 I'm with the Hawaii State Energy Office, and do I have a guest for us today, or what? Dr. Elizabeth Soutouris, a evolution biologist, and I just learned by researching her, a cosmological snoop. And we're going to take a whole different approach to energy codes. Usually, we're right at the technical level. But this time, I'm going to ask Dr. Soutouris some rather open-ended questions, starting with the energy code, and then letting her take off like a rocket. So welcome, Dr. Soutouris. Thank you so much for being my guest today. This is a huge, huge honor. So are we ready to get rolling? We're ready. Okay. The concept of market transformation, where what happens with an energy code is I go to the national codes and we're 300-400 people in an auditorium, and the audience is composed of vendors and manufacturers reps, and the building industry, and us government types. And there's three competing interests there, and what we do sometimes from 8 in the morning till midnight is hash things out, measure by measure by measure. And what happens? We end up ideally improving the technologies that go into the code. For instance, the windows. Let's say that we, the good guys, win out, and the new energy codes shall specify a high performance window, that in this case, sun strikes it very little of the sun's heat gets through it. So in the audience with me are the manufacturers reps for the window manufacturers. They go back to the factory and say, boss, there's the new high efficiency windows that will be coming down the pike. And the boss says, okay, they're pretty rare right now. They're kind of expensive, but we'd better gear up because this is what the contractors are going to be buying in two, three, four years. So they shift from the less efficient windows to the more efficient, and lo and behold, what's out there on the market now? The high efficiency windows and the magic of mass production. They used to be expensive. The per unit cost goes down, down, down, down, down as mass production takes over. Lo and behold, Mr. Home Repairman goes to the hardware store for new windows for his home, and all he can get are the high efficiency windows and their reasonable price. And you multiply that for lighting, air conditioning, building materials, everything. Suddenly everything is all highly energy efficient. So what started out as a decision made by a small group of people had this ripple effect in the economy out and out and out. Do you see any parallels between what I describe as market transformation and the human evolution or biological evolution? Well, what you're telling me is a very interesting aspect of human evolution. In my evolution biology, I see a maturation code for species, a maturation cycle, let's say, for species that's been happening over four billion years. Half of evolution, there were only bacteria on the planet, and basically they were very competitive and very creative for a very long time, and then eventually matured into collaboration and peaceful settling of differences and building whole new collectives at a larger size level than bacteria. And we've repeated this cycle again and again. The bacteria invented the nucleated cell. The nucleated cell is a cooperative of bacteria much more energy efficient than their colonies were before. And then that nucleated cell being new on the planet had to start over in the cycle and eventually forms multi-celled creatures as it's cooperative. And so now you can fast forward to humans because we know the story of fishes coming out of the sea and all that, flowers coming onto the scene. So humans have also been doing going through this energy efficiency kind of maturation cycle, because the tipping point from the youthful mode to the mature mode comes when it gets too energy expensive to be bumping off all your enemies all the time, getting them out of the way so that you can flourish. And so we see right now, I call it our human adolescence. And if we look back to a lot of indigenous cultures, they went through this long ago and worked out how to live in harmony with the planet, with nature, with optimal energy efficiency. And now it's our Western culture turn, let's say, and China's turn, you know, the big players in our human world today are now coming to this crisis point, where we've been hostile and competitive, making wars on each other and wasting energy, you know, like crazy doing things like that and bumping each other off and are moving into the cooperative mode. So I often use the metaphor of the caterpillar that eats 300 times its weight in a day and finally hangs itself up and goes to sleep. And from the folds of its own skin, as it hardens, little imaginal cells come out and they eventually build a butterfly within the caterpillar. So it's not a phoenix rising from the ashes. It's not like everything's going to go to pot and then we're going to build a new world. It's a process of having to, let's say, with the Internet. We have to use the existing Internet's resources in order to build a new, more decentralized one, as so many people are doing now. So I see that wonderful crisis point coming when the energy expenditure is too big to maintain hostilities. And so what you were describing with the new development of the windows and things is beautiful, creative adaptation to coming back into harmony with nature, rather than seeing it as a pile of resources for humans to exploit and then suddenly discovering, uh-oh, we've made a big mess and we may even be responsible for major climate change. And now we have to re-adapt all over again. So love these examples of things like energy efficiency because that's going into mature mode. So that's beautiful. So taking that a step further, we go into, or I go into, technological advance versus human society advance. Best example probably is the LED lamp. 30 years ago it barely existed and it was expensive and not efficient. All kinds of research and development went into that lamp. And just today I read that one particular manufacturer has produced an interior lamp or we call them diode that yields 155 lumens per watt. That's how you measure efficacy in lighting products. And that is literally 10 times more efficient than the incandescent bulbs that we grew up with. Plus the incandescent bulb scatters light 360 degrees all over the place. You can aim the LED at exactly what you want. Small diameter, large diameter. You can have any color you want, red, blue, green, any mixture of those. And you can change moods even. So that's an example of extremely rapid technological improvement. It's almost going at Moore's Law. The computer of course is the most rapidly evolving. And the same goes not so dramatically with air conditioning equipment, with the materials that we build homes and buildings with. Material science is advancing like mad also. So that we'll be able to build buildings for a lot less material than we did in the very, very near future. While that is just going up exponentially, we have government going at something less than Moore's Law speed where there is something called the not adaptive reuse. Administrative rule process where we have our concept of the next energy code. And in order to get the governor's signature so that it becomes state law, we go through, I believe it's a 14-step process, each step of which is really, really slow so that it often takes up to two years between the time when we agree that this should be the new code with the new technology and the time that the governor signs it into law. Do you see any parallels with that? Well, I'm glad you brought up the LED bulb. And it's interesting we had to go through the spiral one along the way and then suddenly discovered we have to trash all those and that they're quite toxic in the trash dumps. But we did get to LEDs and we are a remarkably creative species. That's the wonderful thing about humans. Now, to me, the largest living system on the planet today, I believe, is the Internet. And the Internet is not made of computers. The Internet is made of people who have invented computer technology to connect themselves. Nature is—everything in nature is relational. If you want to understand nature, you have to understand relationship. So anyway, the Internet has been run on radio waves, as you know, up until now, and the radio wave frequency spectrum is pretty fully occupied by now. And the LED bulbs are going to make it possible to put the entire Internet on Wi-Fi instead of Wi-Fi so that every over-the-counter LED bulb in your house can become a transmitter, a receiver and transmitter, for a far more energy-efficient Internet that will go at much greater speeds, because light, of course, is much higher frequencies than radio waves. So that's one example to me, again, of how we interface technology with living lighter on the planet. And most of the new materials that are being developed now that are non-toxic, because nature's number one rule is recycle everything and no toxics. If humans can learn to make only recyclable things, stuff, and never to put toxins in any of them, which makes them much easier to recycle, we would have it made on this planet if we could do those two things. So I think it's wonderful that we're studying nature, finally. And through the biomimicry movement, we now have these microscopes and these ways of seeing what happens at the micro level, that old bacterial level of evolution, which we've never been able to look into before. And we can do the chemical analyses and the spectral frequency analyses and all these things. And we're learning from nature how to do things in safe and efficient ways. So we're doing it, but not fast enough, as you point out, where we've stuck ourselves by our own choice with governance systems that are pretty clunky in a world that's evolving as fast as it is now. So we're going to have to reinvent those too. That's part of it. We can now design a whole new operating system for humanity and ask the deepest questions about why do some people own big chunks of our planet and other people own none of it? Should anybody be owning parts of their planet? And why are we born on a planet and then told we have to earn our living on it? You know, the young people now are asking that kind of very deep question. And I love the fact that the crisis that we're in, perfect storm of crises that we've evolved now, give us the opportunity, that Chinese character that says every crisis is a new opportunity to reinvent ourselves. And energy efficiency is a big part of it. And we'll continue right on this vein, except that it is time for our one minute break. Howard Wigg, Hawaii State Energy Office, back in a moment. Good afternoon again. Welcome back. Howard Wigg, Hawaii State Energy Office. And my guest is the distinguished Dr. Elizabeth Satoris. And we are taking a philosophical anthropological evolutionary approach to building codes just to cue off of a couple of your comments before the break. You mentioned that little computer, almost everything is becoming, it has a little computer in it. The new street lights that are up when we convert to LED street lights. There's a little computer there and we haven't begun to realize the potential of what we can do with these little computers, but they can now send signals to one another. If a street is dark at three in the morning, boom, you can turn that street light off. And then when a car approaches, little computer says, oh, car approaching, let's get back up here. And it's, we're getting to the point of there being able to sense violence. They can hear gunshots and they can send a message to the police department. Hey, gunshot on the corner of third and vine. Immediate notification there. So that's just one example of, oh, and then you can direct traffic. Whoa, heavy traffic over here, go over here instead. Yeah. Or trucks, great big trucks transporting goods. They tune into the computers, okay, the most efficient way to get to my destination is this way, saving energy all over the place. And then when you mentioned networks, one of the more fascinating talks that I've heard some years ago was about fungi and fungi under the soil connected to trees, connected to one another. And there's all kinds of communication going on between the plant growth, the fungi and each other, the second and third cousin to the fungi there. So you like the word network. That's an incredible network under there. And we're just beginning to really, really get through that. But I know you want to comment on that. It's a very smart grid too. Smart grid? That was a very, very, very smart grid. Yeah. Maybe are you an authority on that? Maybe I can have you guessed again, and we can talk about that. But when we left off, we were talking about the slowness of government. And I gave the example of an administrative rule just to get the governor's signature. Inefficiencies. Yes, yes, yes. So I was very privileged a couple of years ago to be taken to Shanghai and then be taken around the Greater Shanghai region where that's the cradle of Chinese civilization there. And one thing that struck me was the energy efficiency and the technological prowess of the Chinese. For one thing, Shanghai has 20 million people in it. And I swear half of them have scooters, but they're all electric scooters. Can you imagine if you had millions and millions and millions of scooters, scooting all over the place, the air pollution effects? If they weren't electric, I mean. Yeah. If they were just plain old cycle, internal combustion engines, they would be horrible. So Chinese government says all scooters shall be electric, period. And housing, crisis? What housing crisis? You go out into the countryside and there's high rises after high rises. And I've been in one of those complexes. They have perfectly nice apartments. Nicely landscape. Everything is well appointed and so forth. And then I had the privilege of meeting the engineer who helped design the levitated rail system between Shanghai airport and downtown Shanghai. Maglev trains, yeah. Maglev, yes. You can get 14 miles in four and a half minutes, do some math and you find that this thing is traveling at 240 miles an hour. And the engineer told me that the passengers can start off with a full cup of tea, let that tea sit on the table and it won't spill a drop through that whole voyage. The whole point that I'm getting at is Chinese is just going forward, including environmentally, with leaps and bounds while we plod along like a Galapagos tortoise. But China does not have a democracy if the leadership says thou shalt be energy efficient, thou shalt be technologically advanced. It's in everybody's interest and they're doing it but they're doing it without the burden of democracy. So I don't know if you see any parallels between the natural world and that. Yeah, well and sure and China made some gross errors in its pollution issues and stuff like that along the way. And they're cleaning up like mad. And it can clean up like mad. And when they suddenly decreed last year that they weren't going to take toxic wastes from abroad anymore, we all who had been exporting our wastes there were forced to look into recycling more seriously. So it had a good effect on us I think that they did that. And they have gotten far more concerned about going green in China and that's very true. The question of democracy is a very interesting one. It is very efficient as you say for the Chinese under their system to just say okay we're going to turn around now and we're going to go green. And then they go green. Or we're going to provide housing. While we in a democracy don't. Why however should a democracy be less efficient than that kind of central government organization is a very interesting question because in nature it basically our democracy is based on a two-party system right? And we have conservatives and we have whatever you want to call the progressive opposite. Those that make the change and those that protect what works in an oversimplified way. And every four years we decide are we going to protect what works or are we going to change what doesn't work. Instead of seeing that in order for a democracy ever to work you have to see this as a division of labor that's going on simultaneously and is in cooperation with each other. That could be extremely efficient and until we have that kind of a democracy it won't work because dividing the two parties and pitting them against each other and now pitting everybody against everybody in the new political correctness and now the identity stuff and things like that is fragmenting it more and more and more rather than bringing it together. So we really need a significant change there but there's no reason why it couldn't become as efficient as any governance system ever was. Yeah that's the ideal. Yeah and that's how nature works. Yeah it doesn't do these either ors it does the both ends. It also never does monoculture as humans do and monocultures have proven deadly over and over and we've set up our trade economies so that the further something travels the more money is made along the way and I could give you lots of examples of that so that the trade system is not designed to feed clothes and house people around the world efficiently it's designed to make profits. So there's a problem there in principle capitalism is inimical to democracy. You can't have rule by the people on a relatively level playing field of opportunity at least and at the same time base your whole commercial world your whole economy on what's now proven to be an outrageous difference in wealth gap and nature would never do that either nor is any species in charge in an ecosystem bullying the others or telling them what to do. So we have so much to learn and nature you know especially in our own bodies if we just look at how efficient our bodies are and how the brain is just an information clearing house and every organ is vitally important and nobody's in charge but 100 trillion cells know what to do and 10 times that many gut bacteria are also in cooperation with us. I mean why can't we mimic some of this? There's a concept of course of biophilia that was promulgated by E. O. Wilson. It sounds like a disease but it means love of nature. And you also mentioned biomimicry. I don't know if there's a difference between the two. Oh huge difference. I mean biophilia simply means love of life. In Greek it literally means love of life. And biomimicry was a word that existed in biology before Jeanine Benus and the whole biomimicry movement as we know it today and it usually referred to let's say a moth that with its wings spread looks like an owl so that no one will eat it because there's a bigger predator being shown right things of that kind. But Jeanine has taken it to a whole other level of learning from nature humans copying nature rather than species in nature copying each other. It's now about humans copying nature because nature is 100 percent recyclable and it's been doing economics for four billion years. If you see economics as the acquisition of resources their transformation to usefulness their distribution their consumption and then in our case a linear economy that makes waste in nature's case a circular economy that does not make waste. So it is more efficient than we are and yet if we see that you know a single plant will will spread out you know millions of seeds to get a few new ones growing you can accuse it of being inefficient right. But when you see how it all hooks together and you mentioned the fungi sort of so does as an example that all trees all tree roots are interconnected with a system of fungi below the ground and those fungi know which tree or other plant has an excess of a resource that some other tree or plant needs and transfers it to them. I mean this is an unbelievably intelligent network. And speaking of resources one resource that we've just run out of. It's time. It's time. Thank you so much Dr. Elizabeth Satoris. This has been absolutely fascinating. We'll have to get you back at some point and get you off on another 10 tangent there. So farewell for now Howard Wigg, Hawaii State Energy Office. See you next time.