TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #373: The Energy of Nations with John Constable

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with John Constable to discuss the economics of renewable energy. John's Quillette article Global Warming Policy Foundation Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl CrowdHealth TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here. To introduce this rip of TFTC, I sat down with John Constable, Director at the Renewable Energy Foundation, to talk common sense about energy, the different sources, how dense they are, what we should be using, how idiotic current is. energy policy in the West is and how China is beating us. If we don't change energy policy soon, we could be cascading into a very bad situation. I mean, it seems that the situation is bad already. However, if we don't make some drastic changes to energy policy, we could find ourselves in a doom loop that really sets society back. Decades, if not centuries. No exaggeration.

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You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. I reread your piece in Quillette this morning.

I think it's very important work what you're doing, especially right now. In a sense, it's a blinding flash of the obvious, but sometimes important things are like that. They're things that I suppose we all knew, actually, but weren't quite facing up to. And the character of wealth, I think, is one of them. Well, we should talk about this, but are we already working on your broadcast?

Are we pre-broadcast? Do you want to start? Well, I hit record since I didn't have a producer, and i figured we could just we could yeah as you like um yes i the quillette piece is uh is the latest version of these thoughts and i'm hoping to to build on on that as as i go along i it's it's frustrating that there are so few of us willing to take this physicalist perspective on wealth seriously, since so much is at stake. And if we get this wrong, according to my view, we may be jeopardizing the accumulated wealth and sophistication of several millennia. And once you start slipping in this way, it could be very dangerous for us indeed. And we tend to

think of wealth and sophistication, and particularly intellectual sophistication, as permanent acquisitions. They're very far from it. Intellectual sophistication is like any other physical state, it's vulnerable to thermodynamic decay. And conceptual elegance and sophistication can easily be lost. Technology is not a permanent acquisition. You've got to keep on maintaining it through the social reproduction of knowledge. And I'm concerned that we may be moving into a time when our energy supply is not adequate to maintain not only the gross physical sophistication of our road networks and our buildings, but also our intellectual sophistication, at which point we really do become very vulnerable to unbounded slippage. You climb slowly in

civilizational terms, but you fall fast. And we know that from the historical record. So I'm pretty concerned about it. So I'm very committed to making sure that these ideas actually get across. But it is frustratingly slow, largely, I think, because of conventional economics. I regard the field of economics as a bit of a curse, actually, particularly macroeconomics. Microeconomics is humble, but decent stuff. You know, it helps you run a business and that sort of stuff. It's basically accountancy. I have a lot of time for accountants, actually. They're not exciting people, but they're much closer to the real world than macroeconomists, who I think give false comfort to politicians and also to decision makers in

large corporates, who genuinely don't really know what they're doing. They have so poor a grasp of physical actuality of the real economy they constantly blunder and uh and make decisions which affect all of our lives whether we wish them to or not that's been a reoccurring theme here on this show is we're not too fond of academic economists as well and i think what you just described there is that these individuals are completely detached from the source of information and they try to granularly control complex systems and centrally plan them which is is not possible no even the liberal economists i think are unrealistic about uh what matters uh to two people they don't see what people are doing you know one of richard scary's books i

have small children um one of richard scary's books i read recently with them entitled what people do all day well it's a pretty good question actually uh and it's not quite clear what they are up to. But I don't think it's so difficult to work it out. I mean, what people are actually doing is gathering resources to secure reproduction. They're protecting their families. They're investing in their future reproduction. And it's that which I think misleads so many economists. They think of people as being hedonic robots just seeking sensory satisfactions of various kinds. But those are all proxies and intermediaries. What they're actually doing is safeguarding the futures of their families. And this is why there's this

constant friction between economic expectations and what people actually do. So economists look at human behavior and think of it as rather irrational, but much of what appears to be irrational makes a great deal of sense when you regard them as organisms like any other, seeking satisfactions as proxies for the development of their own family trajectories. And reacting to new information that is local to them. Yes, which they know very well. And the academic economists know not at all. um in fact yeah absolutely and bringing this back to the concept of energy and

the fact that you believe that humanity is energy blind right now i really like that part of your piece and quillette essentially like in humans relation to their understanding of energy is similar to a fish's understanding of water where it just surrounds us but we don't really understand how it works and the importance of it and there's a causal loop of humans ability over time to harness energy most importantly more denser forms of energy to be more productive throughout the economy and it seems that for some reason or another over the last two to three decades uh the powers that be have decided to completely ignore uh thermodynamics in the reality of physics and the fact that we've only gotten to this point because we've found denser and more

abundant forms of energy absolutely i mean you say the powers that be but the powers that be in the west i mean the powers that be in asia uh seem to understand these matters pretty well and uh they're running their economies as if energy density actually did matter, and they're benefiting hugely from it. I was in the States recently giving talks to people in the Denver oil and gas world, and I was surprised how few of those people, some of them understood it very well, but many didn't, that American energy consumption is not in a good state. You've been flatlining since the early 2000s. It's worse in Europe, by the way. I mean, our energy consumption is falling quite sharply. Those sorts of indicators ought to be front page news.

They should be really very controversial. There should be seminars every week in Washington on why is it that American energy consumption is stalling in this way? This is just not a good sign, but people are indifferent to it. And I think this energy blindness is an interesting way of looking at it. I think that's literally likely to be true. We're developing this idea. It's not fully fleshed out yet. But it seems very likely that awareness of energy has not been a strong selective advantage in human history. You can get by without it.

But we can't get by without it. We've developed such sophisticated societies. We're so far from thermodynamic equilibrium that we're vulnerable to our misunderstanding. So it's now a selective pressure. Those who understand energy will obviously prosper, and those who don't will go to the wall, which is where it seems to be going with me.

From my perspective, I think the West is in a very bad state, and we'll find it very difficult to recover. I trust that we can, but I'm not optimistic at the moment. As you say, our governments seem determined to ignore these realities, and to pretend that one can actually power and maintain, that's a crucial point, and maintain complex civilizations with inferior fuels, such as wind and solar. And we're blind to that quality issue. So when we talk about energy blindness in that piece that Deborah Lieberman and I wrote for Quillette, we're thinking that they're blind to things that really matter about it. People understand quantity because they tend to reason in terms of,

have we got enough? I mean, have we got enough food, for example? Have we got enough vegetables and meat and honey or whatever? And enough is not the right question to ask about energy? It's a subsidiary question. The principal question to ask is, have you got enough of the right quality? Have you got the right quality energy? And then you say, have we got enough? And the first law of thermodynamics tells us you've always got enough. Energy is conserved. It's never lost. It's always there. But it's the quality which is declining all the time over the entire system, the universe. And locally, of course, you look for high quality sources in order to be able to do the work that you require. Having enough is just not the problem.

So people will say in a sort of blithe and rather foolish way, there's an enormous amount of energy in the wind flowing around the world. Perfectly true. There's a huge amount. There's a huge amount of energy in falling raindrops. But it's of such high entropy, it's so disordered and chaotic, it's of no earthly use to anybody. how is it we've got to this point where such a very basic physical point should not be a criteria of great importance in government policy but we really have and so the president of the united states can push through with the inflation reduction act as if these low-grade sources are remotely adequate to sustain you as a nation as a defensible and capable nation that the ira is a disaster for the us and indeed for all of your allies too so reversing the ira is a matter of very great importance for the american people and i i can only hope that at some point people in the democratic party will wake up to the dangers of what they're doing and that in the

green party the green movements as well that they will understand that you cannot push through with an environmental agenda if you're going to jeopardize people's health and well-being in the way that they are actually doing they're going to lose this argument there'll be a dramatic reversal of the environmental movement at some point, unless they decide to accept that there have to be high quality sources of energy in the decarbonization mix, which of course means nuclear, to which they have an unreasonable objection. Yeah, the Green Party was just celebrating the wind down of more nuclear plants in Germany only about a month ago, which is fascinating. and i i agree with you i think there's going to be a a shift in perception toward energy policy

in the west as the situation in europe unfolds and things become more precarious in that part of the world and even here in the united states with the overt confrontational posturing from the biden administration with the oil and gas industry and rising gas prices obviously they fallen in recent months due to the fact that we are reducing the strategic petroleum reserves but that should end at some point there's already talks of diesel shortages hitting the market at some point in the next couple of months but agreed i think the public perception is beginning to shift i think it's already shifting materially but that that trend will only become exacerbated and what moves these trends is prices people react to prices especially in a world where

wealth inequality is as vast as it is today the increase in prices and energy which is one of the most essential inputs into a human's day-to-day life is going to to cause a reaction and i think even if the inflation reduction act was successful in transitioning us to more wind and solar you would still have that reaction because like you mentioned they are less dense forms of energy and no matter how many of these turbines or solar farms that you build the nature of these energy sources is going to lead to higher prices which people will react to yes they got their resource their resource demands are enormous both for the construction of the equipment also for the operation of the system into which they are coerced so american electricity will become much

more expensive as that goes on i quite agree with you about prices i happen to think the ira will actually start to have effects before the price impacts start to hit home and these could be political controversial if they are correctly understood and publicized i mean there is of the well-known figures, the hundreds of billions of increases in taxes, which will be necessary to fund the tax credits that the IRA will make available to the green sector. But also, and I think in some ways, perhaps more importantly, there are these vast capital transfers, which are encouraged by the tax credits. Now, the US is no longer quite as rich as it once was. And there is a big opportunity cost there. So you're talking about several trillions

of capital movements over a decade. And those figures can be calculated from analysis done by Princeton, very supportive of the IRA, by the way, but nevertheless, you can extract these numbers from that work. And you can see the scale. So it's several trillion dollars over a decade. And that implies underfunding of things that the American people might prefer to see better funded, roads, schools, hospitals, and so on, and indeed defense. I mean, you might need to defend yourselves. So this opportunity cost could become extremely controversial if it is correctly discussed and the blame for that cost and that reallocation is identified so that people understand that the reason why the university program and the road program is underfunded is

because you're pouring so much capital into the green sector. Yes. And getting back to the concept of entropy and energy because i think like you mentioned people are simply ignorant to this concept or so it would seem uh if you're paying attention to the policy that's being implemented let's dive into the topic of entropy a little bit to educate the listeners about what it is and how it pertains to different types of energy sources and what types of entropy are are advantageous for a human society that wants to progress and flourish yes it's a thorny concept of course in in physics and uh and there are well well-rubbed jokes about this very highly polished jokes uh you know you start off not understanding entropy and and then the light goes on and you do

understand it and then the light goes out again and you realize that you didn't really understand it. And finally, you realize that you don't actually understand it, but you don't care anymore. And I think you have to keep things relatively simple. But it is a very deep concept, but it can be understood in fairly simple terms. It's fundamentally the difference between order and disorder, improbability and things that are probable and things that are highly improbable. And in terms of fuels, we're looking at fuels which are highly ordered, highly improbable, very unusual states of matter. And that's what the fossil fuels are, because they're derived from organic structures. So the result of organic evolution, they're very improbable molecular configurations.

And they happen to be strong reservoirs, therefore, of energy. So we can break those bonds and release energy. And that orderliness of energy sources is the key to it. Once you've understood that, you can see, oh, yes, the wind and the sun, they're actually relatively disordered sources of energy. This is close to random heat and the intermittency about which we talk so much with regard to wind, and indeed applies to solar too, although it's quite regular, is part of that disorder. It's not a source of energy that you can call upon at will to serve a particular requirement. You have to wait until the wind blows before you can generate electricity.

Now, people will then say, but you need to store the electricity and that will be the solution. But think again in terms of the entropy and the order and the disorder. So you've got a very disordered energy source. You need to correct that disorder. So you apply some order in the form of a battery. But where is that order coming from? Well, at the moment, of course, it's coming from fossil fuels because that's how we build our batteries. So we're injecting negative entropy, as it were, order to correct the disorder of the wind. And at that point, an engineer will say, well, why do we introduce the disorder in the first place? It would be much better to have a thoroughly orderly system. So we generate our electricity from uranium and coal

and gas, and then we don't need to inject corrective measures because they're so ordered that they can develop their own support systems and networks that supply consumers. So I think the simple statistical sense of entropy is the one that's most useful to explain to people. It's orderliness. And people understand the intermittency issue pretty intuitively. And I think that's a pathway for people to see why wind and solar are so dangerous, actually, in energy systems.

They just degrade the orderliness of existing systems. And that's all we've done in Europe. We've added huge wind fleets and solar fleets, and all we've done is to degrade the orderliness of our energy supply system. It's become more chaotic, literally more stochastic, actually, and thus much more expensive and fragile. And the exposure to natural gas in Europe, which is so controversial at the moment, has resulted in this extraordinary political blackmail from Russia. Well, natural gas is the sole thermodynamically capable fuel left in the system. That is supplying all the order which the system requires. It's that which actually fills in the gaps and supports the wind and solar fleets. So the order has to come from somewhere, and we're still relying on fossil fuels in spite of having all these wind fleets because of this fundamental difference between sources of high entropy and sources of low entropy, like fossil fuels themselves. that's it the way you describe that like order with denser forms of energy feels like it's like a fractal right because talking about the situation that europe's in particularly germany with their dependence on russian natural gas the one can make the argument that

a lot of what's going or what is going on in ukraine may have been prevented if if putin didn't think he had the political chip uh in his favor which is hey i have leverage because i have the energy if europe were to use more orderly forms of energy like natural gas and nuclear and really build out that capacity to support themselves one could argue that we wouldn't have disorder at the geopolitical stage because um putin would not have that leverage over europe that he has since they are dependent on its natural gas. He wouldn't have had the courage, perhaps, to invade Ukraine if Europe had been not so obviously weak.

You know, the European system was already clearly deeply in trouble. I mean, people blame a lot of the current problems on the invasion of Ukraine. Well, that's not wrong in the sense that it's the immediate cause. It's the proximal cause of the difficulties. But actually, things were very bad last year. you know you could see the european energy system staggering and huge fluctuations in prices we've had a big blackout in the uk in 2019 there are lots of indicators of increasing fragility throughout the european system particularly in the uk as it happens and the russians are very

observant they knew exactly what's going on so this is a good moment for them to strike as it were because after all they couldn't rely on us not waking up to the problem and fixing it so this It was a calculated risk. He thought this was perhaps a good moment to try it. As it happens, it seems not to have worked out very well for him. His own armed services have not performed well at all. And the Europeans have tried hard to support the Ukrainians, although perhaps not as vigorously as they would have been able to do, had they been actually in much better shape. Yes, I quite agree. i think if europe had been stronger energetically it's quite conceivable that

mr putin would not have taken the gamble that he has yeah and i really want to dig into this point that energy abundance and availability to people globally is important for peace at the end because i mean i i agree with you i do not like academic economists but i but i am a very fond believer in free market economics to solve problems and to bring peace to the world where if we can actually a lot of the strife caused in the world is driven by the fact that we we really don't live in free market economies we have centrally planned monetary systems we have century plan energy policy, centrally planned food policy, and all these things have led to these negative externalities that inherently cause friction in the physical world as the

effects of the centrally planned policies begin to peak up and meet space. And so going back to the fact that the US and Europe has been, the energy consumption in these areas has been decreasing since 2007 correct in early 2000 2003 four five six depends on which country you look at but around about i say 2005 is a good average figure and in the west i mean the the amount of energy being consumed has fallen materially between 15 and 20 percent across the different areas right so in the uk uh final energy consumption um total primary energy consumption, sorry, has fallen by about 30%, which is huge. And we're now back to levels of consumption last seen in the 1950s, which is astonishing, given the rise in population that

we've seen over that period. And our final consumption of electricity has fallen by about 22% since that period. And we're back to levels last seen in the late 80s and early 90s. Now, I think that electricity figure, although it seems slightly less dramatic, is actually much more significant. Because electricity is such a low entropy form of energy. It's a wonderful energy carrier. And it's the carrier which ought to be growing in a sophisticated and increasingly sophisticated and progressively more hospitable society for human beings. You should be using more and more electricity, not less and less. So it's a serious indicator of collapsing civilizational capability you know we're just not as able to serve our needs as well as we were

quite recently actually so yeah falling electricity consumption i think is the key indicator but the total primary energy consumption figures tell their own story too and are very dramatic yeah and i mean and this is one of my favorite charts i'm sure you're aware of it but the henry adams curve which goes back yeah and tries to highlight energy consumption per capita and there's just like an obvious plateau that starts in the 70s and similarly with electricity consumption in the west in the early 2000s that's happening as well all of the environmentalists and the elite cognoscenti in the political realm would say this is a success we're losing less energy but but we have arguably more wealth, quote unquote,

and people are speaking to each other via video stream across the ocean. It's like, things are okay. Things are fine. This is good. We're becoming more efficient. But that's another thing you highlight in your article in Quillette is that the more efficient we become with energy allows us to use more. You'll find that we use more because if you're more efficient in one space,

that gives you more resources to allocate somewhere else where you have other needs energy is like cash it's never left on the table uh this is a well known point this was brought forward by uh the chemist eustace von liebig and the english ws jevons in 19th century it's not a theory this is an empirical observation based on human history but when you improve the efficiency of event energy consumption processes what you actually do is to lay the groundwork for increasing total energy consumption and the reason for this is fundamental reason for this is that there is no limit to the improvements we will make in our environment to serve our own needs. We're never going to say, for example, that child mortality

is low enough. We're always going to want to improve these things. Why shouldn't we? There's no reason why people shouldn't wish to keep on improving child mortality rates, improving the safety of their lives and the comfort of their lives. They never will say enough is enough. So energy consumption will always rise in a healthy economy. And therefore, when we look at falling energy consumption in the West, we know that it can't be energy efficiency. Energy efficiency may be buffering that falling consumption, but it won't be causing the falling consumption. So as energy becomes much more expensive, yes, of course, people are desperately trying to improve efficiency processes. So in effect, that's the system trying to return to

trend, trying to return to growth. So they're protecting themselves against increasingly costly energy by improving the efficiency of their processes. But unfortunately, the costs of energy keep on rising, and therefore, people can't afford to actually use the energy. Now, there are things we would like to do, but we just can't do. And one of those things, and I think this is where falling consumption is critically dangerous for us, it's not simply serving contemporary needs, but it's repairing and maintaining the sophistication which we have accumulated over several millennia of civilization in the West. I think you can observe this in decaying infrastructure in the Western states. I think, actually, too, on my recent visit to the

US, I can see it with you, too. I think it's quite clearly evident that the infrastructure is slipping in the US, certainly is in Europe. And we should be much more concerned about this than we are we're asleep really yeah it's i mean i would agree the infrastructure decay here in the us is very visible and palpable i mean there was it's weird because you have all these weird again centralizing forces one being government contracts driven by the ability to print money so i lived in chicago for six years and it's a pretty well-known fact that in chicago while we're on the concept of infrastructure and roads is one of my favorite stories to tell is the city obviously it's the winters are pretty harsh in chicago there's a lot of

snow a lot of sleet a lot of ice and so the the roads are continuously salted um and due to the fact that the city essentially has a jobs program where they want construction jobs year in and year out they use a medium grade gravel to repave the roads every spring and so to me this always highlighted it's like a negative externality of these government contracts funded by easy money that just led to poor outcomes and it seems like on the energy side of things particularly with the subsidization of wind and solar we're seeing something similar where it's not the roads that need to be repaved every year but it's uh the service to solar panels wind turbines and under investment and more reliable the higher grade gravel if you will to use an analogy and oil gas

and nuclear yeah so the problems here in europe are largely due to starvation of funds going into the conventional energy sector over the last decades under investment due to over investment in renewables. That's quite clear. The refreshment cycle for renewables, to which you allude, is very real concern, actually. The lifetime of these pieces of equipment is quite short. They're sort of reverting to this point about the order and disorder of the fuels. I mean, I said the disorderly nature of the wind and sun had to be corrected somehow. Well, one of the corrections takes place, of course, in the wind turbines and the solar panels themselves. They're very complex objects, actually, in some ways. And they're correcting it. But of course,

that means the wear and tear on them is quite considerable. I mean, effectively, they have been consumed in the correction process. So their economic lifetime is quite short. And the subsidy programs are usually grounded on the false expectation that costs will fall sufficiently to offset the extremely poor quality of the fuel, and also on the assumption that the equipment will last, say, for 25 or 30 years economically. It might last that long in physical terms, but it will be so poor by the end of that period that it won't be worth operating. So its economic lifetime is much shorter. So you're looking at increasing operations and maintenance costs for wind turbines and solar farm panel sites, which eventually exceed the income,

and at which point it becomes economic to repower them. We think in Europe that the economic lifetime for wind is much, much less than the 25 to 30 years quoted by the industry. It's somewhere in the region of 10 to 15 years, actually, for wind. And for solar, perhaps a little bit better, but not quite clear. But then the performance of solar panels in Northern Europe as you can guess absolutely pit why would you do it the load factor in germany is under 10 percent in the uk it's slightly above 10 percent uh you know these these are mal investments obvious mal investments no one should build this stuff that's like as as if they were to build solar farms in in chicago where yeah my freshman year in college the sun didn't pierce the sun for 90

straight days yeah well you do it to show off you know these are classic veblen goods uh you do something so obviously stupid to show just how rich you actually are you know we're we're so rich we can afford to build solar panels in chicago yeah that's um well this is a honing in on the mal investment another part of the mal investment with wind and solar particularly is land use which is a topic that doesn't get enough in attention in the overarching public debate about the green transition is the amount of land that these resources take up they're extremely inefficient if you measure them simply on land use necessary to produce a megawatt hour yes and you might say in the us that matters less than it does in the uk and great britain

is a land area roughly the size of minnesota uh with 65 million people rather than six million people in it. So it's a very densely populated area. But it really matters to us. It's a very, very important consideration for us. This is effectively a land use conflict here in the UK. There's a lot of public resistance to renewable energy developments of all kinds. When wind, onshore wind was very active in the 2000s, there were hundreds of resistance groups all over Britain fighting these things, and pretty effectively, actually. And at the moment, there's a big boom in solar and solar is causing real concern and not just amongst those directly affected by it by those who are concerned about food production so agronomists we're looking at

situations where we have genuinely proposals for uh solar farms that cover two and a half to three thousand acres of british farmland individual sites and we think there is something like a 100,000 acres currently under threat from solar farms. Well, British farmland is pretty good overall, and it's already an energy collector. It's collecting solar energy and turning it into a rather valuable form, food, which is humanly digestible. What kind of government would encourage the production of second-rate electrons when you can create first-rate food from your land. This is a very inefficient use of a national resource. So I don't think that will last. I think the brakes will go on at some point, but we will have lost quite a lot of farmland. So yes,

land conflict is very real in a small country like the UK. I don't think it's irrelevant in the US either. I've thought about this a bit. Well, some of my friends are quite relaxed about it. The US is a very big place. But then again, the truth is that the renewable development won't be randomly located in the US. It's going to tend to be closer to centers of demand, if it possibly can be, and particularly close to substations and close to gridlines. And that means that certain areas will become focuses of attention. Those could be areas that are very valuable for other purposes, whether that happens to be farming or residential requirements or other things, or perhaps just preservation on the grounds of environmental quality. So I don't think you'll

be immune from land use conflict in relation to renewables, simply on the grounds that it won't be randomly distributed over the country, that where there are resources, they will tend to conflict with other uses that the American people would wish. And of course, the scale on which the White House is projecting renewable energy is absolutely gigantic. So it's unlikely to be invisible to Americans. It's going to become very visible. if it indeed goes as far as that i can see the brakes having to go on necessarily because you

simply can't afford it quite quickly actually one of my favorite land use conflicts here in the united states is the people up in cape cod martha's vineyard that area of the country who often find themselves in the camp of championing the green energy transition but they don't want it in their backyard when the wind turbines are set to go off off the coast of of their island towns they they throw a fit who would blame them it's quite i'm on quite understands it's a beautiful place why would you want to do that to it yeah yeah and so is this energy like is it even would it even be possible to transition to the green energy economy set forth in the inflation reduction act which is a very orwellian thing to name and yeah that is

going to increase inflation yes i i get asked this uh question on platforms i you know people say i'm you know you're saying john that we can't have a green economy and my answer is always the same i say no no you can have the green economy but you won't like it when you've got it you won't like it at all. It's going to be deeply unpleasant. What effectively you're going to do is to enlarge the energy sector in relation to all other parts of the economy. There'll be much less energy left over to do the things you actually want to do. The energy sector will be the major consumer of its own output, as it was in the past. And we know what the structure will be like because we know what organic economies were like, that they were dominated by the energy

production sector, which then was the land. So in the pre-coal era in Europe, particularly in Britain, it's a good example, the land owned most of the productive energy sector, almost all of it, and it employed nearly everybody. 75% of the British workforce, even in the 18th century, worked for landowners, hence the enormous socio-political power of the gentry and aristocracy, hence their enduring romance hence you know the romance of Downton Abbey the socio-political power of the aristocracy pre-coal is absolutely gigantic because they own the energy sector and they employ nearly everybody there's hardly any non-energy economy in the organic system and that's what the future green economy would be like we're all going to be working for the wind

and solar industries and there'll be hardly any other economic activities in other words we'll be poor. We'll be grinding poor because the energy sector will be consuming nearly all the available energy in order to try, probably fecklessly and hopelessly, to repair and reproduce itself. So yes, you can have a green economy, but you'll want to go back to fossil fuels pretty quickly. Yes, you'll be working for all the wind and solar farms, which will be owned by the state because they'll be wholly subsidized by the money printer. Which sounds like a condition for revolution to me yes yes and so this could bring this back to the public debate around this because if we're going to give the governments of the west any credit it is that they've successfully

psychologically manipulated a lot of people to believe that this transition is not only worthwhile but essential to human flourishing in the digital or in the digital age as we continue transitioning into the 21st century and i think a lot of the success that the government and the environmentalist groups have had is conflating the idea of increased energy consumption particularly via fossil fuels and nuclear energy with an increase in pollution are these two ideas they can be mutually exclusive can they not yes it's rather like uh it's some kind of eating disorder, isn't it? It's like a tragic conviction that food is actually poisoning you. Well, it may be that you're eating unhealthily and you're eating too, you know, and perhaps you

should change your diet, but you do need to eat. And yes, we've been convinced somehow that energy is something we can do without, but we really can't. But this goes back to the point about misconceptions of energy. And these are very widespread, even amongst highly educated people, even, I'm sad to say, amongst engineers. You'll find people who don't really understand the concept of energy. Energy is not a thing. You know, it's not a substance. It's a mathematical concept. It's extremely abstract. It's just a mathematical representation of the potential of causing change. And it's possessed by all inputs in an economy. So, oil and gas are not energy. They're substances. They happen to have very advantageous energy characteristics,

a lot of available energy in those substances. But energy itself is not a substance. so you you know you you can substitute for particular sources oil gas whatever but you can never substitute for energy so we commonly in common places to say that modern society is extremely energy dependent all societies have always been energy dependent every organism is energy dependent it's always maximal it's always one you're never less or more than one on energy, because you cannot make any changes and maintain your own structure, your body structure as an organism, your society structure, if you're a social organism, such as we economic organism. So energy dependency is always one. It's never less, never more. So we're not somehow

aberrant and sinful in this respect. There's nothing new about the kind of our energy dependency. The early cities of Mesopotamia were the same. Hunter-gatherers are the same. they're just as dependent on energy as we are uh we we consume a lot of it because we have a very sophisticated and comfortable societies we don't have to worry about many things that were extremely dangerous to our ancestors no but if we don't change the tide soon we could be thrust back into we might and yes quite it's indeed you i i one does worry about that so i am as i say you you climb slowly in civilizational terms but you get the energy supply wrong you fall pretty fast steps up elevator down quite like that yeah and i really want to drive this point home

to the audience how quickly because there's there's two types of causal loops uh one in the positive direction and one in a negative direction the one in the negative direction could be a doom loop and how dire do you think the situation is how close are we to getting sucked into a doom loop that we may not be able to get out of i i really don't know and i don't understand the relationship between uh the accumulated physical capital of our societies and our energy consumption well enough to be able to say uh at what point it becomes irrecoverable where your accumulated capital is decaying so fast that you cannot arrest further decay,

that you cannot increase the energy consumption to arrest the decay because your accumulated capital is falling so fast. But it could be quite abrupt. This has brought home to me, actually, when I was in Denver recently and I was learning about small-scale oil and gas production in those areas around Denver

and particularly in the San Juan Basin. And I started reading articles about the geology of these areas. And once you start to go into an energy system like that in detail, you begin to appreciate how intellectually sophisticated it is. This is not crude business. And you have this impression it's just about drilling holes in the ground and getting stuff out. It's not like this at all. There's enormous literature behind these industries. They know so much about the geological structure of these areas that they can find oil and gas. So it's intellectually very sophisticated. There are thousands of papers on the geology of even quite

small areas. Now, that kind of intellectual sophistication is quite easily lost. Once you've lost that, you just don't know where to look for the oil and gas in these areas. So once that sort of social reproduction of knowledge is interrupted, you're back to square one. You've got to recreate all that and learn again and that that sort of point i think is genuinely very concerning i if we get to the point where our intellectual capacities are uh our inherited knowledges are so damaged that we can't understand the literature around us in relation to energy sources yes um we might go into free fall i don't think we're close to it right now i do think there is time there is time to pull this around i i don't want to be uh i'm concerned but i'm not

yet uh fatalistic about it i think you know and i wouldn't be i wouldn't be talking to you about it and honestly if i didn't think there was some chance of persuading people and and turning this around before it's too late but i do think we need to get a move on you know i don't think it's an idea to leave much longer no i mean particularly here in the united states we really need to where You have the current administration, and even behind that administration, a large environmentalist movement really beating the drum, hey, we're going to phase out fossil fuels in the next 20 years. And going back to that point about losing that knowledge, how does that happen? Well, you completely disincentivize individuals from going to seek it out in the first place, because they don't think there's going to be an economic benefit to harnessing that knowledge in the future. Yes. And we know pretty much what this is like in relation to nuclear in the UK. We're one of the first countries in the world to develop nuclear energy. And we had, at one point, a very strong tradition in nuclear engineering. And I remember my last years in Cambridge

as a minor variety of fellow in my own college, all the nuclear engineers were in their 70s and 80s. There were no young nuclear engineers. And that is pretty much the case today. We've gone from being a nuclear leader with a strong tradition in nuclear engineering, where it was being passed down from generation to generation, to being one where we're now unable to build our own nuclear power stations. And we're customers of the French state and the Chinese state. And that's clearly a disaster in societal terms for the UK. And it's clearly a retrograde step. It's a very serious loss of intellectual sophistication. And similarly, yes, you'll see the same thing in the US if you persist along this agenda, which, you know, pray God you don't.

Now, and then you have economic physical constraints, too. I have good friends who actually work in the oil and gas industry and are in control of running drilling schedules. And they're telling me that they can't get steel for the casing to actually drill the well so as you have president biden out there screaming at the oil and gas industry to go drill more wells they're standing there like hey every every rig crew in the country is literally working 24 7 uh if we want to like even if we wanted to drill more we can't because we don't have enough steel casing because of the supply chain mess-ups that the economic lockdowns created.

There's so many very, again, going back to the fact that these are complex systems that central planners have completely corrupted, particularly in the last five years with the lockdowns and the mess-up of the supply chains that don't allow you to fix things if you wanted to in a timely manner. I'm rambling right now,

but I'm just getting worked up thinking about how we've messed up this energy policy but i agree with you we should be going toward denser forms of energy nuclear specifically and i guess that's a good sort of transition to talk about what are the misconceptions about nuclear energy why has been so demonized and what do you think we need to communicate to the market uh to to get people more comfortable with this denser form of energy moving forward. Well, since people are concerned about climate change, I think the rational approach is to say, all right, if you're that concerned about climate change, then you need a serious answer to it. And renewables are physically

inadequate. They're simply not going to be able to produce the low carbon energy that you want to reduce emissions so that if you persist down the renewables track, you will see an abrupt return to relatively inefficient fossil fuel consumption simply to maintain standards of living and to prevent the kind of societal collapse we've just been talking about. If you really want to see a long-term and truly sustainable, a dread word, but sustainable low-carbon economy, then it'll have to be nuclear. So nuclear is the way to produce a long-term low-carbon economy. Some Greens already take this view i mean it's not just us and there are some out there but most do not yet uh accept or they because they believe that renewables can actually do the job so they hate nuclear more than

they love the planet on the whole why do they hate nuclear it's a mysterious subject i mean clearly the weapons program didn't help um it's uh it's mysterious and uh it's a very superior kind of energy so it's rather difficult to understand it's not simple and obvious and i suppose there's some residual um dislike going back into the 1930s remember the germans rejected nuclear on the ground it was you know jewish physics um thank goodness because they would have retrieved a bomb quite early if they they'd uh pursued it so we were fortunate in one respect But I think that the hostility to nuclear goes very deep in Europe and maybe in the U.S. as well, in this way that it's perceived as somehow it's earthy rather than ethereal.

So the renewables have sky and sun kind of rhetoric to them. I mean, the wind turbine is a spin doctor's dream. You know, it suggests a flower and a crucifix embodying rebirth and sacrifice image. You know, it's an absolute gift. um and it's completely useless as an energy producer which is unfortunate um so yes i think it's the it's the earth sky uh rhetoric is very persuasive to many people they'd rather look up to the sky rather than accepting that actually support our lives we we have to go down into the earth that was another thing you touched on your piece which is i think very powerful is that no

other species or animal has ever used wind particularly as their energy source i i find this an extremely compelling argument i and i i tried this on uh biologically trained friends and a lot i think a light goes on i mean you know this is literally the case that there are no organisms none that derive their fundamental metabolic energy from wind i mean the disorder the the entropy is too high. It's useless. I mean, if it were possible for organisms to occupy that niche, as it were, they would. You know, life is very, very investigative. It will find viable niches, and no organism has been able to use that niche. It's just too poor quality. The sun, yes, there are organisms that derive their fundamental metabolic energy from the sun, but they are

simple plants and, by and large, stationary, like the one just over your shoulder there. And they don't do much moving around. And they're stable and very simple creatures over long periods of time. Complex creatures eat those ones and, of course, collect and concentrate that energy. But there are many fewer of those. So you get the pyramid structure of life. Yes, I think it's extremely persuasive and explains why we're so foolish to think that we could even contemplate using wind yeah the only argument i could think of is maybe wind helps birds particularly conserve energy if they're using it as a tailwind right i i say fundamental metabolic energy so they can use it an energy conserving trick and of course plants use it to disperse uh their genetic material

through seeds and so on but it's not actually uh providing the complex structure of their physical bodies uh is is very very interesting indeed uh it's just a useless form i agree that's it's very compelling because then you can sort of ridicule humans like hey why are we using this as an energy source when no other dumb animal is using it because as i say it's a veblen good it's a way of showing off uh you know it's demonstrating wealth very rich people uh can afford to do daft things they would they like to have wind-powered yachts for example and uh well now i'm thinking biblical the hubris uh when it gets to a heightened level will sometimes lead to a downfall are we too hubristic as a society right now

it's it's curious to wonder whether the interest in renewables rose because we were unable to increase our consumption that we began to run into difficulties with fossil fuels that that might be true in in europe we don't have extensive resources there britain had some and norway has quite a lot um i think possibly not i suspect that it's post-cold war rhetoric that really accounts for this, I think, would have maintained exponential growth quite satisfactorily with fossil fuels and moved straightforwardly into nuclear, actually accumulated enough societal sophistication from fossil fuel consumption to make a smooth transition into nuclear, and that would have

resulted in increasingly sophisticated and stable societies. But the Cold War rhetoric was important in discrediting nuclear. And one shouldn't underestimate propaganda efforts from Russia. Russian propaganda on this was very effective. They destabilized the nuclear industries through the Green Movement in the 70s, quite deliberately. And one can see exactly why they would want to do that. think that reverberates on today yeah and another lesser-known propaganda campaign was here in the united states natural gas industry had uh negative campaigns against nuclear because they didn't want

it to take their market share yes i think this this conflict between high-grade fuels is very unfortunate and short-sighted and uh i never miss an opportunity on a platform to try to bring them around to each other. Nuclear has no future without fossil fuels. In order to be able to adopt nuclear energy, you need to be very sophisticated. This is a difficult field to use. It's very high quality, but it's difficult. So you need to be very sophisticated and clever to do it. To get sophisticated and clever and stay sophisticated and clever, you need fossil fuels. And similarly, the fossil fuel industry should recognize that are necessary to the nuclear future. And the nuclear future is quite a way off, actually.

You know, it's going to take a while to move towards very sophisticated and high-grade nuclear usages. And this is a point worth making. I mean, you asked about the nuclear industry in general earlier, and I'm more of an historian than I am an engineer. But one of the lessons of history is that technological development is quite slow, actually. And nuclear is still a very new thing. I know the industry likes to say that it's mature, but historically speaking, that's not really true. This is actually very early days for them yet. Their best days are to come, I trust. You think about the steam engine.

The first steam engines were built in Europe in the late 1690s, the late 17th century. They weren't really good until the late 19th century, by which time there'd been enough societal sophistication, particularly in metallurgy, to allow them to develop very high pressures in the boilers so that they could produce very high thermal efficiencies. And that's just before the steam engine became obsolescent, of course, around the world. So that's a couple of hundred years. It takes time. And so I'd be very patient about nuclear. And I think the nuclear industry should be more modest about this and recognize that they have a symbiotic relationship with fossil fuels and to be less self-harming, mutually self-harming rhetoric from these two industries and recognize that they work together for human benefit. oh there you go you froze for a minute i agree they should they should be working together especially considering the environment right now they're

they're both going to get kicked out of the energy mix um by this this zealot this movement of zealots pushing us towards wind and solar specifically right and they uh they believe that correctly that their fuels will be used by human beings again, that they think they have a bright future, that eventually sanity will dawn, that people will come back to fossil fuels and to nuclear. I agree. That's perfectly true. I think they underestimate the danger that it may not be their companies that actually extract and deliver those fuels. And indeed, within the US, that it not be americans that actually consume these fuels so you may stop using your oil and gas and your coal but other countries for example those in asia may be quite happy to use you as a resource

extraction base and you may not like that very much so they'll prosper you'll become an economic backwater that sells first-rate fuels to earn your living uh not an attractive prospect for you i think no no not at all especially as i've got young children as well thinking about the world that they're growing up in it's it's that prospect seems untenable to me as a father and that's why i'm happy to be speaking with you today to get this message out there because i do think it's extremely important and maybe the last thing we can touch on again we're talking we mentioned earlier a lot of people in the west will say hey you two are live streaming video streaming over the internet um things are fine yes we're losing using less energy less electricity

but look you're doing things that 10 years ago would have been impossible and you would highlight that this is happening in spite of the reduction of energy and electricity usage in the west it being wholly subsidized by increased usage in parts of the world like asia in india exactly and and and you know definitely when i say that explicitly in the quillette piece you know we're living on asian energy consumption at the moment i mean in fact we're borrowing money to buy uh asian goods it's an anesthetic you know we have a a portal line of uh anesthetic wealth flowing in from Asia, which is hiding our own economic decline for us. But that's not a recipe for long-term prosperity. We've lost a lot of productive capacity in the West. Asia has built

it up. You only have to go and look at the energy consumption figures by sector to see how dramatic this is. You look at industrial energy consumption in the United States, for example, and compare it with that of China. Only a few years ago, the US was consuming more energy in the industry, not much more but more now china is consuming very much more energy in its industry than the united states and american industrial energy consumption is falling most importantly its industrial electricity consumption is falling even faster than overall and so you're de-electrifying which again is a very serious concern it suggests that you're moving towards simpler processes so you're living on asian production and that makes you vulnerable i'm vulnerable in several

respects. I mean, firstly, that at some point, Asia may choose not to transfer wealth to you in this way. They may not wish to. They may have nothing that they require from you and interrupt that flow. Or in return for that, they may want greater control over your political administration. If this line of anesthetic is to be maintained, they may demand greater intervention in your conduct and behavior would not be irrational at all for them to do that. But I think the short-term concern is that the productive capacities in Asia are so great that they can be transferred to other purposes should they wish to. So should there happen to be, let's hope there never is, a shooting war between the US and China, China has an enormous

productive capacity, which can quickly be repurposed towards materiel rather than iPhones for your personal concern. Yes. They can put their foot to the floor. I'm not sure you could in the US anymore. No. It's a shame.

Again, going back to hubris, I think this empire has gotten fat, happy, complacent, and dumb. It just seems objectively stupid and ignorant what administration i mean it's it's been happening for decades now or at least two decades this this movement towards these less reliable energy sources here in the u.s and

i do worry that it would take a pulling of of resources from china or something like that from the u.s to force the issue at home where people wake up and say oh this is really important Yes, but it really isn't too late. Churchill famously said that the US is a remarkable place. It always does the right thing eventually, having tried every other possible option. i i think you can do this um but it will require quite a lot of public campaigning and i think it's it's not simply the people i mean i think actually probably the american people understand this pretty well already the problem is in your intelligentsia it's through your university classes and the upper parts of your federal administration and even perhaps the individual state administrations you know that your bureaucracy your civil service and also i

think sadly your military i mean we have the same problem uh in the uk there's serious talk about low carbon war as if this were actually active uh you know the point is to win um and defend your country um now the way will be low carbon ways of uh producing a highly effective defense services but we don't know of them yet uh you know nuclear powered submarines and ships but not nuclear powered planes or indeed battlefield uh equipment such as tanks this is a way off actually uh so the the re-education is not simply with the american people at the you know the blue collar level i think those people are pretty sensible they understand these things intuitively rather well actually uh and i think you know the engineer on the street as it were also understands it their

voice is not heard but the bureaucracy and the political classes uh and as i say i think actually the um the military now these are targets for our campaigning we should try to explain these they're not stupid people but they are definitely wrong about this i don't think they're stupid either are they nefarious though i don't know i think we have to assume that uh their intent the intentions are good uh for the purposes of discussion um i'm sure thinkers in there I dare say, you know, qui bono, who benefits is always a good question when you see something particularly foolish in politics. And doubtless, there are people who understand these things very well and are expecting to make a lot of money out of the adoption of renewable energy.

And when that collapses, they will reinvest their winnings from the renewable energy phase in the corrective measures needed to restore wealth in the fossil fuel and the nuclear industry. So there'll be a huge wealth transfer, which will be permanent. it's also tiresome why can't we just can't we just be sensible and recognize common sense logic which is we should be using denser and denser forms not reverting to 15th century windmills and solar farms not that they were around but the decision was taken uh we're now in a very difficult position uh correct so if it had been stopped in the early 2000s it would have been fine uh but we're now so committed um but the u.s is not in such a dire position as

europe i mean you really haven't yet started i know that you've got stalling energy consumption but your energy consumption not yet falling sharply as it is in in europe i mean your situation is bad but not yet critical as ours is no we should be looking to europe and saying hey let's not let's not absolutely repeat this i mean you just had basf leave germany after being there for over a century correct yes and uh you know european car manufacturers are now looking to manufacture electric vehicles to take advantage of electric vehicle mandates in europe but they're going to manufacture those evs in china needless to say i mean so i as i say i don't think this will run on for forever but it could run on for a very long time um there's quite a lot of wealth

to erode in europe still and uh and and to transfer of course um but the situation in the u.s is although it's bad you can turn this around uh and i think if it's turned around in the u.s then there's a chance for turning it around in europe as well uh you've been you know the the arsenal of democracy before and uh you may have to be so again now one thing that i'm very optimistic about here in the United States particularly is this trend of states asserting their autonomy from the federal government to beginning to ignore federal government guidelines in different areas of the world. Marijuana was probably the first big mover a decade ago. And obviously with the COVID lockdowns, different states took different approaches to what they were going to mandate

or not mandate their citizens to do. And I think we will begin to see that trend insert itself into the energy policy world as well um and then for the context of this podcast for a bitcoin podcast um i do a lot of bitcoin mining and i'm beginning to see that trend pop up as well where more states like texas tennessee oklahoma wyoming are really not falling prey to the rhetoric of the elizabeth warrens of the world who are trying to demonize the bitcoin mining industry for its electricity usage and say hey it's okay they're going to help us actually expand electricity capacity on grid and off grid which i think could actually be a benefit to to overall energy supply here in the united states in the long run yes the federal system is certainly a great advantage

and uh independence decision making on energy in the federal states would federated states would be immensely beneficial. I'm worried that the centralization of energy policy through the Inflation Reduction Act will gradually erode the independence of the states in relation to energy. We've seen this in Europe, after all. We have national governments, but our renewable energy policies, when the UK is out of the EU now, so I suppose I can say their energy policies, We're still under them, however. But those energy policies were so dirigiste that the independent national governments actually couldn't exert their independence. So they were simply delegated responsibility for meeting targets in energy. And I would be concerned that the federal government in the U.S. will follow that European model and attempt to disarm the state, the individual states on energy policy. So it's something that has to be watched very carefully indeed.

Well, this is why I'm very bullish on Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin mining, permanent funds, because the way the federal government would do that, say, hey, if you don't meet these targets, you don't get federal funding. and at the state level at the municipal level at the county level wherever you may be bitcoin being that it's a mechanism to monetize electricity on site in any location on the world provides you with the opportunity to say hey uh we're gonna go issue a municipal bond raise a bunch of cash buy a bunch of bitcoin miners and plug it in maybe off-grid at a strand of natural gas well or maybe on grid you have a utility company that has a substation worth 20 megawatts they're only serving 10 megawatts of that electricity to market so they'll use the the excess 10 megawatts to mine bitcoin and then they can roll those bitcoin revenues up into a permanent

fund that allows them to bolster themselves against the federal government when the federal government comes and says hey we're not going to give you the money the local government can say we actually don't need it we've been mining bitcoin and monetizing our our energy on site uh and and you're you have no power here this is the the future i dream of as a bitcoin miner well um good luck further independence for the states is a very good idea uh i'm centralized we've the the brexit vote which is in jeopardy at the moment after all that with the removal of the the trust government. But nevertheless, you know, the will to self-determination is very strong. And people have given various explanations for the Brexit vote. But essentially, it was that

we didn't wish to be governed from Brussels or Berlin. You know, people make laws for themselves. And the United States is the United States. And the people living in the individual states wish make laws for themselves and that's an excellent um ambition and to be lauded so um as i say good luck thank you well again but this whole problem goes back to what we were discussing in the beginning of the discussion which is proximity to the source of information i think that's what really irks me about the federal government here in the united states you have a bunch of parasites in dc trying to make decisions for people in the middle of wyoming and there are literally thousands of miles away from the information that is pertinent to the decisions

that need to be made on the ground in wyoming and similarly with brexit and brussels uh the the literal distance between the source of information the people making decisions uh to solve problems that they believe exist there just doesn't compute from an information system perspective that's even assuming that they are benevolent uh but of course their interests are likely to be different from those people so even if they have the information they're likely to use it to serve their own interests rather than the people of wyoming but as it happens they don't have the information so they make bad decisions both from their own perspectives and those it's a disaster for everybody um yes of course distributed information processing is

clearly the answer to this. If we were to undistort the energy markets and simply allow people to choose energy sources that serve their needs, you would see a straightforward price signals would encourage it. And you could say, well, that doesn't address climate change, to which the answer is, okay, if you're very serious about that, then the individual states should be allowed to apply carbon taxation, but only a single instrument. You know, I'm not wholly against decarbonization, but it has to be economically compelling. If it isn't so, it's simply not going to work. I mean, climate policy, and I think for the avoidance of doubt, you know, I state my position on climate policy practically every talk I do. Climate policy is like an

insurance policy, you know, and it has to pass the basic tests of any insurance policy. It has to provide real cover. It has to be affordable in itself. And the premium you're paying has to be proportional to the risk, hazard times probability, insofar as you understand it. And those sorts of decisions have to be left up to people on the ground. They have to make decisions about it. They have to decide, is the cover we're being offered real for us? Can we actually afford it? And at the moment, these decisions are being taken by central government, with the result that actually there is no real cover. The policies don't protect people against what climate change there is, or indeed the natural disasters which are not caused

by climate change, but are just normal fluctuations in weather. And the costs are unaffordable in themselves and utterly disproportionate to the risk hazard times probability insofar as we understand it, which is not terribly well. In fact, ordinary people on the ground understand these things much, much better than central decision makers, and they'd be much wiser and more prudent. They would discount the future much more appropriately, but they would also take sensible decisions about the future because after all, they're looking after their families. They're not indifferent to the future at all. They're not short run hedonic robots. You know, they love their children. And I have children too. I think I, yeah, they're quite tarsome actually, but I

love them very much. But, you know, you do think about the future, but you think rationally about it uh which bureaucrats never do you know they are they enter into this extraordinary position where they want you to not discount the future at all because after all being bureaucrats they believe in perfect knowledge yes perfect knowledge does not exist no it's again maybe the theme of this episode is the hubris of man and his inability to to step back from the wheel and hey maybe i can't control this maybe we should let emergent complex systems take care of themselves yeah i don't want to go too far down the hubris thing because i might get into the situation saying well we deserve the crash that's coming and i do actually want to avoid the crash if we

possibly can i do as well yeah but for my own sakes i think it could come within my own lifetime and certainly for my my children yes well hopefully conversations like this begin to to wake people up because again dr constable i want to thank you for coming on it's been great pleasure marty it's been uh the pleasure has been all mine again i think the message that you're spreading is extremely important not only that it's extremely clear and very easy to grok once you take the time to sit down uh read your writings and understand the perspective that you're coming from and that you're trying to imbue on your audience and so i hope that anybody listening to this today share share it with one of your friends that is saying that we

need to transition to wind and solar that fossil fuels are bad that nuclear energy is dangerous yeah i think i think again yeah the prospect of a world without them is much much scarier yes than one with it absolutely yes well thank you again for your time this has been a in immense pleasure we're going to get this out right away uh where can anybody who is curious to find out more about what you're working on what you have written what you what you plan to do in the future where can they find you i write for several organizations uh in london i have worked for the global warming policy foundation and some of my studies there including a large study on the European Union's energy policies, freely downloadable from that

site. I also run a small charity publishing data on the renewable sector here in the UK. It's called Renewable Energy Foundation. As I say, it's not an industry lobby. We just happen to know a lot about renewables, probably more than the industry does in some respects. And that's all free information. You can find a great deal there. But of course, I published individual articles here and there, for example, in Quillette and other places too. But anybody who wishes to get in touch, they can doubtless find you, and you can pass the bomb to me. I'm happy to correspond with any interested party about these things.

I'm coming to the U.S. increasingly often now to talk, and I'm very open to invitations to come and speak. I regard this as immensely important, and I'm very happy to travel to do so. this is a this is a matter of great importance for all of us agreed and if you ever make your way to texas let me know we'd love to have you sit in the chair across maybe we can do this in person next time i i look forward to that it'll be great fun awesome well it is the evening where you are enjoy the rest of your evening thank you thank you um that's all we got today freaks peace and love

Thank you.