 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here, coming to you live from Honolulu, Hawaii through the studios of Think Tech, Hawaii, which is out here to create public awareness of all things political. The show right before me is going after the president, I'm just going after energy, hydrogen in particular. Anyway, last week, two weeks ago, I was on the mainland for the National Merit Review with the Department of Energy, looking at hydrogen, talking to all the 20-pound, 30-pound brains that do nothing but work on hydrogen, and it was a great, great event thanks to the folks at the Department of Energy. And last Friday, we were able to do a moonshot from the island of Kauai, talking to Brad over at KIUC, the co-op over there. And I have to admit, I was really blown away with his depth of knowledge of what he does and my ignorance of not getting over there to talk to him much sooner. So thanks for Mr. Rockwell's time, and this week we have a great show, so I don't want to pick up too much more time, but thanks to everybody who helped with the Kauai trip last week, up at Co-K for the OC-16 shooting with the chief and everybody at the Radar site and the folks at KIUC. Today's guest comes to us long distance from the normally only two-week-long summers of Minnesota. He's a professor that I got introduced to by way of Richard Ha in the Big Island. He's a businessman and farmer there. And the folks that we're interviewing, or the gentlemen we're interviewing today is Professor Nate Huggins, and he's a professor. And Nate, I'm going to introduce you and bring you in now. I never even asked what your specialty was. What do you teach over there in Minnesota primarily? Aloha, Stan. I teach a class called Reality 101, a survey of the human predicament. And it's a generalist class. We look at anthropology, brain and behavior, energy, financial systems, climate change, mass extinction, and look at possible and likely human futures. Terrific. I was wondering why your videos were so fascinating, because I couldn't tell whether you were a sociology professor, or part history, part economics, part, so thanks for clarifying that. You did some great videos. I've talked to them on at least three or four of my shows already. But now I finally got you here in almost in the flesh, at least via the internet. And so tell us a little bit about how you got started and what you're doing right now, and how you end up in Minnesota with your farm and everything. Well, I studied finance at the University of Chicago. I worked on Wall Street 20 years ago. And I started to read books about oil, oil depletion, ecology, the fact that a lot of our prices don't include the negative impacts of what we consume. And I got so fascinated in it, I gave my clients their money back, and I went and got my PhD in natural resources. And since then, I've been learning not only about energy, but about the whole situation of humans, our impact on the planet, what we have, what we need, what's possible in the future. And I really do think it comes a lot to the human brain, which we're kind of unaware of. We spend a lot of time and resources pursuing energy intensive activities when we don't really need to use that much energy. And then the other thing is that our culture, our species, is energy blind. We don't appreciate and understand how central energy is to our lifestyles and our future. That's really fascinating. I'm actually about a year and a half ago, I did one show dedicated to what I called critical analysis. Because I feel like that's almost a lost art today. I don't even know, other than probably your courses, how many people are actually taught how to really think, cradle to grave analysis of anything we're doing. Because it just seems like it doesn't exist in our society. We do everything based on price point or what's cheapest now or what's fastest or who's got the flashiest marketing skills and things like that. And critical analysis, whether it's who are electing for elected officials or what we're buying at the grocery store, is just out the window. Yes, and I would argue that a lot of our political problems in our country and in the world right now are a long-term result of education and not learning about ecology and energy and kind of the fundamental principles of what makes the world go round. Instead, we've trained reductionists to be experts on a certain aspect that leads to a technology, a profitable thing, where we don't see the forest for the trees. And I think and hope that's changing. Well, you started off with a small short series of videos that talked about how the brain makes decisions and what really stuck out in that series. And maybe it wasn't a key point in your intent, but was the fact of what I like to call keeping up with the Joneses, where if you had a $400,000 house and all your neighbors had $300,000 houses, you'd be really happy. But if you had a $400,000 house and everybody else had a half-million-dollar houses, you'd be miserable and you're still living in the same darned house. Did you kind of take that notion and expand it into your bigger picture? Yeah, that's actually at the core of the issue of sustainability on the planet right now because our brains as biological products of evolution care about relative fitness or relative comparisons. We want to be at least as respected and successful as our neighbors, so we care about relative wealth more than we care about absolute wealth. Most Americans today from an energy perspective are richer than Cleopatra or Kings and Queens from 500 years ago in the terms of what we consume. But half of us are more miserable because we're comparing ourselves to millionaires or people that have a lot of money in the bank and so we feel like we don't have enough even though on an absolute basis, we do. And so I think with Madison Avenue and marketing, we get told, you're not good enough, you suck, but if you buy this product, you'll be better. And so our cultural scorecard is pecuniary consumption and cars and houses and jewelry and things like that when in our ancestral environment, it was who was the better storyteller or the provider for our tribe or intelligence or kindness and things like that. So we're really competing for things that are unsustainable and in many cases unnecessary. The average American consumes around 20 times the resources as the average person in say the Philippines, but we're equally as happy. And why is that? Because there's a lot of poor people in Philippines but they're surrounded by other poor people. And so they don't feel this dislocation whereas in America, we have a very small percentage of Uber rich and then a few other moderately rich people and 60 to 70% of society has virtually nothing. And so that we're miserable. And I don't think that has to be that way forever but right now it's a real disconnect in global culture. And recently there's been some talk about of setting fixed prices on credit cards and things to help people get back in control of their financial lives. And there's people on both sides talking about that but basically it sounds like that credit card debt is more related to your basic principle that we're trying to keep up with the guy next to us or get that much ahead. You say that's pretty good. Actually credit, I mean, there's a deeper story stand. There's no way we're gonna fill that all in in 30 minutes but credit cards, our nations are running on credit cards right now. The world economic, the main nations in the world have 350% debt to GDP. And since I've been alive we've grown our debt more every year than we've grown the size of our economies. And that is patently unsustainable. The reason we do that is because we're a biological species that prefers, that really focuses on the present versus the future. So allowing spending money on credit cards as an individual or as a country allows us to consume resources today that normally we wouldn't be able to we would have to wait for the future. And this is adding to our sustainability crisis. Right, well before we get tracked too far off into just brain power and credit cards you came up with a phrase that I really thought was captured a really important part of my thought process which was energy blindness. Could you kind of give us an idea of what you was running through your head as you came up with this notion? I know we've already kind of talked about some of the aspects but give us a big picture of energy blindness. Well, people know energy is important. They look at their kilowatt hour bill at the end of the month or when they go to the gas station they look at how much money they pay for gasoline to fill up their tank but energy is ubiquitous in what it provides for us. One barrel of oil has 5.7 million BTUs of energy and if you translate that into work it's 1700 kilowatt hours of work. You or I stand doing yard work or physical labor would do 0.6 kilowatt hours in one day. So one barrel of oil replaces four and a half years of my labor and we pay $60 for it. So in fact, we're blind to that. Our culture just looks at the dollar cost of energy and we forget that mother nature sequestered and condensed and refined this fossil carbon over hundreds of millions of years we're pulling it out 10 million times faster than it can be replaced and we're not paying for the creation of it nor are we paying for the pollution from it. We're only paying for the extraction costs. So in effect, if you add up all the coal oil and natural gas that the global economy uses per year it's 500 billion workers that we have helping the 5 billion or so human workers and so we're energy blind. We just pay the dollar cost for that and since it's so cheap it ripples through our economy and we're consuming 100 times more energy than our bodies need in the way of calories in our daily American lives as an average US citizen. You mentioned that folks look at their electric bill and get a feel for their costs but I'm willing to bet that most people only look at the dollars and cents on their electric bill and they don't look at the kilowatt hours because I look at the kilowatt hours and I know exactly the range of kilowatt hours my house does on an average day. It's between 20 and 22 kilowatt hours and you're telling me a barrel oil is 1700 and something kilowatt hours? Yes. Oh, my house. You're energy blind. So if energy goes up 500% in price you can bet people would take a look at their kilowatt hour usage and they would turn things off but since you and I have been alive in this very unique period of human history energy has almost been too cheap to meter and so we don't think about it much. We leave the lights on when we leave the room we leave the air conditioner on. So we haven't appreciated pretty much the magic that it has allowed us and now it's getting more costly. It's depleting. There's plenty of fossil energy left but it's more costly and that cost will ripple through our system and potentially not allow for continued economic growth and it's costly in environmental terms. You live in Hawaii so you're aware of the ocean acidification, the reduced ocean oxygen some of the climate change forecast for the future. So there's a problem with our current energy trajectory. Yeah and I don't think people realize the magnitude. I gave a briefing to some folks about two weeks ago and I said we're burning fossil fuel like it was monopoly money because we really don't value the oil and there's other products we make from oil just like there's other products who make from lithium in our batteries that would make grease and lubricants and other things that our batteries only currently take up about 30 or 40% of the lithium that we harvest and the rest is used for other products but oil is used in plastics and polymers and all kinds of things that are durable goods things that we are gonna keep for a long time and keep using rather than burning it in our engines and turning carbon dioxide loose in the environment. It's amazing like I say I've had these feelings for a long time about energy and how to deal with it but your videos really brought it into clear focus. So one of the things I really liked in one of your videos was your picture with your horse and your truck and your other stuff there and their percentages. Can you talk a little bit about that image? Yeah, so I'm 250 pounds in reasonably good shape. I can do the work of maybe one seventh of a horse. My horse can do the work of one horse. My car can do the work of 250 horses. Those airliners that are coming into Oahu every day they do the work of 100,000 horses and they do that for very, very cheap amounts. So we are our physical labor of all human ancestors with the exception of the last four or five we're done with muscles of animals and humans. And now it's these fossil carbon helpers that are doing most of our tasks. All right, we're gonna take a quick break here and I'm gonna come back to that thought especially based around the airliners and we're gonna switch back maybe a little bit from energy back into economics just for a short bit. So we're gonna take a quick break here and we'll be back with a professor in about 60 seconds. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m., aloha. Hey, aloha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We wanna teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because security matters, aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour with Professor Nate Higgins from Minnesota, Minnesota. That's up north near Canada for those of you that haven't been studying your maps lately, it gets cold there in the winter time. They have about two weeks this summer so he's getting ready to enjoy both weeks here pretty quick. And we really appreciate having you on the show there, Nate. You're just, your videos are awesome. And you talked a little bit about airlines and how much an airplane uses in terms of horsepower and energy. You know, in Hawaii, our economy used to be based on sugarcane pineapple, so agriculture, and then the military and then tourism. Well, agriculture's all but dead in Hawaii and we import virtually all of our fuel, all of our food. The military and tourism are the two other big legs to our economy. And the military, of course, it's a factor of whatever the government wants to afford, they could pull military out of here, at least a good chunk of it pretty easily with the stroke of a pen. And tourism is just a fuel price or a crisis away from killing us. You know, I mean, on 9-11, where we didn't even have any impact to the energy, a lot of the tourists from other countries didn't want to come to Hawaii because they didn't want to feel like during a grieving period to come and visit Hawaii and our economy just took a main beating. So when we put Hawaii's economy in that kind of perspective, so heavily reliant on tourism and those jet airliners and those cruise ships coming in here and doing what they do. Can you kind of give us, with an economic background, the kind of impact that just a shift in oil prices back to $100 a barrel or $130 a barrel or $150 a barrel, give us an impression of how you think that would impact Hawaii's economy? Well, you are at the end of supply chains and so Hawaii is both more susceptible to global systemic risks. That's the bad news. The good news is you're psychologically aware of that so that you can more so than Texas or California do things ahead of time to prepare for these risks. You also have the spirit of Aloha where people are just a little bit less materialistic and less consumptive and frenetic as people on the mainland. And so I think you actually can pursue cultural change there easier than places on the mainland. But I have to say $100, $150 oil, I'm not so sure we're gonna get there again because of the global credit limitations, but there's any number of scenarios right now that will cause a 2008 repeat, but 2008 we bootstrapped ourselves and used quantitative easing and other financial methods to keep growing for a while. The next time that happens might not be so easy to continue growth. So not only are you susceptible to higher energy costs but you're susceptible to a global economy. And if there's a global recession or depression, a lot of those airliners are gonna stop coming into Hawaii. So how do you practice resilience and think ahead of how you might change things in Hawaii ahead of time? And at least as an individual you can understand how these risks relate, but politicians don't know what to do with this. So they're not gonna really do anything until there's a crisis and we see the whites of the eyes of whatever's facing us. So we have to use intelligent foresight and imagine scenarios where maybe those planes stop coming into Oahu or maybe there's a 50% drop. What does the food and energy situation look like? And I have no idea what's gonna happen in the next five years. But the next 10 or 20 years it's pretty clear that oil is gonna get significantly more expensive and there are large risks to global growth continuing. So we might have what I refer to as a great simplification, which is maybe a 30% smaller economy in the next 20 years. And that has massive implications for Hawaii, but also massive opportunities for doing things differently, living with less imported things, living with less overall energy throughput, taking advantage of your indigenous resources, geothermal, the great solar potential there, eliminating your total dependence on supply chains, especially oil and maybe being an example for other places in the world to really do things differently, more sustainably. You have a low population density, which means that there are lower barriers to political change. So I think you just need to get people working and talking about these things. And I agree with everything you said there. And do you get to Hawaii very often? I may be coming to do a workshop on this exact issue in September or October. They're trying to set it up. That'd be great. I'd like to be part of that if you get over here, but you're exactly right. We have, I would say as a conservative estimate, maybe eight times the amount of energy that we need in renewable sources over here between geothermal and particular geothermal. Hydroelectric, believe it or not, we have a lot of in-stream hydroelectric from our old sugar flumes, where people are putting, you know, megawatt or partial megawatt scale generators in those old flumes and generating electricity. We've got wind, we've got solar. In some of our neighbor islands, we have the landmass that can support maybe solar. Here on the, what we have as a problem is here on Oahu where most of our population is centered, like a good, I want to say 70% of the population is here on Oahu, if not more, but a lot of our renewable energy resources are on the neighbor islands. We've thought about putting undersea cables. We've thought about all kinds of ways to bring energy to this island for more than more renewable sources are in the neighbor islands. One of the things that I'm trying to get some attention on is a modern geothermal system on the big island that's scaled big enough to make hydrogen and or liquid hydrogen and use it as a energy storage device for fuel cells on this island that would be in microgrids rather than in a single grid. And therein lies the problem because getting a public utility to change their model of how their grid looks to what I'm imagining with microgrids and dispatchable power and things like that, it's not even on their, it's not on their radar. It's just not there. I think what you have to do is come up with scenarios and don't say this is the scenario, but this is one scenario and under different things in the future, maybe this is what makes the most sense for Hawaii. And if you think about renewable energies, what is the single biggest use of energy on Hawaii right now? Transportation. It's actually jet fuel, the single biggest category. Exactly. And that renewable energy that you're talking about aren't gonna help with that. So you have to think 10, 20, 30 years in the future or even longer, in 2050 are all those jetliners gonna be coming in from around the world to support the Hawaiian economy that is today. And at some point between now and then, I think the answer to that is no, or at least significantly smaller. So what is the economy gonna be based around and you could have a lot of happiness and wellbeing? My opinion is that when people start to understand the energy, money, growth situation, there's gonna be a lot of people that leave Hawaii for the mainland. And there's actually also gonna be a lot of people from the mainland that wanna come to Hawaii. They're gonna move to Hawaii because of its remoteness, because of the spirit of the loa, because of the beautiful, amazing place you have there. But you need to start crafting what that looks like now instead of waking up one morning to some international crisis and now what are we gonna do because a few of the doors are closed that we could have done in 2019 or 2020 or 2023? You've already hit the nail on the head. We're already experiencing that micro Exodus and micro influx happening already. And here's the one thing, because I agree with you, I'm an aviator, a retired aviator. And I can tell you that people don't understand that here in Hawaii, those jet airliners that come in here have to buy their fuel here because they can't afford to be carrying twice the fuel that they need to get a round trip out of. So they're gonna have to buy aviation fuel here and the aviation world is not gonna change engines and fuels in the next five years. That's like 15, 20 years down the road at the best. And so we're gonna have to at some point be able to make some kind of aviation fuel either from gasification or from biodigesters. And that means our agriculture, if we could sustain ourselves with our own agriculture and use the waste products from the agriculture to make biodiesels and aviation fuel, you're right. The transportation, we include aviation and transportation fuel and that would make a huge, huge impact. So all of these things are possible right now with renewable energy, we can over build solar and wind and turn the excess via electrolysis into methanol or methane or all these heavy fuels. The problem is, is it's way more costly than currently buying it via gasoline. So a lot of the renewable plans in the future are totally technologically viable, but they're gonna cost multiples of what we currently have. And that means slower economic growth and less consumption on average for the average person. But if we prepare for that and accept it and change our mindsets, it can actually be a real opportunity. So I think we have to pair the technology that you're talking about with the change in the mindset of how we consume energy. Well, Doc, I tell you what, you really kind of wrapped it up into a nice tight package that I think we need to start really exposing our leadership and our communities to looking for solutions ahead of time. And I'm looking forward to your trip out here in September. And so, believe it or not, we've hit our 30 minutes on the show. It goes by really fast, but I'm looking forward to seeing you when you come out. And I hope we can have you on the show again in the future. Is that sound like a plan? Okay, I'd be happy to. Nice to see you, Stan Mahalo. Okay, Aloha Nate and thanks for joining us. And until next week, this is Stan the Energy Man signing off.