 Welcome to Stan Energy Man today, I'm Tink-Tek Hawaii. Stan Osserman here, coming to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii, on the windward side of Oahu, and my favorite beach in the background, Makapu Beach, which has a beautiful cliffs for doing snorkeling and diving along, and great surf for surfing, especially around Easter weekend, historically seems to be a great time to surf over there. But it is a little dangerous, so you gotta know what you're doing before you jump in the water over there. Beautiful view too, there's a lighthouse, right at the top of that mountain off to my shoulder. Anyway, today's Stan Energy Man is gonna be a little bit different. It is about energy, but if you've been watching my shows for the last couple of months, we're also talking about money and economy and things like the petrodollar and the reserve currency of the US dollar reserve currency around the world, because energy actually, I will call it a money or a work multiplier. If you understand the history of currency of money, you understand that it's basically a transfer of work to somebody else. And I'll tell a short, I'll tell a little bit of the history of that through society, kind of a really condensed version of history. But when you get right down to it, money is a product of work and energy is a multiplier of work. So when you have an economy that's running on energy, which is multiplying the work of all the humans on earth, you have a huge, huge system in place. And today we are the beneficiaries of slash probably the victims of a very huge economic system that's very complicated and I think confuses the daylight side of a lot of people. And they forget that energy is just a multiplier of work and work is currency is based on work. So let's start back in the earliest days of mankind, not back 100 or 200 or 300 years on the start of our country, but thousands of years back when we didn't have organized societies and groups of people got together, maybe hunted, maybe gathered and collected what they needed to live and survive. They'd follow herds around and where they'd follow the climate to go where things could be gotten to be, to eat and things like that. And at that time, there really wasn't any need for currency. It was all about just pure survival. But as people started to get together in communities and organized together, what they found was, hey, it made sense that the best hunters do the hunting and the best farmers and gatherers do the farming and gathering and the best tradesmen, the best tradesmen, the folks that did the best woodworking or the best construction or the best toolmaking, they specialized and if you let them do their thing and the hunters did their thing, that was great and you could just barter. You could, like the hunters could get new spears from the tradesmen and the tradesmen could trade some cart stuff or things to the farmers to help them to dig their fields, plow their fields better. And they would just trade between each other. But as the world became more organized into specialized societies and societies that expanded, there were so many different people doing specialized work. It was hard to trade on a barter system where the hunter could just give meat to the toolmaker and just do a trade. Now, maybe the toolmaker needed corn or wheat instead of meat. So now the hunter had to trade with the farmer who then had to trade with, then had to go and trade the wheat off or something else to get what he needed. And that's when currency really came about but that wasn't like a couple of hundred years ago or even just a couple of thousand years ago. It was several thousand years ago. And the earliest cultures that I know of that have used currency were probably Asian cultures. And to show you how clever, how practical those cultures were with currency, their currency and most of the early currency came in the form of coins and I'll talk a little bit about why that is but Asian currency have a hole in the middle. Not may sound simple, but when you have a hole in the middle of your coins you can string them up on leather straps or you can organize them and put certain ones on certain strings and certain ones and other things that you could count them easier. Anyway, having a hole in the middle of your coin made it really practical. And that was around three to 5,000 years ago in the Asian continent. But coins are around in Byzantine, Rome, Greece, they were around and the reason they were coins and the coin was chosen as that kind of, I wanna say notional medium or abstract medium for trade is that if everybody could agree that a coin was worth a certain something then they can all agree that the hunter could trade his meat for coins and then he could take those coins and trade them for whatever he needed whether he needed new spears for more hunting or whether he needed some wheat so his wife could make some bread for him or whether he needed a new house or a new tent so he had a place to live. He didn't have to worry about all that barter work around a complex society he could just take his coins and go pay for them. But as society moved forward we even got to the point where coins were a little bit cumbersome, they were heavy and as trade got international as trade became more prevalent between Asia and Europe and around the world it became kind of tough to be lugging all of these coins and they were usually made of metal because metallurgy, if you remember we went through the Bronze Age and the Stone Age and the Bronze Age to the Iron Age metalurgy was the new science of the day that was hard to forge it was hard to copy they had very specialized people who worked with metal and so the average person didn't have the technology or the wherewithal to make fake coins the government took control of making money and the metal workers that have the skills to do that did it for the government. So you went from just trading and bartering to early coins and exchanging to now we're at an international market where you have to trade not only across different skill sets or different commodities but you have to trade to different countries different parts of the world and maybe had different coins than you have. So now we started seeing international banking stand up about the time you also have the Industrial Revolution where the idea or I think that energy becomes a multiplier comes into the picture. You have to remember that even at the start of this country and we're a relatively new country at being less than 300 years old George Washington didn't have the kind of military weapons that we have today people didn't live in stick built subdivisions with hundreds of homes that average person could afford. The rich people could afford big houses small folks lived in cabins that they primarily built themselves with no building codes or anything else and some of our more nomadic natives were still living in tents and things like that and moving to follow herds. So as the Industrial Revolution kicked in money went from just being those coins to being printable paper dollars because at this time printing was also a really well understood science and nobody could make fake dollars very easily because printing and engraving was a pretty much refined by the 16 and 1700s and that it was better to carry around printed paper that was hard to forge rather than carry around tons and tons of gold or silver or other metal coins. And as international trade grew paper currency became better but the rule was if you're a country that went printed currency you also had to have a certain amount of gold that you could exchange for your currency to give it some value to give it a solid value. So moving forward through the Industrial Revolution World War I World War II now we have massive population growth massive trade around the world and massive industrial improvements with things like aviation. Think about it. 500 years ago nobody ever even heard of an airplane and my grandfather's generation was a generation that invented aviation as we know it today. And now in my generation in fact, even when I was a kid we had airplanes that could go supersonic. Now most people today think that that's been around forever because their whole lifetime it's been around but when you're my age, I'm almost 70 you realize that things just in the last 100 years have progressed dramatically on every scale the financial side, the production side the population side, the farming efficiency side everything we've gotten to a point where even paper currency is kind of a little hard to deal with when you're dealing with millions and millions and millions of dollars, billions of dollars and sending money back and forth like most people when they go to work nowadays they don't get a paycheck or if they do they go deposit the paycheck at the bank but when the bank moves money around it's all done digitally and that's where people kind of think I think for my son for a while when he was really young thought yeah I can't be bouncing checks I still have checks in my checkbook not realizing that no the money is actually something that you're not seeing unless you keep your balance up to date and you balance your checkbook when your statement comes the number of checks and the paper and stuff doesn't have any intrinsic value it's the work that's represented by those dollars in the bank that have value so now we have a society where we have huge amounts of money traveling worldwide to different countries to different banks to different locations purchasing all kinds of different commodities and a system of not only moving that money but inside the world of economics and banking we have a system where people are loaning money so businesses can get started and when they borrow money like you can borrow money for your car or your house you pay a little bit of interest and the people that are loaning you they're extra money make money on their money and you get to start your house or your car get to drive your house or your car live in your house you know and it's a good system you get something out of it they get something out of it and it helps economies grow and as economies grow and money is more available because more work is being done then the quality of life goes up that's why the United States is based on an economic system of capitalism and what you basically do and private ownership so that as you work you can take your hard work that you do turn it into money take the money turn it into property whether it's real estate property or cars or collectibles or whatever it is and you can grow in a state and you can pass it on to your kids things like that but money and its core still remains a function of work and like I say in today's industrial age energy makes that work even more and more productive so for example if my car runs out of gas well first of all I hope I have a passenger that can push because somebody has to steer the car to get it to a gas station but the bottom line is if you ever have to push your car to get it somewhere you understand really quickly how much energy is in a gallon of gasoline because it takes a whole lot of your personal energy to take that car and push it to a gas station that's a half mile away and try and fill the tank back up that energy is a huge multiplier of work because it doesn't take hardly any money at all to get your car moving from zero to 50 it takes a little press of your foot down onto the floor and you're going we take that for granted but that energy piece is connected to the work piece and the work piece is what makes money worth something so if you have a society run on slavery or you have a society like communism which communism doesn't allow personal property the government owns everything and even in some socialist countries the government owns almost everything what happens is the government is in charge of divvying out the work but also dictating who gets any benefit out of it as a result those governments number one run really slowly they don't have any incentive to get better and better or improve it because the quality of your life doesn't change the harder you work in a communist world you can bust your butt in fact if you're not working hard enough they'll come in and probably chastise you or throw you in jail for it but you don't get ahead working in a society where you're a slave or you're in a totalitarian dictatorship or a communist society you just don't because they don't value your work or you don't get the value of your work they get the value of your work so those societies are really kind of a fallacy it sounds like a great workers paradise where everybody's equal everybody gets paid the same I beg to differ I've been to communist countries I've been behind the iron curtain in a communist country and I can tell you there are some really really poor people and that's most people a really tiny small middle class and they're scared to death that whatever they have is gonna be taken away at any time and then a very small upper class that pretty much lives the way a good portion of the people in this country are able to live today because we have the kind of economy that's based on work ethic turning that work into money and using energy to multiply that work effort to greater and greater things like aviation and computers and things like that so you have to always think back that work and money are the equalizers money is not just some mathematical formula it's not some abstract thing where you can just change the digits around or put a new logarithm into your computer and the thing changes into something and creates more money from no money there's no Rube Goldberg in the economic system you work harder, you invest well you make smart decisions sure you can move up but it's not just a paper transaction or a mathematic transaction or a logarithm transaction money and work are intrinsically tied that's what work is energy is a big multiplier of work so let's take that in today's world in today's world what makes our whole world not just the US but in great parts of the US but what makes our whole world so remarkable is fossil fuels and the reason is because fossil fuels contain a huge amount of concentrated energy fossil fuels contrary to their popular name or belief they're not made from dinosaurs it's made from vegetable material trees, plants, bushes, algae all kinds of vegetation that have been compressed underground over years and years with heat and pressure and transformed into highly concentrated energy in the form of oil and natural gas now when we say we're on a fossil fuel society we're not making oil oil companies do not make oil oil companies find deposits of oil and suck the oil out of the ground and collect the natural gas coming out of the ground they used to just throw the natural gas away it was like a waste product now they actually keep that because they understand it has energy in it too and they're being more efficient by using natural gas as also a source of energy, not just oil but I asked a couple of my friends who are really good on international energy and I said, do you agree with me that energy is a work multiplier? they said yes and would you agree with me that energy as a multiplier can be multiplied using the amount of work you put with the energy like you could take the energy and put it into an engine or a turbine or a boiler or something and make a lot more production and a lot more work by adding that energy and they said yes and I said, what is a barrel of oil really worth in dollars for energy? I had two guys I asked a question to they both gave me a different answer but I was impressed one said $10,000 of barrel and the other said $12,000 of barrel if not more and then when I told the first guy about the second guy's answer he said, I'd agree it could be more bottom line is we're paying and we're squawking about $100 of barrel oil right now which is probably gonna go even higher because we think that it's causing gas to cost too much the reality is that the supply of oil seemed limitless 50 or 60 years ago or 100 years ago even and therefore oil's always been cheap because all we did was suck it out of the ground and refine it in refinery and stick it in your tank and boom, you got cheap gas but over time, finding oil and refining oil with higher standards against pollution and stuff has become more and more expensive and the amount of oil has actually gotten quality oil has gotten harder and harder to find so despite of your picture of climate change and killing fossil fuel and everything the bottom line is whether you like it or not whether you agree with climate change or not we're on the downhill slope of oil we're on the downhill side of the hill that is giving us that energy work money multiplier that energy is slowly tapering off and we have to face the fact that we have to modify our entire society and make some radical changes which are not gonna be inexpensive, not gonna be free solar panels are not free the sunlight may be free but the solar panels aren't the wind turbines aren't the construction to build more hydroelectric powers not even the construction to build nuclear power if we decide to go that route again is not cheap we have to build all that production back in and it's gonna cost a lot of money but the bottom line is to just replace fossil fuels which are already on the downhill slope is gonna be a challenge for the whole world because as much as everybody's been squawking about greenhouse gases for the last 10 years the demand for oil and fossil fuel products has gone up it's gone up to the tune of probably 2 million barrels of oil a day and right now when you do the math on who's producing oil and I've done this with Dan going on the show who's producing oil still, what their max limit is what their production capability is what their future reserves are we're on a downhill slope and it's gonna keep going down no matter who says what and who zooms whom as we used to say not referring to this broadcast but who's BSing who you can talk about your energy policy all you want but it's just like saying that money is just digits and just information no you can't BS your way through energy policy you just can't do it energy policy is tied to a real commodity and that's oil, natural gas and electricity so as we go forward from here on and we work towards a greener planet, carbon free planet we have to start managing energy in such a way that we limit our use of fossil fuels we start doing efficiency first of all in fact if you look the state of Hawaii's energy plan for 2045 the very first thing it says is the first goal is to reduce energy consumption through efficiency using using CDLs for example compact fluorescent light bulbs and things like that seem like a good idea before but using newer technology and LED type lighting is much cleaner and much better and much cheaper we have to start looking for those golden nuggets to become more efficient there's nothing that says you can't have your house running on DC lighting and AC for your refrigerator your computer runs on DC, your cell phone runs on DC everything that we use today almost even your TV I think converts AC power to DC to run we could start converting our houses to run on DC from our solar panels and not have to be converting it and stuff and then the stuff that has big power requirements like your dishwasher, your range, your washer dryer, your refrigerator maybe those things would still be AC but there's new technologies coming out nowadays that help us become more efficient and what we have to start doing is marrying up the advances we have from technology that help us to multiply the dollar multiply the work to equal the number of dollars we're spending today on fossil fuel we have to find technologies to take our work multiply it to get us where we're going and we have to start shrinking the amount we're counting on fossil fuel because we're counting on it way too much to be a dollar multiplier so I hope that makes a good picture for you and I hope that we start to as citizens as people who vote for folks in government I hope that will take the active role that I think people are starting to feel they need to take a more active role in government whether it's a school board or whether it's doing things that your public utilities commission or testifying at your legislature I think people need to take their own personal energy and start getting more involved in what's going on in their legislature, in their community and with energy and if you wanna really make a difference start making personal changes in your personal life your personal habits to bring the cost of energy the I would say the efficiency of the energy that we have using it more wisely to try and decrease that demand on energy and on the same side we go on the renewable energy side and become more and more creative about where we get our renewable energy from not just solar, not just wind we start looking at geothermal we start looking at ocean thermal we start looking at ocean current we start looking at other things one to tell you how fast breaking some of this is here in Hawaii we do have geothermal on the big island we have it in a company called Pune Geothermal Ventures and they produce roughly 20 to 30% of the power on the big island and it's really kind of an intriguing pretty clean, very reliable firm power we talk about but there's a lot of community pushback on geothermal because of the perceived dangers and pollution problems that could come from using that technology but that technology at Pune Geothermal is relatively old and because of some of the new technologies that came about believe it or not from drilling for fracking oil that we have better technologies for drilling and what scientists have found is that in the aviation what we call the lapse rate that in aviation the higher you go in altitude the colder it gets, everybody knows that but there's a standard rate for that it's two degrees Celsius per thousand feet so every two, every thousand feet you go up it drops two degrees so by the time you get up to 30,000 feet you're sub freezing well when you start going below the surface it's the same thing for every I mean, it's my number here for every 2,000 feet you go down there's a 30 degrees rise in temperature so 2,000, 4,000, 6,000 feet a mile you go down to 12 to 20,000 feet and you're starting to hit rock anywhere in the planet hot enough to give you geothermal power you don't have to be over a lava hotspot like we are in Hawaii you can literally with the new drilling technologies you can go all the way down to hotspots and do geothermal much smaller footprint than you use in solar much less obtrusive than wind gives you good firm power 24 hours a day clean, non-polluting it has a lot of positives we need to start thinking about that so I hope that's a good primer for people to understand where energy fits into this currency picture the where at right now and how our gas prices are going up why and understand that money is a function of work and energy is a multiplier of work so the better you handle your energy the more productive you are the more work gets done the better your economy expands and the better the quality of life is for everybody that lives in that economy as long as the government handles it correctly so requires every citizen to be a part of the government and all our government officials to do the right thing that's going to do it for this week's Stand Energy Man a little bit different hope you liked it talk to you later next week, Allah 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 you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com Mahalo