Tangle - INTERVIEW: Scott Tinker on the future of energy

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

Scott Tinker is an energy expert, geologist, and documentary filmmaker trying to carve out the "radical middle" on the future of energy. In today's podcast, he discusses both the reasons we need to move away from oil (or make it cleaner) while also diving into the myths of "renewable" energy, which he says simply is not a thing. Tinker breaks down the pros and cons of fossil fuels, solar, electric vehicles, nuclear energy and much more.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.

Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, I'm thrilled to be sitting down with Scott Tinker. Scott is an American geologist and energy expert who currently serves as the director of the Bureau of Economic Geology in Texas. He's the chairman of Switch Energy Alliance and the CEO of Tinker Energy Associates. Scott, thank you so much for coming on

the show. Isaac, it's great to be here with you. So this is a wild time. We're recording this right now, Friday, March 18th. And just today, I published, I was just telling you this 5,000 plus word piece on why gas prices are going up. It feels like we're in this moment where the ground is kind of shifting beneath our feet on energy. And I'm really excited to chat with you about that. But before we jump in, I'd love to just hear a little bit about how you came to be here sitting in front of me. Who is Scott Tinker? What's your story? And how'd you come to be such an expert in the space of energy? Well, all stories are contorted, right? Look, my dad is a geologist and so is my son. So we have it in our blood.

He worked in the energy industry his whole life. I did for 17 years. And then I came to UT Austin 22 years ago where I hold an endowed chair as a professor and studied energy my whole life, essentially, in different ways and different parts of it. Along the way, got quite interested in all forms of energy. And they all have pros and cons. You know, there's no, the binary good and bad, clean and dirty sounds great, but it doesn't exist in the real world of physics and economics. So, you know, you have to look at them and their environmental challenges and all that stuff.

And formed a 501c3 called the switch energy alliance met a great filmmaker named harry lynch and about a dozen years ago we made a film on global energy called switch filmed in 11 countries and it was one of the first if not the first kind of uh pros and cons of energy went to the best places in the world for each form of energy and looked at the best forms and some of their challenges and it still plays all over the world in classrooms because it's non-biased, non-partisan, kind of like you're doing. Here's the real deal. And so the faculty and educators love it. Students love it. And then he went off and did some cool things in mental health. And I came back and said, hey, Harry, we left off about half the world,

people that don't have much energy. So we made another feature-length film called Switch On, and that looks at energy poverty globally in five or six very different countries. And that completes a little bit of the total picture, if you will, Isaac, of where we are in energy from people living hungry and naked in the dirt with nothing in the modern world to some of the most severe wealth you can imagine. And that's kind of how I got into it. And of course, the Bureau is a big research organization that I helped to build in Iran, and we got 250 people. And we're doing research all over the world on energy and the environment and the economy, and looking at how those play together. And they play very tightly together, as you know.

So no form of energy is clean and no form is completely dirty. No form is cheap. It's very nuanced. And that's what's critical is understanding some of that. And I gave a TED talk just a couple of weeks ago where I said, it's not simple, but it's solvable, but you have to have some information. So that's my story a little bit quick and dirty. And my first grandkid is on the way on Tuesday. Oh, wow. Mazel tov. Amazing. Congratulations. Thank you. We've been at it a long time. Yeah. I'll take a couple of guesses at what I guess his career is going to be. So listen, I think that's a great kind of segue into one of my first questions,

which, you know, we're going to get specific and in the weeds a little bit, but I'm interested just to start by asking you a really broad question, which is maybe if you could just kind of contextualize this moment in energy history for us. I mean, I know that's a really big task, but it does feel like the last few weeks, the last few months are going to be the kinds of, you know, the kinds of weeks that are written about in the history books decades from now. And I'm wondering if you could maybe just zoom out for our listeners and explain a little bit about where we are in this moment in the history of energy, you know, in the world, really. where we are in this moment in the history of energy, you know, in the world, really.

It's an important conversation. I actually went to the Soviet Union in 1982 after college and visited Kiev, spent some time there in the Ukraine and other cities in the Soviet Union, including several that are no longer part of Russia. Beautiful city, beautiful people. And it's tragic what's happening today. Energy unrelated. We all hope that modern society wouldn't attack one another this way again, but we are. So what's the energy role in that? It's very real. Energy has always been a weapon. It's always one of the, without energy, again, we're hungry and naked in the dirt, literally. And there are people that live that way in the world today. And that's not right morally, not necessary either. So it's weaponized. And Russia is not the first to weaponize energy. It's happened globally for many, well, several centuries, actually. So contextually,

what this does is it shines a very real light, intense light on issues that have been brewing for decades now. This conflict, apparent conflict, solvable conflict between secure energy, and by that I mean it's affordable and it's available and it's reliable to you, and protecting the environment. So the climate, to be sure, atmospheric emissions, methane methane and co2 but other forms of the environment the land the air and its water the environment i learned about in school you know so how do you protect all of those pillars of the environment while also making sure energy is secure and it's tough it's the dual challenge it's it's what i gave a TED Talk on just a couple of weeks ago. So that contextualizes the challenge. But by what's happening in Ukraine, it's forced us to acknowledge this challenge exists. has really happened in Western Europe and California here in the U.S., that we have this clean energy and it's going to be reliable and cheap. We just have to get on with it,

the sun, the wind, and batteries. And in fact, that's not true. Okay. A, they're not clean. And B, they're not reliable. And C, they're not cheap. They're good. They have great aspects to them. But they aren't those things any more than coal and oil and gas and nuclear are clean and cheap and reliable. They're some of those things. But they're not all of those things. And this has exacerbated the challenge and, again, shown a bright light on that, particularly in Europe, where they're paying, I just spoke to a good friend in Scandinavia yesterday morning, $20 a gallon for gasoline. And he said, and if I charge my electric car per mile, it's more than that because of the price of electricity. And we can talk about all these things, but when you start to get to

those kinds of levels, energy underpins everything you do. And when it gets so expensive, Isaac, it's regressive, which means those who make the least money pay the most proportionally of their income for gasoline and electricity. And it hurts them very deeply. They literally can't go to their job or they can't afford to do the kinds of things with electricity that they used to do. And that's in the modern world. There's a whole bunch of the world that has unreliable energy or no energy at all, just trying to get some. So it's complicated. There's a dynamic globally that's going on that recognizes we need to lift the world out of poverty to prosperity. Energy will help to do that. We need to protect the world's environment while we are about that task. and some playing together in what I love to call the radical middle, the radical middle of energy, the environment, and the economy where it's hard. There's data and you have to compromise and you don't get everything right. But that's where the real action is. That's where the work gets done.

And I'm passionate about that radical middle and making sure we have as many people in it as possible. So I hope that is a good start. Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I am really interested to pick at some of those comments about the renewable space, because I think it's such an interesting and under-discussed part of this is sort of like, what I sort of think is a mirage that these renewable energies are just clean and easy to get, and everything's going and everything's going to be rainbows and unicorns. But given where we are right now, I want to start actually with oil, which I think is just at the top of everybody's mind. The price of oil is obviously skyrocketing right now. I wrote a little bit today about just all the different ways that, all the different factors that go into the price of oil going up from the moment it is extracted to refinement to the market

supply demand, what your gas station wants to charge you, all of those things. But one of the sort of underpinnings of that that I think is important is that, you know, oil, I guess by definition, is kind of a finite resource. There's only so much of it in the earth, we think. I've heard this said. We can only drill for so much of it. As we keep drilling for more of it, it's going to get harder and harder to drill, which is probably going to make it more expensive to extract. Is that a real problem? Is there enough oil on the planet to serve us for the years to come? Is that sort of, in your mind, an accurate way to frame this issue, you know, really long term, I guess? A lot to think about there, a lot to unpack.

And so oil is finite. Yes, there's a certain amount of oil in the earth today, and it takes a long time geologically to form it. That said, we have discovered and produced a lot of oil, but a tremendous amount still remains. Think about your driveway and your leaky car engine. If you have an oil and you drip a drip of oil on the cement, which is limestone, and you can't get it out, it stays there forever, no matter how hard you scrub. And that's what happens in rocks. So we try to produce a lot of oil from the rocks, but most of it gets left behind. It's hard to get out until technology changes. And then technology comes along and says, hey, we can put some carbon dioxide in there or some soaps, or we can crack the rock and more

will come out. So we continue to produce more oil. And so there are important concepts here. There's the resource. That's the total amount of oil in the tank. And then the reserve. That's what you can produce with today's technology and today's price. Price changes, technology changes. You can get more. Then there's kind of what's there, what's producible, and what are we actually producing today? What's the rate of production? About 100 million barrels a day that we're consuming. It's a lot of oil.

So, yes, oil is finite, but there's still a lot that remains in the world today. And it's just getting started in some ways because of technology and price in North America called shale. So going down into the earth, that's the kitchen. That's where the oil gets cooked. And because oil is lighter than water and there's a lot, every rock, let me start back. Every rock in the subsurface is rock, but it has a bunch of little holes in it and they're filled with water, old oceans. And oil floats on water. You know that when you go out and spill gasoline on the lake or something with a boat.

There it's floating. So the oil floats up and gets trapped in these conventional reservoirs. And that's what we've produced in the world so far today, the Middle East, Russia, big conventional reservoirs. conventional reservoir. The kitchen where that oil is made is mostly shale, grab bag of mud and silt and organic stuff, gunk. And that's where it's cooked. We're down in the kitchen now with long reach horizontal wells, cracking the rock and it's flowing into the wellbore, natural gas and oil, where it was never produced before. That's technology. It's only really happened in the US, Canada, parts of Latin America now. It's just getting started in the Middle East and Russia and other places. They're going into the kitchen. It's more expensive.

There's a lot of politics around that. They funded a lot of anti-fracking propaganda, most of what you all probably believe. You can trace the dollars, do it. It's fun. Back to Russia and the Middle East. Say, for big feature-length films, Matt Damon starred in one. You know, look where it's funded. And why?

Well, it's business to them. They want to produce and sell the conventional oil, which is cheaper, and they make a bigger margin. It's just business. But they have the source rocks, and I go to the Middle East, and I've been to Russia and China many times, and 60 countries I've been fortunate to travel to. And they're working slowly on how to produce that. So in the timeframes we're talking about, the next set of decades, or even potentially a century, there's still oil to be produced if it's needed. And therein lies the demand piece. You know, when do technologies, when do things really change? When do we leave something and go to something else? When something better comes along. So people often say, well, we, you know, there's people skipping the landline. I grew up with one. The cord stuck in the closet so you couldn't hear me talking to my girlfriend,

who is now my wife. We got something better, didn't we? We've got cell phones. And now I'm not attached to a cord. And man, that phone will do other things too. It's really cool. It's better technology. So I will go use that instead of this old technology. It's hard to replace oil. It's a wonderful fuel, very dense. You can move that vehicle of yours 300 miles, 20 gallons, and the only byproduct, which isn't a good one. Let me say it clearly, carbon dioxide, not a good one, but there's no residue or other kinds of things from burning gasoline. It's pretty miraculous, really. So how do you replace that really dense gasoline tank with something else that will do the same kind of work and be better? That's a big challenge. So that's kind of an oil story. And by the way, I'm just talking transportation. Everything you're wearing, everything on your ears that I can see, all the plastics, all the pharmaceuticals, all the fertilizers, everything in our lives depends on the molecules from oil and natural gas. Those molecules are used for everything, not just the ones we burn to move ourselves around inefficiently, everything. So we got to start to think pretty hard about

what it is in our worlds that benefits from this and what many people in the world do not have today or just have sort of in a very insecure way. It's a huge challenge that we have to think about thoughtfully as we transition to something better. We will, but it isn't a snap of the finger because that's a tough thing to replace. Yeah. So I'm curious. I mean, from your perspective, I'm getting this idea from you or getting a sense from listening to you talk that you believe this transition has to happen. I mean, given the impacts of climate change, I think is the number one concern for me personally, just the emissions element of it. I also know a lot of people have a great deal of concern about the impact fracking has in

certain places. It sounds like, you know, you have some counterpoints to that. And then obviously, just, you know, the stuff you see on TV, the oil spills and the blowups in the Gulf of Mexico and things like that. I mean, from where you're sitting, should we keep going, you know, in the short term, I guess, with oil? Do we have the technology to do that safely? Can we possibly keep emitting the way we are right now? I mean, where are we in that space from how you see it, I guess? Yeah. And there's lots in there too. Who is we? So, you know, we, the United States, we, Western Europe, we're pretty advanced. You know, we, the United States, we, Western Europe, we're pretty advanced.

But if you take a step back, we built our economies on coal, our modern economy. Every economy started with humans with wood and hay and dung. Hay in our engines, which were horses and oxen, and then, you know, wood to keep us warm and to cook over. So carbon, all carbon-basedbased but not very dense biomass and then we found coal wow look at all this biomass it's really dense nature did it i can burn that and get a lot more heat value out of it okay so i start boiling water making steam turning turbine running a generator i can make electricity from coal from the heat from coal electricity changed the world over a century ago thomas edison etc so you go from coal, from the heat from coal. Electricity changed the world over a century ago, Thomas Edison, et cetera. So you go from coal to now along comes liquid hydrocarbons. It's not just

all carbon in coal, it's hydrogen in carbon. That's what a hydrocarbon is, oil. So there's benefit from the hydrogen part. And now I go to natural gas, methane, one carbon, four hydrogen, the hydrogen part. And now I go to natural gas, methane, one carbon, four hydrogen, CH4, mostly hydrogen. Okay. So coal, oil, natural gas, carbon, mixed, hydrogen. And that's a very natural progression that we're living through in modern economies away from coal to methane and beyond. away from coal to methane and beyond. Most of the world isn't there yet. They're just starting. China, all coal. India, looking hard, probably coal. Vietnam, coal. Why? To compete with China. Why? To make your stuff and mine. We demand it cheap. Everything that we're manufacturing in the world today,

over half of it is made in countries that use coal. So when we say we, we can close our ears and eyes and say, yeah, we're clean. Just keep making our stuff over there, you know, really cheap. And I'll buy it on Amazon one thing at a time to my door. It's cool. You know, deliver it to me. It's awesome. My toothbrush or maybe a pair of socks, but that is not really great for the climate. In fact, on a per product basis, something manufacturing in Asia emits more CO2 than something manufactured here because we have stricter regulations and we follow them for emission standards and other things. So I'll ask you and our listeners, how many atmospheres are there in the world?

Just one. And just like the ocean, it's really well connected up there. So the emissions coming out of Asia go into our single atmosphere. And we're not reducing our consumption or our products. We're just moving the emission source somewhere else. This is not a good climate solution. It's a big challenge. So yes, climate change matters tremendously.

And I know what you've grown up with and thinking about, and I agree. But to me, the biggest challenge, even bigger still, is poverty. It's lifting people from poverty to prosperity in the world because over half the world still lives in what you and I would think is severe poverty in this country. And it gets very severe. Again, I've been in 60 countries and you can't imagine it. You can't imagine the level of poverty that exists without energy and modern things. Unless everybody starts to lift up, here's the trick. Energy underpins healthy economies, ours and others, and healthy economies invest in the environment in a big way. We have the cleanest air in the world in the U.S. because we clean it up.

We have to. There are air quality standards and we follow them. So you go look at maps of air quality around the world, particulate matter, and you see where it's the cleanest is where it's rich. And it's the dirtiest where it's poor. Same with water and soil. So these big components of our built and living environment are actually, you can afford to take care of them where you're wealthy. And this is the challenge. We can't expect everybody living in poverty just to stay there so they don't have an impact on the environment. They've got to come up to some standard of wealth and then begin to develop the systems to take care of their built environment. They can, we can accelerate that. But to me, that lifting from poverty to prosperity is so critical. So a couple of things,

the natural transition from coal, carbon away from it happening, probably need to accelerate it. And then the transition out of poverty to prosperity, vital. And that's the dual challenge. That's again, we come back to this energy in the environment, energy, the environment, they have to work hand in hand together with the economy wrapped around them. So one of the things I'm really interested in discussing is the future of renewables. There are a couple of common refrains I hear right now from skeptics out there that I find really compelling and worrisome and don't totally know how to navigate. I think the first one is just that renewable energy is actually not as environmentally friendly as a lot of people think it is, maybe in their minds.

A few of the examples that I can think of, you know, off the top of my head that I just jotted down before our conversation started was, you know, mining lithium and cobalt, which is critical for batteries and electric vehicles can be really destructive for the environment. Once you have those batteries, solar panels, all these things, they have to go somewhere. We have to recycle them or throw them out when they're, you know, used up. I read something just the other day about how windmills need to be replaced, you know, every 20 years, the blades on windmills or something. I never thought of that. Never heard of that before. I mean, incredible amount of waste. And you think about how big those things are and how many windmills there are. What do you think about

this line of argument? I mean, this seems like the kind of stuff that you really work on and think about and talk about. I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. Sure. We made a film called Switch about 10 years ago, released now, went to the best places in the world to look at these different forms of energy, looked at their pros and their cons. The TED Talk I gave two weeks ago was this exact subject actually showed pictures of the things you just described and some of the challenges. Here's the reality. Don't throw daggers at me. Okay, please.

I'll say it first and then I'll describe it. There's no such thing as renewable energy. It doesn't exist. The sun and the wind are renewable, at least on human timescales. exist. The sun and the wind are renewable, at least on human timescales. But everything to collect the sun and the wind, the panels and the turbines and the batteries to back them up, comes from the earth, is manufactured, and gets dumped back into the earth. We don't recycle much. And even if we did, which is more expensive across the board, just look at your recycle bin each week. Even if we

did, it's still a lot being dumped back in the earth. So when I mine, you mentioned cobalt, you mentioned lithium. Look at the nickel markets today, another commodity going crazy. The metals that have to come to bear copper for a large wind turbine or a whole array of solar panels, PV or other forms we could talk about. And the batteries, they all get mined. And here's the unfortunate reality. In my talk in TED, I talked about kale versus cow. And I love kale. You know, I love the nutrients. I like kale salads, kale soups. I can't get enough kilocalories in a day on kale alone without a lot of supplements.

So I looked at cow. I like cow too. I actually like a steak now and then. Good protein, but a lot of fat, things that aren't that great for me, but it's dense. I could actually get enough calories out of cow each day, but it wouldn't be that great for me necessarily. The kale and the cow, you know, the kale is solar and wind and batteries and hydro and biomass, and the cow is coal and oil and gas and nuclear. They're really dense, not a little denser, three to 500 times denser. So it doesn't take nearly as much stuff to convert coal and oil and gas and nuclear into the energy that we use. We're using right now to do this zoom and everything that goes into it, all the cloud and all the data centers that are whirring and the electrons that are flowing into this microphone and this screen so we can talk right now. Tremendous amount of CO2 emissions,

tremendous amount of energy. It comes from dense energy for the most part. So the challenge with this concept of clean and dirty, good and bad, renewable, not renewable, clean and dirty, good and bad, renewable, not renewable, is it's not real. You have to mine and manufacture and dump, and they do wear out. Batteries, you know about batteries. How often do you get rid of your phone? How often do you, the solar panels wear out, they get abraded, and they become less efficient, ineffective. So you replace them. The turbine blades do wear out and they're not recyclable today. We're working on it. They're inert, unlike solar panels and batteries, which are toxic. They're inert, but we bury them. We cut them into thirds and bury them in these giant landfills. You can go online and look at 100

blades being buried in Wyoming. It's there as a picture. 100 blades, you'll see it and you'll go, that is unbelievable. We have 40,000 turbine blades in Texas today alone for the biggest wind producer in the nation, 40,000. So unfortunately, earth resources are used to either drill or mine. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web,

his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. To manufacture or convert and use as energy and then to either bury in the earth or the trash can for oil and gas and coal is the atmosphere. You know, we burn it and the CO2 emissions and methane go up into the atmosphere. They're not clean either. I'm not trying to say they're clean. They're not.

But when you start to think about density and the amount of stuff, it's a big set of arithmetic that goes on in our heads. So it's not skeptics. Use the word skeptic. I think what you're reading are people that are probably pretty energy knowledgeable, and they're trying to say, here are some realities. Now, maybe they are skeptics. Maybe they hate wind and solar and they love oil and gas. I don't know. But I'm going to tell you, I don't have an opinion. What I would like is secure energy for everyone to lift them from poverty and continue to clean it up, which means we have to have some wealth. Those all can

be cleaned up, but it costs money. And that's the great challenge, Isaac, is how do we blend those together? I like a little steak and a salad. I'm an omnivore. I'm not an herbivore or carnivore. salad. I'm an omnivore. I'm not an herbivore or carnivore. In fact, omnivore energy works pretty well. Lots of different things play well together. Again, the other great challenge, of course, is some forms of energy are always on. When I have a nuclear power plant, it's always on. You can talk about nuclear, some downsides, but some big upsides too. Always on. Some things are not always on. The unfortunate reality is night comes along, the sun goes down, and we have to have electricity all the time. The wind stops blowing. And we do have big times when wind isn't blowing. It happened in Europe the last few months. So all the Europe crisis was happening way before Ukraine.

Don't blame it on that, the politicians, but that's not what drove it any more than here. So you have these things and when they're not blowing or shining, you got to have something else there to use, to back it up. And that backup is redundant. It's expensive. It just sits there waiting to come along and fire up for a while and go back down. So it's very expensive to do that kind of thing. These all play together. These different sorts of energy, the way they're reliable or not reliable or intermittent or not, where they come from, what it takes to make them, where they go, what it takes to make them where they go, plays together. It's very solvable. It's not simple. And maybe that's a big message I will say again. It's not simple, but it's solvable. If we start to deal with the reality of these different kinds of things and not label people

believers and deniers because you don't like what I like, or skeptics and optimists. It's not that. It's physics and economics, resources, it's education levels, it's political regimes, what some do and some can't do, et cetera. They all wrap in together to provide these things for us. And the modern world is very, very fortunate to have all these things where we take them for granted. That's not an accusatory statement. We're born with energy. We turn on the lights. They come on. It just happens.

Occasionally not. Mostly it does. We're just used to it. But a lot of the world isn't that way today. A lot. Three quarters of the world. Really something that we have to ponder about and get ourselves as educated as we can. Let me ask you something. I mean, I want to ask this both about oil and coal and then also about some of the quote unquote renewable energies, you know,

with the accepting your position that renewables don't actually exist in the way that a lot of people think that they do. Well, it's not a position. It's just a statement of fact. Right, right. Or I don't know what else to call them besides renewable. So we'll say solar and wind. We say oil and gas. Let's just say solar and wind. So how do we, I want to ask this about solar and wind and then also ask this about, but first ask this about oil and coal and gas. How do we clean it up? I mean, what do you see, what kind of emerging technologies are you seeing out there that, you know, will make running cars on gasoline 20 years from now less dangerous than it is right now, you know, for the climate? Sure. Coal's tough. Coal has not just CO2, but it has particulate matter that goes into the air and sulfur and nitrogen, socks and knots and mercury sometimes. It's a tough one. It's very affordable and efficient. That's why we built our economies

on it. And so is China. It's there, I burn it, it works, you know, dah, dah, but everybody can't breathe. So getting rid of that, you have to have something better, just like we talked about. So what better came along? Oil, but oil is not a great thing to burn to make electricity either. Natural gas came along. Sox and nox very low,ulates, essentially zero. I cook with gas in my kitchen and don't have any particulates. Mercury, none. It has the CO2. Less on a per heat unit basis, but still has CO2. So you've got to capture that CO2 and do something with it if we're going to burn gas. It's called carbon capture and storage, technologically doable. Full disclosure,

I have a big research team here in my day job for 20 years, working with federal money to study this and see where we can put it away at scale. We can do it technically. It's expensive. Anytime you put something on to capture and put it away, it's just the cost, right? There's an energy penalty, which costs money, and you got to go do that, And we all pay for that in the end. Everybody pays always in the end. Okay. I like that. Yeah. I might steal that line. That's true because it's either taxes or it's subsidies or it's at the pump or at your plug. Everybody pays always in the end. And that's why we have to be thoughtful because it's regressive. We don't want to put too much burden, but you can clean up natural gas easier than oil.

For example, now I can keep going. Nuclear has its own waste products. Their fission products are pretty intense. They're radioactive waste, very small volume, tents. They're radioactive waste, very small volume, very high heat. And right now, not many people in the world are doing anything other with it other than leaving it in swimming pools and their spent fuel rods are in dry cask storage. France is finally starting to do some things and the US has balked around and messed around and taxed us to do it for 30 years and never spent a dime on the disposal like we were supposed to because politicians wouldn't let them. Don't put it in my state. But nuclear has intense waste, but boy, it's an amazing source of electricity with no emissions. Some upsides too. And then the waste as you get into solar and wind that we've already talked

about, those things, I don't think the scale is well understood. We should probably do it with batteries because electric vehicles are really popular. Are you based in California? No, I'm based in New York, actually. Yeah. Well, you know, battery vehicles been around a long time. They were they came before gasoline. We had electric vehicles and then we found something better. Gasoline, denser, more efficient, blah, blah. But maybe we'll go back to EVs. They make sense in New York City. I'd probably own one if I was there. I'm driving three miles to work. It might take a while, but I plug in at night. My 110 or my 220, I can charge the

battery, get a small car, no emissions, quiet, dense city, dense little car, great. As you get larger and larger in your vehicles, it takes more and more battery. And it becomes where the vehicle is only hauling battery. It can't haul anything else because they weigh so much. And that's a tough problem to get around because it's metals in there. So you start to see this trade-off. That's where we go either toward more efficient vehicles using gasoline or natural gas or hydrogen. And hydrogen fuel cells is another technology that exists today that can run your vehicle with zero CO2 emissions out of the tailpipe, just like an electric vehicle. It's just a different way to carry electricity, hydrogen is. So I like fuel cells. I think they have a big role to play and they could be kind of in that

mid-range vehicle, maybe batteries, maybe fuel cells. And then the real biggest one still, the ships and the planes, going to be liquids for a long time. They're very dense. Hard to get your head around that differently. So you see this different technologies for different purposes. And that's where I think, again, the radical middle comes in and we start to recognize these solutions. And don't protest everything because then everybody pushes back and we get nowhere. Let's make it work. These things for this purpose, these for this, this for this,

better environmentally, still gets everybody some energy, lifts them out of poverty, onward we go. So I'm happy to talk, but back to the electric vehicle. So in a, you know, I don't know if we're supposed to use brands. Let's say in a large, popular electric vehicle, the sedan. We can use brands. For example, in the Tesla S, there's 7,000 lithium ion batteries in the floor bed. Google it. Great pictures. I showed one in my TED Talk, but it wasn't called that. Not my brand. Here's a big electric vehicle. 7,000. It's easy to find that. And they're each a little bigger than your cell phone. So let's just put 7,000 cell phones

in one car and they wear out. So here we go. We'll do some arithmetic. 7,000. Now, that's a big sedan. Maybe you could cut that in half for little ones. 1.4 billion vehicles in the world today. 1.4 billion. If we electrify half of them, which is what the forecasts are trying to do in the next 20 to 25 years, half, 700 million times 7,000 is 4.9 trillion new batteries. 4.9 trillion. And we have, I'm showing you my cell phone, we have tens of billions of these. 4.9 trillion. if I were to make 250,000 batteries, 250,000 every minute,

24, seven, three 65, 37 years, just to make 4.9 trillion batteries, 37 years, 250,000 a minute. We're not even in that realm today. And then they wear out.

So we make them again and we dump the old ones. We recycle 5% of lithium-ion batteries in the world today, and those are expensive. So this process of mining, manufacturing batteries, manufacturing chemical plants, dumping them, they're toxic, making them again is not renewable. It's clean at the tailpipe. But this is a story everybody hears, well, what if you're charging it with coal? That's very real in China. China gets a lot of its electricity from coal. They're the world's leaders in EVs. So they're moving the emission from the tailpipe to the stack. But we might use more wind, more solar, more natural gas, more nuclear to charge. That's better for the emissions,

but most people aren't thinking about the actual fuel source, which is the battery. Now, the motor is awesome. An electric motor is really efficient. No gears. You know, the torque is fantastic. Way better than a combustion engine. So, this weird thing, a great motor, not a great fuel, the battery, not a great engine, the combustion engine, but a great fuel, gasoline. So you put these together and they both have pros and they both have cons. And it just depends on the work you're trying to do and where you're doing it. Again, not an easy solution, but you don't look like you're wanting easy answers. No, I'm not.

I mean, I think this kind of realism is sort of something that I feel like is sorely lacking from the conversation about, you know, the future of energy right now in the United States and globally. You know, something kind of occurred to me, again, listening to you talk, which is just, you know, this kind of happy middle ground that you're pointing to as a place that we should aspire to. And I guess sort of on a note of optimism, because a lot of the things you're saying right now, I personally find frightening and worrisome, you know, that we're lacking some of the solutions

that I feel like we need is that I do, you know, you talked about being in Texas with the huge windmill capacity you have. I kind of feel like the United States is actually moving toward a place where we are leaning more and more heavily on both sides of the solar and wind and hydro and also the oil and natural gas. What do you think about that? I mean, it seems like every year, solar and wind capacity is going up across the country. Obviously, we're still using oil and gas and natural gas. Companies like Tesla are dominant electric vehicle markets who are just like growing, growing, growing, growing. So, you know, is there a, is there kind of an upside or a positive outlook on where we

are right now from, from where you're sitting? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, maybe I'm not, I appreciate you using the word that it's frightening or scary. It, it can be, um, it, It can be. It doesn't frighten me because I'm pretty deep in it. And I may not have as much vested in the impact of the outcomes as you do. I've got four kids. They range from 32 to 21. So I know how they grew up and that kind of thing and what they learn. But Tesla is growing, growing, growing. But go look at, again, the graphs. The number of electric vehicles in the world today are around 15 million, I think. Check me on that. Maybe 16 million out of 1.4 billion. So it's 0.1% our EVs today after a lot of growth. It just takes a long time to make transitions. I'd like to see electric vehicles grow a lot more. I'd also like to see

fuel cells grow. And I'd like to see more efficient combustion engines because we're going to need them for the bigger vehicles. So some blend in the radical middle. And it's not happy. It's hard. The radical middle is a really hard space. And nobody's that happy. They're all pissed off a little bit, which means, you know, everybody, we're going to get to a good answer here because everybody's just a little angry. But that's okay. Because that means we're, everybody's bringing their best. And we're working through that. I think, again, I'm very optimistic about our abilities, I think, again, I'm very optimistic about our abilities economically and technologically, if we all think critically and get some of the politics out of the way, that we will address the environmental impacts of the negative ones, emissions from dense fossil fuels,

and we will address the negative impacts of intermittent, not dense solar and wind and batteries, we can address both. And they will, again, complement one another. If you think about the transition that's going on in the U.S., we have moved quickly away from coal in the last 15 years, remarkably fast. One of the fastest energy transitions ever in the world in terms of source of energy, replaced mostly by natural gas because it became cheap, thanks to fracking. And then nuclear held on, although we're not building new nuclear reactors, we're shutting some down, and then solar and wind grew. So if you look at a partnership between nuclear, natural gas, solar, wind, batteries, that addresses the intermittency challenge.

It addresses most of the emissions challenge. It gets the density piece in there pretty affordable. All those things come together, but it means people that are passionate about nuclear have to get right with solar and wind. about nuclear have to get right with solar and wind. People that hate natural gas are going to have to get right that it's a hell of a lot better than oil and coal probably for a lot of the things we do and the hydrogen that could come from it. So you get these compromises going on. So I'm very optimistic that we can address it if we get the binary conversation kind of subdued. Again, good, bad, clean, dirty, even religious terms like believer, denier. I mean, where did that come from?

Really? Who's a believer and who's a denier of what? You know, let's look at the data and the science and the physics, the economics, environmental impacts and get them working together. So I think we can do this. Now, I'm less hopeful for the severely impoverished in the world. I don't think we're thinking about them. I think as we go here in the wealthy world wanting clean, clean, clean, because we already have reliable and dense, always on, we already have it. They don't. And it's not us and them. It's this continuum of wealth disparity. And Isaac, that's what worries

me is the reality that 1.2 billion people in Africa today don't have much, and another 3 billion in Asia, another 1 billion in the Middle East, and kind of extending into Africa and Asia. And Latin America, another billion. I exaggerate, 600 million. But you add it all up, you're looking at about 6 to 7 billion people out of 7.8 with none to some, and they're going to get it. And they should. There's nothing morally that says we should prevent everybody on this planet from having access to energy and the kinds of lifestyles that we're very comfortable leading here. of lifestyles that we're very comfortable leading here. That's the worst scenario in the world to me because that leads to really bad outcomes. Okay. Let me ask you about that because I think when I hear you say that there's the Pollyanna-like naive part of my brain that says like,

why not just start that part of the world on, you know, solar, wind, hydro? Why don't we go that route? Just because we don't have the technological efficiency or it's too expensive. Is that the barrier right now to just, you know, if we want to bring those parts of the world online, why don't we do it with the cleaner quote unquote energy sources that we have right now? Yeah. Well, in our film Switch On, we go to Ethiopia, we go to Kenya, Nepal, Vietnam, Colombia. We go to the largest dam, one of the largest in Africa being built today, almost finished now, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, massive facility. And we look at the displaced people. We looked at the scale.

We looked at the electricity it's going to bring into Ethiopia, which is awesome. Starts to lift them up. The challenges, it's on the Nile. It flows into Egypt, eventually to Cairo. Cairo is threatened to bomb Ethiopia because they're taking their Nile. Well, now it's in our country too. So all the political weaponry around energy. So hydro, big deal. Now renewables, solar and wind. Yeah, that's, we brought, you'll see in the film, we took first solar to the little village of Gunchukwe in Columbia, an indigenous Arhuaco village. That's all they can have. I mean, there's no roads or wires or pipes. They asked for that. And so we installed a three kilowatt array, half what you have on your house for seven mud huts and thatch roofs, light bulbs, ceiling fans in the community hut, and one refrigerator freezer. That gets them started. It gets them started. Now, that gets them started. It gets them started. Now, you would think that that was no energy.

If you had one light bulb, open air, dirt floors, and ceiling fans in one building, you'd say, I don't have any energy. It's brand new energy to them. So let's not forget scale. The scale of the energy that we consume in the modern world compared to that, you can't compare it. They're orders of magnitude different. So as you start to scale up and get electronics more than phones, like a washing machine or maybe a dryer, a refrigerator or two, you know, how many cars flying all over the planet, zooming, food wasted, all takes energy, on and on and on. You can't put in enough solar and wind to handle the density of the populations in India and China. India and China alone combined, you put the two populations together, it's one out of every three people on the planet today. Two and a half billion,

2.6 billion people. One out of three in two countries alone. And India is severely impoverished, severe wealth. And then China is just coming up, you have to have dense forms of energy. You can't feed them all on kale. It just doesn't work. So the thought that you could build enough solar and wind is interesting. But let's not forget then, what's the environmental impact of that? Where does all that metal come from where does it all get made and where does it all go and and what are the human rights related to all that mining i mean i'm gonna look let's be candid with one another let's raise our hands do you think mining's green okay they can't see us but I'm not putting my hand up. I'm a geologist. I don't

mind mining, whatever. Do you think chemical manufacturing is green? No. You think landfill disposal of toxic stuff is green? Definitely not. So why are batteries green? We mine, we make them in chemical plants and we dump them in. It's not green. It's cool because there's no emissions out of the tailpipe for the climate, and that's a big deal, but we've got to recognize all these trade-offs. I get pretty passionate about this, but the atmosphere and the air and the land and the water are all interconnected. It is one system. And we can't go too far on one or we hurt the other. We've got to use a lot of land to do low-density things. So we start getting into these trade-offs. And I know people don't like that. We'd like to have a simple answer. I promise you if there was

one, we'd be doing it. Because if there was something that was clean everywhere and affordable and reliable, we would be doing it. Move on. The closest thing to that, and yeah, look, I'm glad nobody's in the audience. The closest thing is nuclear. It's the closest we have to that kind of, you said butterflies and something earlier. I don know you know but because it's really dense there's no emissions it doesn't take much land it doesn't take much mining it's always on now it has challenges too so we have to be cognizant of those but as we move down this road to empower 10 billion people which is where we're headed, it's, they're going to be a lot of dense energy and that's why, I mean,

I don't know if that's going to be satisfactory to people, but that's why you're probably not going to put up enough solar and wind in Africa or Asia. You'll put some in some, and then you have to have some other things too. It's a, it's a, it's an omnivorous diet. Let me ask you, I mean, this is, we're coming up on an hour here. So I'm going to let you go. And I've one or two more questions left.

But one of them that I had written down here is the question that I maybe get the most when I talk about energy policy. And it's the one you just alluded to, which is the question of nuclear energy. I get emails, I mean, literally almost every day from readers saying, what about nuclear? You know, the format of my newsletter is I tell you what the right saying, what the left saying, and then I give you my take. So a lot of people have written in, could you do like a pros, cons breakdown of nuclear energy? Yeah, I'd love to just give you the floor on that and sort of what, what you see in the space about, you know, what the huge upsides are, what the downsides are. You know, I'm, I have to just show my cards here. I have always been a proponent of nuclear

energy. The last time I said that in my newsletter, I got bombarded with hate mail for weeks on end from people, which I understand. I watched Chernobyl on HBO. It was terrifying. Nobody wants a nuclear disaster. But yeah, so go ahead. I'd love to just let you explain where you think things are. Sure. Yeah, I co-convened a nuclear and climate conference last fall at NC State, and we had some of the top environmental groups in the room, top power producers, top scientists, et cetera. It's very fascinating. It was all Chatham House, which means I can talk about it, but I can't say who said it, which is fine. Look, everything has pros and cons. The pros of nuclear are it's a very, very dense form of energy. And let me give you an example. When you make fuel rods,

well, let's start back. Nuclear is a different source of heat. So basically, radioactivity produces heat that boils water. It makes it turns a turbine it runs a generator instead of burning coal or oil or gas for the heat you use the natural radioactivity you have to constrain that reaction fuel rods do that you put uranium pellets in there a uranium pellet is about a centimeter tall and maybe half a centimeter wide. It's this little thing, you know, it looks like a deer pellet almost. There's enough energy equivalent in that to drive your car from New York to LA back to Dallas, Texas in one pellet. Okay. That's what dense means, a lot of energy. It would take lots of wind turbines, lots of oil and gasoline. So that's why uranium and thorium are both important because it's a very dense source of heat.

That means I can make, when I get that reaction going, the nuclear reactor is always on. So it's generating electricity 24-7, 365, very efficient. It's the most efficient form. 90% or more of the energy is used and converted into usable energy. Nothing else comes close. Coal doesn't. Gas doesn't. Wind and solar are way down there, 20% to 30%. So very efficient.

And then there's no emissions. No CO2, no methane, nothing, you know, other than from the mining of the uranium. Now, when that reaction is finished, we have to either reuse and recycle that uranium, those fission products, and do it again, which is being done in some places, but it's expensive, or we take that hot element and we store it. It'll be radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Radioactivity sounds scary. We're bombarded with it every day, naturally, in airplanes and cars, everywhere.

You walk outside, inside. We're always getting radiated. But that's intense radiation. The intense radiation will be there for a long time, but the heat is a couple hundred year problem. We've got to keep those things stored and safely for 100 to 200 years while they cool down, and then they're really not a big issue. That's still a very long time. So that's the challenge is what do you do with the waste products, the fission products from the nuclear reaction? Nothing's perfect. We have fission today, which splits an atom, and that's where

the heat comes from. Fusion may be coming in the future, always getting closer where you collide things and make heat. There's big reactors today, like Chernobyl was, not a very good design and a terrible set of human failures, as you saw reasonably accurately in the series. But on a kilowatt hour basis, nuclear power has been the safest by far for humans of anything else. Human deaths, way low for nuclear compared to anything anything else you can name the three big three mile island chernobyl fukushima diage right and three mile island was a react that was actually at work we caught the problem and shut it in fukushima wasn't a nuclear problem it was a tsunami that wiped out the reactor and the diesel tanks on the surface to back to flood the core were wiped out so we couldn't

pump fresh water in ocean water went in and then things started to go south there the nuclear problem but not a it wasn't because of the nuclear reactor itself so there's these big ones and they're i think you're seeing china build a bunch about 50 and more a lot more on the books. I hope India does. Dense population, dense energy. I'd like to see parts of the world continue to grow their nuclear program as part of the solution. One way to get there, Isaac, is going to be smaller reactors. You've heard of small modular reactors. You can Google NuScale, a company John Hopkins runs it, and there are others out there that are making these smaller ones, 50 to 100 megawatts, so maybe a 20th to a 10th the size

of the big ones. Why is that cool? Well, I could put a small modular reactor in a village somewhere, even in Africa, always on electricity and supplement it with some solar and wind. And now I've got something pretty stable that's always there for them. And even a little bit off grid, because it can kind of stand alone and generate electricity. There's some big advantages to that. And people worry about them. Yeah, but we've had them on aircraft carriers and submarines for 50 or 60 years. They're nuclear powered. There's a reactor on the boat that's making the energy to drive that big propeller and it's mobile. So we can probably manage to put them on the ground somewhere and yeah, you got to watch the waste.

It can't get away from you. But I think if you think about small modular fission and larger reactors, there's a big role to play for nuclear. And you may get hate mail, I might get hate mail, but if you're passionate about climate change and something that is scalable today to address those big emissions, nuclear is one of those big wedges. It is one of the things we can do today at the rate of scale we need to. There's others, hydrogen. We've talked about fuel cells. You can use hydrogen for other things, burning it, capturing the carbon and storing it. We've already mentioned geothermal, the heat of the earth. Out in California, there's great geothermal. Texas has some. We're starting to see it become more affordable potentially. So there's other non-fossil related things, non-oil gas and coal related things that are coming, but they take a while and there'll be wedges as well.

So in terms of purely climate change, some of the big wedges to reduce emissions at the timeframes and the scale and the costs, and those all three have to happen or it won't happen. Nuclear, replacing coal with natural gas, capturing the carbon from the gas, hydrogen, geothermal, hydro facilities, solar and wind. Those are the big wedges. Those are the big things we can start to do in combination around the world, depending on what resources you have and do it. You know, it's hard to put hydro in West Texas. It's bloody flat and there's no water. So it's just resource

limited. And that happens for all different kinds of resources around the world. It's hard to put solar in Seattle and Germany. It is not sunny. It's one of the low, low solar intensity regions, and you can put them in there, but their efficiency is going to be terrible. That means it's really expensive. So these are the things that you think about as you study energy systems. I love it. Scott Tinker, thank you so much for the time today. It was a fascinating conversation. I think it gives me a lot to chew on and think about. If people want to follow your work and keep up with your stuff, where's the best place to do that? Yeah, probably switchon.org, which is our not-for-profit. A lot of videos there, films and series and small feature or little primers and labs and things.

And then I'm on some social media, kicking and screaming, Instagram, LinkedIn, and probably Facebook. But, and then the Bureau of Economic Geology here at UT Austin, we do a lot of research in these things. BEG, Bureau of Economic Geology, UT Austin, and all those places. If you Google me, unfortunately, I'm very easy to find. I love it. Well, thank you so much for the time. It was an awesome conversation. And yeah, let's do it again sometime soon. Well, thanks for all you're doing, Isaac. I appreciate your drive toward thoughtful and bipartisan dialogues on these subjects because it's really important. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75.

For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.