The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Staying Warm Data with Nora Bateson | Frankly #20

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Winter has come - and for some people it's colder and more expensive than the recent past. This week Nate reconnects with Nora Bateson to discuss how she and others living in Sweden are responding to the phenomenal spike in their electricity costs, which are currently 35-40x higher than this time last year. What steps are people taking in their own homes to stay warm and reduce energy use, and what tools and support is the government providing its citizens? Is there any single event or person to blame for the drastic increase in energy costs or is the root cause broad and deep within the systems we have created? What can we learn from this dress rehearsal as we anticipate and prepare for The Great Simplification? For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/20-keeping-warm-data  To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WK-WYZ9bOg

Hello, I was going to do a frankly this week on nuclear. That'll have to wait till next week. Some new news on nuclear fusion. I'm going to give an outlined debunking on the opportunities and constraints of nuclear. Since that was kind of involved, I instead called my friend Nora Bateson, who is in Sweden where electricity prices are 30 to 40 times higher than they've been in the recent past, and asked her what's going on? What is she doing in response?

What are people in the country saying? What is the government saying? It's kind of a big deal and maybe a dress rehearsal for what's coming to some other places. Here's a short conversation with my friend Nora Bateson. Hello, Nora. Great to see you.

Hello, Nate. Great to see you too. Welcome to my Frankly episode. I do have Frank. Frank's on the ground below me taking a sleep because it is snowy and cold here. Is it snowy and cold there? Snowy and cold, yes. It is snowy and cold.

I just looked on the map, and Sweden is way further north than Wisconsin than I imagine. It's like as far north as the Yukon territories in Canada. You're really up there. It's the refrigerator. It's Scandinavia. It's winter.

This is what it is. And it's also dark, darker than in summer by far. It gets dark now by 2.30 in the afternoon. So the reason that I'm inviting you to have this conversation, first of all, I haven't talked to you in a while, great to see you. Always good. But I saw your Facebook post.

I saw your Facebook post yesterday or the day before on how extreme the energy prices are now in Sweden. and what people are doing, what you're doing in response. And I just think it's so topical. It's like a dress rehearsal for things that you and I have been working on and discussing for a long time. So maybe just tell me what's going on. Well, the price of heat has skyrocketed. The price of electric has skyrocketed, and therefore the price of heat primarily houses in Sweden. and are heated with electric heat.

Most of the time that heat is, that electric is produced by either nuclear or hydro plants. So we don't really have those big oil tanks in the back of the house or natural gas that makes heat here. That's not really part of the program. So when the electric price goes up so extremely, people are in trouble.

And so to give you an example, in, you know, not very long ago, in early November, late October, the price for electric per kilowatt hour was about 42 Eure. Now 42 Ere is about 4 cents. And that's really cheap. Okay? It's probably too cheap. But right now, it's upwards of 800. So this is an extreme jump. Now, some people are locked into three, four-year plans that they made last year. Lucky them. And they are okay for now. But a lot of people had to get a new plan this year, or they were on a flexible program. And so they are caught.

And for those people who are on the fixed plan, there's been some promise on behalf of the government to do some reimbursement. But looking closely at that reimbursement, you know, you might get a couple hundred dollars back. Whereas the energy bills are upwards of for a normal little house, upwards of a thousand dollars a month right now or more. So things are changing quickly, and you can imagine what this means for businesses. You can imagine what a grocery store is paying or a hair salon or just anywhere you go. So of course, systemically, it's drifting everywhere. This price increase is moving into all parts of life where it can't actually be solved back with the electric price. And what's interesting to me is how we are adjusting.

Because this is a fast adjustment, okay? No one was really prepared for this, you know, except for maybe the real preppers. Well, you said even in October or November, it was 120th of what it is now or something like that. Yeah. So that's extreme. And so you learned quickly how to live your life different. And we learn, you know, you don't run the dryer. Just don't run the dryer.

If you want to dry your clothes, you hang them. But you better hang them in front of the fire because there's, it's a house is freezing. We're keeping our house at 14, 15 degrees centigrade, just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. And we're not alone. There's lots of families who are doing this. And you don't turn on the tea kettle.

You don't use the electric oven. You don't use the electric oven. the hairdryer. You turn off the floor heat in the bathroom. You, I mean, you take really short showers. So let me ask you this. I have tons of questions. You haven't actually gotten a bill yet, though, right? So when people are anticipating, because they know what the price is, the bill's going to come later this month or in January. So when you look at a hairdryer or an electric oven and you're about to get the human brain services that we get from cheap energy, do you then in your mind translate that to dollars or the Swedish money?

Yeah. Like, oh, I don't want to turn that on because next month I'm going to have to pay a lot for that. Is that what's going in your mind? It's past that point. I mean, we have this app, okay? So this app shows me, they'll put it where, let's see, where we are right now. So this is where we are right this second.

we're at 731 yere. And this shows the time of day and the ups and the downs. So we follow these ups and downs, and we try to run the washing machine accordingly. Or turn the heat on accordingly. So it's not grid-based management. It's your own individual management to the prices. Right.

So tomorrow, let's see. So this is this week. All right. Yesterday, it actually went up to 918. But look at this. Three years ago, it hardly ever even went up as far as 500. Two years ago. Yeah. Right? So, yeah, so I feel like my house is populated with all these machines that are just sitting there. And you don't turn them on. Like, you just don't do that. So I don't know about Sweden, but in the United States, there was a recent essay that showed the average American household had 60 things that were plugged in all the time. And that that was like a 10 or 12 percent drain of the total energy use.

It's just being used by things that are plugged in sitting there not being used. But this is all fascinating to me because you know my work is about we really live in a biophysical economy. that energy and materials power things and we use money and technology to you know grease the skids and to have as our proximate story but now what a massive shift so are you talking to your neighbors and people what are people how are people reacting in Sweden in Stockholm and in the countryside well it's cold it's really cold because also outside today it's minus five And so, you know, we bundle up in the household and we are not, this is a culture that's much more individual-based. So this is a place that is kind of geared around self-reliance, which is a deterrent to the type of collaborative and cooperative possibilities.

So by contrast, I have a friend in, I believe she's in Ireland, and their prices are also skyrocketing. But what they're doing is they have a group of friends and they're going to each house for dinner. So they're rotating so that it's, you know, one eighth of the price because there's eight people in the group. Do you see what I'm saying? So that type of collaboration is what? is where it's at. But we are not there yet. However, I can only say that this culture of everybody having their own machines and being self-reliant is not really going to be an option. People cannot afford to live alone. They won't be able to. We're going to have to start sharing these costs.

Well, I just extrapolate that to, you know, driving across the state where I live, you see areas that have these huge six or seven thousand scorefoot houses. And if electricity was as high as it is in Sweden, could you imagine the bills that's going to be to heat those places? And I think, I mean, you're right. We're going to have to have more people living per structure if energy prices really increase in the future. So do people in Sweden think this is a short-term thing and next year it's going to be back to the good old days or is there some sense that this or something like it could last? That is a really interesting question and I think it varies. I think there's some people who have been watching other systemic processes and are thinking, well, this may be more than just to fix it. you know, you're talking into causation here when you ask that question.

And the causation is all too easy to place on, okay, well, this is because of the war and because the pipeline got burst and because Angela Merkel made a deal with Russia to get the natural gas and they don't have it. So now Sweden's selling power to the rest of the EU and then we have to buy it back. and it looks like it lives there, and therefore, if the war ended and the pipeline were fixed and the da-da-da-da-da, then maybe the prices would go down. But is it, is that really where it lives, or is this more of a continued consequence of big everything being a problem, big energy, big ag, big education, big pharma, big tech? And the fact that the politics, the politicians,

and the people on the ground can't seem to stop it because the electric companies right now are making unmitigated profits. So it's not like there's a lack of electricity. So what is going on? It is, yeah. Isn't one of the nuclear plants shut down there for maintenance unexpectedly or something like that? That is part of it also. But that's not all of it. And so this, you know, It starts a long time ago. And so where does it end? So where does it start and where does it end? And these things place this situation in a linearity that's not quite so easy.

So it could be that the electric bill goes down, but the food bill, all the other things have been moving around it, supply chains, et cetera. So it's whenever you see. see this type of a whip lash in a very interdependent system, you're going to be seeing consequences that are in multiple contexts, not just the electric bill, but actually very seriously in the culture. So I have to drop this pun in here. Maybe you should keep track of all this and call it keeping warm data.

Staying warm data. Yeah, staying warm data. So is there a sense, and I don't understand the intricacies of the EU rules, but as part of the European collection of nations, there are some energy laws that you have to export a certain amount to the greater European grid. Is there any nationalistic sense that Sweden is relatively energy independent because you have so much nuclear and high. and biomass and other things that we don't want to have to be forced to export our energy. Are conversations like that bubbling up or not so much? Absolutely, they're bubbling up. And they're bubbling up in exactly that description that you just made,

as well as a general degradation of trust in the state, which to you and I, who didn't grow up in countries where there was trust, in the state is very serious because part of the way that the whole Scandinavian program has worked is with the social welfare and the idea that the government is actually benevolent. Now this may seem ridiculous to you being in the states and it certainly does to most other places in the world but this is the foundation upon which the state has its stability. So what we're seeing here is,

that's why I was saying very seriously there's changes in the culture happening. So you're seeing a loss there of trust in the state to be able to respond and to take care of people. Okay, that's the deal. I pay big taxes, you take care of me. And the take care of me isn't happening.

What sort of messaging is coming from regional or national governments on how to manage? Are there public service announcements on turning down the thermostat or things like that? Or what? And TV shows, radio shows, it's the buzz everywhere on how to keep your heat down. And if you talk to any Swede today and you see them in a Zoom call, they're going to be wearing their puffer jacket in the house. which is not a disaster by the way no i mean i often do that and when it's really cold here i sleep in one of those thermal sleeping bags if the fire doesn't reach where i'm sleeping so i mean this is i think the disaster here is we have a longage of expectations not so much a shortage of

energy and now we're at the inflection point of that conversation. And we can live significantly differently, but ripping the band-aid off is going to hurt and be cold metaphorically. But I just, you know, energy prices are not that expensive in the United States yet, but what you're experiencing, I expect, will come to all of us in coming decades. And it may be on the permanent side. So I just wanted to get your boots on the ground perspective on this. Are you seeing any application to your work and working on culture change and this is an opportunity?

Or what are your thoughts there? I mean, I'm with you. This is not a disaster for me. Right? And that's important. There are a lot of people for whom it is a disaster. And I think that the changes that we are discovering are needed and that there's no need to go back. You know, we actually should be watching how much energy we're consuming.

And it was like we were on a runaway spending spree of just using the juice out of every plug in every room. And so this is a good wake-up call to the reality. of that. And I'm with you. I don't think it's going to end anytime soon. And I also think it's going to take different shapes. So, and because of that, it's very, you know, the politics of this are that you can respond to a crisis here or a crisis there, but it's not staying in the box. So this becomes a food crisis. This becomes a health care or a, you know, all sorts of different issues can come out of this. Most of all, the lack of, the, the, the pixelating of the state is, is really the issue. But my work in warm data is really about nurturing

a kind of flexibility to be able to respond to all sorts of stuff. And so the sentence I usually use here is it's about nurturing the flexibility that we don't yet know we're going to need. So it's not about getting a perfect crystal ball, you know, forecast of what the future is so we can align the perfect preparations. It's about how to be in relationship with each other, with your body, with your land, neighbors, with your parents, with your, you know, with your children who may live a long way away. And that those relationships then produce a kind of possibility for response that is in stark contrast to the individualistic go out and buy yourself a kit for survival type of behavior. I totally agree with that. So instead of preparing,

for an energy economic change, prepare yourself behaviorally so you're flexible to any of these changes and not only yourself, but yourself in relationship to everyone in your life. I totally agree with that. Just out of curiosity, how are our families and schools handling the impact to their kids on this? I would suspect that kids would be less affected by this because they're tougher and more resilient, but maybe not. I don't think we've seen it yet. You know, the thing is, is that when I first moved to Sweden,

my husband said, don't worry, it gets cold here, but Swedes don't like to be cold. You won't be cold. No one keeps their house cold. It's not like England, he said, where you'll freeze to death in someone's house. And he was right. I mean, really, up until this year, I never set foot in a house that was cold here.

So there has been a just generosity of usage of heating. And my guess is that the schools are still warm. I think there's some folks who are in for a bad surprise. And I think there are a lot of people who actually aren't really. registering yet that even if they have a long-term plan, that the companies are probably going to claim force majeure and raise their rates on them. And that if there's bankruptcy, again, force majeure. And so there's a lot of loopholes for no one to be responsible and for the bills and the consequences to land on the individuals. But I can see once the December bills start

showing up in people's mailboxes that there's going to be a huge social reaction to this unless the government helps out somehow with the bills. And right now they've kicked the can, so the promise of support is there, but if you do the math, it's so minimal that it's actually insulting. Well, not only that, but when you're going around your house and looking at what you could turn off and you're thinking, oh, the government might help me with this, but they might not. So I think I better turn it off just in case, that sort of thing, right? Yeah.

And I think you're right. I think the December bills are going to be a harsh reality. And, of course, it's still, it's, you know, it's the holidays. It's not, this is not an easy time coming up for folks here. And it's, like you said, it's because of large expectations. And a kind of comfort that is. being removed. And, you know, have you ever been at the airport when somebody who got a upgrade, when they

didn't actually buy the first class ticket, they just got an upgrade? And then that upgrade gets taken away. Have you ever seen that person get angry? It's a special kind of angry. Yeah. It's loss aversion, but that's a microcosm for our whole culture on a century timescale. is we've become accustomed to first class seating. And now we're going to go back to coach.

And coach is going to be fine. But it's the drop that's going to cause us to go a little haywire. So, you know, I'm privileged, of course, with all these lights on and a globe and a dachund on my lap, talking to you on a Zoom call. But I can see this as a positive dress rehearsal if things kind of go back to normal because people will have emotionally experienced this reality.

Not only in Sweden, across Europe, and then we're so tied to the United States that we learn from what's going on. So I'm hopeful this is an opportunity to really think about how we restructure things in coming decades. And the only thing I can add to that, because I am in absolute agreement with you, is that what's great is the unexpected stuff.

You know, like I had an old whistling teapot that I was like, why am I keeping this? We always use the kettle. But I kept it because I had a sentimental attachment to it. And now we can put it on the wood stove and make tea without turning on the electric stove, without plodding in the tea kettle. and, you know, just the things that you figure out to do. So I live with my 93-year-old mother is living in our house.

So everybody also has very different needs, okay? I'm cool to sleep in my room when it's 10 degrees. That's fine. I can bundle up and I'm, but she can't do that. So we are definitely tapering everything in one side of the house so that we can put more into her room. and then, you know, we might take our breakfast or our tea or our computer and go hang out in her room. So there's a whole new relationship coming out of everybody going to Nana's room to hang out because it's warm in there, including the cats and dogs. So there's things that come out of it.

Well, I think that it's the things you don't imagine. You can't. The complexity of how you're going to respond is so. in the detail. And I think when we think about the possibilities of future and future with upheavals, it's important to always remember that there is a huge quotient of weird. And the weird details that come up in the possibilities you find together are absolutely unpredictable, unscriptable, and that's wonderful. Which gets back to your focus. on the importance of being flexible against many different futures.

Thank you so much, Nora. Do you have any closing thoughts? I really appreciate you taking the time with 24 hours notice to talk to me. I love doing this and anything with you, Nate. My only closing thought is just that it's really important that the story get told in the complexity that it exists in because like I said it's all too easy to create a very linear causality of this

but it starts you know it starts in the Thatcher years it starts when the real social welfare was sold to private enterprise and when that happened then the maintenance bills didn't get paid right and it began to degrade and so this is this is part of the flow of immigration that happened when Syria got their grain cut off from Russia in 2009 or something like that, 10. And there's a lot of story in here that is way beyond those numbers on that graph.

And it's just too easy to point to the bill or point to the politician in charge or point to Putin or point to Merkel or whatever you want to point to, it's a whole world that has been working toward this for quite a while. And I think the listeners on your program are aware of that. So that's just something to always reiterate. Yeah. I don't know that you know this because we haven't spoken in a month or two. But a few weeks ago, I spoke to hundreds of members of the Swedish government, their entire energy agency I gave a presentation, which five years ago wouldn't have happened, right, because of what's going on. All of a sudden, everyone is interested in how the pieces fit together and the

complexity of our energy, material, growth, money sort of system. So it went well. I hope we use this as an opportunity to maybe shift the path of our culture. Thank you so much. Stay warm and keep thinking and working on warm data stuff. Thank you, Nate. Nice to be here.