in the news, well, we're gonna switch this electric arc furnace instead of using coal, we're gonna use solar. Yes, we have the technology to do a lot of things like that but it's the benefits that results in giving to human societies, that's the question. Like how much is it gonna cost relative to what consumers and humans around the world can afford? Third aspect is all of our grandiose optimistic plans about technology in the future are blind to the fact that we've been riding this pulse up here and they don't think about what can technology do when we're down here? They don't think about this incredible invisible subsidy of coal oil, natural gas powered machines that are in our world today. They just look at, oh, this is what this technology can do. And let's extrapolate that forward into the future without looking first of all at this and second of all at this systemic backdrop of our economic and global situation which I'll talk more about next Saturday. Higher full system cost means lower economic benefits. There's a lot of claims in the news that solar or wind are the cheapest form of electricity. And that's true in the sense that in some areas probably Tamil Nadu that you add a solar panel and that is at the margin the cheapest additional unit to generate the additional unit of electricity but most places after they have a 20% or 30% penetration then all the solar comes at one time and then you have too much and then sometimes you don't get any solar and it becomes more and more complex and you need to build batteries and backup and things like that. So this is a chart that I just got this afternoon that shows the household electricity prices worldwide the most costly energy in the world is in Europe that has the highest electricity penetration by renewables. So I think we need to go to renewables. My bottom line is we need to go more towards a renewable energy system and renewable energy can power a wonderful civilization just not this one not the way the Western world is living now. So some people accuse me of being anti-renewable. I am not. I am pro-renewable but I'm pro-reality. I wanna look at how can we live in harmony with the earth and give benefits that humans need especially basic needs instead of the United States using as I talked about the other day we consume 100 times more calories than our bodies need and it's not making us happier or healthier. Here's another aspect about energy transitions. There's a lot of people and I should have gotten a graph for this and I didn't because I have so many already. A lot of people are saying let's get rid of fossil fuels because of climate change and carbon and let's get rid of internal combustion cars and drive renewable energy cars, electric cars and then we won't need all that gasoline and that gasoline is bad for climate change. Okay, that makes sense on the surface other than the fact that we have over a billion cars and we'd really need another billion cars that's a separate thing. But and I did a frankly on this a few months ago so this you could see this unpacked in 20 minutes instead of two. If for whatever reason we suddenly did not need any gasoline in the world that we transitioned with a flash in a blink of an eye, all of the internal combustion engines that need gasoline we've now switched to electric cars. That would not change the amount of oil that we needed at all because every barrel of oil only 40% of it is gasoline. The other 60% is diesel fuel, bunker fuel, naphtha, ethane, plastic precursors and every barrel of oil results in 6,000 other products football helmets, crayons, shampoos, tires, condoms, fishing poles, tents, telephones, casing for this. So all of these things come from a barrel of oil. So unless we reduced our demand for all of those things we would still need the same amount of oil from the ground and then what would we do? Like flare the gasoline or dump it in a river or something. So this is a real issue. Yes, it's true over time that we could shift the refinery mix at a cost and divert it towards the things that we needed out of this 6,000 items but it would be costly and it would take a decade or two but still it would only be a shift of 10 or 15% not the whole thing. Lastly, and I would have 20 points here but I just wanted to keep this brief. So far the energy transition has actually been an energy addition. There has been no paradigm shift or green revolution. If you look at the last 200 years this bottom green is how much trees and forests and biomass humans have used. We're using more biomass today than we did before we found fossil fuels. This is coal, oil and gas. And here at the top are solar, wind and other renewables the purple, the yellow and the red. New energy sources and we're gonna talk about this on next Saturday when I talk about the super organism. New energy sources in a global sense have been additive. So we're growing our electricity demand in an absolute sense more than we're growing the amount of energy we get from low carbon renewables. So total global energy consumption continues to increase. Okay, so I have some brief not even conclusions because I'm not trying to make a case here. I'm just trying to educate you all about the fundamentals of how these things fit together in like a politically agnostic way. So the way that our culture views the world and again, I'm speaking of Western culture but I think there's probably rhymes here is there's politics. We disagree about the left or the right or it's a big deal who's we're gonna vote for and things like that. And underneath that is technology. There's a story about technology. And underneath that there's money and you could maybe mix these three in a different order but this is how we think the world runs but all of this pyramid resides on top of a huge amount of energy surplus from the ancient past that is invisible to most people. And that entire pyramid rests on top of a thriving functional ecosystem of earth that we get the oxygen and everything else for free. And we are, as I'll talk about Tuesday really damaging that on a long-term basis. So there's a rule of 70, the young youth link people here's a little educational trick for you. If something is growing at X% you can put that X into 70 and that will tell you how many years it will take to double. So if you're growing at 7% a year it will take you 10 years to double. If you're growing at 2% a year it'll take you 35 years to double. So this is from the OECD and this is the expected growth rate out to 2050. So think about this. Energy and materials are 99% correlated with GDP. Energy is 99% correlated materials are 100%. So if we grow as most institutions and all governments in the world ostensibly expect at 3% a year we will double the size of energy and materials that the human ecosystem uses by the year 2050 and we'll double it again by the year 2080 which means that young people today in their teens by the time we reach 2080 there will be four times the energy and materials used on this planet as today under current default expectations. Is that desirable? Is that possible? What happens if that happens? What happens if that doesn't happen? These are the issues of our time. I do not think the next doubling will happen. I think we're gonna have to respond to a flattening and a decline because of the energy technology money into relationship that I've been describing. Growth seems normal to us because we have all lived during this moonshot of productivity and economic consumption of goods and services. But our productivity is largely the machines powered by these ancient carbon workers. And some of the productivity is the addition of these fossil workers every year to the labor force. So over long periods of times this was a 700 year period where economic growth declined for 700 years. And then we had the medieval period where we had a sharp decline in economic output. All of our economic rules that are taught in the business schools around the world were created in this little period in that red box. So modern economic theory was developed under an anomalous set of circumstances. Briefly on the distribution of energy which is also another story. This is the energy consumption per capita by certain countries. The black is Canada. The orange is the United States. The world average is the red. India is this bottom line here. So per capita, the United States is using 12 to 15 times the amount of the average Indian. Roughly. I had another graph that I forgot to put in here. So when we talk about is growth over it could also mean that growth is over for the global north and growth is not over for the global south. That is a possibility because the global north is way over leveraged in our financial claims on reality. We have a musical chair situation which I'll talk about next Saturday. And I think that's less so in the global south but also a lot of the food is grown in the global north and gets transported. And there's a complexity aspect as well. So there's some good news. This is energy supply per capita. And this is the human development index. And it is true that if you are very poor as an individual human or as a country you get massive well-being and economic development benefits from an increase in energy access until you get to around 100 gigajoules per capita around what Italy has. The United States has three times what Italy has but our well-being is not any better. And I can argue it's worse and has been getting worse for lots of reasons medical reasons, mental health reasons. There's more guns than there are humans in the United States. So the story is we have enough energy to live in this region for lots of the world. We do not have enough energy for everyone to aspire to the global north average today. I don't know the answer to this but I'm just laying out the groundwork as I see it. And as an individual basis and I will talk about this on my final lecture is a light bulb uses around 100 watts. Each of us use around 100 watts when we're walking around during our daily life. It's as if we had a 100 watt light bulb turned on 24 seven. That is our individual human metabolism. So the average American uses 100 of these 100 watt light bulbs per day invisibly turned on behind us turned on 24 seven. Now the first couple of these can power a laptop or can power my phone or can do really important things. The last few are I'm bored at two in the morning and I turn on the oven I bake two turkeys because I don't know what else to do. And there's things that don't really generate well-being or health. So this same dynamic that happens as countries applies to individuals. And this is one of the things that we're feeling in our morning sessions. Energy will constrain and enable our future. And we'll talk a lot more about this the next three lectures. Thank you. I have time for questions. That's a lot. We have a half hour or so reactions, questions, concerns, disagreements, ideas. Yeah. When we were talking about money and energy and money and natural resources, you said when we're printing out money, basically we're increasing the amount of money available but the amount of available capital does not increase. They remain the same. But in fact, isn't there a natural mechanism that brings down the value of the money down for it to actually meet the ground? It's really complicated. Had I given this presentation 15 years ago, it would have been 95% of our money is created from commercial banks. But now it's about an 80% because when the government's deficits spend, again, I'm speaking from the West, from the United States, from Europe's perspective, we have huge budget deficits because we have big militaries and things like that. So we're spending more than we're taking in. So when governments spend money, they're creating money by doing that. And they can do that because they can print money at will. When you pay your taxes, the money disappears. The money ends up disappearing and so they're continuing to grow that. The reason that this is all okay is an economist would say, it doesn't matter that oil is declining or it doesn't matter that copper is getting a receding ore grade because if the prices go up high enough, if oil is $500 a barrel, that will give incentives to people to find more oil. So truly an economist thinks that natural resources are perpetually unlimited because the market will give them the signal to find more. So that's why money creation doesn't seem to be a problem because if we have inflation or we have deflation, we kind of want to monitor that so there's not too much inflation or if there's a financial crisis, we need to come in with some guarantees to support the system but none of those people are thinking about the carbon impact of creating more money, the natural resource impact or the drawing down of our finite resources. If my country was really smart, we would be printing money and buying other nations oil and leaving our oil under the ground. But we're not doing that. I mean, we're in the shale oil part of it. I don't know if that answered your question. Yes, Annie. Nate, would you mind talking to the reality of so much oil in all these? So the United Kingdom used to be one of the world's larger oil producers. They had the North Sea, which they shared with Norway. The United Kingdom peaked in oil production in 1999. So for 24 years now, your country has been in declining oil, which is why your prime minister is now approving new oil leases, even though he ostensibly cares about climate change. So I think, I don't like this fact, but I believe that even the most progressive nations who are doing things on behalf of climate, the way a pro-social part of our species should, are going to be forced to switch for energy security instead of environmental protection. In fact, Germany is reopening towns that have coal mines in them because of what happened with Russia. I think it's a powder keg, to be honest. And I think at the highest level, people understand the oil part of what the story is. And this is why I don't think this is ever gonna be spoken at a G20 meeting, because if this is voiced out loud, it immediately creates a phase shift in the people at the table. All right, we've said it. We've said that we're at the top of the carbon pulse and we're gonna go down. We've been saying that technology is gonna be able to kick the can and solve it. But now that we've said it, now we're gonna go get the oil and make sure that our people are taking care of. I mean, I think that is a plausible reaction. And we do have the technology to give human needs using the materials we have right now. But one of the things that we've mentioned in the morning discussions is people that have outsized power, historically from agriculture, the first shaman and kings, then with fossil fuels, then with monetary creation that we can have a billion dollars of digits in accounts. Now with artificial intelligence, which has the ability to siphon and direct that power in an even more concentrated way. Those people, they don't wanna stop and slow down. I mean, my job on Wall Street was to manage money for those people and they were never satisfied. And so if they have a billion dollars and you wanna say you should give that billion dollars to help people in the environment, they might give three million to do that. But the other 997 million they want in the system that gives them more optionality in case something happens. But I'm diverging from your question. I think it's quite known that most of the oil is in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran, Iraq, Russia. Russia has a low population given its land size and it has huge amounts of natural resources, which is one reason and I'm really speculating here and I probably shouldn't do this on camera, but Russia and India may become long-term partners because India has a lot of people and not a lot of resources. Russia has a lot of land and a lot of resources and not a lot of people. I mean, those sorts of dynamics may start to unfold. Of course, China throws a mix in that too. There's an uneven truce between those three nations. But I do think we are now living in the early stages of a shift from a unipolar world, which is the United States and the UK to a multipolar world where there's different factions of power. And I don't want to depress anyone here, but I also don't want to dissemble and lie, but I think a big war is a big risk in the coming decade. Yeah. Yes. Every so often I hear of an invention. For example, in Africa recently, they ran a motorbike on some kind of electromagnetic. Do you have any hope that we would actually do something innovative that wouldn't get bought up and shelved? Yeah, so that's an excellent question. I think I might talk about that in my final lecture on responses because there's tons of technologies that are appropriate for human futures, but that don't necessarily fit the mass of 8 billion people to build a multinational company and sell them. They're local and regional solutions that use more local and regional inputs to create things to give humans services that are really important. They need heat, sanitation, transportation, food, water, those sorts of things. So I do think there's not one of those things that's like a game changer. You could say that sodium batteries instead of lithium batteries is in that class of things. A caution I will say, and I have a listserv with 40 systems ecologists that are world-class curmudgeons at saying what won't work. And so I'm better at saying what won't work than what will. But I think like I said at the prior lecture is the human brain, we had sounds way before we had words and we would point and have a small vocabulary, but now we can string together so many word combinations that make sense to us, but don't exist in the real world like an electromagnetic scooter that's scalable around the world. I'm not gonna say that that's not possible. I'm gonna say that I've seen a lot of things like roadways covered with solar panels that are the answer to everything. There will be things like that that help us. But technology is ultimately not the problem because any technology that continues this is gonna pull more resources into the core. So it's our governance in our hearts and our consciousness that are at the core of the problem. And then once we straighten that out, then we figure out the best technology and architecture and other things to give us that. That's how I see it. I don't know how that's gonna unfold. Yeah. Yes, sir. Thank you for coming all the way from Wisconsin to Orville and sharing, creating human sharing. I'm very happy to be here. I'm sure this has been a research over so many years and you would have presented this in the US where you are. I'm wondering what has been presentation on the concept and the patterns of and also the industry. Historically, how do you kind of look at the impact of your work? What do you think? Take a guess. What do you think I will say? I'm very curious about your response because you have been doing, I have not been doing it. Yeah. You have the answer that you have been witnessing. Yeah, thank you for asking that. For a very long time, I was looked at as kind of a fringe, interesting, entertaining clown because none of this stuff was making sense. You weren't seeing this stuff in the news. So I've been assembling this story for 20 years, 22 years now. And 22 years ago, I realized how energy underpinned our society and how we weren't paying for the cost of externalities in our prices. And I keep learning more and I've gotten some things wrong and then I integrate new things. But COVID and the Ukraine war all of a sudden made everything I'm saying instantly more credible, infinitely more credible because people see what happens in Europe and they see what the supply chains and the complexity. I would say that the choir of those people, there were a couple of people that have followed my work for a long time that you, sir, you said you've known of my work for a while. Yeah, a friend of yours. I mean, there's a choir that has, this is makes sense to them. I think there's a large percentage of the population that cannot hear this because if they were to agree with this synthesis, it would impinge on their built identity, on the decisions they're making in their lives. This can't be true. Otherwise, my four kids in college and my vacation home in Colorado and all these other things wouldn't make sense if this was true. And then I think there's another camp that agree with this but cannot say it in public, but in private, they agree. And there's another camp that this is too complex and they just wanna focus on watching a show and having some popcorn and watching a football or a soccer match and they're already too stressed and they have no interest in this. And then there's another camp like yourself who feel that some of these things are correct and want to learn more and want to play a role in our collective future. And that's why you're in this room tonight. So it's not a uniform response. I've noticed there's different categories. And the worst possible categories are people that comment on YouTube which is one reason I'm here is to figure out a psychological coping mechanism for that because when I have a podcast with some climate change expert, half the comments are supportive. A quarter of them are, this is a socialist hoax. You should never have climate on. Climate has always changed and it will always change. Humans have nothing to do with it. But then another quarter are, this guy's too conservative. He doesn't understand. We're gonna go extinct and climate is such a disaster. And it's like, oh my God, do humans have different beliefs? Like a huge spectrum. And you know what? Everyone in this room and everyone in the world, you believe in your view of the future. Otherwise, if you didn't, you would believe in someone else's and maybe coming to this talk, you might shift your belief a little bit one way or the other. But we all believe that our, what's in our head is the middle of the distribution of the future. Otherwise we would change our minds. So that is a real problem. You weren't here for my last talk, but cognitive biases and authority biases are huge. Authority bias I didn't talk about. Authority bias is that humans respond to very confident and charismatic people. And they've studied that if they have a scientist with impeccable credentials and he presents a synthesis, but he's very mild and soft spoken and talks like this. And another person has no credentials at all, but will be super confident and charismatic that 90% of people will believe what this guy or woman said. Like that, we do that. And yes, you do. Yeah. That's gonna be next Saturday's discussion. The different pathways forward. Personally, I don't think our renewables good, our renewables bad. I don't think that is gonna be one of the important questions in the next five years. We're gonna have to respond to economic and geopolitical and financial events. And that is just gonna play into that. Another problem with renewable energy that I didn't say is the largest cost for renewable energy is interest and finance. So as interest rates go up, they make a lot of solar and wind projects no longer viable and that's been happening in the last 18 months. So, here's another way to state it. Renewable energy is the right answer to the wrong question. The right question is how can we live in perpetuity on this earth with our descendants within reasonable biospheric limits using our seed corn of highly dense fossil carbon and our technological know-how? So sparingly using natural gas and oil in tandem with solar and wind to give us basic human needs in a Orville sort of way all over the world. That's the right answer in question. But right now we're saying how can we continue to grow the system by using a little bit less fossil fuels and using more renewables. So right now renewable energy is acting as a fossil fuel extender. It's not acting as a climate change solver or a civilization departure to a new path, if that makes sense. Yeah. Few more questions we have time for. Yes. I remember an oligocarbon peak is death. So maybe that already now the claim for future resources is already not covered by resources. So Japan had a debt problem 40 years ago. And so a lot of people are not concerned about debt because they say, oh, people have been worried about debt for 40 years and it's never been a problem. That is a concept called risk homeostasis, which is if you run a red light on your motor scooter 10 times in a row and nothing bad happened to you, your homeostasis and behavior will shift so that you start to run red lights all the time. And it's the same thing with debt and some other issues that we haven't had a problem with so we don't think they're a problem. Japan was able to do what they did because they have a monetary playbook where they're buying 50 or 60% of their own debt and stocks because that's okay. Japan is a great technological innovative country. From a monetary perspective, they'll invent their way out of it. From a resource perspective, it is a Ponzi scheme. Japan has no indigenous energy sources. But while they were doing this, the rest of the world economy was doing this. So they were part of that. Now it's the whole global North and West that are in this debt situation. And I think rather than understand and agree with everything I've said and say we need to tighten our belt and live within our means, we're gonna double down and print more and more money around the world. China's following the US example in spades with their expanding credit way faster than the United States is. Now, how can I be wrong about that? We could invent some new energy technology that is scalable and gives us more productivity that in fact enables us to pay back our debt and our interest for a while longer. Personally, I think if that happens, it will still result in what I refer to as a great simplification. But it will draw more things in from the natural world in the meantime. So it's not like I'm rooting for that or not. What I'm rooting for is we use this next five to seven years wisely. But I care most about the viability of the natural world and the 10 million species that we share the planet with. I'm gonna talk about that on Tuesday. There's a lot of room still on debt but there could be only one month more of room. I don't know. It's a trust. Trust is probably the most important variable in here. Trust could decline much faster than oil or money because there's a global agreement of trust. There's a global agreement that these digits in the bank or these things I have in my pocket can be exchanged for stuff the next day. And that may continue for 20 more years. I don't know. I don't think so. We'll talk about that on Saturday. More questions. Yes. So I'll give you the bottom line first and then I'll give you a few points. The bottom line is I don't think nuclear is a silver bullet but I think it is probably part of a package of solutions. Here's some of the problems with nuclear. Number one is in order to replace large amounts of fossil carbon we would need to grow like build like one nuclear plant or one and a half nuclear plants a day for the next 20 years. So that the scale is massive and what's really happening is the opposite. We're building like one a year. I mean, it's so slow because of fears and things in the past. I mean, nuclear, they're now shutting down more nuclear plants in Europe which I think is probably a mistake. Here's another problem with nuclear. Just like solar and wind, nuclear you turn it on and it does this profile and human demand is like this. So nuclear will need to be paired with something to balance out when the energy demand goes above and below it. There's the cost. There's the fact that my friends tell me we have 60 to 80 years left of uranium. There are new technologies out there, thorium, molten salt reactors, things like that that are on the come possibly. My biggest negative towards nuclear is the building of these nuclear power plants assumes an intact human civilization and perpetuity because if there is ever a hiatus or something happens like a solar flare or human civilization grinds down to be hunter-gatherers or something more simple the way that India was for a thousand plus years. If that happens and we lose the complexity of the modern world, we have 500 nuclear power plants that burn out of control with no intervention. So the cost of nuclear is really back loaded and we don't know what it might be. So that would be my environmental caution on nuclear power. But I'm open to nuclear developments. Ah, one more thing. They're talking about AI developing nuclear fusion and nuclear fusion is gonna be the future. Two problems with that. Number one is if we invented fusion today, it would be 20 years before it would be implemented because you would have to have all the new infrastructure and all of the safety things and things like that. The second thing is that if humanity at eight billion people with our current level of maturity not as Homo sapiens but more as Homo calidas which is clever man, we would be like eight billion locusts on the planet because if we had too cheap to meter electricity everywhere, I mean, we would just consume us out of a planet. So that's my view on that. In the future, nuclear power with appropriate governance and change in consciousness that we mentioned earlier, it's possible. And it is one thing that could last for several centuries under the right conditions. So my bottom line is we should continue to research it and look at it but I'm more view and we'll talk about this on Saturday. I'm not focused on technological solutions. I'm looking at how humanity can adapt and respond to what's quite likely coming in the next decade. And so I don't wanna focus on, we need to scale nuclear now because that's a tiny part of the broader arc of the story. Does that make sense? Yes, sir. Yeah, I can't follow very well what you say. The topic of waste, which is a metaphor for all the things we are talking about actually, waste. And in the case of atomic waste, we are doing much more unsolvable deaths. We are creating deaths which are not controllable at all and are as much as the scientists telling us now at least it's for thousands of years. And this is not, when this is not part of the equation, that's the period syndrome also which I can understand in the world about the thing itself. And deaths before regarding money, consciousness, this, consummation, these are all deaths. And we are living as a society, civilization to such an extent of deaths without realizing it that one day collapse and then something else is happening there. Yeah, I don't. This is for me the human factor which I'm always expecting in these discussions to come out, it comes out now, more and more I'm very curious to come to the next. Yeah, that'll be Saturday and the following Tuesday. I don't disagree with you. I don't like the word collapse, first of all. There's two reasons I don't like the word collapse. Number one is it's binary. There's either a collapse or there's not. Number two is collapse is already happening in many places around the world in Ukraine and Syria and Lebanon. So the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. So I prefer to use the word a great simplification which is a form of collapse but it's moderated and managed and prepared for. And that's why I'm doing these. Yeah, yes, sir. Should a local energy strategy as well as relocalization should it include powering down? Yes, it depends. I think at the core of powering down is if there are as a community of people that says we wanna live at 2000 watts per person and let's power down so that we get to that level and here's what that's gonna look like and we're gonna do a lot of singing and eating local food and we're gonna be happy and secure. Then yes, but if it's some Machiavellian person that says we need to power down and the population is not ready for that then it becomes authoritarian and people are gonna fight it and so it depends on the culture which is another reason this education is important because after basic needs are met most of the best things in life are free and the more humans that understand that and live it and feel it the more politically viable options there will be for a politician to say we need to tighten our belts and live with less. I personally don't think we are going to degrow as a culture. I think we're gonna hit a wall and then have to respond but those individuals, families, communities, pockets of humans that are kind of meeting the future halfway and living that way a little bit already partially will be more resilient when those events happen and partially they can act as pilots and beacons to others. Okay, so I think that's probably enough for tonight. I will, these are a lot of slides I don't expect you to remember all that. If you're interested in getting a copy of the slides you can give your email to Namu here in the front and we can send those out to you. And then we'll be back. Are we doing it in the same room on Tuesday or don't we know that yet? Yeah, let's just do it here and if there's more people then yeah, we'll squeeze them in. Okay, so Tuesday at 430 we're gonna talk about the environment and I'm gonna tell you what's going on with the oceans, climate, biodiversity, plastics, endocrine disruptors, other species. If you don't know a lot about what's happening it can be a sledgehammer. So I'm just giving you a tricky warning now but I'd rather, this is something I've cared about and researched deeply over the last 20 years and I'd rather tell you what's happening than keep it from you. So that'll be a heavy discussion but also informative on seeing how things fit together. Then next Saturday I'm gonna give a summary of the modern myths underpinning modern civilization 10 or 20 of those and what I call the four horsemen of the 2020s which are the things that we're gonna have to face in the coming decade and the various scenarios for the future like what's possible and what does that look like. And then the final lecture will be Tuesday, nine days from now, 10 days from now which will be a framework of responses at different scales and about half of that will be my own tentative recommendations as individuals how you cope and manage with this and like I'm not an expert on that. So it's things that I've come to understand and I've had to strip out about a third of them because I couldn't do them in my own life and if I can't do them myself I'm not gonna recommend them to other people but I haven't created that yet but I'm gonna work on a new one for that since all you bright pro-social humans are showing up for these so. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.