The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Energy Gratitude | Frankly #18

Episode Date: November 24, 2022

This week, most of the United States celebrates Thanksgiving.  As we think about the things we are grateful for - family, food, football, dogs etc. - we don't often remember to recognize energy's role in enabling all this. . In this brief video, Nate reflects on all the things which abundant and cheap energy provide for us, especially in the United States, that we often take for granted. The opposite of energy blindness might be 'energy gratitude', so being more aware of all the magic we are surrounded by everyday is perhaps a first step in conserving it and planning for a less energy intensive future. For Show Notes and more visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/18-energy-gratitude To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rUEU-0YlPk

Good morning and happy Thanksgiving. The holiday with an inauspicious beginning that has morphed into a couple days off of work, a lot of food, watching football, spending time with family, and then shopping for many on Friday. We are thankful for these things without recognizing the finite natural resources. that go into providing the energy services that allow us comfort, convenience, novelty, security, heat. So I thought I would do a little bit of energy gratitude, a whirlwind in my own life. I like food. I drive to Whole Foods and I have to look away and not go in because I'll spend and eat a lot. but the average supermarket, grocery store in the global north is a cornucopia.

Could you imagine Genghis Khan or George Washington or Cleopatra walking into a modern supermarket? The amount of food stuff options is unbelievable. The average food in the United States travels around 1,500 miles to get to your plate. I'm grateful for the food. That has been available in my lifetime. Then each of us have our own temperature-controlled root cellars in the form of a refrigerator. One American refrigerator uses more energy than many countries in Africa and over 150 million humans use totally in their lives.

Between my office and my house, we have two refrigerators and a chest freezer. The amount of energy that those devices use just them is more energy than 650 million humans use in their lives. That's food and preserving it. What about heat? My house is heated with wood, which I chop with a chainsaw. The amount of human and animal labor that a chainsaw with a chainsaw with a little bit of gasoline replaces is enormous. My office is heated with propane, which if you watch my recent podcast with Art Berman, you know, is one of the first things distilled from a barrel of oil. These energy services

come from ancient sunlight. I have a utility vehicle, a little bit of gasoline. I can do a lot of chores around the farm here, carrying wood and manure and seeds and hazelnuts. And, and any number of water and other things pretty much does things indistinguishable from magic from what we can imagine a few generations ago. I also have a car. The average American uses 400 gallons of gasoline per year. That equates to around 10 barrels of oil. That amount of energy, just the amount of gas.

gasoline we use equates to a human being working for 45 years. If you add this all up, it becomes a really a leviathan amount of energy that supports our modern industrial lifestyle. And I forgot the internet. When I Google something, I can access all of the accumulated knowledge of mankind in a few seconds and the energy workers that are invisible to me supporting this activity use around 18 to 20% of all electricity with the batteries and the components and the servers and the networks and the batteries and everything. So we are energy blind as a culture. And on the flip side,

the inverse of energy blindness is energy gratitude. I was born in the 20th century in the United States as a human. I have deep gratitude for this. And there is a sliding scale between entitlement and privilege and responsibility. And I think moving on that scale is an awareness of the times we live, in and how fossil energy supports our lifestyle. I'm grateful for so many things and gratitude is, I think, a very important emotion at this time. I'm grateful for my family. I'm grateful for a vast network of friends. I'm grateful for my dogs. I'm grateful for the nature that surrounds my

house, my state, my nation, and the world. I love the animals that I encounter and the birds and the fish and the ecosystems, I'm a grateful human being. And while I have the mic, so speak, I'm grateful for you, the community that has kind of coalesced around this podcast. Earlier this year, I decided to do a podcast because I know a lot of scientists and people working on systems regenerative activism towards better future. So I'm like, hey, I'll start podcast and I didn't know how grateful I would be for the community, the comments, the emails, the support that other humans are recognizing, feeling, striving towards a better future given what we face. So happy Thanksgiving everyone. I'm grateful for a lot of things,

particularly for energy. Talk to you next week.