The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - This Week's Learnings: Corn Sweat, Coral Bleaching, and the Climate Credit Crunch | Frankly 102

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

In this week's Frankly, Nate shares a handful of things he's learned in the past few days that have implications for the Great Simplification. Nate covers a wide range of topics in this edition, from the connections between corn sweat and wet bulb temperatures to a timeline of coral reef bleaching events.  Our culture is marked by information overload, which has been expanded intensely by technology. This makes it difficult to absorb the data, narratives, and headlines we are presented—let alone sort through them and examine what is relevant for the Great Simplification scenario. This will perhaps be the first of a regular series where Nate outlines what he has learned recently, and what it means for this work and our lives.  What does it mean to have a "climate-induced credit crunch" across the financial sector? What's up with the recent tariffs on copper, and what connotations does this hold for the Great Simplification?  Why are mental health issues currently more prevalent for liberal-minded individuals, particularly women?   (Recorded July 16th, 2025)   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

Good morning. It is Wednesday, July 16th. I am not finished with my frankly on the 10 blind spots of the progressive movement. That'll come out next week. What I thought I'd do, and maybe I'll start doing this once a month or so, is do a little overview of what I learned this week. It may seem that I have an encyclopedic mind on all the issues we cover here. from the environment to finance to human behavior, but I don't. I just am interviewing people who are experts, and there's a ton of stuff that I get emailed

or in the social media or my team shows me. And quite often it's in one eye and ear and out the next, and I quickly forget it. But there are things that I learn every week. And here are five that I've learned the last couple days. First of all, I live in the upper Midwest on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and there is a lot of corn. And it is GMO corn and it is growing fast. The old phrase knee high by the 4th of July no longer is relevant. Probably end of June, corn was knee high.

Here's a picture of me this morning. It's over my head. And it's July 16th. So I learned the term this week, corn sweat because it is so unbearably heavy and uncomfortably hot here that I have to get up at five in the morning to do any exercise in my bike ride. Otherwise, it's unbearable. So what I learned was an acre of corn, just one acre, can release three to four thousands of gallons of water per day. And fast growing corn like GMO types, more than that, like 6,000 gallons. This equates to like three-tenths or four-tenths of an inch of water in the local area,

which increases the dew point like three to five degrees Fahrenheit. The dew point, again, is the temperature at which the air becomes fully saturated with water vapor. So the higher the dew point, the more moisture in the air, and the harder it is for sweat to evaporate off your skin. And of course, this is related to the term wet bulb, temperature, which we hear about in global heating discussions. So a wet bulb combines heat and humidity into one number, and it's how hot it feels when your body tries to cool itself through evaporation.

And at a wet bulb temp of 95 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 35 degrees Celsius, humans can no longer cool down, even in the shade with a breeze and unlimited water, You stay in that too long and you die, which is why rising dew points and wetball events are a growing concern in a warming world. So this week here in Minnesota, at least in my front yard, was a bit of a time machine. And I learned about corn sweat because the corn has to transpire the water from the soil. And that gets locked into the local humidity and environment. Second thing I learned, and I don't know how I missed this a couple months ago, but one of the board members of one of the largest insurance companies in the world, Alliance, by the name of Gunther Thalinger, did a LinkedIn post saying that climate is going to cause a systemic risk to capitalism. I quote from his post, this is a systemic risk that threatens the climate is.

the very foundation of the financial sector. If insurance is no longer available, other financial services become unavailable to. A house that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged. No bank will issue loans for uninsurable property. Credit markets freeze. This is a climate-induced credit crunch. This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry. the economic value of entire regions coastal and wildfire prone will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like. He went on to say capitalism must now solve this existential threat.

The idea that market economies can continue to function without insurance, finance, and asset protection is a fantasy. There is no capitalism. without functioning financial services, and there are no financial services without the ability to price and manage climate risk. So it's good that this isn't some fringe blogger, but the board member of one of the largest insurance companies world is saying these things. I don't know how the market can solve this, because the market at the same time as pricing risks, it's also requiring growth because the interest isn't included when money is

created and the entire system is geared for growth, a.k.a.a. the economic superorganism. So this is good that this is being raised. I personally think the credit risks in the world will manifest before 1.5, 1.752 degrees are reached and some of these things happen. But look at what happened in Texas and look at what happened last year in Florida. And, California and North Carolina and all over the world. So I think the ecology conversation and the finance conversation, the Venn diagram is beginning to have a larger and larger overlap. Third topic I learned this week is President Trump announced that copper tariffs are going

to go up 50% starting August 1st. And this has many implications, you know, potentially a 30 to 40% increase in domestic copper cost, higher costs for electric wiring, plumbing, HVAC systems, increased building costs passed on to consumers, potential delays in infrastructure projects, more expensive power and power grids, transformers, higher costs for electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines, which are copper-intensive. And the auto industry would be hit hard, like electric vehicles use three to four times more copper than regular cars. So while the goal of this administrative action might be different, taxing non-renewable inputs to the economy like copper, like hydrocarbons, is one of the longer-term policy responses to resource depletion and climate change.

But it's a classic example of bend versus break. And I think some of the unintended consequence of the current U.S. administration's attempt to add tariffs will rhyme with some of the dynamics of the great simplification. It's kind of like firing a little mini avalanche gun in the Swiss Alps to, avoid the big avalanche. But I think, you know, this is really interesting because I think ultimately what he's trying to do is, you know, onshore some of the basic essentials. Because if we're importing all the super important things like copper and fertilizer and

other things, we need to have domestic production of those. But that's going to cost a lot more, which means we're going to use less of it, which means we're going to have to simplify sooner rather than later. So I'm going to continue to watch that. The fourth thing I learned this week is there was a convening of experts on climate in the UK to discuss which tipping points are the most concerning. And I read about 20 of them. We'll put them in the comments.

And the majority of people said the tipping points they were most. concerned about were the Amazon dieback and the positive feedback that would result in from deforestation and a warming world turning more of the Amazon into Savannah and coral reefs. This is a quote from Johann Rockstrom, who's at this conference. The tipping element that worries me the most is coral reef systems for the simple reason that the scientific uncertainty range is very limited. we have unfortunately ample evidence that at one and a half degrees Celsius, we're very likely to knock over potentially the entire tropical coral reef system on Earth.

This threatens the livelihoods of 400 million people and a fundamental nursing ground for the whole ocean food web. So that is one deep concern. It is the canary in the coal mine, the first kid on the block to fall over. So after reading that, I emailed a coral reef expert friend of mine and his reply. which I kind of knew but didn't know was quite sobering. This is from an email. The first global coral bleaching event,

aka Marine Heat Wave, occurred in 1998, with 21% of the world's reefs being affected. The second occurred in 2010, with 37% being affected. The third started in 2017 and damaged 68% of coral reefs. And the current,

the fourth one, started in 2023 and as of March of this year had affected 84% of the world's reefs. This current one is ongoing and expected the final percentage of affected reefs to exceed 90%. I also expect, this is my friend writing this, the next major event to bleach close to 100% just extrapolating the trend of the first four. This fourth one started within a few months of the world passing one and a half degrees for the first time in early 2023. This number was not arbitrary.

It was a genuine planetary boundary that should not have been exceeded. And the next boundaries stated by scientists is two degrees, at which time over 90% of the reefs in the world will die. I need to know more about this. I have invited a world expert to come on the show in a few weeks to discuss what's going on with the coral reefs. One of the things I learned this week. but not least, and this is the reason I decided to do this little frankly, I saw this graph

in my Twitter feed earlier this week showing that mental health for people under 40 in the United States was dramatically overweighted by liberal people. And all of the comments were like, yeah, those liberals, they're weak-minded and they have mental illness and such. So I couldn't find the actual source of that graph, which is unfortunately the case more and more when people post things on Twitter and social media. But with some sleuthing, I did find an original scientific paper saying much the same things. And in this graph, the blue are women and the red are men.

and the vertical scale is percentage of mental health diagnoses. And the horizontal scales on the left shows extremely liberal all the way to extremely conservative. And it's quite clearly evidenced that liberal people, especially liberal women, have a much higher preponderance of mental health issues. The surface explanation of this is something to do with their personalities, you know, or experience or whatever. But if you think about the first few points of this, frankly, maybe it's because liberal, progressive-minded people have a wider boundary of care, a wider boundary of empathy, a wider boundary of what they think about, what matters to them. And women versus men have shallower discount rates. Men have steeper discount rates, which means they choose an immediate reward over a long-term reward.

So women, especially progressive women, are thinking more about the future, the planet, climate change. And when you, I actually think there's an empathy handicap going on in the world because people who are focused on the looming sixth mass extinction, what's happening with, ocean and the great migration of animals fleeing towards the poles to get more oxygen and all the things we talk about in this podcast with climate, not climate now, but climate 20, 50 years from now, it's no wonder that there is a larger worry in your life than someone who doesn't care about these things or thinks there's some sort of a socialist hoax. So I think this empathy The handicap is a real thing. And I'm going to look to find someone to talk about it.

By the way, we do have an upcoming episode on Dark Triad and Psychopathy, which should be fascinating. So that's all for letting you all know what I learned this week or what I started thinking about more this week. Lots more to come. Let me know if I should do these things or if these are helpful. I may also, some people are asking me to do a live YouTube thing periodically because I usually do these things on one take and I might as well do them live. Let me know what you think. And hope you are all well.

Talk soon.