The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Tales from the Carbon Pulse | Reality Roundtable 11

Episode Date: October 6, 2024

(Conversation recorded on August 6th, 2024)     The damaging effects of humanity's disconnected relationship to Earth's ecosystems are broad and deep. Yet, despite targeted efforts to address these issues and mitigate risks, our insatiable appetite for fossil hydrocarbons continues to grow at an alarming rate. What will it take to reframe our relationship with nature to move forward in a symbiotic, life-supporting path?  In this episode, Nate is joined by longtime colleagues Tom Murphy and D.J. White for an in-depth exploration of the mounting ecological crises driven by human behavior and unsustainable energy consumption. Together, they offer both scientific insights and personal reflections on trends such as the rapid decline in wild animal populations, the rise of microplastic pollution, the overwhelming scale of human-built mass, and many other facets of this unparalleled time in human history.  Why is it so difficult for society to recognize the scale of ecological destruction, and what needs to change to raise awareness? In what ways is academia struggling to provide the systems understanding we need to address the pressing environmental challenges of our time? How could recognizing our kinship with all living beings reshape our relationship with the planet?   About Tom Murphy: Tom Murphy is a Professor of Physics at the University of California San Diego and is the Associate Director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. He is also the author of Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, and continues to write regularly on the challenges associated with long-term human success through his blog Do The Math.    About DJ White: DJ White is a co-founder of Greenpeace International and founder of EarthTrust.  He has played a leading role in protecting dolphins, whales, sea turtles, and countless other marine animals, including successfully stopping a national dolphin drive kill, and breaking the deadlock in capping the Kuwait oil fires. He was the driving force behind the transition to more dolphin-friendly tuna as well as stopping widespread use of ocean drift nets in the 1980s.    Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

It turns out that solutions are really easy when your boundaries are narrow and your visibility of the problem is narrow, then it's, you know, it's a snap. As you gain awareness and perspective, you realize that, oh, well, there are complications. It's not so easy. What is it we do with our energy? And so that list of things that I went through about what's causing this biodiversity crash, almost none of those have to do with fossil fuels. A suitable substitute would basically just do the same thing.

It's swapping the engine, but you continue the mining and the manufacturing and the pollution and the deforestation and the habitat loss. And I haven't heard anybody talk about, okay, once we have solar, we can stop doing all of these things. Because the point is, once we have solar, we can keep doing all these things. Isn't that great? It's keeping modernity fully powered. That is the goal. You're listening to the great simplification. I'm Nate Higgins.

On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Greetings and welcome to today's reality roundtable discussion. This is the first of many upcoming roundtables. There's one coming up on plastics, on bioregionalism, on population, on global cooling, on finance. We're setting up quite a few reality roundtables. Today I'm joined by my colleagues Tom Murphy and DJ White for an in-depth conversation that delves into both the scientific and the emotional response to humanity's impact on Earth's ecosystems. Many of you are familiar with Tom Murphy, the professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego.

He's the associate director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences. He's also the author of a really great energy book, a textbook called Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet and continues to write regularly on the challenges associated with long-term human success on a finite planet through his blog, the math. DJ White is a co-founder of Greenpeace International and a founder of Earth Trust. He's played a leading role in protecting dolphins, whales, sea turtles, and countless other marine mammals, including successfully stopping a national dolphin drive kill and breaking the deadlock in capping the Kuwait oil fires. He was the driving force behind the transition to more dolphin-friendly tuna, as well as stopping

widespread use of ocean drift nets in the 1980s. This episode explores a wide range of pressing topics on the challenges posed by our energy-hungry civilization, from the alarming decline in wild animal populations and limitations of renewable energy to the complex interplay between peak power demands and declining human fertility rates. While this discussion is far from lighthearted, DJ and Tom provide both scientific insights and human perspectives on these critical issues, offering, as I like to say, a wide boundary view of the challenges we face in the shaping the future of our planet and our species. Before we begin, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament, where my team and I post special announcements related to the Great Simplification. You can find the link to subscribe in the description.

With that, welcome DJ White and Tom Murphy. Tom Murphy, DJ White. Welcome to the program. Hey there, my friend. So the original intent back last year on my reality roundtables was to have friends. The first one we had was Art Berman, Simon Mischo, and Pedro Prieto, three guys that you both know or know. of and I've known the two of you for a very long time.

Tom, you and I met 15 years ago at an ecological economics conference. DJ you and I have written three books together and been longtime intellectual ecological colleagues. So I invited you both today to address kind of an odd umbrella topic. I might think about calling this episode Tales from the Curlowe. carbon pulse and how the carbon pulse, as we describe it, drawing down ancient sunlight that is embodied in fossil hydrocarbons millions of times faster than it was created has massive implications for our societies and our futures. So I thought I came up with seven or eight kind of broad

categories for the two of you brilliant ecological minds to opine on. How does that sound as a format? Yeah, let's go for you. Okay, so the audience may not know, but the three of us have exchanged thousands of emails over the last 10 years. So these topics are not new to us. I've stated many times on this podcast the fact that mammalian biomass on earth is 98% humans in our livestock. And if you include mammals in water, then it's 96%.

The per person, per human amount of animal biomass is two and a half kilograms. So that's like five pounds. So every human on the planet, there's like five pounds of wild animal remaining. We've lost 70% of the populations of wild animals since 1970. One to two percent annual declines in insects, birds, which results in 75% per century. And the list is long from there. Can each of you, and we'll start with Tom, can you describe why this is happening? why so few people are aware of it or care about it and why it's important.

Yeah, so I think this is incredibly important. It's, I think, to my mind, the most important aspect of what we're doing wrong. We're driving our natural world into the ground, and we're seeing the six mass extinction start, and this is how it starts through population declines. The fact that we've only got two and a half kilograms of wild land. mammal mass per person is to me just devastating. I almost can't get my head around it. I mean, my 19 and a half year old cat was, you know, skinny cat, but more than two and a half kilograms. So why it's happening, it's a whole host of things, but, you know, in one word, modernity, it's

our deforestation, our mining and manufacturing and pollution, it's, um, habitat. attack destruction and fragmentation. It's over hunting and over fishing. It's herbicides, pesticides, basically mass murder of large swaths of indiscriminate, you know, killing of populations. And all of these are connected to each other. I mean, it's a cascading web so that the pain gets distributed. We've got encounters with infrastructure, you know, even windows and windmills and turbines of all sorts. Ocean acidification and climate change are both on the list. Invasive species that have been introduced.

It's a huge set of things and all because we're not paying attention to that we're ecologically detached. We've kind of built an artificial world that's not ecologically minded and so we don't even appreciate that it's important. And so we are doing things in complete ignorance of those things. And it's out of side, out of mind. In a global system, a lot of the ills can be pushed to distant regions, and you never even know what's happening.

Let me ask a follow up there, and then we'll go to DJ. Some of this, the three of us anyways, we're aware of this and spend time. studying it and are able to care about it because of the energy surplus from the carbon pulse, because this is my job now to talk to scientists and learn about these things. What would you speculate? What percentage of humans would care or deeply care about the facts that you just described if they were fully informed and aware of it? Is it 2%? Is it 80%? I mean, do you have any guess?

I would guess it's way high. I think 80% sounds a lot better than 2% for me. I don't think people want these things to happen. I think that they don't understand that. It's happening. But the difficult question is when push comes to shove and you ask them to trade their comforts and conveniences for this devastation, that's when it gets really tricky. I mean, they might not want this stuff to happen, but they still want their car and they still want, and look, I'm in a house too. So we're all products of modernity here,

and it's difficult. But I think, you know, that trade is the difficult question for me. Well, if you're right, and it's 80% of humans alive actually do care about those things, to me that's good news, or at least it makes me feel, like our species isn't completely sociopathic.

Of course, there's no way to really measure that. But Don, what are your thoughts on this subject? I know you have a lot. Yeah, I do. I'll try to keep them brief. Obviously, it's appalling. And I think when you first give this statistic to people, most people did slap their heads ago, no, no, it can't be.

There's got to be a lot. Because in their mind, the wildness of nature is big. It's out there. You know, if you had somebody guessed, they might say, oh, maybe half and half or something like that. So there's an initial shock value. But, you know, what it does come down after that initial shock. Okay, what would you be willing to part with in order to make this any different? And that's really where the rubber meets the road.

It says, you know, I've spent the better part of the last 50 years intervening to try and keep various species from being wiped out and populations from being exterminated and kind of up to my elbows in some things that are very depressing to know. It's very difficult. The percentage of people, as you asked Tom, I think 80% of people probably would say, yeah, yeah, we want a healthy planet, we want all the species to exist. But how many of them are willing to take any hit for that? Like, if there was a $1 per person, one-time tax proposed to bring back the passenger pigeons to the United States, States, would that pass? And I'll answer that. No way in hell that would pass. It would poop on people's cars. Nobody wants to see pigeons from horizon to horizon anymore because, you know, the pragmatism of our,

the way we live now is, it trumps the wonder of seeing that much beautiful biomass. So I try not to kid myself about it. I do think that people like in concept, they did not wiping things out. but you know in primate history what's salient to being a you know a primate on the African savanna which is the way our brains are made and wired up mostly if you other species were competitors or predators or were just annoying

and you know that's I think a lot of that is kind of still there in our wiring because the wonder that we can feel isn't as automatic as the annoyance. And it's like, when we bring back the Rocky Mountain Locust, probably the biggest biomass loss in the history of the North American continent, there were a lot more of them than there were the bison, and they're gone now.

Who really misses them? I don't know if the word locust has got, you know, religious, you know, semantic associations. Who wants the Rocky Mountain Locust back in, you know, just billions of tons? nobody does. And, you know, I don't want to go on particularly, but the different, the shifting baselines is what's going on to, even within my lifetime, the kind of biological diversity I found in the suburbs of Indianapolis when I was a little kid in the 50s.

I had to go all the way to the mountains of Costa Rica to find in the 90s. And now, even those mountains don't have the same species. The amphibians are gone. It's happening just that quickly. And the shifting baseline things, the people, you know, the students who have taken your classes have never experienced that. And descriptions of the size of the fish and the size of the flocks of birds and stuff that go overhead, how many whales and dolphins there used to be, it sounds like rantings.

It sounds like crazy exaggeration. And so they don't all miss it. So I don't know if that answers your question or not. I don't mean to sound depressing about it, but I've kind of been up against the reality for a long time. Kind of to DJ's point, looking back at the past, the two and a half kilograms today was 80 kilograms per person of wild mammal mass, land mammal mass, and 1800. And it was 50,000 kilograms per person 10,000 years ago. So I just want to make that shifting baseline is really important. So 10,000 years ago, there was 50,000 kilograms of wild.

wild animal biomass per human and now it's two and a half? Yeah, wild land mammal biomass 50,000 kilograms per person, now it's two and a half. And it was 80 kilograms, which is me, I'm 80 kilograms in 1800. It's changed very rapidly. And so, well, that, that echoes what DJ was saying. In the Pleistocene, when we evolved, there was 50,000 kilograms of land mammal biomass per human. It was so large to not be able to be disrupted or destroyed. And for a long time, that was the case. So in that way, we're a species out of context. The way that our brain looks

outside at what's happening doesn't account for a planet full of humans and built infrastructure. Right. And now it's small enough to drown in the bathtub as a notorious politician once out of government. But yeah, it's tiny and it's fragile. So building on that, my extended family goes way beyond my cousins and nieces and parents, but to cats and cows and orangutans and butterflies and hummingbirds, basically every living thing on earth. How related are we and what's the deal here? And why don't we recognize our kinship goes beyond certain alleles we should,

share with other humans. Tom, start with you. Yeah, well, first to put some framing on it, the human genome has 20,000 to 25,000 genes, protein encoding genes. And I think the most striking comparison to me is an amoeba, which has 13,000, not dramatically different, and we share a third of those genes with an amoeba. I think people don't realize how connected we are even to, you know, single-cell microbes. Well, we had a universal common ancestor at some point. That's right. And there's a reason where there's so much of, you know, similarity,

which is that, you know, the early life figured out a lot of things. They figured out how to replicate. They figured out how to build cell membranes, how to metabolize energy, how to use proteins for catalysis, because these chemical reactions aren't going to make themselves, or at least not very fast. They figured out how to do waste processing. And so we do all of those things, too, in ourselves.

And so, you know, why reinvent the wheel? We just carry on those very successful time-tested, billion-year time-tested, I mean, deep-time solutions that are genius in a lot of ways. And so, of course, we're going to just plagiarize. And that's how it works. That's how evolution works. But we're not some, you know, fantastic new beast on the planet that is wildly different from everything that came before.

There's a long heritage. And that heritage is important. And it makes us 50% similar to mushrooms even. And 60% similar to bananas. So, I mean, there's just a lot of kinship here. But why should why should the average person care, Tom? Well, I think it's worth realizing that we aren't, we think of ourselves as separate and as superior.

And these devastating losses on the ecological plane are partly because of that, because we disregard other life as being inferior. And so I think if we really, how much we depended on those even simple organisms for everything that we do. I mean, neurons have been around for 500 million plus years, the same ones, essentially. We owe respect to that community of life and, in fact, could not have existed without it and can't continue to exist without a healthy ecological community of life. Obviously, I agree. We do spring from a universal common ancestor, which, you know, for instance, it makes incredibly profound for me, like when getting to know a dolphin, it has evolved self-awareness separately, or like 80, 90 million years from the last common ancestor with a dolphin. And yet, there they are, and here we are. It's pretty amazing.

I mean, I am not necessarily, you know, as into saying the DNA commonality makes that big a difference. Would I care any less about sharing jokes with the dolphin if it had sprung from a different ancestor, a different quickening of life? I don't think so. I really think that, you know, sapiens and empathy are not necessarily about it. It's good to know. It's good to realize that dolphins and humming you. birds are our brothers and that mushrooms are our cousins. And there is that deep connection. But on the other hand, too, let's appreciate with empathy and sentience what we can find around

us. And if it ever turns out that we find or interact with some species that didn't spring from the same initial puddle, let's appreciate them too. Now, you know, obviously if we got to some sort of differently chiral DNA going on, there would be ecological problems. But yeah, I think it's a profound thing to realize. And it goes, you know, and it's a profound thing to realize that we're heavily an overshoot and wiping out a lot of, a lot of those others. You know, we're a piece of a puzzle. We evolved to be a piece of a puzzle, and we can't really exist for long as the main piece of a puzzle. So I guess that's what occurs to me. So, Don, in evolutionary biology, there's something called Hamilton's rule, which is R times B is greater than C, which is your relatedness factor, presumably to another human, times the benefit of doing a behavior.

If it's greater than C, the cost, then you do that behavior. and I think it was Haldane that famously said, I would gladly jump in a river to save two brothers or eight cousins because that's their genetic relatedness to me. But that all is an anthropocentric framing because you just look at the few alleles that my Hagen's brothers or cousins have, which are different than the whites and the Murphys,

which are different than the bonobos and the orangutans and all the way down to mushrooms and bananas. But we are from a genetic standpoint related to everything. But what you're saying is, yes, that's true. But who cares? Look at the wonderment of life. And shouldn't we have an ethic responsibility to have these co-travelers on this one planet known to host life, to chaperone them through what you and I wrote a book called the bottlenecks of the 21st

century. Do you have any follow-up comments? Well, yeah, I just say that I and my wife have explicitly rejected that relatedness thing as BS, really. In fact, we decided not, although we were capable of doing it, and like big families, we explicitly decided, okay, we're not going to reproduce more fire apes in the middle of overshoot. We're going to reproduce other species biomass and not human biomass because that's what's called for right now. And that's very much central, honestly, to our relationship and to my philosophy. And you know that, having known me for a long time, but it's, and we probably don't want to take this tangent, but I could make a case that DNA is essentially our enemy at this point. What we're backloaded to do and be, we need to get,

it's what got us here, but if we don't get away from that and transition, to sentience and empathy that what God is here is going to take us out and take a lot of others with us. Tom, any closing thoughts before I move on? Yeah, I think that two brothers or eight cousins, I mean, that's an economist speaking right there who wants to quantify the value of relationship. And I completely agree with DJ that our relatedness is, important to recognize, but I think any, anything that lives and knows and has figured out how to replicate and carry on, deserves a great deal of respect and,

and has earned a seat at the table in this, in this world. So, yeah, it's not strictly relatedness, but I think it's important to know still. It actually wasn't an economist. It was a biologist, and there's tons of studies. that underpins the tentative kin selection, that behaviors are actually chosen because of this impulse.

Of course, in real life, if you're in a war somewhere and you jump on a grenade to save your five people in your troop, you're not genetically related to them. It's as if your brain recognizes people near you as someone that was evolutionarily related to you. But I think what Don is saying, is that we've arrived at a species level conversation

and our impulses to do things that favor our direct biological human kin are not necessarily the correct impulses for a living planet for thousands or more generations of ours and other species. Let me move on from that to a related gut punch stat, which I saw when it came out and it didn't register but it's related to the two topics that we've discussed so far. There was a recent paper in nature, which I'll link in the show notes, that highlighted that the built mass from humans around the planet,

buildings, skyscrapers, stadiums, trampolines, amusement parks, cars, everything, outweighs all the living biomass on Earth. Tom, can you want to be able to do that? unpack this, does this just mean animals and insects and fish or like everything? What is the deal there? Yeah, that's everything. That's

all plant matter, every living all trees and grass and shrubs and everything. Everything. All the kelp, all the, every living piece of biomass on the planet, which amounts to about a trillion tons and now exceeded by our

built environment. I mean, for animals, the plastics alone are twice as massive as the animals. So you asked about the animals. Well, that's already exceeded by a factor two by just plastics. So it's staggering. And I think, you know, one thing to point out about this is that, you know, humans and most, most biological life forms are mostly made of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. And those four things come from air and water. I mean, the carbon is processed through plants and the nitrogen also plants and microbes.

But 96% of the human mass is air and water, which is quite a trick. You know, the other things are, you know, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, and then trace amounts of other things. But the anthropogenic stuff is weird, to use a word that's in circulation a lot lately. Copper and aluminum and silicon and gold and silver and zinc and nickel and titanium and neodymium and cobalt. I mean, these are not critical parts of life, and that's what we're now. overwhelming our environment with and that environment has no way to process those

materials I mean these are not materials of life and so they're often toxic and and at the very least you know sort of get in the way or or interrupt the life processes so not only is it an overwhelming amount of mass it's the wrong stuff and it has no place in this living world it's it's sort of not of this world of this living world So let me clarify that. So back in the day, most of the human biomass was carbon and oxygen based until we started to develop infrastructure. Now in 2024, our built mass of human structures is greater than all the other living biomass on the earth, which mostly came from living and non-living things that we took from the surface or from under the surface or from under the Earth. which mostly came from living and non-living things that we took from the surface or from under the ground.

A lot of those, like copper and neodymium and titanium, were underground for millions or even billions of years and now are on the surface. And the earth never had to deal with those novel entities as such. Is that correct? That's right. And so we wonder about why our endocrine, processes disrupted and all these kinds of things and it's not just in humans. I mean, we've got a lot of just strange stuff that wasn't ever a part of the equation. And now it's just sort of dredged out from the deeps and, you know, scattered to the winds. And hey, good luck with that.

Let's see where that goes. This is another thing that like, who knows this? The scientists that write about it and people looking at ecology and environmental impact. but I don't see this on CNN or Fox News or, I mean, is it because it's just too overwhelmingly of a buzzkill of a fact? Is that why we don't hear about this? I mean, it's pretty epic that we're living in this time and that is the case. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I think a lot of people would say, hooray, good on us. Like, wow, that's quite an accomplishment. How amazing are we? I think if it's understood better, I mean, so that paper about the biomass being exceeded by anthropogenic mass didn't really concentrate on the ecological impacts of that. And those are difficult trends to really connect. And that's one thing about science. It's very conservative.

And unless you can prove something and all the connections, it almost might as well exist in the literature. And so it's it's somewhat hidden and it's somewhat difficult to get to connect the dots all the way from what we're doing to the consequences. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a good slap in the face again to remind us of the scale of what humans are doing. Now, if we were still just like building pyramids using human labor or something like that, It's like, okay, maybe no harm, no foul in terms of us just scurrying around and doing mischief. But in fact, we've got a witch's brew of chemicals, chlorine chemistry, but all kinds of other stuff. And so the built biomass is, I guess, one rough metric of it.

I will say that also, in terms of what we're even made of, people when I was born were mostly just made, you know, their protein came. from nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These days, a large part of the human biomass of proteins come from nitrogen fixation of natural gas using a Nazi process. So, you know, that's different. We may get into talking about the biomass bubble at some point here.

But, you know, we miss a lot of stuff because of its relatively slow speed of propagation. You know, we do something to fix what we perceive as a problem. And the other effects from that, and there are always other effects, tend not to happen as immediately as the thing we do. And so, you know, we treated as separate. But yeah, it's a big wake-up call or should be.

So building on that, the growing total mass of structure in the world, you both have written and spoken about the least, limitations of so-called renewable energy to act as a solution to some of the problems we've outlined so far. I think about it that renewable energy, first of all, is not really renewable, but rebuildable. But it's not changing anything about what we do with the energy. It's just trying to swap out one form of energy for the other. Can you give us an elevator pitch on this topic, Tom. Yeah, this is an important one for me.

And I was, just to be clear, a real enthusiast in the early days of my awareness about this. I thought, you know, sunlight is so completely abundant. There's, you know, it's done. You know, it's just obvious that that's where we go. But a lot of awarenesses have, you know, crept in. It turns out that solutions are really easy when your boundaries are narrow. and your visibility of the problem is narrow, then it's, you know, it's a snap. And, you know, as you gain awareness and perspective, you realize that, oh, well, there are complications

that's not so easy. So the question you asked is the right one. What is it we do with our energy? And so that list of things that I went through about, you know, what's causing this biodiversity crash, none of those, almost none of those have to do with fossil fuels. in in terms of, you know, a suitable substitute, even though that's technically hard to achieve, a suitable substitute would basically just do the same thing. It's swapping the engine, but you continue the mining and the manufacturing and the pollution

and the, you know, the deforestation and the habitat loss and the pesticides and the herbicides and overfishing, overhunting. All of those things are still present. and the question becomes, what of those activities do we propose ceasing under renewable energy? I haven't heard anybody talk about, okay, once we have solar, we can stop doing all of these things,

because the point is, once we have solar, we can keep doing all these things. Isn't that great? It's keeping modernity fully powered. That is the goal. And it's important to realize that's the goal. It's just doing it.

without CO2 and greenhouse gases, which, you know, I'm not a climate denier. I think those are, that's a very important phenomenon that's happening and it's not making anything any better. It's exacerbating the situation in an interactive way. But, you know, I like to think of it in terms of the Titanic, which would have been equally capable of ramming into the iceberg under a solar-powered battery system. it's what you do with the energy that matters not what the form of the energy is.

And it relates to something that I heard on this podcast, Dennis Meadows, when you interviewed him, talked about the man rushing at you with a hammer intent to do you harm. You don't really care if it's a hammer or a knife or a gun or a mace or whatever. It's the intent to do you harm. That's the problem. And so it doesn't matter what technology we're wielding in our energy ambition. it's the fact that we have energy ambitions. And it's what we do with it.

So that's my take on it. So our conversations are focused on the gun or the knife or the mace or the hammer when they should be about the man running at us. Right. And it's which is better, which is going to kill things better, you know? Yeah. It's not.

And it's squabbling over the ins and outs and the technical details. and whoa, you know, what are you even doing it for? Let's ask the bigger questions. Don, what do you think? Well, first off, just to alienate half your audience, I'll say there's no such thing as renewable energy per se. No energy has ever been renewed. Does entropy end up winding down? That's what's happening.

You know, there's diffuse kinetic energy that we can grab. with various mechanisms we can build. But we build those mechanisms with fossil, you know, by burning energetic flammable fossils. And we probably always will. There's never been a solar panel made without a fire somewhere burning fossils. And I wonder if there ever will be. So it's a meme, and it's fine as long as you realize,

when people say renewable energy, they realize, okay, well, this is like Coke light or something. It's a brand. The fact is, if you look out this window here, my house is festooned with solar panels because it's a reasonable energy trade. However, and who knows, if we were husbanding our fossils

and carefully making 200-year solar panels, they could probably be part of a really great civilization, but they're not going to power this civilization. There are one more thing we do, with the fires that we make. And I think they're probably going to, you know, they're right now, well, right now the ones on my roof were mostly made burning coal,

and they probably always will be. And that also goes for windmills. And I'd also make the case that it also probably goes for fission plants and fusion plants if they ever happened to. You know, the thing that took us to the moon, everything else, it's energy from fossils. That's the big bolus. That's the thing.

All of the others. you know, would we really have ever made fish and plants if we were burning only wood for power? I think and not. You know, we would have theories of how to do it, but we wouldn't have made any of them. We sure wouldn't have pointed a bunch of, you know, thermonuclear warheads at each other. No, this is all like, you know, like an enormous boxed car sugar derailed next to an ant hill. And for a while, that ant hill would be high as a kite, reproducing and doing things and all, you know, sitting back. but, you know, it's finite, you know, and we're halfway through our box car of sugar now when it comes to oil, roughly, and things are going to start changing.

So you got to replace the solar panels out here. I've got 44 of them. Two of them are already dead in 12 years. They die, and we don't really recycle, not really that recyclable, much less the material. So I think they're going to be a phase. I'm one of the things I'll throw in now, just in case you I'd come back to it. I'm not looking at things like between now and 20 years, but now and 2100, an arbitrary thing.

I tend to look at things in terms of deep time because the predicaments that we're creating will roll out in deep time. And there's no way we're going to be able to make more than a few generations. So, you know, by 20 years' worth of these mechanisms, another 20, another 20, another 20. Well, the diffuse energy of waves and wind and solar are going to keep falling on our planet, but the era of these mechanisms is going to be gone pretty soon. What would an optimist, unruable energy say to what you just said? What would their plan be for 2080, 2100, 2200, like infinite recycling or something?

I mean, they can't be so naive to not realize that. that every 20 or 25 years they need to be replaced? Most people think in sentences that they are told of them by other people. And if they say, well, we've got renewable energy and we could run the civilization on these, therefore we can leave all of the oil in the ground because we're not going to need it, it's dangerous because it leads to shallow illusory movements. And people who think, for instance, that the only actual problem is that the oil companies and coal companies are run by sociopaths.

that's not the problem. And if you've got millions of people to believe that's a problem, you've got a problem. Because it doesn't matter who run them. We're demanding that stuff. And people who send, you know, 10 bucks off to get a T-shirt to be green now, well, at the point their air conditioners aren't working in the summer and their heat's not working in the winter, they're going to demand that environmental rules be suspended, you know,

and stop sequestering that CO2 with the one plant that's, doing it so we can, you know, get more output. I think we're on a glide path to coal and what I have termed a Mordor economy after this simplification crash has happened. And I worry a lot about that because the entire story of humans and other species in the future is very much at existential risk right now and not from what's going to happen in the coming 20 years, but maybe from what we commit to in the next 20. Can you briefly expand on why you think we're on a glide path to coal and what that means. We've got all of these, you know, we can turn on a light switch and get a lot of power.

We've got base load electricity. Most people are not going to want to give that up. And there's increasingly going to be emergency waivers from the environmental restrictions that may be passed. Like this island up until a couple years ago burned coal. Now, the electricity, most electricity here has come from burning oil. It's going to go back to coal. Why?

Because people want baseload, and they can get baseload by bringing in coal from Australia, India, or wherever they want to. Oil is going to get very expensive within the lifetimes of most people listening to this. There's not going to be forever a global market in cheap oil. will always be demand, and it's going to run out. I think what I worry about 100 years from now, anybody who's got much energy at all will probably be using coal, because most of the solar panels will be broken by then, and the high-tech supply chains that we see now via globalization are going to be long gone, and they'll be long gone pretty soon.

wouldn't it be possible with declining costs of batteries to use all the solar power in Hawaii coupled with batteries so that we wouldn't need to burn oil and eventually coal? Well, we don't need to anyway. I mean, 100 watts per person would do it in Hawaii. Nobody ever dies if exposure is here. If you build your house, right, you don't need air conditioning, you don't need heating, you know. nobody dies of exposure here unless they're really trying hard. But if you look at where humans live right now, well, we're mostly inhabiting places that get too hot in the summer

and are going to get hotter in the summer and get too cold in the winter and it's still going to be too cold. And so Hawaii is like the sweet spot if you want to be a naked ape, you know, lying out and not just dying from the earth doing its thing. but the human species in general, we like our baseload. We don't need our baseload, but who wants to give that up? I'd love to see a no-base-load movement, but lots of luck finding millions of people to sign up with it. We could probably get 2% of people to do it, and then may already be living out farming goats and, you know, using car batteries.

but if you actually do the math, a phrase that I've heard before, I think you can figure out that maybe Tom can speak to this that what it would actually take to run things indefinitely on batteries and solar panels and windmills. Well, Tom, what do you think about that? Yeah, I mean, indefinitely is a strong term. And Nate brought up the infinite recycling idea.

And DJ, you would sort of maybe resonate with this, that's just thinking in words. That's not actual thinking. That's just throwing words around. There's no such thing. You know, even this sort of fantasy level of 90% recovery, I mean, end to end, cradle to grave, like somehow recovering all of that material that's been distributed into the world and being able to get that material out, which, you know, again, this is fantasy. But even then, you're down to less than half the resource in just seven cycles. So you're talking about maybe a century, you know, for the lifetime of these kinds of devices, a few centuries. And then you're just going to have this decline.

That's just the way it is. So, yeah, modernity will starve itself on the materials front. These, to echo the idea that there's no such thing as renewable energy, I mean, the sunlight will still come. It's not being exhausted by our putting panels. out, but that is almost irrelevant. Very similar to how people get very excited about the energy density of nuclear. What does it matter? Your nuclear sub is enormous. Your nuclear power plant is enormous. It doesn't matter what this, you know, one component is. Just like it doesn't matter that the sunlight keeps coming. You're using non-renewable materials to do the collecting and converting,

and that's a dead end. It just, you know, it is a dead end. It is a dead. in. So it doesn't last forever. There's nothing, no such thing. And to the point of, onto the point of demand, I think that's very important. I saw a bumper sticker in town recently that I really liked. It said, and it was on some old beat up pickup truck, it said, if, if you don't like loggers, try using plastic toilet paper. And I loved it because it points out that loggers aren't doing this, and oil companies aren't doing this because they're just evil sociopaths, they're filling a demand. And if that demand went away, they would wake up in the morning and feel completely satisfied, not chopping down trees.

It's just the machine makes them do it. And I wonder how many of our jobs would fall under that category that you just said. So moving on to the finiteness not going to last forever and the energy topic. So humans, nature and humans, because we're part of nature, we optimize not for energy, not for efficiency, but for power. And we currently use around 19 terawatts of continuous power as a global economic entity. I call it the superorganism. That equates to 190 billion 100 watt light bulbs turned on 24-7. So this is our power output as a species.

When might this global human power output peak and enter its terminal decline, basically, because it's a one-time pulse that we're burning through. And why would that happen? Tom, let's start with you. Yeah, there are a lot of reasons that it could happen. It is inevitable as a pulse, as a surge, and fossil fuels have been such a big part of that. And I guess I used to look to peak oil as the thing that would drive that peak and then, you know, the post-peak decline. But there's an interesting wrinkle here that the fertility rates in the world in all regions are falling.

Africa included that they're still high, but the rates are falling everywhere. And the fall has been dramatic in the last, say, 10 or 15 years. And the United Nations projections, I've looked at this for every year that they put out a projection in 2010 and 2012 and 2015 and 2017, 2019, 2022. I look at what is the trend actually doing and what did they think it was going to do at each stage. And it's almost orthogonal to what actually happened. You know, it's tanking, tanking, tanking. They said, we think it's going to recover. We still think it's going to recover.

We still think it's going to recover. And it's just completely falling. It's no region in the world outside of Africa is above replacement rate at this point. Now there's demographic inertia, and that takes a generation or so as the population pyramid sort of moves through its progression. So that, you know, India, for instance, is below replacement. It's at 2.0 children per woman right now, and 2.1 is the replacement rate. but it will still grow its population for a few decades. China is already looks like it's at peak.

Japan is past peak. A lot of European countries are at or past peak. And this is happening. It's already happening. And it's going to happen at different stages across the world. But if you just keep the low fertility rates that are already present and have been for 15 years, and the factors, many factors that are driving those trends are not going to just magically go away. So let's say that it continues for the next decade or so.

That's all it takes to produce an early peak in global population, you know, 2040 time frame is quite possible. So what this means in terms of power is if I combine that with the per capita power of each, region. So North America, northern America, basically U.S. and Canada is about 10,000 watts per person, whereas, you know, Europe is more like 5,000 watts and so forth. But if you combine all these things, you end up finding that the peak of the power, just from demographic forces alone, could happen as early as 2033. That's not long from now. And the downside of that is going to be very interesting because power is a decent measure of economic activity, as you well know, that these are highly correlated phenomena.

So I think we could be looking at economies that are struggling to figure out how to survive in a power decline, you know, population decline. scenario. So even if Africa is so growing during this period, which it will for some time, it's got such a low, it's 500 watts per person on average. It's not a big contributor to the power story, which means resources, which means manufacturing, which means, you know, economic activity. And so I think we could be looking at a peak in civilizational power, you know, even in my lifetime. So, you know, before 2050, I think is possible. I'm going to push back on that. I hadn't heard you unpack that logic before.

I totally think we're going to hit peak civilizational power before 2050 and before 2040, but for different reasons. And just assuming that you're correct on everything you said, why couldn't the countries that have lower populations just double or triple their power output per person? So we have fewer people, but more consumption per person. I mean, basically what you're saying is that power is going to peak from the demand side as opposed to the supply side. And my work and you guys have followed me for a long time and been my colleagues. and allies, you know, with oil and energy and the monetary markers that we create without any reference to any biophysical relationship and the geopolitical game of who has what and who's looking for what and the wars. I think that's going to be a much bigger constraint on our peak

power date than the demographics. Yeah, I guess I would say, to correct you, I'm not saying this is what's going to happen, then it's going to be demand side. I'm saying that it very well could happen. It's on the table. I mean, I've always been on the supply side as well that, you know, finite resources, you know, duh, it's going to, that's, that's what's going to hit you. What I had not even entertained, and it's a head spinner for me to realize that, but it's from looking at the data, it's looking at what the fertility rates are doing. They are just plummeting. I mean, South Korea is at point seven right now. That's a third of the replacement rate, meaning that if it were to maintain that level, each generation is a third the size of the other. So two out of three

schools are closing every generation. Now, I'm not proposing that the world works like that, that it will stay flat at point seven, too. But the point is that it's a new phenomenon that the demographers haven't done a good job of anticipating. It's because they don't run systems models. They're just extrapolating like, you know, most models. And so you ask the question, can't you just increase your per capita? I guess you could if you mandated that people leave their lights on all night, you know, but why would that happen? And especially if this thing will catch a lot of people by surprise, okay, and economies are going to be kind of in convulsions trying to deal with it. And supply chains are going to be interrupted. Uh, it's, uh, it's,

It's going to be messy, and I don't think people are just suddenly going to figure out ways to double their per capita energies. So this is kind of Elon Musk's argument that a decline in population is going to be catastrophic for economies. I think, you know, there are some similarities, but I hate the comparison. But, you know, it's, it could be catastrophic for economies, and I think, oh, thank God, because economies, what's good for economies are bad for ecologies. And you can't have an economy long term without an ecology. It's just that sort of inversion of our hierarchy that we think that the world is owned by economics and that somehow the environment is a subset of economics. but you know very well that that's the inverse of the truth that economics is a small subset of the physical world. So I, the same data, the same trends produce completely different reactions.

I think that's the relief valve. It could be the relief valve that we need naturally, not through war necessarily. I mean, you can't predict what's going to happen. But just people deciding, you know what, I don't think I want to have kids. It's too expensive, the world's going to shit, whatever it is. It's already happening, but I am less sanguine on you that this is a relief valve, because as economies contract, like you were saying, I'm not so sure that will be a break for the ecologies. I think humans will go out and chop down trees and kill all animals nearby and remove the global carbon sense. sink that in standing biomass and such. So I don't think it's a direct one for one tradeoff

benefit. But I don't know that you can maintain the economies and the ecology. I don't think you've got the wolf by the ear and it's an unfortunate situation. I mean, you're just, there's no good solution out of this and there's no easy way. I would rather it be something that just sort diffuses itself through demographics, that seems a gentler way to me than just hitting the brick wall as hard as fast as you can go. So you're changing thinking now versus a few years ago is you actually think this is quite plausible that we will, for demographic reasons, hit peak power and decline from there, rather than hitting hard resource limits. It certainly caught my attention as a maybe even a likely thing in my mind now.

I don't know where I am on that, but it's definitely something I never considered before, but I just was gobsmacked by the fertility data. It's an amazing phenomenon. It's fast. It's global. There's so many reasons contributing to it. I don't think it's going to go away.

And I don't think you can make people have a bunch of kids very successfully. So I think. Well, and there's actually. Endocrine disrupting chemicals, too, that are affecting sperm count. So I don't think this is going to just be waved away, and I think you're going to get a lot of screaming from people like Musk who say, oh, we have to, this is terrible, or J.D. Vance, we've got to stop this. We've got to have babies. You're going to get a lot of that. These are people panicking that modernity is their priority, not ecology. And so they will do anything they can. They are the mouthpieces of the superorganism. They will do anything they can to keep that thing. pumping as fast as it can until it hits the brick wall, which they don't acknowledge is there anyway.

I agree that Tom's trend graphs are headspinner, you know, it's interesting stuff I need to look at. I personally still would come down on the side that it's going to be supply that is what constrains things. But I may be also, since I take a longer view, hopefully a view that's based on an ecological sort of time frame rather than human pragmatics, I think, yay. If human population starts going down on its own without any draconian stuff happening, I think that's a good thing. Because as you know, Nate, I personally think that in general, as a general phenomenon,

that the human biomass, also or livestock biomass, that basically trace the carbon pulse up, is also going to tend to follow it on the way down. And there are graceful ways to get from circa $10 billion to circa $2 billion, and they're non-graceful ways of getting there. And we're kind of, it seems like, as Tom said, we're ready to just keep going until we smack a wall.

I will certainly not surprising a way to say that I think the assumptions of the economics that are now making decisions in the world are bullshit. They're almost hallucinogenic level bullshit. And this idea that human demand and cleverness of the ultimate coin of the universe and we can keep doubling our material wealth and energy output forever world without end, it's nuts. Just like I hear Elon Musk figures that terraforming and colonizing Mars, that one of the big limiting factors is going to be how much of his sperm there is. So he actually put out apparently a press conference that he's willing to supply personally sperm to help build out the Mars colonies. You realize how crazy this is. So, yeah, I'd say put me on the side of hoping for humanitarian reasons that a population drop is going to happen. because I don't think it matters whether it peaks at 8, which is roughly where we are, or peaks at 10 or peaks at 12, because, you know, in the coming 50 years, it's going to go down because it can't go any other way.

And I think we need to have our eyes fixed not on what the immediate consequence are going to be, and some of them are going to be tough. But what the consequences for human survival is going to be, and that's on the order of magnitude of about 1,000 years. not on 10 years or one year or, you know, the Dow Jones average or anything. You brought up Mars while you are on that topic, could you just give us a brief checklist of the reasons that that's not going to happen colonizing Mars, Don, because I know you've studied a lot of space travel and issues like that. Back when I was in college, I was actually a devotee of Gerard K. O'Neill, who was going to do, he's the guy actually. that inspired Jeff Bezos, apparently. But I actually met the guy. He was going around doing lectures.

He was planning to do space colonies at L5 and, you know, LaGrange points and stuff. And it sounded fairly cool because right then we'd seen how rapid the progress was to, you know, shooting people to the moon and stuff like that. It, you know, without having any real idea of the amount of resources and stuff that there were, which I didn't in college, it was like, okay, that's cool. That's actually why I was initially a physics major, then chose a geophysics because I could do so I could get a job.

And then, of course, quit all of that to do whatever this is. But in terms of Mars, it's just nuts. I mean, you could colonizing Antarctica is fantastically easier than colonizing Mars. And nobody wants to do it. I mean, you can fly planes there, there's air, there's water. you can like probably order off Amazon. I mean, now, you know, before things get rough, it's just a crazy, crazy place. I love astronomical stuff.

I was there for the last launch of a Saturn 5, and I've even been on the boards of companies, organizations that promoted exploration in space as a way to appreciate this planet. You know, I love the culture of space, everything. And I wish that the geeks that were now following Elon Musk down on Mars Routhole were following the kind of system science that we're talking about here because there's some really good folks there, you know. But, you know, I doubt anybody is going to land. Certainly, I doubt anybody's going to land on Mars any one of Musk's rockets.

And if they do, it's going to be a very depressing reality show as they die off, one by one. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not physically impossible to land somebody there. It is physically impossible to terraform it. And how long do people even think it's going to take to terraform to give Mars an atmosphere? You know, it'll be thousands of years, 10,000 of years. It's all just nuts. And it's one of those thinking of words things again, it's like, oh, I'm going to take people to

Mars. I'm going to land them there in 2018. And we're going to have a civilization and it's going to be populated. by my offspring. Okay, Elon, I guess I'll buy some shares in Tesla because that'll maximize my short-term income. It's nuts. So let's integrate a couple things that you guys just said. One is on the thinking in words, and the other is on the one-time carbon pulse period that we're living through that we expect the three of us will end on its growth phase. in the next decade or two.

Tom, you're recently retired as a college physics professor. How ubiquitous is the combination of thinking in words with neoclassical economic assumptions of economic growth forever? If we run into scarcity, price signals will solve it. The environment is outside. side of the cares of our economy. Being retired now, do you question some of the advances in science, especially the softer social science that did all the sociology, psychology experiments during this one-time moonshot phase of our species growth? What are your thoughts

on all that, if you have any? Yeah, I've definitely thought a lot about this. And I've tracked how students are responding and thinking about things. And one thing I'll note is that we've done a very poor job training people how to think. And so it's its recipe following. It's formulaic, algorithmic. They haven't really thought about these big questions. And so when I teach my course or when I would teach my course, a lot of students would say, how come we're only hearing about this now for the first time? I'm a senior in college. You'd think that, you know, this stuff would have been more present as important as it is. And I think the default assumption for most of them is that, like DJ said, human ingenuity is the ultimate coin and, you know, is never going to run dry.

That's a bit of a delusion, just like, you know, it's again just a sentence and it's, it's, it doesn't really have good backing. I think, you know, a lot of things are going to change. the context is going to change a lot. And you see it all over the place. And one example is the demographic transition that, you know, the current, say, European countries, Western countries have stabilized population. And the idea is, well, let's just have that same thing happen for all the growing countries like in Africa now. And it completely misses context.

And so the one word that I think. think characterizes our big blind spot is context. So many problems are defined narrowly and thought of narrowly so that you're missing the great majority of the reality. So the demographic transition worked for European and Western countries because the context was an exploitable world that was not yet denuded. Where are the Africans going to find their Africa? so to speak, where are they going to find their exploitable, colonizable world of bountiful resources? It's just not going to happen. You can't just rinse and repeat.

And, you know, this happens all the time where we, people are very social animals, and we pay attention to what other people are doing and what other people have done. And so we inform a lot of our understanding of the world based on history, based on past experience. And that makes a lot of sense. Usually the world doesn't change dramatically, but we're about to go through kind of a big phase change. And so I think a lot of the things that people thought about how the future will progress are just going to prove to be almost laughable in the future because that was all an context of the world that we know continuing, the world of, you know, infinite resources, um, uh, continuing to, to be true. So I think, I think there's going to be a real, um,

you know, what bucket of cold water, um, when people realize that all, all these things that we thought were about to happen in the arc of history and justice and intolerance and all these things are going to look a lot different on the flip side. I agree with that. What about the academy, though? I mean, there's some of the smartest people in the world are professors and teachers, and you had lots of friends and colleagues at UC San Diego and in the global connection of your colleagues. Why can't the systems understanding bubble up there? Because the Academy potentially has a lot to offer our situation. What's the barrier there?

Or were many of your colleagues starting to become equal-ed and systems fluent? No, they weren't. And this distressed me. And I wondered this. I asked myself this question all the time because I met real geniuses in my work. I didn't even know what that meant until I went to grad school. And some of the grad students at Caltech, I realized, oh, those. are geniuses. That's not me, but those, now I see what it's like. And I admired their,

their capabilities. And I'm, I've been surrounded by, by those kinds of people. And I think, well, why aren't they seeing the same things I'm seeing? You know, what am I missing? That was the way I approached it. What am I missing? And I would talk to them. I would try to understand. And what I got was kind of blank stairs. I never got anybody saying, oh, yes, I've gone through the same exercise, you know, when I was six years old, I thought through these things. And here's the big mistake that I was making. Here's the thing that I was missing. Here's the, here's what will resolve this for you and let you go back to doing your, you know, fiddling around in astrophysics.

that never happened because they never really thought about those things. So brilliance, you have to realize, and it's a kind of cleverness, but it doesn't mean broad, it doesn't mean wisdom, it doesn't mean breadth, it doesn't mean big picture, doesn't necessarily mean complexity, it means powerful, almost sometimes algorithmic, not always, I shouldn't sell it short. but it, you know, it also follows the incentive structures in academia, which are not really about, hey, think some big thoughts and tell us why modernity is not going to last. That's not that's not where the action is. That's not where the funding is.

That's not where the publications are. You can't prove stuff like that. And so it has to stay narrow. It has to stay conservative. It has to stay, you know, publishable. it has to stay within the reward system for promotion and all those kinds of things. So it's not really, I was disappointed. I retired at age 53 and part of that was it was just a disappointing space.

I didn't find myself surrounded by intellectuals who could talk about the biggest problems and really brainstorm. They, you know, brilliant people, but focused on narrow, uh, research interests. So it's kind of a wide boundary version of the Upton-Sinclair quote. You can't expect a university to understand something that its funding depends on it, not understanding. Exactly. Yeah. If I could jump in. It's, I think I agree, obviously, with that, and I am not an academia, hallelujah, but it's what's rewarded, and not just an academia, but by society. How many people have heard of Stephen Hawking versus how many people have heard of Tom Murphy, both brilliant guys.

But one of them is an extreme reductionist who thinks we can colonize Mars, and that it's a top priority that was Hawking. And the other is a guy who's actually integrating and synthesizing, you know, doing a synthesis of various aspects of science and looking at him simultaneously. And I dare say fewer people know about Tom than knew about Stephen Hawking. And maybe maybe they should know. What is there about our societies that the very nature of expertise that you have to win an award in something that's so reductionist that you might not be able to use a microwave open to make a ramen?

So there are people out there that are self-taught generalists. You're one of them, Don. You figured this all out when you're 20s on personal exploration. And then you founded Earth Trust and did your, dolphin and ocean saving missions. So it is possible for an individual member of our species to buck that trend and learn about systems and how they fit together and then go out in the world and do good things, yes? I have found it to be if you're asking.

Yeah, I absolutely have found that to be the case. And actually, and it's literally 50 years ago I was hired as a geophysicist. That's how old I am now. And I was never a physicist like Tom is a physicist. I was just paid as one. But, you know, it's been interesting that if you don't think in sentences and, you know, being probably more than a little bit on the spectrum, I didn't automatically think in sentences. And maybe it gave me a little bit of a barrier against the crazy all around me.

But I've tried to index my delusions. And I've had a lot of them. I probably still have some I haven't found. But I have a pretty good index of my delusions now. I think most people not only don't have one, but wouldn't want one. You know, it's a shame, but an individual who does that and doesn't accept the limits that other people seem to be implying or there couldn't do amazing things. Now, I'm not being implied that I've done amazing things, but the things that I've done have seemed impossible. It's not just like one or two impossible things, a bunch of things that seemed impossible.

And part of that is just thinking through stuff on your own and trying to see how you can get a little leverage in the world. And if you do, you find out that you're out there on the tight rope alone. There's not many people out there being effective. You know, there are people who'd like to be effective, but they're doing the same stuff everybody else is doing. and thinking the same things everybody else thinking. So I know you sent you sent some of your past pupils of Reality 101 off to live with me here so they could be exposed to the crazy just a bit. And I think there may be something to that.

So how much of this is the narrative in society and the social hierarchies that we have? because if there's a viewer of this program that this is the first show they watched on the Great Simplification channel, the two of you may come across as a little misanthropic or anti-human, though I know that you're not. But certainly some popular technologist would think and say the exact opposite things is you, but those things would be popular. So what are your thoughts on that juxtaposition? I see myself as an advocate for humans. I like humans. I like you guys. Most of my friends are humans, but not all of my friends have been humans.

I'm not just talking about dogs. I'm talking about other peoples of Earth with brains bigger than mine, social beings. I'm specifically talking about cetaceans who I've known. And they are people too. And they're here. And then this predicament is actually none of their problem whatsoever. I mean, it's their problem, but it's not what they're doing. Well, please go on because a lot of the implications of this entire hour plus conversation are that humans are appropriating, you know, a third of the net primary productivity and all of the ancient productivity and adding into our economies.

And that is shrinking out the natural world, our nieces, nephews, cousins, and nature. and if you voice these things, you sound like you're anti-human. I just wondered how you guys process that and recognize that. I don't think it's true, but that's the perception. Well, not at all. Well, having said that there's dozens of self-aware, conscious peoples on Earth, and I know that from my own experience, but also if you just get down to humans,

that mostly what matters is humans, I'm as far as I know the only advocate so far for Naya. I gave her a name because nobody else has. She's the trillionth human being to live. We've had about 100 billion humans now in Homo sapiens lines. How many are there going to be in deep time? There will be a correct answer to that at some point. There will be a specific number of human childhoods, human lives.

Is it like okay with everybody if we cap it somewhere close to 100 billion? Most large mammalian species in the past have tended to live about 10 million years. Okay, well, if we lasted 10 million years at maybe, you know, a population of, you know, what, a billion, even 100 million, there would be trillions of human lives lived and very possibly very good lives without a broken planet. You know, lives with well-oxygenated cool oceans and not broken ecologies. plenty of wildlife and stuff like that. The only thing we had to do by about, say, year 1800, in order to get to trillions of human childhoods that might have been quite nice, which don't break the damn planet. And so we've done the very worst thing we could do. We've dug up all of this

sequestered carbon and hydrocarbons, and we're burning it, which is very possibly other than making nuclear weapons, which we couldn't have done without digging up those fossils anyway, there's pretty much no way we could break the planet, except we've come up with the rationales to do that. How messed up is that? So, yeah, I am an advocate for most humans. So if we figure that humans only make it to one trillion, and up until Naya, the trillionth human being, trillionth human lifetime, that's 900 billion more than have been lived so far.

That's the bulk of human experience, existence, knowledge, love, caring. That's what I'm an advocate for. And it's the same damn things you need to advocate for to keep from killing off the dolphins and the whales and the hummingbirds and the rainforest and stuff. They're all in the same boat, literally. I agree a lot with what DJ said. I also love people. I mean, humans themselves, an amazing organism, just, you know, exceptional in so many ways. versatile brains, which is a blessing and a curse.

That's what got us here, but in both good ways and bad ways. But I agree that my goal is the longest, happiest existence for humans on the planet. I'm looking for the long run. I'm looking for the millions of years. But that has to be in an ecological context. this context that we've crafted using these brains that are a bit of a curse really can't work because, I mean, if you think about our brains were really kind of evolved as to be,

to make us keen observers of patterns and cycles and tracking animals and very complex social interactions. and that brain power had a versatility to it that opened a loophole, this unintended loophole, where we could also turn that into kind of an artificial construct of how we could change the context and invent our own world, in a sense, And it turns out that one of the problems is that we feel like we can fit the entire world into our heads. Each of us, our brains are capable of presenting allusions to us, things that we believe to be true, but really aren't. And one of those beliefs is that we can think the whole thing.

We can get our heads around the entirety. That's just so far from true. It's just like saying that the environment is just a subset of economics. It's the inverted hierarchy. Really, the complex world is far bigger than anything our brains can conceive, but we think we can. And so we invent these schemes and these ways of living that have no history, no vetting, no evolutionary check. And we think, well, this is a lot of fun. Let's just do that.

And it's completely out of ecological context. It is damaging. it is, um, it's hurting ourselves. It's, it's turning this at, an advantageous brain into a liability by, um, kind of getting ahead of itself and it's almost a Dunning Kruger kind of effect where we think we're the masters. We think we're, we've got this competence. So I love the fact that humans have this great versatility and I'd like to see that thrive. Um, so I'm, I'm a big fan of it, but I know that it has some downsides that need to be watched. It's hurting our future selves and our descendants,

but it's not hurting our present selves. I am in a climate controlled building with lights and internet connectivity now, and I'm going to have delicious food from the farmer's market that I drove to the other day. So it's not hurting my current self. It's just my future self, yes? Yeah, and I think that's a good distinction. I think DJ and I and you and you care a lot about future selves that we will never meet. And our empathy extends, you know, it's a wide boundary empathy, you might say.

And I think that makes a difference in how you approach these questions. I think one of the important things to realize about the upcoming travails and there are going to be travails, is that it's not going to really be anybody's fault. We're going to be blaming a lot of people. It has to do with the way our brains are organized, the way we evolved to exist on the Savannah, and very simple, logical series of decisions, like using the best resources first,

which, I mean, who's not smart enough to use the best stuff you find first? The problem is that if you use the best stuff first and you keep doing that, you set up an inexorable decline of energetic remote, for the future, to where everything that you want and value gets energetically further and further away. And in a large part, that's the knock-on effect of what we're going to experience. We've kind of obscured this by burning more flammable fossils every year. So we can't really tell if this remoteness is kicking in just due to the way we are,

the way we are as people, the heuristics that come from being a savannah primate. But that's going to accelerate the curve on the trip down, because not only are we going to be tracking the downslope of available exosomatic energy. So I'm thinking this tails from the carbon pulse round table might be a thing. And we could have various people in our wider network of friends chime in because it's not just peak oil. and it's not just the decline of mammalian biomass, and it's not just the acidification of oceans and the backloaded cost of our economic decisions on Earth's ecologies, but it's a system.

And everything's connected, and I love the perspectives that both of you have shared today. Briefly, as a closing question, could each of you share what you're actually doing now with your time and how can people find you online or otherwise? Well, I've been contributing to this or running this blog called Do the Math for quite a while, which started as a, you know, predictably scientific, quantitative exploration of what our options are. But I've pivoted more to ecological focus, societal focus, what is modernity, why can't it last? And I, I,

I recently started a video series called Metastatic Modernity. I plan 18 episodes that I think will be done by the end of August, so probably by the time this hits the airwaves, it will have been completed. So these are short videos that try to build the perspective because you can't do it in an elevator pitch. It needs a lot of unpacking, and so that's what I'm trying to do in that series.

So you might check that out. Well, what can I say? I've been 50 years now. I'm still working to try and do the impossible because every once in a while that works. Of course, it's now broad boundaries impossible. It's like, okay, what do we do to try and make the peak of the Holocene Anthropocene Thermal Maximum the peaks in, you know, 800,000 years? How do we keep that from being the bottleneck beyond which humans and other species simply cannot pass?

a lot of the things that need to be done are going to need to be committed to in the coming decades, certainly in this century, a lot of things are going to be locked in after that. So being alive now is an amazing thing, and it's an appalling thing in the level of responsibility. It puts on the shoulders of anybody who realizes that they maybe can possibly make a difference. And so one of the things I'm doing now, I'd like to make the pro-futuretists more effective at what they're doing, and I have a toolkit of things that has worked for me. As a working title, I call it effectiveness. It's a kind of contrast with activism, which I think is a more limited set of things.

Whether that catches on, I don't know, it's not as much fun. It doesn't give us, there's not as many behavioral rewards for doing it. But I'd like to see a few people kind of expand their toolkit of what can be done. And beyond that, as I do my thing, I'm, you know, I'm hoping that somehow some huge, you know, a pile of connections or funding or something will fall to the point where I can advise it, in which case, there are a bunch of things I would like to try. And that's a whole another discussion. But I do think not that we can take everything back to the way it was in 1880 or even 1950 when I was born, but apocalypse is not fungible. You know, we can make

things be a lot better than they would otherwise be. And that's what I'm committed to. And I take personal responsibility for that, because I'm nuts in just that way. And I thank you two guys. for being nuts in a very similar way. Gentlemen, thank you so much for your wisdom and verbal mind bombs today and your equal-lit wisdom on behalf of our future selves and the future selves of other species. Great. Thanks, man.

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