 Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Yuan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. You'll see all my brand new background as our logos and everything else, and I just did that today. So I'm really pleased to welcome our guest and my good friend, Peter Sternlite, from Sustainable Energy Hawaii, SEH. So we're going to be talking story today about spaceship Earth, and we have a problem, Houston. So today we're going to define, today we're going to define our energy system problems, and we plan to make this one of the first of a series of shows, and the subsequent shows will be talking about solutions, because yes, there are solutions. So Peter, welcome to the show. Hey, Mitch. And let's throw up the first slide, and I want to talk about the first slide, because we're living on spaceship Earth. So the spaceship, so spaceship Earth is just like the shuttle. So we're living in a space, in a spaceship. It's called Earth, and with all of its life support systems. And essentially, it helps us with three things we need to sustain our life. We need food, energy, and water. And today we're going to be focusing on the energy part. So Peter, talk to us about energy and your aha moment when you said, wow, Houston, we've got a problem here. Oh, wow. I mean, the aha moment was kind of, it goes back to the first Gulf War. And when I realized that that was all about energy, you know, and what we use for our economy. But there have been a number of aha moments, which you know, have been evolving over time. And I guess it was in the early 2000s that I realized that, you know, really pragmatically that petroleum was a finite resource, and that it was intertwined in everything that we do. From there, I got into realizing that it's not just petroleum, but it's all natural resources. And it gets compounded with exponential growth of our population and increasing demand and pollution and climate change. And it just, we've done a number here. And finite means it'll run out. And are we ready for when it runs up? Peter, why don't we talk a little bit about sustainability, which is the topic of our next slide? Yeah, I do not think we're ready. I don't think we understand what sustainability is. I mean, we named our organization, our nonprofit, Sustainable Energy Hawaii. And I was really hesitant about using the word sustainable in the sense that it's such a cliche word. And it's like, what does it really mean? I mean, people use it like the word cleanup. But the definition that resonates for us at SEH, Sustainable Energy Hawaii, is that it's a means of configuring civilization and human activity so that society, all its members and its economies are able to meet their needs and express their greatest potential in the present while preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystems by planning and acting for the ability to maintain these ideals for future generations. It's a long term vision. So I really want to make the point that renewable and sustainable renewable energy and sustainability sustainable energy are really two different things. Yeah, it's really important. And we'll be talking about this today is like not using up all the good stuff for us. And then essentially leaving nothing left in the kitty for our kids, grandkids and even looking way out in the future for future generations. I mean, it's basically the survival of the human species and also all the other species that inhabit, you know, spaceship. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, our extractive economic system and the energy system. So next slide please, which is the GDP slide. Yeah, so one of the things I've had the opportunity to get involved with, you know, with some pretty serious academics. And one of the things that I stumbled across was that there's a correlation between energy consumption and GDP. I think to understand the nature of energy is that it is the ability to do work. That's the way the science of physics defines energy. It's the ability to do work. And so everything we do requires energy. And our GDP is the output of the work that we do. So there is when you graph the when you graph GDP against the consumption of energy over time, you find that they virtually track identically within less than 1% deviation. So the thing is, is that we're at a critical point now where we're obligated due to climate change and also resource depletion to change the paradigm of what we do, where we source our energy. And are we going to be able to have the same amount of energy using what we consider renewable energy as compared to fossil fuels? And that's going to be a stretch in not just my opinion, but the opinion of many learned experts. So when we're planning this show, there's actually a plan for this show, believe it or not. We talked about our extractive economy and how it's always going to be bigger, faster, better, and growth, constant growth. I mean, if you're a publicly traded company and you're not growing every year, year on year, your stock goes down. Is that a sustainable economy, Peter? Is that a sustainable business model? You know, I'm not an economist. I just play one on TV. Marcus Welby, sorry about that. Anyhow, it doesn't seem sustainable to me. My, what I've, everywhere else that I know of where you have rampant or continuous growth, it's given, you know, it's usually in a medical sense and it's called cancer. It is, you know, life has ups and downs. It has contractions and expansions. And the theory that we can grow our population and our economy and that there's enough stuff to allow us to continue doing that infinitely, I think has been one of the great feats of storytelling, you know, in our civilization, in our society. So if our energy supply starts contracting, what's going to happen? According to your graph, our economy will be going down, correct? Yeah, I think that's a fair assumption, less energy, less productivity, less products, less stuff. And, you know, so I see human behaviors being something that is, that we need to worry about because people have been told and taught that continuous growth is the way to be. It's the right way. It's what we can expect. It's what we should have and we're entitled to all this. And I just don't see, excuse me, I don't see how it, how that can continue happening, especially as we stop using or starts use less fossil fuels. I mean, an example, I mean, the concentration of energy that's in fossil fuels is unequal to anywhere else in nature. You know, for instance, there's 12,500 kilowatt hours of energy in a cubic meter of petroleum. That's an enormous amount of power. And it's in a very small, very portable form. So you can use it. It's easy for transportation. It's very difficult to run a tractor trailer or a trans-oceanic freighter on when mills are solar panels. Right. And it's been relatively easy to get. When you look at the supply chain for getting that gallon of gas to our gas station here in Kenioa or over there in Milo, you know, if it starts out, let's say Saudi Arabia and it flows out of the ground, they've got to run it to the ship that loaded on the ship. Then the ship's going to come about three or four thousand miles to get here. And then it goes into a refinery. And then from the refinery, it goes into a truck and then it's distributed. Everybody's got to have a little piece of the action all on the supply chain. They've all got to get a little bit of a profit out of it. Otherwise, they're not in business. Yet we can still deliver a gallon of gasoline up until like a month ago for about three or four dollars a gallon. Right. That's pretty unbelievable. If you look at the calories or the output energy of human labor, a gallon of gasoline has about four and a half years of human labor wrapped up inside of it. So at the point you can get that for four dollars after all the processing, it's really remarkable. I mean, it's like, it's been free free labor. I mean, so I yeah, I wanted to make the analogy that that petroleum replaced the free labor we had up until it's discovered the human free labor that we had. And just to give you an example, like let's throw up the next slide, which talks about oil tankers, getting that petroleum from Saudi Arabia, for example, here. It's incredible that, you know, you've got a hundred million barrels of oil per day arriving on, you know, or being distributed around the world every day. We had a great slide, which we couldn't use because of copyright issues that showed the number of tankers at sea. And it was unbelievable as Alex, yeah, as a next submarine guy, I was saying, wow, look at all those great targets, you know, but a hundred million gallons of oil a day is a lot of a lot of oil that we have to displace. So I kind of wrote a couple of little notes down, do we really have a problem? I wrote to myself, I mean, everything seems okay to me, I can drive my car, I can have my hot shower, I can run my computer, everything seems to be pretty good. So, gee, is the sky really falling? Exponential growth is one of those things where everything seems fine until it's not. And like one of the people that I interviewed for a documentary that I made a number of years ago, a guy named Dr. Albert Bartlett, who was a physics professor at the University of Colorado, he put together a really amazing video of just basically talking about exponential growth. And one of the examples he used was, if you have a container, and this is a mind problem, so if you have a container and the rules are, is that you put in a thing and you double it once every minute, and at minute zero, it's empty, and at minute 60, it's full. How many minutes have elapsed when it's half empty? Oh, 59. Oh, okay. At 58 minutes, it's three quarters empty. If you, if you add three more containers, how much additional time? So if you have three more earths, let's say earth is that container, if you add three more earths, how much time do you, additional time do you have? Two minutes. Right. So we're at a point now, for example, I mean, if we can go to the human population growth, I mean, this is probably a good time to bring that slide up. Slide five. There we go. So when, when my father was born in 1922, the population of the entire planet was 1.9 billion people, and it took the Homo sapiens, our species, 300,000 years to grow to that point. Right. In 100 years, we've added another six billion people, all of whom want to live like Americans, all of whom want to live like Western society, all of whom want to consume, and our economy wants to deliver all that stuff to them. Right. And there is no notion that we might not be able to do that. So. Oh, sorry. No, that was, that's it. Well, the other factor that came into that, I mean, why, how, how are we able to support an additional six billion people? Well, it was the development of fertilizers, ammonia, which made the land four times more fertile than it was before in the early 1900s. And so, I mean, I think they developed ammonia around 1922 in that, that, that era. And that just allowed food production to basically explode excellent exponentially. Yeah, fossil fuels. Yeah, fossil fuels enabled that. I mean, it's not just, and fertilizers are wholly dependent on fossil fuels. But you have all the machinery that you use for farming and for transporting and the centralized production that you have. And the factory farming, all of that is dependent on fossil fuels. We're in a situation now where everything has to be transported. And ninth, even today, with, I mean, I have an electric car, I have solar panels, even today with, with the vast expansion in our perception that it's expanded a lot, electrifying transportation. 96% of global transportation still relies on fossil fuel. Yeah, another interesting fact, you know, with this Ukrainian war going on, as I, the number I heard was like 75% of ammonia is produced by Russia. So here we are, you know, shutting them down. So they're going to, you know, shutting down the ammonia that's going to affect our food supply. So this is a kind of a really interesting time we're going through right now, because that war has really woken a lot of people up about the fact that gee, maybe it isn't as great as we thought. Maybe the lights aren't going to go on. We're going to have a blackout because we can't get enough natural gas into our system. Yeah, Russia is, Russia is also the, I mean, it kind of goes back and forth over the last few years, where it's been going back and forth between Russia and the United States being the largest oil producers in the world. The United States has achieved that due to, it's due to the development of or the fracking, basically shale oil. And that those, those people who track oil production, conventional oil production peaked in 2018. And all of the increases in the years in the last four years to the global market for petroleum have come from U.S. fracking. The thing about fracking is that it is very short-lived. You, you drill a productive well and within, within two years or two and a half or three years, it's producing half the volume in it, it did when it first started out. So looking at, looking at the well count on a daily basis, I mean, we're, we're basically at a standstill right now in terms of being able to increase the amount of petroleum there is to move the global economy from one end of the planet to the other. So it's, it's a very, it's a very mixed bag because we have this global economy and we want to transition away from fossil fuels. But just to get the solar panels from China to the United States, you got a, all of this involves fossil fuels for transportation, for mining the natural resources, for it, it's still all wholly dependent on it. And, and looking at the sun as a renewable energy, that looks at the source of energy. It doesn't look at the unified system. And the system, the whole system, I mean, essentially I'm very comfortable saying there is no renewable energy today without fossil fuels, which is really a conundrum to deal with. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Let's throw up the next slide, slide six, which talks about recoverable oil. Right. So there's, there's an energy analytical company in Norway called Bricehead Energy. And they pulled together the three major oil or energy assessments each year, which are put out by the United States government, the EIA, the international, excuse me, there's a freaking plot pardon me, fly flying in my face. The International Energy Agency and the BP Statistical Review, which comes from British Petroleum. And they gather all this data and then Bricehead takes and it parses all that and interprets what they've said. And in, in July of last year, they made an incredible statement, which was that the recoverable oil, not the oil we're using, but what we know is still there to be recovered, contracted by 9% in one year. And they're forecasting that by 2050, the flow rate of petroleum will be less than half of what it is today. So if you look at energy consumption, and especially how much is dependent on transportation, liquid fuels, having half of what we have today is going to have an impact on the scale of the global economy and the global economy, and all of the people and all the wise people who have been, who have been going grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, are going to have to re, rethink their, their assumptions. Right. So let's, the other factor is the critical raw material. So let's pull up the critical raw material slides. So I mean, they're not finite, yeah, they're finite resources too. Right. So, so you have, you have raw materials like cobalt and lithium and nickel and, you know, some, some very subtle, very rare earth metals that are all essential to producing the systems that provide us with what we call renewable energy today, our solar systems, and our wind systems. And the rate at which we're mining these is, is, is at a staggering rate of consumption. There are reports that have been put out in Europe where they're estimating that the ability to produce batteries, for instance, to replace internal combustion engines for light duty vehicles can be done one time in terms of producing batteries. Let's look at the next slide as well, because it kind of really illustrates what you're talking about. Thank you. So what we have is, we have a situation where the slide on the left, this where in blue what you have is you have the known global reserves. And then in yellow, what you have is the amount needed to phase out fossil fuel use in light duty vehicles, which is cars, buses, vans, delivery trucks, motorcycles, etc. So the thing is, is if you look at cobalt, there's not enough cobalt to do that one time to replace it. And these batteries only last if you're lucky 10 to 15 years. So what do you do after 15 years? Where are those replacement batteries? We'll have a new technology by them at scale? Maybe, maybe not. Can you recover them easily? No. We don't have a, everything has to happen at a massive scale. I mean, you might be able to do it in a laboratory. And it may, you know, you may be able to have technology that's feasible, but getting out of the lab and into the marketplace at scale is an enormous problem. And all of that is going to be dependent on the same critical raw materials that these systems are. So, yes, recycling is going to have to be part of it. But once, I mean, the slide on the right takes a look at a scenario where we're now we're talking about solar and wind systems that have battery backup, that have battery storage, power storage. And the ability to do that, it becomes, we can't even do that one time to replace the existing fossil fuel power generation. And that doesn't even begin to deal with industrial scale transportation. So space, earth, we have a problem. And the thing is, is that the solutions that we're using now have been, we've been told that this is a stepping stone. This is a solution. And I personally, I question that. Right. Yeah, if you look at what it takes to recycle batteries, and we're not just, like I said, it's not just like on a lab where you can take it apart slowly. You have massive tons and tons of batteries coming in. First of all, some of them are charged, some of them are not. So if they're charged, they've got electricity in them, and there could be dangerous. So you've got to bust them up and grind them up. And you've got all this potential electricity floating around. You've got acids. You've got a whole variety of materials. And it's not, it's not obvious how you're going to be able to recover that. Now, I've heard also read that some manufacturers are developing new batteries like lithium ferrofosphate batteries that are solid state and are claiming that they can recycle up to 99% of the lithium. So that's hydro come back has got a battery that can do that. There's a scientist that came out of Tesla who has, who has now left Tesla and has started a recycling company to recycle batteries of all different kinds. And it's really impressive what he's done because like you said, he's able to, he's got a pipeline, he's got a production pipeline that could be scaled. But when we say could be scaled, I can't picture how big the scale is for dealing with this on a global basis. So, and, and the thing, I mean, the great equalizer and all this is time. How fast can you do it? It's not like we have, it's not like we have forever. And we can just sort of amble our way into, into getting this done. Because as we, you know, as rice dad was saying, the transportation, the liquid fuels are simply not going to be available in 20 years at the scale that we're dealing with now. So, and if we, if we don't find ways to recycle or dispose of it properly, what's kind of happens going to end up in the landfill, or somebody's just going to dump it and eventually get into our groundwater supply. And you know, heavy metals and groundwater isn't a very good thing either. So, so there's a lot of, a lot of issues that have to be solved. So, we do have a problem in spaceship Earth. And there is no Planet B, Plan B, Planet B, that we can just, oh, well, let's just dump this planet and let it sit around for a couple million years and regrow the trees and get better. And we're going to go off to this other planet and do the same thing. So that's not going to work. We have to change the stories that we tell ourselves. We have to want different things. There has to be a different metric for being happy, for bringing happiness to ourselves. We can do this, but we have to know that that's part of it. Yeah, we can't just be consumer, consume, consume, throw away, throw away, throw away, dig more. You know, we have to be really smart about it. So, I want to throw up the last slide, which is about 25 years ago, I was working for a company in Florida and we produced a little brochure and this was the end message on it. Basically, our world is fragile. Our future energy needs are great. It's time for those of political power and financial strength to make a difference. And so, in our follow-on episodes, as we go forward with this, Peter, we want to look at what are some good plans that people of political power and financial strength can do to make a difference because that's what it's going to take. It's going to take a combination of good policy and finance and the money to do it. If I look here in Hawaii, I don't see the big dollars. We want to be 100% this and 100% that by 2035 or 2045. Like you said, it's got to be at massive scale and I don't see massive resources like money, which is the engine being put where our money and money where our mouth is. So, that's why we need to have this kind of a shift. This is why we need this kind of a conversation. That's why we need to get our political lead on board. And we got a lot of very wealthy people here in Hawaii. They come out here to retire. I hate that word retire, but they're coming out here and they can really help us here in Hawaii, spaceship Hawaii. And we can show an example for everybody else. So, final comments from you, Peter, before we dial out. Well, I'm thinking that probably the most renewable, sustainable source of energy I know of in terms of making both transportation fuel and electricity is, and we're very lucky here in Hawaii, is geothermal energy. And that's something that theoretically could be available anywhere on the planet. You just have to drill deep enough. And it's really, you know, so we can talk about that as, you know, in the next shows, but it certainly here it is an option for us to minimize or to mitigate the degree of impact that the inevitable change will be having. Absolutely. We're going to talk about that in our follow on show because that's definitely a gift that we need to utilize. Otherwise, it's not going to be as business as usual. It's like you said, you know, it's like the nine, we're at the 96% point. You know, we haven't got that much time. We've got to, we got to get off the dime and get going. So thank you. Thanks a lot, Peter, for helping us put the show together in the series and using your enthusiasm and great and great communication skills to help us out on this path. So I'm going to leave it there. And we've been watching Hawaii, the state of clean energy on think tech Hawaii. And today we've been talking story about spaceship earth and our broken sustainability system with Peter's stern light. Who shares insights and in our following shows, we'll be discussing solutions. It's not all problems. We've got to have solutions. So thank you, Peter. Pleasure. And Aloha and thanks to our viewers for tuning in. And I'll meet you and we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Thank you so much for watching think tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. 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