About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of Climate Change Recalculated — Saul Griffith from The Long Now Foundation, published October 16, 2026. The transcript contains 16,985 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"For It TV: The World is Thinking Good evening. How are we for signal? We're good. I'm Stuart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. You may wonder what this Twitter thing is about. This data, it turns out, is helpful for funders of Long Now and of these talks. They get to find out what the sort of..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: For It TV: The World is Thinking
[00:00:30] Speaker 2: Good evening. How are we for signal? We're good. I'm Stuart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. You may wonder what this Twitter thing is about. This data, it turns out, is helpful for funders of Long Now and of these talks. They get to find out what the sort of watershed of people that feeds into this event is. How many people have been to one of these before? How many have not been to one of these before? That's interesting. The drill on these things is, this is for questions on the back. Put your name on it and look for somebody in a yellow hat like mine. Pass it over to them and comes up at the front. Kevin Kelly combs through for the stuff that will really embarrass the speaker. And we'll hit him with it. Another thing we may do with this data is as we move from venue to venue, we find out who's well served by public transit, things like that. We'd like eventually to get a bigger place, obviously. And the place that we can count on being all the time. So this data helps us move in the direction of being able to handle more of an audience with more regularity and more access for everybody. So thanks for your help on that. I should say something about the next speaker, since not everybody knows who Dmitry Orlov is. He's a sketch. He's a close student of how collapse went forward in the Soviet Union 20 years ago. And notices interesting parallels going on in the U.S. You always start with a financial collapse. Climate change may figure into it by the time these things play out. And one of his points is that the Soviet Union, screwed up as it is, was actually better at collapse probably than we are. So we can learn some things from their experience and move right on through the collapse into rebirth. This is the long-term thinking we try to encourage in this organization. Saul Griffith also is talking about long-term stuff. The weird thing about climate is that its lag times and its lead times are so much longer than a quarterly report or an election cycle or a news cycle that we're still getting used to thinking in terms of what one has to do to make something happen 40 years from now. And failing to do that, are you willing to live with the consequences 40, 30, 20, 10 years from now? Now, Saul is a MacArthur Fellow. He got named last year, 2007, last year in N1. And the MacArthur Fellows, it's a lot of money, which is great. It's a lot of attention, which is useful because it gets usually young, creative people, a bigger audience and a little more focus. And also they connect with each other. And so the Fellows are, in a sense, a lifetime club of extremely creative people who infect and infest each other.
[00:03:59] Speaker ?: That's what Saul Griffith is here for tonight. Here he is. Thank you, Stuart. So I'm super excited because this is the first time I've ever sold out a house, I think.
[00:04:00] Speaker 2: So I hope they indeed. So I hope they indeed. And I hope that they do.
[00:04:04] Speaker ?: Thank you.
[00:04:05] Speaker 2: Thank you, Stuart. So I'm super excited because this is the first time I've ever sold out a house, I think.
[00:04:09] Speaker ?: So I hope they indeed.
[00:04:10] Speaker 1: And I hope desperately to neither infect nor infest you tonight. Climate change recalculated is the topic of my talk tonight.
[00:04:22] Speaker ?: Now, I'm not going to try and tell you that everyone's equations and all the science is wrong. And if you recalculate it, you're going to get a great result.
[00:04:22] Speaker 1: The recalculation I'm talking about today is the topic of my talk tonight. Now, I'm not going to try and tell you that everyone's equations and all the science is wrong. And if you recalculate it, you're going to get a great result. The recalculation I'm talking about is the topic of my talk tonight. And I'm not going to try and tell you that everyone's equations and all the science is wrong. And if you recalculate it, you're going to get a great result. So the recalculation I'm talking about is the type of recalculation that will help you answer questions of this kind. Do you prefer a glass of wine every evening or do you prefer to have an annual business trip? Would you prefer your taxes spent on schools or roads? Would you prefer a hot shower every day or would you like to eat meat at every evening meal? So they will turn out to be surprisingly relevant questions by the time we get to the end of the talk. So you've obviously heard about climate change. That's probably why you're here. You have heard about the concept of carbon footprints. You've certainly heard about energy independence and we'll hear more and more. But let's look at these things as though we are sort of reconciling the short term us, the us that are sitting here in the audience with the 10,000 future of us. So the 10,000 year of our children's children's children's children or something. Hopefully doing that, and so when the talk is called climate change recalculated, it should be maybe re-envisioned through a very personal view. Hopefully we will now answer two questions. How do your personal actions affect climate? And given that, can there actually be a global solution for climate change? Which is another way to say you're going to see a big pile of numbers to show you that climate change and energy issues are actually really an aesthetic issue. It's really a question of what is a quality life and what is the life that we all sort of want to live. So you're going to see two stories tonight, the global big picture. How much of all the different types of energy are there? How can you use them? Which ones are good? Which ones are not so good? But to set the context for that, and I used to just give the talk exclusively about that very big cold picture of the planet as a physicist would see it. And people would say that's a very cold picture that a physicist paints. And so I put myself in the picture, and so you'll learn more about my personal life today than you probably want to know. And why? It's because probably about 18 months ago, in order to sort of understand my context in this picture, I decided to ask this question. How much power do I use as an individual? So, super basic physics. Energy is measured in joules. If I was to lift an apple or this cup of water from the ground to the podium, that takes about one joule of energy. If power is the amount of energy you use in a period of time. So if I lift that, if it takes me one second, that's about one watt of power to lift that glass to the table. If I lift 40 apples per second from the ground to the table, you can imagine that's quite a lot of effort. That's about 40 watts. And that's about the amount of power that's driving the computer that's running this presentation. So these numbers are going to -- a lot of you probably know this, but for those who don't, I'm just trying to give you some intuition for the lots of numbers that are going to come afterwards. So here is sort of some ordered magnitude of the power of certain things. So the bioenergy that's running you while you're sitting there in your chair or if you're standing more likely is about 100 watts. It takes about a kilowatt or a thousand watts to boil the water in your kettle. It's about a megawatt. If you've ever seen a very large diesel locomotive or a very large wind turbine, that's about a megawatt or a million watts. It gets very hard to imagine power of larger sizes than that. So maybe you've stood at the edge of Hoover Dam and you've been awed by the power of the water. That's about a gigawatt. In fact, it's two gigawatts of power. And a terawatt, which is 10 to the 12 watts, was about how much power the world used in 1890. Hard to imagine a terawatt. It's also about how much power you need to launch the space shuttle, but that only lasts for a few seconds. So, if you're still struggling for an intuition about power, I'm going to tell you about my lifestyle. And you can imagine my lifestyle and consequently your own in terms of the number of light bulbs that are burning at any instant when you're talking. Normally, I stand in front of the slides here. I know I wasn't meant to walk out of the light. And I like to stand here and say that's not the glow of genius you see. That is the number of light bulbs that it takes to power in my lifestyle. So, why watts? So, why would you use power as a unit instead of energy? Because we hear about an energy problem. Why watts? Why watts? A couple of good things about watts. Watts allows you to compare activities you do on different timescales. So, you can compare the things that you do yearly, like flying a certain number of miles, to the things you do monthly, like paying your electricity bill, to things you do daily, like drink bottled water or energy drinks. And you can merely add all those things together once you've got a watt value for all of them, add them all up and that gives you the sort of power of your lifestyle. It also allows you to consider non-carbon based effects of using so much energy or so much power. And we'll get to that later in the talk. So, this was my, as you can see I own my own airline. This is the route map that will fly you. And in 2007 I flew 112,000 miles. If we assume that every one of those flights was on a fully loaded 747, operating as well as they can, that's about 18,000 watts of power. So, that's 8,000 watts all through the year is the equivalent of that. In terms of driving, I drove about 10,000 miles in 2007. That was the equivalent to driving around the US on this route. In reality, it was really just driving to the store or to work. The first 4,500 miles were driving from San Francisco to New York via Atlanta in a Honda Insight, a hybrid, 55 miles per gallon. Jumped in a cab from New York to Boston. Rented a car, you know, one of the big rental cars from Boston to Key West. Up to Jacksonville in a van, a diesel van. The only safe way, obviously, to go across the southwest is in a truck. And once I got to Tucson, I jumped in my vintage 1959 Volkswagen dune buggy and enjoyed Highway 1 all the way to San Francisco. So, 10,000 miles is less. The average American drives 15,000 miles a year. And in reality, the majority of the cars that I drove in are much more efficient than the average American car. I drove less miles in more efficient cars and it was still 1,500 watts. For the average American, that value could be 2,500 or 3,000 watts. I live in a small stand-alone house in the Mission. It's two bedrooms. I share it with my wife. My half of the gas bill and the electricity bill in watts is about 625 watts. You can see here that I can break out the hot shower I have every day, the gas that we use for cooking. I can sort of single out the electric toothbrush and the fridge and phone chargers using these sort of wall measuring devices for power. So, 625 watts there. It turns out at my office, nearly everyone runs four computers all the time, 24 hours a day, using 411 watts of electricity each. As you can see in the winter months, January, February, December, they all leave their windows open and use the gas to heat it. So, that was about, I think about 600 watts if you divided out the power consumption of my company and amortized it across everyone. I eat, hopefully you all do. Turns out that that also consumes a lot of power. These are, I'm using numbers here that are taken from reviewed peer journals, in fact, throughout the whole talk. If anyone wants the reference list, see me afterwards. I tend to believe actually that no one truly has a handle on the energy consumption for eating yet. But this would be the conservative estimate. In conservative in one serious way and then one funny way. The funny conservatism is that this assumes that I only drink two glasses of wine a night. And that that is equivalent to 76 watts of power. There's a funny guy, he's quite a serious guy actually. He runs a blog for wine aficionados called Dr. Vino. He did a study of the carbon footprint or the energy consumed to deliver wine anywhere in the world. Turns out if you live on this side of a line roughly between Chicago and New Orleans, it's more energetically favorable to drink wines from Sonoma County. And if you live in New York, you should drink French Bordeaux. So, more reasons to live in New York like you needed them. So anyway, maybe I shouldn't say that because I think the local wines are much better than that. I don't like the French. Anyway. So, obviously I eat more meat or I used to eat more meat and fish than I should. And that is the majority of the power consumed in my life. And everyone's probably aware that to create a pound of meat, you have to feed it a lot of grain. And so it's a pretty inefficient way to get your calories. Surprisingly though, the numbers for farming, transportation and fertilizers. So the transportation is moving that food around. The fertilizer is the energy in the synthetic fertilizers we use. That is really just assuming that those are the US-wide national numbers for those three figures. And I have just assumed a 1/300 millionth share. Very likely I have a probably a better diet, a more expensive diet than most people in the country. So this is almost certainly an underestimate. Speaking of taking 1/300 millionth shares, you also pay taxes. Your taxes get spent in all sorts of different ways. So a number of government departments publish their use of fuel and electricity. And if I took my 1/300 millionth share of the US military's aviation gas and diesel bill, it's about 94 watts. To keep all the silos warm, it's about 50 watts. The US government, just to run all of its buildings, is about 18 watts. And your 1/300 millionth share of NASA is 1 watt of power. Hopefully there's some NASA people here. I would happily give them more of my watts. Get us out of here. And then the US Postal Service uses a little. This does not take into account all of the energy that's embodied in the roads, in the actual steel that makes the tanks, et cetera, et cetera. And we'll come to that later. I also own an awful lot of stuff. You can now see everything that I own. And so this comes to the issue of embodied energy. So any item you own, it weighs something, and it's made out of a material. We know how much energy it takes to make those materials. If you do very conservative assumptions for all of your objects, you can figure out, and you know how long those objects last, you can figure out how much power they use. I own 11 bicycles, so that little bicycle thing is not one, but 11. But because my bicycles last 20 years and bicycles don't weigh very much, it's not a very big piece of my pie. You can see the cars, my wife's Honda Insight that I sort of share, and then a vintage Toyota pickup, and a very vintage Volkswagen, and that's the red section. Surprisingly, if you look at this and you think, okay, if I was to reduce the energy use of my life, where should it come from, you go after the big pieces, you find some interesting things. So very big objects that weigh a lot, even if they last a long time, use a lot of energy. So your house, your cars, your boats. The other unusual things for me are things that you get very regularly, like the newspaper, or detergent, or washing powder, or toothpaste. Because you just get them regularly, that's quite a large portion of your power. And then the green section at the bottom is my furniture. I think yellow is toothpaste, detergent, washing powder. The purple section, you should be thankful for, because that means I'm not standing before you naked. That's all my belts, and shoes, and clothes. And the purple section, I can't remember, I'm sorry. The difference between this slide and this slide is that Kirk Von Rohr, the designer who's hopefully sitting in the audience, did this slide, and I did this slide. Kirk is amazing. If you ever have an opportunity to work with Kirk Von Rohr, you should. So this is actually my entire life. So 17,000 watts. You'll notice later in the talk that actually my new estimate is 18,000 watts. It's because you keep forgetting that you do things that use power. That big, blue, green area in the top right-hand corner is your tax dollars at work. And part of that goes to all of the energy that you saw previously for the diesel, etc. But a lot of it is in unusual things like, for example, if you do conservative assumptions of how much energy is embodied in all of the road infrastructure in the United States, and you divide it by everyone, and you assume that all those roads last 40 years, the embodied energy in the road infrastructure is about 330 watts. So 2 or 3% of the average American's power consumption. Obviously, the biggest -- everything on the left-hand side is basically my flying. You can see my driving there. So I won't beat this to death, but you can -- it is, in fact, possible to understand how all your energy is used. So that was just me. This is me and my lady friend. You probably went to a high school with about 1,000 people the same way I did. You can imagine 1,000 people. You live in a city order of magnitude, a million people. You can sort of imagine a million people. You have no chance of imagining a billion people. And that's a really long and awkward segue into the demographics of energy use. So you would say, "Soul, you used 18,000 watts. Is that a lot or a little?" So you can actually use gross national data to get a per capita power consumption by country for every country in the world. The United States typically likes to think it's number one at anything, at everything. Unfortunately, it's number 10 behind Canada, which are Americans who live somewhere colder. I think I've managed to offend 90% of the audience in one sentence. I'm quite proud of that. And then there are some unusual things. You know, in Kuwait and Bahrain and Qatar, they basically burn oil to do air conditioning all the time. So those people are pretty high. Australia, that's my accent. That's in 15th place. So you can sort of get a sense of the numbers of different countries. And then the green line that I've put in there is the global average. 2200 watts is the per capita global average. We might come back to this slide later. But so the 18,000 watts I use really shocked me. I thought I'm a bicycle commuting guy who runs a renewable energy company in hippie San Francisco. I must be better than the average American. Turns out I use about twice as much power as the average American. So it was a little surprising. And doing this process is incredibly illuminating for you. You can look at the historical increase in power consumption by country. This is one of my graphics, not Kirk's. And I tried to put the maps in and I lost. This is interesting. I couldn't get all the little tiny ones. So America is increasing but not that rapidly compared to things like China and Russia, which you can see up there, and India. One of the most interesting things about this graphic is the big discontinuity in around 19, you know, just before 1990. And that is the Soviet Union changing into lots of smaller countries. So this is maybe only interesting politically. How did the world make all of its energy and use it grossly in 2007? These are International Energy Agency numbers. The majority of it was in producing electricity. You can break down how we made that electricity by fuel type. And you can see the scale there. Transportation was nearly all oil. That was in second place. You can sort of change these buckets around to mean different things. It sort of gives you a pretty good gross sense of how we use energy globally. So what's the result of using all of that energy? It has led to this problem. This graph has been made by people who can fill every audience that they speak to. And it's going up. So this is the CO2 concentration as measured in Mauna Loa, a mountaintop in Hawaii. And you can see the seasonal variation. And you can see that we're now -- So this data is -- I think the last data point I have is 2003. I think we're now up to about 387 parts per million. So you'd say, well, who put all that carbon into the atmosphere? I find this a particularly interesting aspect of the demographics. So you can sum the cumulative CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning for every country in the world for all those that have kept statistics. And it tells you this. Of all of the carbon that's in the atmosphere, 90 giga metric tons or billion metric tons of what was the United States. So, happily, they're at number one position again. In number two, it's Russia. Number three is China. Number four is Germany. You have to do some pretty weird political remapping of the data. Because Germany changed hands so many times in the 200-year data set. Et cetera, et cetera. But basically, the first six or seven countries there have produced 90 to 95% of the carbon in the atmosphere. So, in terms of who is responsible for solving this problem, the evidence is fairly damning. And I don't think it leaves you any choice but to figure out who should act first and fastest. So, let's think about all that carbon. This is a very, very cartoony look at where all the carbon in the world is. There is around about 700 giga tons of carbon in the atmosphere. We put another 8 giga tons of carbon. This is not carbon dioxide, but carbon. If you want carbon dioxide numbers, just multiply everything by 4.4. We put 8 billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere every year. The oceans reabsorb about 2 billion tons of that. We know how much carbon is in all the soils in the world. It's about 3,000 billion tons. There's 40,000 billion tons of carbon remaining in the oceans. Both of those numbers are reassuring because there's so much there, there's a chance that we can take some of the carbon in the atmosphere and actually drive it back there. The scariest number on this graph is that the amount of carbon left in vegetation that hasn't been burnt yet is equal to the amount in the atmosphere. So, we shouldn't burn too much of that. And the fact that there's still 1,600 giga tons of carbon in the ground. Of the carbon that we burn into the atmosphere, around about 55% seems to stay and linger there. And that's why you don't sort of get 8 minus 2 is 6 going into the atmosphere. You sort of end up sort of ratcheting up by a couple of billion tons per year right now. Those carbon flows have resulted in this problem. This is the best graphic I have seen to very visually represent the temperature rises globally over the past 25 years. So, for every large red dot, this is actually from the Stern report in England, every large red dot represents a 1 degree Celsius temperature raise per decade for the last 25 years. So, that's maybe 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit in the last quarter of a century for every large red dot you see there. So, be a little frightened. Alright, so here's my fantastic, great question that I think we all really need to answer for ourselves really quickly. What temperature are we going to choose as the target for humanity? This gets to the question of aesthetics. What type of life do we want to live on this planet that we have? So, this is a really terrible slide to try and give you a way that you might think about how to answer the question of what temperature. So, there are climate models into those climate models are based on physics, etc. We can actually, they're actually doing a very good job of predicting the sort of matching historical data and predicting future data. With those models, we can then come up with scenarios. You've heard of scenarios. Scenarios are where economists and scientists sit down and say if the world does this, how much carbon will that produce? You feed that back into the climate model and it tells you what the atmosphere might stabilize at. And after people have done scenario models, then there are impact studies. The impact studies are the climate science that gets all the headlines. They're the things that say at one and a half degrees Celsius, as you can see on the left axis here is temperature, we will lose 10% of all species. At two and a half degrees Celsius, we will lose 15 to 40% of all species. At three degrees above where we are in 1990 is the base level. At three degrees above, you'll get one to four billion people facing water shortages. You know, three and a half, it just gets worse and worse and worse. They are all the nightmare scenarios. So basically, you would probably like to say how far down, you know, how far up that list of nightmares do I wish to go before I've said enough? And a lot of the consensus has been around about two degrees should be enough. That will mean a hundred million refugees crossing borders. I think the State Department mobilizes troops if they hear of about 50 or 100,000 people crossing a border as refugees. So a hundred million means a lot of little spot wars around the world. Anyway, so two degrees, you know, the other problem with two degrees is it might reverse the thermohaline cycle, which will disrupt the ocean's cooling mechanisms and throw Europe into an ice age and everywhere else into hell. And so, okay, we'll stop painting the horror picture. Let's say two degrees is where you want to get. So the consensus is if we hit a target of 450 parts per million, you've got about a 30% chance of staying below two degrees. So you could argue that let's shoot for two degrees because 450 sounds achievable. And let's cross our fingers and hope that if we hit 450, it really is only two degrees. But to give you an idea of how long I've been giving this talk, which is about a year, the really encouraging thing to me is a year ago, it was scandalous to say 450 parts per million because everyone was like, that's impossible. That's too low. The consensus was 550. But fortunately, Jim Hansen has been out. Jim Hansen from NASA being America's leading climate scientist. And he has managed to get into the public dialogue that 350 parts per million is the correct answer. He has a much better way of arguing for 350 than I did in the last slide arguing for 450. He says humanity evolved in a world that had always less than 350. If you want to have any world that looks like what we evolved in, let's stay below that. I think that's probably pretty wise words. But let's go back to 450 and assume that's what we're going for. And we're going to accept two degree temperature rise. What do you have to do? One way of thinking about it is you've kind of got to balance this equation. You've got to have about the same amount of carbon going into the atmosphere every year as it's being sucked down into the oceans. This is still not a rosy picture because if you're putting that carbon in the oceans, you're increasing ocean acidity. And that has bad effects on fisheries and coral and all the rest. But still, cross your fingers, this is a better picture than just going off the charts. Again, this is a Kirk slide, this is a Sol slide. What I've just presented to you is not entirely an accurate picture because really with carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, it's about how much carbon we can burn anymore. This is actually a guy called Jeff Kumi who did this work in the 80s. This is 20 years old. This was a very simple model that is largely still valid for understanding what effects putting a billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere has on the parts per million concentration of CO2. So if you put a billion tons of carbon in the atmosphere, you get about 0.26 increase in the atmospheric concentration. Or if you make one terawatt of power for one year using coal, it increases the parts per million by 0.2. For oil, you can see at 0.15. And gas is better at fossil fuel again, about 0.11. So we're at about 380, 390. We've got about 60 parts per million to go to get to 450. That means you've got about 400 terawatt years of fossil fuel burning. 400 terawatt years is a measure of energy. It just sounds like power. What does that really mean? That means you've got about 40 years of 10 terawatts of fossil fuel burning or about 20 years at 20 terawatts to stop at 450. All right. So now I've sort of tried to ask a question. Okay, if we've got to get the carbon going into the atmosphere down to one or two gigatons, how much power could humanity get? Turns out, you know, we've chosen two degrees. We're shooting for 450. We understand where the equilibrium point will be. You'll only get two to three terawatts of power from carbon fuels to drive humanity if you want to stabilize at 450. If you want to stabilize at 350, it looks like zero. So it turns out that doesn't make a lot of difference. We'll get there anyway. So hopefully you're now asking yourself, well, how much power does humanity use? Turns out we use quite a lot. Some people say we use 18 terawatts. Because they count all of the plant matter in the world and its various uses agriculturally and in burning for cooking, etc. If you ask the International Energy Agency, they'll say it's 15 or 16 terawatts because they pretty much count the more traditional fossil fuel sources. I guess more recently traditional, to be correct. All right. How do we use it? This is how the world uses its power in terawatts. All right. So that's obviously not going to last 10,000 years. So I've told you we can only really burn two to three terawatts worth of fuel if we want to stabilize at 450 and have that sort of aesthetic of world. And this is telling us we want 16 terawatts to power humanity. So that's not going to last. What are the other options? So how can we produce this 16 terawatts of power for humanity without putting too much carbon into the atmosphere? This is the only slide that you need to remember in my talk. This tells you this is basically the playbook for humanity. So in the top there we have 85,000 terawatts of sun coming in. So that's the amount of power in solar energy that's hitting the surface of the earth at any instant. You've probably heard of numbers of 170,000 terawatts. That's what hits the outer atmosphere. That's the principal input. We also get a little bit of input from space in the form of tidal energy from the moon. So as the moon goes around the earth and makes the oceans lift up and lift down, that's tidal energy. The scary thing about that is if we built a 100% efficient tidal machine, it would... And we flattened all of the tides so they no longer went up and down. You'd only be powering one fifth of humanity today. So it's not going to scale. Similarly with coastal waves, if you put a 100% efficient wave collector around every coastline in the world, you're only going to get about one fifth or one sixth of humanity's power supply. So when someone submits you a business plan for wave power and says wave power will save the world, you say wave power might save some cities in Northern California and the Bay of Fundy, but it doesn't scale the humanity. One of the sources of power that does scale the humanity is wind power. That's the second largest after solar. There's 3,600 terawatts of wind. That's why I work on wind, specifically high-altitude wind. We need to figure out how to get at that. It turns out we know that the Hoover Dam is awfully powerful. You might ask how many Hoover Dams are out there. Well, if you collected every raindrop as it hit every continent on the world and you ran all of those droplets of water through the Hoover Dam, you'd only get 25 terawatts. If you waited for all of that water to get in the river, you only get 7 terawatts. Surprisingly, you know, we hear a lot about biofuels. What happens if we took all of the photosynthetic activity on the planet? That means every mangrove, every grassland, every tree, and we burn them every year and let them regrow, you only get about 90 terawatts. Of that 90, only 65 is on land. So to fully power humanity with biofuels, you'd have to take one quarter of all the photosynthetic activity on the planet. There's some heat in the ocean. You could extract ocean thermal gradient. You don't really want to screw with that as we're already screwing with the ocean currents. There's also geothermal. So geothermal is a hard one to express. The renewable flux of geothermal is about 32 terawatts. That's the natural rate that it comes out of the Earth. You could extract that faster, but you would be cooling the rocks faster than they replenish. So that gives you the picture. So what is the challenge? Humanity uses 16 terawatts. We can only get two, let's be generous, three terawatts of that from fossil fuels. We've got about one terawatt of nuclear today and about half a terawatt of hydro. So you get one and a half there. So the new clean energy we need to make in the next 25ish years is around 16 minus 3 plus 1.5. So we need about 11 and a half terawatts. Let's take a wild guess at how you might do that. And in order not to offend anyone in the audience, they'll just make it fairly equal. We'll do two terawatts of that with photovoltaics, two with solar thermal, two with wind, two with geothermal, three with nuclear, and we'll give half a terawatt to biofuels. So that would actually be your 11 and a half. That sounds easy. That sounds doable. There's probably a lot of engineers in the room. You just want to say, well, how fast do I have to build it? And what do I have to build? It's pretty easy to do two terawatts of photovoltaics in 25 years. And let's assume they're really good ones, 15% efficiency. That's about 100 square meters a second, every second for 25 years. So that's probably every five seconds you've got to cover this auditorium with solar cells. That gives you two terawatts out of your 11 and a half. For solar thermal, you can get 30% efficiency if they're well-sighted. That's where you take a mirror and you heat up a pool of water or preferably a molten salt. And then you use that heat to drive generators, steam or otherwise. You'd need to install 50 square meters of mirrors every second for the next 25 years. In terms of wind turbines, you'd need to build 12 3-megawatt wind turbines every hour. So a 3-megawatt wind turbine is the largest wind turbine you've ever seen. It's about the size of this whole building. It's about 100 meters in diameter. So basically the other way to express that is roughly one every five or six minutes. To get your three terawatts of nuclear power, this is to be ambivalent about the political aspects of that. You need to do one three-gigawatt nuclear plant every week for the next 25 years. I think the US has eight or ten slated for approval in the next decade. So we're just a little behind schedule. But I am sure we'll pick it up with the Obama administration. All right. Geothermal. Two terawatts of geothermal. That's basically 300 megawatt steam turbines every day for the next 25 years. So a 100 megawatt steam turbine is probably the size of this room, but it looks more like stainless steel. And this is not counting the holes that you have to drill to do that. All right. And just for kicks, let's get our last half terawatt of biofuels so we can fly jets. It's an Olympic swimming pool of genetically engineered algae that's four times more efficient than the best genetically engineered biofuel we have today. So we're being a little ambitious technologically, but assume we get that. And you need to fill one of those Olympic swimming pools every second for the next 25 years. Then someone will say, but cement's really bad because cement, we know that cement produces a lot of carbon. Let's not use that. So let's not make swimming pools. Why don't we just fill in a natural land formation? Turns out this would be Wyoming, I think. So I didn't mean to pick on any of the Wyoming people. Like I just as easily said, New Zealand. Yeah. All right. So then you'd say, okay, that's pretty scary. Those sound like really big numbers. Is that at all possible industrially? Or another way to phrase that is what should Detroit actually do? All right. Well, this is not really the Detroit question. This is, don't tell Coca-Cola, but this is the killer business plan for the 21st century. So, Americans drink 110 billion cans of soda every year. Aluminum cans. If you cut all of those aluminum cans in half, and you flatten them out, and you polish them nicely as aluminum can, and you made them into mirrors, that represents 200 gigawatts of solar thermal capacity every year. So, Coca-Cola is going to return to its original business plan of selling you really concentrated packets of sugar. Then they don't have to ship the aluminum around, and they're just going to take their reserve aluminum capacity, and in 10 years, Coke and Pepsi will make 2 terawatts of solar thermal. That's awesome. Problem solved. So, Nokia, again, I think when I first made this slide, Nokia, in fact, only made 9 phones every second. I think they got to 12. I suspect next year it will be not 12. Nokia, Intel, AMD, Apple, if you took all of them in their industrial plant, they can probably do, that's roughly the scale to do the sort of, the photovoltaics required. GM, yeah, slides are really out of date. GM used to make one car every two minutes. They used to make one transmission every one minute. General Motors and Ford together, you could argue, may be able to make one wind turbine every five minutes. So, it's not impossible. I think this is a good example. When we were retooling for World War II in the United States, they made 300,000 aircraft. I think they were making 1 or 2,000 a year up until 1939. And between 1939 and 1945, they made 300,000 aircraft. So, aircraft, it's roughly the size of a wind turbine, 300,000 wind turbines. That would be close to half of the American electricity grid. Okay. So, not impossible at all. But it's, you know, people say this is a Manhattan project, this is an Apollo project. Sorry, they're science projects. Fusion is a Manhattan project or an Apollo project, right? And we want fusion to come true. But the rest of this is more like retooling for World War II, except the Germans, the French, the British, the Americans, are all playing, and the Japanese are all playing on the same team. It's totally doable, but we have to think a little more like that. So, this is, okay, I've got you all depressed. This is a super optimistic slide, right? So, what does this tell you? In 1965, the planet was using, was able to generate 5 terawatts of power. In 2005, we were able to generate 15 terawatts. So, in 40 years, we installed 10 terawatts of generating capacity, right? 10, that's not much different to 11.5. There is precedent. It is industrially possible. So, there's a note for feeling optimistic. Okay, awesome. We can do this. But if you're thinking in the long now sense of the word, you might want to think ahead. Because what we're about to do is, in fact, and indeed pretty awesome. So, what might, what other things might you consider? And this returns to the question of, why would you measure things in watts instead of carbon? Because if you use watts, you can do things like figure out, you can translate into land area. So, how much of the planet are we going to use to build this engine to run us? So, for those particularly observant people in the audience, you've just noticed that I say that the incoming solar flux of the earth is 1270. That is wrong. I'll tell you in advance. It's 1366. It doesn't really matter. Anyway, that's about how much power comes in at the upper atmosphere. We lose some in the atmosphere due to reflection. Obviously, you lose 50% of it during day and night. You lose some with clouds and with weather. You lose some with geography and latitude. And globally, the average power density of the solar flux is 90 to 300 watts per square meter. And we have photovoltaics and we have solar thermal. And those can have technology efficiencies between 10 and 40%. It's unlikely that we're going to ever get any of those above 50%. So, this is a pretty good range. And if you take all of that and then you also compensate for the fact that you don't... When you lay solar cells down, you don't cover every square inch. You cover maybe 15% of the land. And with solar thermal, you really only cover 25% because you track. So, the actual solar energy influx to electrons gives you about 10 to 20 watts per square meter of land. We may do twice as well, but we won't do 10 times as well. So, keep that in your head, 10 to 20 watts per square meter. For wind turbines, 100 meter diameter wind turbine is 3 megawatts. There's a capacity factor because the wind doesn't blow all the time. That's typically 33%. So, a 3 megawatt wind turbine really gives you about a megawatt averaged out over the year. We space those wind turbines 10 diameters apart and 10 deep. Typically, sometimes they can be 3 by 8. So, if you take that megawatt that we get and the kilometer squared that we have, you get about 1 watt per square meter, maybe 2 watts per square meter of land use. Hydroelectricity. I didn't really know how to do this number, so I cheated. And I just said, "What's the area of Lake Mead, the feeder to the Hoover Dam?" It's 639 square kilometers. Hoover Dam's a couple of gigawatts. You get about 3 watts per square meter for hydroelectricity. That's a map of the Hoover Dam, it's not an internal organ. Just incidentally, biofuels. So, if you filled Lake Mead with 3% efficient bioengineered algae, and I mean filled it, so you could basically walk on this algal mat, it will still give you about 2 or 3 watts per square meter. So, here is Sol's map of the world. The land masses of the world are now square. What you can see here, this is actually every country in the world represented as area. So, the largest land area is in fact Russia. And, you know, so that's it. China is in second. Actually, I have to now recant that, because an angry Canadian, insulted by my first comment at the last time I gave this talk, said Canada is the second largest country in the world. Turns out that's true, but only just. Then, you know, you can see the top six countries. Russia, China, Canada, USA, Brazil, Australia. They're pretty big in terms of land area. So, I would like to invent a new country called Renewistan. Renewistan is 10 terawatts of renewable power, 2 terawatts of wind, 5 of solar, 1 of hydro, 2 of biofuels, and it's about this big. So, Renewistan, it turns out, is the seventh largest country in the world. So, what does this say to you? It says, we're engineering machines that are country-sized, as we endeavor into this clean energy future. And you want to probably be very careful. You want to use the most efficient technologies by land area. Because if you use 2% efficient solar cells instead of 15% efficient solar cells, that stripe becomes bigger than Russia, for example. So, choose carefully. There's another way of expressing that. So, this orange area here, this is the land area per person in the USA. This lighter orange is the land area per person globally. It's square 140 meters by 140 meters. For my personal power consumption, if I had those 15% solar cells, I need a 41 by 41 meter solar cell to run my personal life. That is a lot larger than the roof on my house. So, please install solar cells on the roof of your house. It's a great idea, but just don't stop. Right? Put them on your neighbor's house. Put them all over the place. Paint the streets with them. The average US citizen is this green one. And this is this sort of 15-ish meter on a side square. That is the land area required for the average global citizen. All right. So, you've got to choose carefully. You've got to act quickly. It is possible and you have to be a little wise and you have to think a couple of steps ahead or you can make mistakes in this challenge. All right. So, let's come back to putting ourselves into the picture. So, you now realize that the 18,000 watts or 17,000 watts in Saul Griffith's life looks a little extravagant because if everyone in the world went from 2,500 watts to 18,000 watts, suddenly we're not going to need to have just renew a stand. We're going to need to have six or seven renew a stands. All right. That's not going to scale. So, it's inevitable that China and India bring their power consumption per capita up and probably we shouldn't begrudge anyone in the less developed nations to do so. And that sort of means that we have to go down. This is what a lot of people talk about when they talk about efficiency. My personal pet favorite hate is people who stand up and say efficiency is the biggest energy source we know. Efficiency is not an energy source. Efficiency is using less energy. It's a lot more like abstinence than being an energy source. All right. All right. So, there's my old life. So, we remember my old life. You even know how many watts it takes for my underwear. This is my new life. So, I'm going to shoot to be roughly at the global average 2,291 watts. How would my life change to do that? All right. So, this is my new route map. My airline has got a sort of strictly changed thing. I now get to fly once per year to the East Coast, return. Once every three years, I get to fly to Australia to visit my parents. Once every five years, I get to go... Looks like I'm flying to France, but I think I want to go a little further and go to Italy. Once every ten years, I get to go to Hawaii to go surfing. That will still be 983 watts, grossly half of my power consumption. This is assuming, again, that I'm flying fully loaded 747s. I now get to drive quite a lot less. Six times a year, I get to drive to Sevastopol in a 55 mile per gallon Honda. Twice a month, I get to drive the same 55 mile per gallon car to Alameda, where I work. Both times, I'm going to be carpooling. Once a month, I'm carpooling in a van with four people to go visit, looks like Google. And then, twice a year, I get to take my dune buggy out to go surfing. Now, obviously, you know that I'm lying, because those of you who know me will know that I'll go to Sevastopol twice a year to see my in-laws and go surfing six times. So this is obviously a lot less driving than circumnavigating the country. I now call myself six-sevenths vegetarian. I can't kick the habit completely. So I try to eat very good meat once a week instead of bad meat all the time. Obviously, I'm lying when I tell you I'm going to only drink one glass of wine a night. So this might be the really hard thing to do. And the only value in my new lifestyle that went up is vegetable use. In terms of stuff, I just have to own less stuff and make it last ten times as long. Or sometimes I call this the Rolex and Montblanc pen approach to life. So that just made me sound like a pretentious wanker. I'm really not. I'm a deep green environmentalist. And what you want is when your child is born, or when you were born, to be issued with a Rolex and a Montblanc pen. And that's the only writing implement and the only timepiece you get for your whole life. So we solved just now for writing and time reading. But how about cell phones? So I think this is actually kind of a great challenge. How do you make the first company that makes a cell phone that will last a lifetime totally wins in my heart. That would be the most amazing for everyone in the audience who just got laid off. Please go and start a company to make a cell phone that lasts a hundred years. That would be the best thing you can do. All right. I'm not sure why that slides there. Oh, that was a point about... Oh, okay. Now this is every business model you need for the next century. Pick any piece of that pie. Do it with one tenth the amount of power. Or make something that will last ten times longer. And you've just done your bit to save the world. This is when people talk about the green economy. You know, a quarter of the energy we use is just in our crap. Just go after this. Just take any one of those things and make it a better product. And you're saving us. Ironically, we used to have drinks in the fridge at my energy company called Energy Drinks. They have a nutrition label that we're used to seeing. And ironically, we have a 2,000 calorie per day diet is what we aim for. If you weigh the plastic of the container of that material, just assume that the water in it and the sugar comes for free. But just the plastic in the bottle and the lid and the cellulose in the label, if you weigh those up and you figure out the embodied energy to make that and how much it would take to refrigerate it and transport to you. If you had a 2,000 watt lifestyle, drinking one of these per day would be 4.5% of your daily value. I think you would look at every product you ever consumed extremely differently if we had this labeling on all products. I'm sure you would choose a glass of wine each day rather than this I would. Alright, so it's all possible. And we have to think pretty radically different. And it's pretty obvious that we have to change our lifestyles. But we forgot a couple other things which is possibly the hardest part of this entire project is going to be to turn off the current carbon dioxide emitters. So historically when we figure out more efficient ways to do things, we just use more of it. So as we bring new power plants online that are renewable, the temptation is to leave the old ones running. You just can't do that. And the other very difficult thing to do is to stop deforestation. So deforestation produces 10 to 20% of the CO2 in the atmosphere. So you obviously have to bring a halt to that or the entire project just laid out is sort of lost. Oh, here's a super encouraging slide. This is one of the more optimistic ones. So this is a graph of the energy consumption of the US over the last century. And it turns out that we have a fantastic technology for lowering power consumption. And you can see the first experiment in that was the depression. Work to treat. Great during the oil crisis. Awesome during the recession. And then for the six months after September 11 when we didn't fly very much, we also did pretty well. So I'm really, really excited to see 2008 and 2009 energy consumption data because I'm a numbers nerd and to see how it fits on this map. So you can make light of this situation. The good side of a down economy is that we are using less energy. The bad side is, is we are tempted to invest less into renewable energies and the solutions that we need. Obviously, we should think carefully about our priorities. And then obviously, we also need to think about what happens when we come out of this economy, right? You don't want to go straight back to the old work. We should use this as the nucleating instance to figure out how to keep the trend going down. If we had the downward slope of the '80s recession or the '30s depression starting today, that would be roughly the type. And we just sustain that slope. That would get us to our target. But we need to figure out how to do that while improving quality of life. And that's to the aesthetic question and the Mont Blanc and Rolex question. So if you were living in this 2,255-watt world, you have to think pretty differently. The temptation is, I'll go and buy my 100-mile-per-gallon equivalent Tesla and it's all solved. It turns out, if you had a 100-mile-per-gallon car, you get to drive that for about 20 miles per day. And that would be 500 of your 2,250 watts. 20 miles per day is less than you are driving today. So the average US person is about 40 miles per day. So if you were driving half in a 100-mile-per-gallon car, it's still a quarter of your age use. So, you know, that makes me think twice about that. And is 100 miles per gallon really ambitious enough? This is the Citroën de Cheveau. The French president went to Boulanger, who was the designer for a Citroën, and said in 1932, can you design me a car that will carry four peasants to market, plus their eggs. It has to drive over an unplowed field. It has to do 60 kilometers an hour. And it should get, he expressed it, 3 liters per 100 kilometers. So Boulanger went away and in 1938 returned with this, the de Cheveau. And indeed, the de Cheveau originally shipped with an eight and a half horsepower motor and could get 75 miles per gallon. So is a 100 miles per gallon target 70 years after that really ambitious enough? No. Why was this car efficient? It was slow, and it was really, really lightweight. The seats were hammocks, it had a cloth roof, and it was dangerous. So, to that point, one of the best things we could do instantly to make a really big dent is to reduce the speed limit. And what would you reduce it to? 55 was one shot. Probably you want to go a lot further than 55. And it might sound shocking to reduce the speed limit. Just as a point of note, the average speed traveled in any city in the world of more than a million people in a commute is around, hovers between 9 and 12 miles per hour. I suspect if you slowed traffic down, you would increase the speed of commuting just because there would be less screw-ups. So, I had an intern this summer. I made him drive in circles on a runway, and he had to do 100 miles at every speed you saw here. Turns out... The funnier aspect of this story is it was three days, but he'd been there all summer and just wrote boring code all summer, and he was like a code-writing robot. And three days before the end of summer, I wanted this data point, and I went to him and said, "I'd really like you to do something that's a little ridiculous." And he says, "Well, I've been really hoping that I got to do something ridiculous. You don't want to go back to school without a stupid story." And I said, "I want you to drive in circles for three days." He says, "Awesome." And he says, "I learnt to drive stick last night." Which, this makes my wife is in the audience nervous because it's her car and it's stick. And anyway, so as he bunny-hopped out of the driveway... Yeah, so we had to remove the first few data points. Anyway, so the optimum speed to drive this particular car is about 30 miles per hour, and you get 85-ish miles per gallon. So I think lowering the speed limit, that's the point there. Or do this, even better do this. I think electric motor scooters, that's the other thing. If you're not making cell phones that last 100 years, please make electric motor scooters. All right, so you might ask me, "Okay, so for a year now you've known all this data, and you're trying to reduce the power consumption in your life. How did you do?" Well, I did about 17,000 or 18,000 watts of power in 2007. I think this year I will use about 12,000. And my life has only improved so far. So I'm eating less and definitely more healthfully. I'm exercising more, doing more commuting by bicycle. I'm spending more time with my family by sort of traveling less. Finding that living closer together with your friends and work people certainly helps. I'm doing a lot less business travel, which is great. Business travel actually sucks. Higher quality, better design products. It's a really nice filter on your purchasing consumer self to just say, "I'll only buy good things," because you can't afford many. And so that's totally working for me. Less junk in my house. The house is cleaner because there's less crap. And, you know, hopefully if we're all doing this, we're breathing cleaner air and drinking cleaner water. So I think there is a reasonable argument to say that we can have much higher quality lives while we sort of hit the goals we want here. The one thing I didn't mention here is I could have really reduced my power consumption for 2008 by another 3,000 or 4,000 watts if I stopped paying taxes. Now, who knows how well we, you know, the US government apportions the tax dollars, but I suspect if I were running the show, I wouldn't spend the power on behalf of the citizens it is now. And it's a fairly serious point that we actually should be lobbying government to use the power that it uses on our behalf a lot better than it actually does. And roughly, imagine what portion of your salary that you pay in taxes. That's grossly the portion of the energy that the government decides on your behalf. So, finish with the obligatory photo of the world. Oh, okay. No, that's for later. Alright, so that's it, and I guess there's going to be hard questions. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, actually, I've called you up here too soon. Shall I go away? Oh, you can stay around. So, everyone's probably wondering why on earth did Saul bring his IV drip? So, this is the illustrated point. A lot of the math that we put into making this presentation, there's a fantastic guy called Rafi Khourian and his crew at Synthesis Studios in Boston. They've turned that into a website called Watson, Watson.com. And you can go through and enter in your data. It's like a carbon calculator on steroids except it uses energy. And once you've figured out how much power you use, and I'm up to 18,000 watts, you can say, for example, visualize for me. You can do me versus light bulbs or how big is my personal wind turbine, how big is my solar panel. But I happen to like the one you versus oil. And if you look at my life of oil in pints per day, I'm about a 90 pints of oil per day person. So, this used to be a pint of oil. Imagine that is full. 90 pints a day basically means that I am using one of these every 15 minutes to support my life. All right? And so, the average American is using one of these every 20-something minutes to support their life. So, I think when you reduce it to these terms, you remove the invisibility of, you know, we don't typically see how energy is produced or used. But if you imagine it this way, you really get a visceral feeling for just how quickly your addiction is. I think the joke here is this is jammed and my arteries are finally clogged with oil. Anyway. So, Stuart. All right.
[01:01:34] Speaker 2: How's my sound? Good. Ping has a question. Who's Ping? Where's Ping? Waving back there. How would high-altitude wind, this is a chance for your plug, enhanced geothermal and nuclear measure up in your watts per square meter and where does it fit in? Renew a stand.
[01:01:57] Speaker 1: High-altitude wind will be a little higher power density than traditional wind, maybe as high as solar. So, I think you want to use that. When I made this presentation, I wanted to say we have to start today. So, I'm only using technologies that are ready to go. Hopefully, that's ready to go next year. In which case, you can add that to the list and I think we need to use every resource possible. Enhanced geothermal. It's hard to know how you measure enhanced geothermal in terms of land use because it's under land. So, maybe this is a great argument in favor of enhanced geothermal. I think there's a great argument in favor of all of them. Full tilt, let's go. But I'm not, I actually, if anyone in the audience who thinks more deeply about geothermal than I do, ha ha, then tell me how we convert that into a watts per square meter of land. And for nuclear, again, I don't, I'm not sure how you measure it in power density. I will use that as a segue and a distraction to tell you that I tried to buy a gas station in Los Angeles. You would ask me why. I think it was the CEO of Chevron used to give this example of how glorious fossil fuels were. And if you measure the power density of gasoline as it's coming out of the nozzle of the thing that goes into your car, it's astounding. It beats all renewables by a factor of a thousand or ten thousand or something. If you try and buy a gas station in Los Angeles when they're trying to sell it to you, they tell you how many gallons of gas it pumps per month. If you take that amount of energy and you divide it by the land area required for the gas station, not the nozzle, it's about the same as solar power. So, how you do the numbers and statistics can obviously change the way you think about it. So, not working for Chevron, let's be a little more fair with what the reference area is.
[01:03:55] Speaker 2: Here's a question from Paul Hawken. We'll pursue this. Paul, where are you?
[01:04:00] Speaker ?: Greetings.
[01:04:01] Speaker 2: Are there any Promethean technologies that you favor or are interested in? Do you think they will be deployed? This again is looking at technologies coming at us. Okay.
[01:04:12] Speaker 1: Is the question actually, is there a get out of jail free technology?
[01:04:18] Speaker 2: Get out of jail less expensively than what you've said so far.
[01:04:22] Speaker 1: Okay. I really have racked my brains on this one. I think if you assume that physics is as we know it, the answer is somewhat no. And certainly you don't have 25 years to develop it, so that's also an argument for no. I think the get out of jail free card for humanity is fusion. We have consistently reduced the investment in fusion. That's the put atoms together, not split them apart form of nuclear power. We've been reducing funding for fusion for year over year for the last few decades. That's just not viable. Actually, Jim McBride, who's in the audience, who helped me with a lot of the math and all the slides, he has a friend who is a solar physicist who studies fusion for the sun. And he says, "Oh, well, if you just give me $2 billion, I can do my research project on solar flares and give you fusion for free." So, fusion... The consensus among physicists is not impossible. It won't be easy and it will take some time, but we should be doing that. I think that's the closest we have to a Promethean technology. I find it very hard to imagine. We're not going to double the solar power density. When, you know, existing photovoltaics get to 40%, I think the thermodynamic limit for photocells might be 79% or something. The best wind turbines today operate at about 51% extraction efficiency. The theoretical upper limit is 59.6%. We're kind of pretty close. We're actually doing pretty well on most things. So, there's not a lot of super way out there stuff. I think the question might be, "Are any of them going to be really, really cheaper?" And we're all working on that. But it's pretty hard to beat Cole's business model, which is you drive a truck up to a hill, scrape it into the truck and burn it. So, that's what we're shooting for.
[01:06:07] Speaker 2: Okay, here's a question from, it looks like, Adrian. What about carbon sequestration, carbon offsets, biochar? All these things that might draw carbon from the atmosphere just go directly at the problem.
[01:06:25] Speaker 1: A year ago, I would have said, "Let's not even talk about it." Because I don't find any of them terribly palatable. Biochar, the results are still out. The reality is, for all of these things, the results are out. Carbon offsets, the result is in. Offsetting does nothing. If you want my opinion on the matter, go to cheatoffset.com. Does anyone know this? Cheat... Cheatneutral.com. Yeah, so it's basically a conversation. But anyway, go to cheatneutral.com, you'll get my opinion on carbon offsets. But on biochar, the numbers aren't in yet. It's not proven that we can do to scale carbon sequestration. I think we should run those experiments as soon as possible. It'll cost about $6 billion to put them on half a dozen coal plants and really see if it works. We should have done that yesterday. That looks like a better spend of money than $700 billion on a few banks. So, you know, we have to... What we don't know about these technologies and their capacity, we should find out next week.
[01:07:29] Speaker 2: James Lovelock refers to carbon offsets as indulgences. Yes. Max Marmer. How come so many people are investing in renewable sources of energy that will have little impact on humanity's energy portfolio? Do you know something they don't, or are they just stubborn?
[01:07:51] Speaker 1: Which ones? So, hey Max. I know Max. Do you mean wave and tidal type things? Yes. I don't... I think proportionally there isn't that much money going into those things. Deep ocean waves are... There's 60 terawatts in deep ocean. So, if you go after deep ocean waves, maybe it is a better idea. There's then a challenge of transporting all of that and the transmission lines. So, I'm not sure that proportionally the investment isn't terribly well matched to roughly how the portfolio you'd want to invest in is. Except maybe for biofuels, which I think has a wildly disproportionate investment compared to its capacity to solve the problem.
[01:08:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. Kevin Kelly is right here. Says, let's say in 50 years, you were wrong. I hope I am. You'll still be around. I won't. You missed something. And things are not so bad. This is the up scale wrong. There's a down scale wrong, which would be worth talking about too. What part of your calculations are you least confident about?
[01:09:09] Speaker 1: To play to what I know you would like to talk about, I'm also interested in, are there any negative feedbacks in the climate models that we don't know about that are maybe going to help us out? And what I mean by negative feedback is, do the oceans do something non-linear at 410 parts per million that starts sucking more carbon out of the atmosphere? Do we, so could something like that happen? I think that's the biggest hope that these numbers are grossly, grossly wrong. On the energy production side, it's a little hard to see any glare. I haven't, I've talked to a lot of very smart people on every energy. We haven't really found a horrifying like order of magnitude error anywhere. So fingers crossed there is a negative feedback. But we've been looking now for 10 years and no one's found a great one.
[01:10:05] Speaker 2: Yeah. Are you tracking on geoengineering schemes and any of them appeal to you?
[01:10:10] Speaker 1: None of them appeal to me because I just think we should solve this problem the right way. So geoengineering, the concept for geoengineering is that, you know, well we're already doing geoengineering. We are engineering our climate but now it's a laissez-faire kind of engineering. We're just, you know, warming it up with carbon. The concept of geoengineering, can we do very large scale climate modification? So examples of that are pouring iron into the ocean and hoping that you, you know, you encourage a lot of biotic life that will then sink to the ocean floor and sink that carbon. Another version is to create clouds over the Arctic and you generate those as a mist. Another version is, this is the more entertaining one that I have some, this is, this is, this one, I don't even like talking about these things because you kind of don't want people to know that this may be an option. You really are an environmentalist. I really am an environmentalist. Damn. Lost my Republican, young Republican badge. The, if you'd burnt, if you had really dirty jet fuel and you burnt it as you flew around, you'd have more reflective contrails and that would lower the solar insulation. So it's not inconceivable, I, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a great fan. At least that one is testable. So, you know, I think there, there is a reason, there is a pretty good conversation about geoengineering now. The guy who I know, I talk to about it most, who I have a lot of respect for the way he at least frames the problem is Dan Schrag at Harvard. You should all read what he does. And his argument is, yes, we should know every single, we should do the research to know every, how every single one of these works. And his, the, the other bit of information that's interesting, the way he thinks about it is, we should be pursuing those ones that have an off switch that can be turned off pretty quickly. So the, take a nuclear weapon, blow up a volcano, put sulfur in the atmosphere one, doesn't have an off switch that's real good, right? Right. The, I'll run a few jets with dirty jet fuel, you can, you can test that. Yeah.
[01:12:18] Speaker 2: By the way, there's very little testing in any of the geoengineering schemes going on so far. They're referred to by the guys who do it as sort of a hobby. They're not getting funding. They're not getting encouragement. It's partly, it's because, oh my gosh, what if they work? Then we don't have to all change our lifestyle to be like yours. And we're embarrassed about that, on and on and on. It's actually, I think, outrageous that it's still just an intellectual exercise on all of the geoengineering schemes that I know of.
[01:12:47] Speaker 1: Well, I think as we all are getting more and more aware of these days, the world is about resource competition. And, and in terms of funding, the voices in favor of clean energy generation are very, very loud compared to this. It's not an insane decision that I think that the money is being invested in generation technologies rather than these hobby things. Basically, I would not want the hobbies to tax the generation research side. But what I would like is more money to come in to sponsor the hobbies and make them real disciplines.
[01:13:21] Speaker 2: Okay, here's the money question. We're about to get a new administration next week. Robin Sloan asks, "The U.S. Government is about to embark on a spending and investment project so mind-boggling in scale, it almost fits with the mind-boggling numbers you've laid out. What would you, Saul Griffiths, Secretary of Mind-Boggling Numbers, spend it on?"
[01:13:44] Speaker 1: I really want that, this is my new business card. I've been looking for a new one. Absolutely fabulous. Whoever you are, come and find me and I'll thank you. So, you can put an upper bound on the price, which is the good news. So, today you can buy a watt of installed wind turbine for two bucks. And roughly four bucks will buy you a watt of installed solar, maybe it's two. So, okay, we've got to do 11.5 terawatts, that's roughly 25 teradollars. What's a teradollar? That I have to go back on. So, that's only 25 trillion dollars. So, okay, that's not a big number. So, if I'm Secretary of Mind-Boggling Numbers, I can say that's a small number. I mean, we've spent a couple of trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan so far. We've spent, I think if you do the larger numbers, but it's not real money in the market saving, but there's been five or six trillion in total used in this bailout. But that's not quite the same as a couple of trillion in Iraq because it's a little more smoke and mirrors. So, 25 trillion dollars, that sounds pretty cheap for what you see on screen here. 25 trillion. Yeah. I think if we, what is the surface area of the earth, Jim? Do you have that on the top of your head? No. No. It's probably only, you know, a few cents per square meter of land, right? So, look down and say, I will donate a few pennies or something. Actually, you know, it's probably a couple of dollars. But, you know, let's do that.
[01:15:21] Speaker 2: So, we're always trying to put dollar numbers on ecosystem services. What's the value of a stable climate?
[01:15:30] Speaker 1: Infinite. Prices. I mean, let's get this out of a dollar argument into it. You know, we are deciding the aesthetics and the quality of life for everyone. Right down to our personal quality of lives, to the quality of the global environment. You need to, you know, dollars are a tool for putting money and resources around in the right way. But it's not quite the right unit of measurement. It's not an SI unit, last time I checked. So, it may not be the right unit to measure the value of having a, let's not even call it a perfect world anymore. Let's just shoot for reasonable. Yeah.
[01:16:06] Speaker 2: Question from Drew Indy. Who's where, Drew? Over here. Over here.
[01:16:11] Speaker 1: Is this revenge, Drew?
[01:16:13] Speaker 2: Drew is on this stage just a couple of weeks ago. Improved tools make big problems much easier, but people tend to want solutions now. How should we balance basic research, foundational research, with scaling up and implementing what we already know about?
[01:16:31] Speaker 1: Do you want me to give you, like, what portion is on stuff that's ready to go today versus stuff that's ready to go in six years? Ninety-ten. I think we need to, we know, so I sort of gave you, we know how good the solar cells that we have today are, and how close they are to the best ones you'll ever get. We should be taking the best we have today and going massively with them. We know how good modern wind turbines are, you need to go massively with those in the layout. At the same time, you should absolutely be investing research dollars into resources that we haven't really successfully used before, such as waves, be it near shore or deep ocean, high altitude wind, better versions of tidal power, biofuels that go closer to the 9% or 10% theoretical limit for photo efficiency instead of the about half a percent that we have today. So you could get a factor of 20 in biofuels if synthetic biology bears fruit. So money should be going into the things that we don't know, but the major proportion should also be going into laying out there the efficient ones that we do know. Yeah.
[01:17:52] Speaker 2: What's your sense of the lag time now between, under circumstances that are crisis-like, World War II-like, between basically discovering a plausible, likely, potentially scalable, relatively new technology from discovery to deployment? And most technologies is 30 to 40 years. Is that going to be the case always?
[01:18:19] Speaker 1: I think high altitude wind, enhanced geothermal, wave and tidal that we don't do yet, all of those are realizable in five years. And you're starting to really scale at five years. Fusion and really, really efficient biofuels I think might have longer timelines, but Drew probably would contend that biofuels may be able to be bought up faster. I'm not sure. In reality, I don't hold out a lot of hope for a magic biofuel. That's why I only apportioned half a terawatt to it. And I also think the power density of biofuels are sort of problematic. But, you know, maybe if we could get a factor of 10 in biofuels, that would be, that might shift the equation there. But there are a few that I just think are, the problem is it's a disappointingly small list, actually, is the real problem with that. There aren't that many that we don't know that aren't that good.
[01:19:16] Speaker ?: Yeah.
[01:19:17] Speaker 2: When I asked you a while back, sort of, do you have hope? And you said you had hope in terms of, yeah, we could do it. Humanity has technology and the chops and maybe the, once they figure out what's really going on, the desire. Do we have the political ability to make this happen in the world? I mean, the U.S. can do whatever it wants. It's still a fraction of the big event.
[01:19:45] Speaker 1: I'm going to wear my optimist hat and say we could have the political will. We absolutely don't today. But today is so markedly different than two years ago. The fact that we ratcheted from 650 to 350 parts per million and that is now the lingua franca. I mean, Al Gore was standing up and not being mocked when he said the new target is 350 in Poznan a couple of weeks ago. Like, that's a fantastic shift.
[01:20:12] Speaker 2: But he's also saying we can do this, don't worry, in ten years and get a lot of jobs doing it. Do you believe that?
[01:20:16] Speaker 1: I do believe you can do that. I am worried about how you phrase it. I think you can absolutely do it. I mean, the numbers here will show you can do it. But let's not call that an energy independence project as it is being sold. Energy independence is about oil. That was sold, that's a project about, that was for, you know, wind farms for an electricity grid. The electricity grid is coal and nuclear. So, if you're putting all those wind turbines into doing that, yeah. But that's not, so, that doesn't solve energy independence. Energy independence is something that replaces, you've got to stop buying oil. So, I think it's politically possible. We're not really, you know, I'm just hoping that the groundswell changes. I think one of the political problems is that we're selling this as technology will come in and save it. Green jobs programs will come in and save us. Hopefully, tonight, you've realized that the problem is a little, it's not going to be solved by a magic Promethean technology. We will have to use energy far more wisely. I suspect that more and more people who start to change their lifestyles to reflect this, because they personally want the right end outcome, will become exactly the right types of political lobbyists to make politics get to where it has to be. And I think that can happen surprisingly quickly. So, everyone sign up for a 2200 watt life and lobby you hard.
[01:21:44] Speaker 2: What do you think the chances of that happening are?
[01:21:47] Speaker 1: I'm going to say we will do it, because I'm going to have a child in four months. This is the tear-joking thing. Hopefully, he doesn't look like a cardboard gorilla. He is a boy. But I think we don't have any option but to solve it.
[01:22:03] Speaker ?: Right?
[01:22:03] Speaker 1: So, I now am genetically required to be optimistic. So, this is a fascinating experiment and it's incredibly difficult for me. So, this child is born in this year. Let's assume that he'll live 80 or 100 years. So, everything that we've just said will play out is going to play out in this lifetime. Hopefully, it will play out with a Kevin Kelly, something saves the day. But let's assume that it's got to play out in his lifetime. So, this kid has to live it and breathe it. And so, you know, I now know how to calculate how much energy it takes to run a life. So, the kid is going to be an experiment actually before day one. I'm already counting every joule of energy and every gram of carbon on his budget. Funny things horrify me. You cannot legally bring a child home from the hospital without... You have to check the baby out of the hospital in a car seat. Right. Car seat. And we don't own a car seat. So, I have to buy a car seat. And it has to go into a car that has more than two seats. I only have a dune buggy and a two-seat truck and a two-seat Honda. So, in order to get my child home from the hospital, this is maybe the best argument we have for home birth, I have to buy a new car. And that car, because I promised myself I'm never going to buy a car, that car goes on his budget. So, day... Yeah. Day one, the poor kid is clawing his way back. Yeah. What was the question?
[01:23:41] Speaker 2: Whatever it was, if you answered... And I'm going to stop showing child porn. That's actually really bad. Yeah. Let's... You're going to... You've given this talk a few times. You're going to give it a few times more. Suppose you're giving it in India. And it goes so well or badly or whatever there, that China says we want it. And... The talk? They're going to take you there on a sailboat or something. Don't worry. And... But to an Indian audience, to an audience of a nation which is busily getting the hell out of poverty. Or a Chinese audience, which is busily getting the hell out of poverty. Everybody's moving to town. They're moving up. They're... They're making the stuff that we have to buy in order for that to happen. On and on and on. This sounds a lot to them like some Americans saying, "Don't do it what we did. Stay poor." I'm...
[01:24:36] Speaker 1: I agree. It sounds imperialist to the nth degree. And coming from a colony that doesn't like its imperialist overlords. I'm not a huge fan of imperialism. Or colonialism. I don't like the French either. Did I mention that? They... They, they, they newt Murora Atoll just outside our, you know, you know. So, but the serious side of that question is you say to the Indian owners, yes, this, this could sound like imperialism. Or this can sound like you guys are going to be selling your technologies into America because you actually know how to live low power lifestyles. And to change, you don't have the inertia and the infrastructure challenge that America has. I mean, America has the hardest challenge in solving this problem because in the last 50 years you had free energy and you built suburbs that are a long way apart. And you built a culture around properly good energy use. There's a lot of inertia culturally and just in terms of physical infrastructure that makes it very hard to solve here. India and China has a much better chance because the, they can build that new infrastructure much more wisely and not make a lot of the same mistakes. So the optimistic version of the talk to those audiences is you have a great advantage. You also have a lot of cultural skills and a lot of cultural practices that are low energy. You can export those as technology, social or otherwise. So you can, you could pitch this as you guys are really are going to be the new empire and you're going to make a lot of money doing it because you're, you're going to teach the rest of the world how to solve problems. There's obviously a whole lot of ways that that talk wouldn't play out well. But as you know, I'm genetically inclined to be an optimist now. So, yeah. Did I dodge that one enough?
[01:26:19] Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting. I mean, it sounds like you've got a two prong thing for the, for the developing world. Uh, stick with a lot of the traditional practices you have, uh, honor them, don't leave them behind because they are a low impact. Uh, at the same time, uh, you did amazingly in leapfrogging to cell phones, new technologies that are relatively, uh, efficiency producing light on the land, all the rest of it. Yep. Uh, and they could lead the world in showing what are the right technologies to do.
[01:26:49] Speaker 1: leapfrog to, uh, that do have these lower impacts? Oh, okay. I'm going to try another answer. All right. So you, you, another way to, to sell this appropriately. Um, and another reason to think about American lifestyles more carefully. Um, so imagine you lower the speed limit to 30 miles per hour, right? People will drive. Okay. So what are the four lead, where four of the top five leading causes of death in the US are, uh, heart disease, car accidents, obesity, diabetes, uh, all of those get drastically reduced if you subscribe to a public transit, cycling, six, sevens vegetarian lifestyle. So you can pitch it to the developing world. You can go down this path that leads in obesity and high healthcare costs and et cetera, et cetera. That would be a normal social, enormous social cost and et cetera, et cetera. Or you can do this the right way. So again, I think there's, there's positive spins on all of the on all of these things. Uh, on all of these things. Uh, and we have to, I think absolutely we have to find positive ways to tell this entire story. It's very easy to look at all these numbers and be like, oh, it's too hard. That is, that is the impulse. Um, but I think it is just as easy to say we can actually do it. It isn't outside of the capacity. Humans have done similar things before in terms of effort. Um, we did it for the wrong reasons like World War II and other industrial efforts, but we can, we can do it all. And we can, if we choose to allow this to improve our lives, right? So instead of spending money on disposable plastic crap, you, you still want an economy when you do this. So it's not about just not buying things. It's about using that money. money in ways that are much more rewarding. So there should be a lot more theater, right? You guys all, well, some of you donated money tonight. The rest of you should go out and donate a lot of money to the, on the, on the way out the door to long now, because this is the best way to spend money. You're not using a lot of carbon sitting here. And not using a lot of energy. And not using a lot of energy. You're being entertained. So there can be a much more vibrant community around, around things that you maintain and repair, high quality craftsmanship, around cultural events. Um, that's the low energy way to spend money. Again, I forgot what the original question was.
[01:29:06] Speaker 2: Uh, it's you struggling to stay optimistic. Yeah, that's right. Last question. The, some behavior changes with talks like this, or slideshows like Al Gore's and movies like Al Gore's, mostly behavior changes with events in the world. Uh, and one can imagine a good news event, uh, a sense that, wow, you know, something rather worked. It is reversing a thing. Uh, you know, maybe we'll feel good about financial decline for awhile. Um, more typically behavior changes around a bad event or, or more effectively a sequence of two or preferably three bad events, which are interpreted the same way. So when we had 35,000 people die in 2003 in the summer in Europe from, uh, what everybody thought was an unusual heat wave, it went by. Nobody, as far as I know, uh, thought that was something serious. Katrina, maybe, but, you know, it's a maybe thing. We always had hurricanes. We'll always have hurricanes. It was a climate, wasn't it? Um, do you have a sense of, do you have a sense of what good news or bad news would change behavior?
[01:30:21] Speaker 1: Uh, on the good, I'm not sure what good news event changes behavior, um, in, in this topic, except everyone.
[01:30:32] Speaker 2: A geoengineering scheme that works, uh, to get a sense of, we might be able to get a handle on part of it, that kind of thing.
[01:30:38] Speaker 1: Right. So, okay. I think those things will, will help a lot. Um, those, those good, those, those events that say these technologies, these strategies are working and positive feedback around those things will be fabulous.
[01:30:49] Speaker 2: Or laser fusion, you know, across the bay, they're doing laser fusion. It's supposed to be better than magnetic fusion. It shows promise.
[01:30:55] Speaker 1: Right. Where is that in the headlines? Yeah. Um, you know, actually I wrote an article for make magazine last year on this, you know, the, the most incredible headline of the, the decade, if not the last quarter of century happened last year. We turned on the large Hadron glider, right? 60,000 engineers from every country in the world built the largest machine that humans have ever built. It's, this is like, this is the pyramids of our times, but it's, it's all stainless steel, steel, and it looks like a Swiss watch buried, you know, 18, you know, eight miles in diameter under, under, uh, Geneva. Absolutely incredible. It turned on and it worked for a little while, right? Right. And that's amazing that we can take our tiny little monkey brains and we can get all those people to work together and we can design the most incredible, fantastic thing. And what is it to do? It's to ask the most fundamental questions that are, well, what, what is mass, right? We all think we know what weight and mass are, but we kind of don't at a fundamental level. So we built the most expensive machine, complex machine ever with all these people to answer that fundamental question. And, and, and it, and it, it worked first time. It's, it's now not operational, but it will be bought back online. That has to, that was the best new story for, for decades, completely sort of missed by the popular media. So we need to get those stories and lots of them, um, around enhanced geothermal and high altitude wind power and the, you know, um, new solar thermal technologies and more, you know, things like the Aptera, which is a electric car that, that is designed the right way. Um, they should be great news stories.
[01:32:33] Speaker 2: Say more about that one. I don't know that one.
[01:32:34] Speaker 1: Uh, Aptera is really a, a motorcycle disguised as a car that, so the, the secret for cars to, to be efficient, um, you don't want to see this. All right, sir. Sorry. I, I really almost made it all the way without equations. Um, travel in a vacuum. That's a good solution. So this is, this is, so actually these two slides are here. These are the only two slides. These are the only two equations you need to know if you care about energy use, right? So all, nearly all of humanity's energy use goes through one of these or the other in an engineering sense. So this is sort of the engineer's version of the fluid drag equation. So the amount of power it takes to push something through a fluid is proportional to half of the density of the fluid that's running through times the drag coefficient. That's the purple one times the reference area, that's the blue A times the velocity V cubed, right? So you want to lower, you want to increase. That cube is the killer. The cube is the killer. So the very first thing you do is take the cube and you make things go slow. This is why you go to 30 mile per hour speed limits and increase the speed that you get across the city. But you also make things fish shaped. The Aptera is fish shaped. You make the reference area small. This reference area is small. It doesn't travel in a vacuum, unfortunately, but that one's kind of hard to work. And, you know, it's not, it's not a sports car.
[01:33:52] Speaker 2: Cook off our atmosphere, actually, will be the norm.
[01:33:55] Speaker 1: So, you know, I think there's a lot of good news stories out there and we really should celebrate them. Then to the second half of your question. All right. So bad news stories. I try to be an optimist. So there's going to be, there could be some, you know, I've played out all sorts of dark scenarios. When you look at all these numbers, you go through every possible emotion. You're elated, you're depressed, you're all sorts of things. So I have plenty of time to think about bad scenarios. So all of the water that feeds into Pakistan comes through the Indus that runs through India. All of that water, in turn, is glacial melt from the Himalayas. So global warming heats up, less glacial melt flowing into India. India takes its share. There's nothing left for Pakistan. Pakistan is nuclear armed. India is nuclear armed. China's siding with Pakistan. America's siding with India. We can all get pretty creative about how this one ends. That will look like, you know, the clash of civilizations or whatever people want to call it. That's a climate change problem. So, you know, there's scenarios like that. There's...
[01:34:58] Speaker 2: That's an interesting thing, because we've got a resource war in Darfur. We don't think of it in those terms. There's sort of one in the Mideast between Palestine and Israel. But that would really be a resource war. It's really clear that the water coming off the Himalayan Plateau is being turned off by the guys upstream. Yeah.
[01:35:17] Speaker 1: So that one doesn't look good. Bird flu outbreak in Asia after a couple of horrifying tsunamis hit Southeast Asia. That also could be sort of a climate problem that we're going to call something else. So I think there's... You can... There's no need to tease it out. There's enough... We've all read all the horror story scenarios. They're all somewhat possible. Hopefully, they're not terribly possible. I don't think we should dwell on them a lot. We should just get to work and do what we know we have to do. And actually build the most beautiful world you can that sort of fits these constraints. I used to say in this... In sort of some version of this talk, you know, how did we end up here? So I think the problem was, you know, we figured out that the world was round, right? While ever the world was flat... Spherical. Yeah, spherical. But while ever the world was flat, you could conceive that it was infinite. There's going to be everything of everything, right? The first moment we knew that the world was spherical should have been, "Oh, okay, so it's a finite system. Maybe we should think about how we manage the resources and be careful." It took us about 200 or 300 years after we realized that to... That's the lag time. Yeah. So that lag time is a little too long. We don't have that much luxury now. But I think this is really... You know, the Club of Rome was famous a long time ago for sort of doing the first attempt at what are the resource limits. I think we're actually facing them much more realistically now. I don't think it's horrifying. We just have to learn to work within more reasonable resource limits. The bottom line is you have to work.
[01:36:57] Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you.
[01:36:59] Speaker ?: Thank you.
[01:36:59] Speaker 2: Thanks a lot.
[01:37:00] Speaker ?: Thank you.
[01:37:01] Speaker 2: Thanks a lot. Thank you very much.
[01:37:03] Speaker ?: Thank you.