The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: The end is in sight for fossil fuels. The future of energy is renewables.

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

The lowest oil prices in history thanks to stalled economies in lockdown. A President Elect and a Green New Deal that promises a carbon neutral America in a decade. Governments pledging to make the internal combustion engines illegal within a decade. It seems like the way we have powered our civilization for two plus centuries, using hydrocarbons, is on the way out as we welcome an energy revolution to combat climate change and environmental degradation. Fossil fuel proponents say that this is wildly wishful thinking that doesn't take into account renewable energy's infinitesimal contribution to current global demand. Moreover, most green energy is incredibly difficult to store and transit in the ways modern economies need, raising questions about whether hype has replaced common sense about replacing hydrocarbons as our dominant energy source.  Arguing for the motion is Ramez Naam, energy innovation advocate, and Co-chair for Energy and Environment at the Singularity University. He's also the author of the award winning sci-fi Nexus Trilogy. Arguing against the motion is Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-founding partner of Cottonwood Venture Partners, an energy-tech venture fund. He served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan. Sources: Global, BBC, NBC, MSNBC, AP Archive, CBC, CNBC International, Global Warming Policy Forum The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   For detailed show notes on the episode, head to https://munkdebates.com/podcast. Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ The Munk Debates podcast is produced by Antica, Canada's largest private audio production company - https://www.anticaproductions.com/   Executive Producer: Stuart Coxe, CEO Antica Productions Senior Producer: Christina Campbell Editor: Kieran Lynch Producer: Marilyn Mazurek Associate Producer: Abhi RahejaBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop. We're not an imperial power. We're a revolutionary power. We are no longer in a world where you can plot out moves statesmen to statesmen like a chessboard. You don't know anything about my background to where I came from. It doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man. We can't do this to the next generation because America will cease to exist. Welcome to the Monk Debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. Free of spin, focused on the facts and animated by smart conversation to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind.

Today's debate, be it resolved, the end is in sight for fossil fuels. The future of energy is renewables. BP says the growth of global oil consumption is coming to an end and will peak in the next few years if it hasn't already. Today traded as low as minus $40 a barrel. It's the first time the price has turned negative in history. It led to a day of chaos in the oil market. So let's talk about this. Governor Newsom came out swinging today.

He wants to ban the sale of gas powered cars and trucks by 2035. That's why today I'm releasing my plan to mobilize millions of jobs by building sustainable infrastructure. and an equitable clean energy future. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. Well, it seems that the way we powered our civilization for two plus centuries using hydrocarbons is on the way out as we embrace a green energy revolution. This is the CEO of BP, British Petroleum, Bernard Looney, talking about his company's strategy for the future.

We intend to reimagine energy so that we do so for the good of the planet, and in a way that improves people's lives. Fossil fuel proponents say the claim that a carbon-neutral future lies just around the corner is wildly wishful thinking that doesn't take into account renewable energy's infinitesimal contribution to current global demand. Moreover, most green energy is incredibly difficult to store and transmit in ways that modern economies need,

raising questions about whether hype has replaced common sense, when it comes to replacing hydrocarbons as our dominant energy source. But even by 2040, all renewables combine are only estimated to make up around 19% of the global energy mix. Natural gas experiences the largest demand growth, and oil is expected to remain the foil with the largest share. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved, the end is in sight for fossil fuels. The future of energy is renewables. Speaking for the motion is Ramez Nam, energy innovation advocate and co-chair for energy and the environment at the Singularity University. He's also the author of the award-winning sci-fi Nexus trilogy.

Arguing against the motion is Mark Mill. Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and co-founding partner of Cottonwood Venture Partners and Energy Tech Venture Fund. He served in the White House Science Office under President Reagan. Rames, Mark, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well, I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. You know, the future of energy has been really brought into a kind of an intense spotlight with the COVID-19 pandemic. We've seen wild gyrations in energy markets. We've seen arguments emerging that, you know, we shouldn't let this crisis go to waste, that this is the moment for a big pivot from fossil fuels to renewables in the backdrop of climate change and everything that that possibly entail. So a lot of different issues here to dig in with you and just a real privilege to have the two of you with your considered experience, your thoughtful analysis of the future of energy.

Our motion today is, be it resolved, the end is in sight for fossil fuels. The future of energy is renewables. Rames, you're going to be arguing for our motion, so I'm going to put two minutes on the clock and turn the program over to you. Let me just say first that fossil fuels have been essential in building human prosperity. They've caused environmental damage, but so much of what we have, not have been possible without this concentrated energy. Nevertheless, the end is in sight for fossil fuels.

That end started with coal. The world's consumption of coal peaked in 2013 and is now on a secular decline, and it has plunged nearly to zero in the UK and has fallen by half in the US. The next fossil fuel to be disrupted will be oil, which either at or very near to its all-time peak in global consumption before it too begins at secondary decline.

And the last will be, fossil fuel will be disrupted, will be natural gas, which will still grow for some time to come. The driver of this disruption was initially policy. It was initially governments like Germany subsidizing clean energy. But now what's happened is that those early policies

by scaling these technologies of clean energy have driven their cost down immensely. So now we see that even fossil fuel advocates, and shareholders like the International Energy Agency, now say that solar is the cheapest electricity in history, that solar with the future king of electricity. We see offshore wind prices at grid parity in Europe. We see the cost of batteries has fallen by a factor of 10

over the last decade and continues to. We see electric vehicles have been plunging in price and are on track to be cheaper to purchase than gasoline vehicles in the next three to five years and markedly cheaper to operate to fuel and maintain. And we can see this manifested in business transitions and forecasts even from within the oil industry. We saw that when Saudi Aramco put out as prospectus for their IPO, it forecast very, very minimal growth of oil out to 2030 and then a plateau and peak.

British Petroleum now forecast that even if the world passes zero new climate policies ever, oil is very close to its peak, and under a fast transition driven by more policy, oil demand could decline 80% in the next 30 years. And perhaps one last example, in 2013, the most valuable public company on Earth was Exxon. Now Exxon is worth on the order of $150 billion down markedly from their all-time highs, and they have several times of the last few months been worth less than Next Era, which is essentially a wind power company. And that's the sign of the transition that's happening.

Thank you, Remez. Actually, I believe Exxon even reached the market cap of Zoom, which we're using to record this debate. So an interesting data point to think about. Well, Mark, you're up next. You're arguing against our motion, be it resolved, the end is in sight for fossil fuels. The future of energy is renewables.

Two minutes on the clock for you. Let's hear your opening statement. So when it comes to the usefully foreseeable future of energy, we actually know three things with a lot of certainty, and they're all anchored in the laws of nature. Essentially human nature and the nature of the universe that we live in. First, the world will use a lot more energy in the future, not less, as populations and wealth grows. Second, all machines that acquire and deliver energy in useful forms are non-renewable. All of them. They require a continual infusion of materials, money, and land.

use. Third, compared to hydrocarbon machines, all of the so-called renewable energy machines use far more materials to deliver the same unit of energy, on average a thousand percent more materials per unit of energy delivered. So these three realities have predictive value because we know one other thing that's certain for the future, frankly. The world's governments are eagerly and lavishly subsidizing and mandating far more use of the so-called renewable machines. So we can predict the outcomes of this path. First, it'll lead to an epic. In fact, the greatest increase in mining that the world has ever seen with all the attendant environmental and the geopolitical challenges that leads to. It will also lead the higher energy costs, not lower,

for consumers, with all the attendant social and economic challenges that creates. We know that because Europe is ahead of us and has done the experiment. Energy costs have gone up with renewable machines increasing their penetration. And it will not eliminate the use of fossil fuels. It doesn't end fossil fuels. In fact, even the most aggressive new forecasts from the renewable energy made by the International Energy Agency, the same IEA that ROM characterizes as pro-hydrocarbons, but they would say we would certainly disagree on whether they're pro-hydrocarbons or pro-renewables. Nonetheless, their latest forecast, which will require policies that are far more aggressive than what's in the Paris Accord.

Even with those policies, global use of natural gas rises, as Rahm said, and it doesn't peak in the usefully foreseeable future. Oil use actually continues to rise slightly. It does peak in that scenario from IEA, but then it only declines very slowly. This is a very slow decline from an astounding 100 million barrel per day level roughly. So in short, it's true that the future of subsidized energy is heavily tilted to the so-called renewables.

but it's not true that the end is in sight for fossil fuels. We'll use a lot more of both, for the usefully foreseeable future. Thank you, Mark. Well, look, now is an opportunity for you both to kind of rebut what you've heard from each other, and we can start to really dig into this debate. So first, over to you, Ramez. What would you like to take exception with in Mark's opening statement?

Well, I think I'd like to take exception to most of Mark's points, except for the very first one. I agree the world will use more. more energy going forward, more finished final energy. Whether that's more primary energy or not is a very different story. Primary energy is the content of a fossil fuel, but of course, burning fossil fuels, you just lose most of the energy is heat. It's mercury wasteful.

But in final energy delivered to consumers and businesses, absolutely. We need a high energy planet to pull people out of poverty and so on. But almost everything else that Mark said is incorrect. So in terms of resource use, let's look at land use. In the U.S., solar per acre that you deployed on, actually generates more energy than coal when you look at the footprint of coal plants and the coal mining that we have done and the land that we have destroyed. There's no shortage of raw materials for most of these clean energy technologies.

and in a few cases where there have been, say, cobalt for batteries is a place where it's actually a difficult situation. It all comes from Congo. What you see is clean energy companies moving away from that entirely. And Tesla's newest batteries, lithium iron phosphate, a subtype of lithium ion, use zero cobalt whatsoever. So through innovation, we replace all of these scarce materials. But the two things that I think are most pernicious are this idea that renewables are how. higher cost. That was once true. But comparisons to Europe and what Europe did in the 1990s make very little sense because over the last 40 years, the cost of solar panels per watt

of power has plunged by about a factor of 500. In Tesla's Q2 earnings call, Elon Musk dropped this little bombshell. That solar is now 30% cheaper than the U.S. average. After the federal federal tax credit, Tesla, that now costs $1.49 for a white. And so now, even the IEA says renewables are the cheapest electricity you can buy, period. And virtually every forecaster that's serious

about mobility sees that the fuel cost and maintenance cost of electric vehicles is already cheaper than fossil vehicles, and the purchase price will be cheaper within just a few years. The idea that renewable wind and solar in particular use similar or less amount of land and even coal is just not supported by any studies by the UN, by the IEA, by the EIA, by the EIA. The energy density of wind and solar

is epically low by definition. It takes far more acreage, it's counting the entire fuel cycle. We count the idea of the fuel cycle matters. It matters from when the very beginning to the exploration, to land use, to transportation, pipes, materials. All these things are counted in the analyses of acres per unit of energy delivered. It is indisputably the case that wind and solar to deliver the same kilowatt hour use five to ten times more net surface area of the earth. It just does. Well, it's quite disputable, actually. This data is also indisputable. The quantity of iron ore, steel, concrete, material use per unit of energy delivered is higher.

It's not lower. It's not the same. It's higher by a factor of 10,000 percent. These are not disputable. What is true? These are very disputable and they're quite deceptive, actually. You're not counting the volume of fossil fuels themselves. I just said we're counting all of the inputs. No, you're really not. Coal is a straw man, first of all, because it's a surface mining and nobody is comparing or proposing to run the world on coal except in a lot of South Asia where China is building 300 gigawatts of coal plants. But comparison of the metric, and merit that matters is with oil and gas. And there, the land area used per watt hour delivered is one-fifth to one-tenth, counting everything. There's no subterfuge or deception on this.

No, I completely disagree. Let's have Remez come back on this point of material use. The material inputs that have to go into a renewable energy system. How big are they, Rames, and are they significant in terms of the environmental impact of creating that renewable energy capacity? Every industrial activity, including the generation of solar and wind, has some environmental harms. But that environmental harm is dwarfed by orders of magnitude by the environmental harms of fossil fuel combustion, both the direct pollution and the carbon in the atmosphere. But the second thing is all of these things, land use, material use, we can debate them, but they really come down to a key metric, which is cost.

And renewables end up being better for the environment in every way that you can quantify it. And they are plunging in cost faster than any other energy technology ever. They are simply the cheapest energy that you can buy. Let's have Mark come back on that point, because it is a key one in this debate, the contention that renewables, you know, forget saving the money, planet, when it ultimately comes down to it, they're cheaper. You're getting more megajoules, kilojoules, giga-joules, pick your jewel. But that's what renewables at the end of the day deliver over fossil fuels. Do you agree with that, Mark? Well, first, no, I don't, and it's demonstrably

not the case. But let's just back up with Scotia. The idea that the material uses are irrelevant is really fallacious. But it is a fact that electric cars, for example, use twice as much copper per car. the consumption of nickel, coal, cobalt, lithium, dysprosium, iron ore, and the materials used to make cement. This all goes up. This is something that a lot of environmental groups are very worried about around the world.

What most environmentalists are worried about, the secondary effects are not associated with carbon dioxide. They're associated with mining in remote areas where it's easier and faster to open up mines. Lithium is the component of choice for today's batteries, and that's led to big lithium demand, expected to at least triple by 2025. Already mining is eating up freshwater supply in South America's

lithium-rich regions, requires harsh chemicals in extraction in North America. Then there's copper, nickel, cobalt, all with dark sides of their own. From a fundamental perspective, the absolute quantity of materials goes up per unit of energy delivered. But Mark, just help me here and help the listener. Is that true for the life cycle? I'm only talking about life cycle. The tenfold increase in concrete and steel required is the life cycle energy delivered by building a gas-fire turbine versus building a wind or solar array. All these things are always in life-cycle basis because life cycles are what matters. This would be true for a car. If you count the weight of materials used to build a battery, the electric car consumes 10 times more materials extracted from the earth than the internal combustion engine does.

You know, this is a vastly, vastly deceptive argument. It's vastly deceptive in two ways, because it's not counting the actual materials that we extract, which are the fuels that get burnt in these objects, which is actually the most massive. Two, there is no comparison between the environmental impacts of mining, which are real, and the global, systematic environmental damage from climate change, and three, the incredible water use of thermal generation. these materials that are put into a vehicle or a battery, that's a closed system. The world recycles half of its steel at this point.

We recycle close to that in aluminum. The copper is one of the most recycled materials on Earth. And even lithium, which we don't recycle very effectively from batteries, when batteries are a large enough industry, we will recycle them, as opposed to what happens with the combustion of these fuels and the pollution that they put into the atmosphere. This is just nonsense. Like this, it really comes down to the environmental impacts all up of renewables are much, much better.

And the cost is either better than fossil fuels in almost every location or the incredible pace that they're plunging is destined to be. Thanks for a mess. So, Mark, come back on this point on cost. So, no, we can't come back to cost because if you don't get the materials right, you can't get costs right. Rom said the numbers I gave were nonsense because I didn't count the consumption and the weight of the combustive materials. the hydrocarbons. Of course I did. It's not complicated arithmetic. A battery that weighs a thousand pounds requires something like 500,000 pounds of materials, be mined, moved, and processed. You can compare that to 50,000 pounds of combustive materials and associated materials over the life

cycle of an internal combustion engine. It's 10 times less counting the hydrocarbons consume. Rom says I didn't count that. I'm not counting the engine. I'm counting the fuels the engine consumes. The renewables consume more materials. They consume different materials, but they consume absolute quantity more. That has relevance to costs. It's the principal reason electric vehicles are expensive. I want to move on, Mark, and have you talk, though, about the cost argument that Rames is making here, saying that these technologies are going to ultimately drive down energy costs for everyone

and that it's a misnomer to think that renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels. Most of the wind and solar that's been installed in Europe was installed relatively recently and wasn't the stuff that was 40x more expensive from 40 years ago. It's relatively inexpensive, installed relatively recently, and resulted in extremely high electricity costs. There's a reason for that. And it's not related to the subsidies. It's related to the inherent problem in the delivered costs of energy from episodic power.

In sunny Singapore, solar power would seem like the natural fit. So what's preventing its mass adoption? Well, it's not that straightforward. For one, the unpredictable cloud cover over the tiny city state. Delivering power when society needs it is critical. Obviously, the linchpin for wind and solar is either to have a duplicate grid available when the sun and wind aren't available or storage. So all of the hopes for the future for wind and solar to get rid of hydrocarbons

require us to have cheap battery storage, not cheaper by a factor of 10% or 50%, but by factors of 1,000%? Because storing energy is the critical feature of any grid. Right now, the cheapest dispassable power is gas-fired power plants. And in South Asia, unfortunately, for people who don't like coal, it's coal-fired power plants. Mark, this is an absolutely key point, and is one I wanted to get to in this debate, and I want to hear Rames's response to this. Remez, how do you address, I think, the very interesting question that, the mark is raised, I've certainly thought about it,

the whole storage and transmission challenge, that we live in 24-hour, seven-day-a-week societies that consume energy all the time, that there is load on our grids day in and day out. How do renewables meet that actual real-world demand and make up for what hydrocarbons are doing right now, is providing that continuity of energy supply across all the world's major industrial energy systems? Well, let's say, this is a real world challenge, and I don't disagree with Mark that it's a challenge.

Nevertheless, it's one that we are making tremendous progress on. Take a look around this corner, and there it is, at a manufacturing plant in Massachusetts, something that just might change the world. A giant battery. Big enough for a whole neighbor. and designed to be cost-effective and to keep working for a very long time. And it's not just about storage. We have solar bids in India, a country that people thought would have massive coal rise. The most recent unsubsidized bids just released today are about 2.7 cents a kilowatt hour. And in India, a dispatchable gas plant costs four or five cents with a fuel going

again. So when the sun is shining, it makes no sense to run light gas plant. Now, for a little while, we'll keep using gas to fill in when sun and wind aren't shining. But those hours of operation will get narrower and narrower, because sun and wind are typically countercyclical. The sun shines only during the day, and the wind physically blows more at night. The sun peaks in summer, the wind peaks in winter. So they're broadly countercyclical. And when you look at broad-based grid simulations, if you build decent-sized grids, you can get 70% of your power from just those two. More than that, if you have some nuclear and you have some hydro. But the close you get to 100%, the more you have to get these storage technologies down to those prices. But it's a mistake

to get against that. People have been saying for decades that solar prices would not drop any further, and they kept falling. And people now thinking that battery prices aren't going to drop any further are missing the big picture that these technologies can easily drop by their factor of 10 or 20 or 30 in price. Okay, Mark, come back on that. Whether they'll be cheap enough in the future, let's just set that aside because they don't exist today. Whatever conditions of wind and solar are being added today are depending on the conventional grid to back up when wind and solar are not available. Because there are not enough batteries to supply a minute's worth of the nation's electricity here or anywhere in the world. world. There are been more than a few dozen times in the last 40 years where the entire continent of

the United States has been be calmed and been cloudy, which is a way of saying essentially no wind and no sun for a day to two. So what do you do then? Well, if it happens when you don't have enough batteries, obviously you have to have a grid on backup sufficient to run the country for the day or two. There'll be a hydrocarbon grid largely because that will be what you cycle. That's a very expensive proposition. So the cost of wind and solar have been going down. But what happens is you require markets to use that power, which is what's being done legislatively. Markets are required to buy it. And then you use the, say, gas fire turbines when you want, instead of running them on an economic basis. It essentially doubles or triples the cost of the electricity

from the gas turbine. So it drives costs up, not down, by virtue of sort of the, we'll call it political preferences. If we wanted to plan a grid for the next couple decades and be able to keep the lights on, the computer's running, you need a lot of batteries. You look at the Tesla Gigafactory, which is still the biggest battery factory in the world, it would have to run for 500 years and use all the output of 500 years of production to make enough batteries to store one day worth of U.S. electricity supply. These are enormous numbers. Even if those batteries were cheap, It's a stounding quantity of material needed to meet that kind of goal. That's why I say for the usefully foreseeable future, we're not going to see that happen.

We're going to see a grid that has lots more wind and solar and will depend on, depending on where you are in the world, gas or coal mainly. And in some parts of the world, it's actually oil fire generation that's being dependent on. And that will lock in very significant uses of gas and oil and, frankly, coal in the Asian countries for a very long time. But when I say a long time, I mean decades, not for all of human history, but for decades. That's meaningful if you're in a policy planning or an investment world. It's meaningful because it keeps society running. Okay, Ramez, come back on that. Can we ever get rid of those fossil fuels that would then underwrite the security of the green, renewable power generation for a complicated economy like the United States?

So today, gas is that fill-in. It's a very flexible energy source. It's got half the carbon emissions of coal, and it ramps up and down with renewables very easily. We have a study that has 36 years of five-minute resolution weather across the U.S. and five-minute resolution electricity used. And what that study says is that with roughly 12 hours of storage and solar being the number one source of energy on the grid

and wind number two, you can meet 99.99% of the country's energy use over that 36-year period. We had a bid last year in Los Angeles that added solar plus four hours of storage. And that four hours of storage added about two and a half cents to the cost. That solar plus storage was actually competitive with natural gas for four hours of storage added on. to get to 12 hours, if the price of batteries drops by the other three to five, you're there. You are at the point where it's cost effective, where it's cheaper to have solar or wind in many parts of the country plus 12 hours of storage than it is to dispatch a natural gas plant. Hi there, Rudyard Griffiths, the moderator of the monk debates.

Look, this we know. Our society is becoming dangerously polarized. We don't listen to each other. We don't search out opposing views. Instead, too many of us live in tribes, convinced that we are right and they are wrong. It's time to put a stop to polarization before it wrecks our democracy. This is what the monk debate's charity is all about, ending polarization, searching for common ground. We do this by producing the world's only weekly debate radio program through our monk dialogue series

and through mainstage debates on the big topics of the day. Support civil and substantive public debate by becoming a monk member. As a member, you get access to our 10-plus-year online library of great debates in streaming high-definition video, a free Monk debate book of your choice, ticketing privileges, and so much more. 30% off when you use the promotional code, Monk, 21, at our website, monkdebates.com. Again, that promotional code, Monk, M-U-N-K-21 at Moncdebates.com. Join now and help fight the polarization of our democracy. Now back to our program. I want to mark in our remaining moments here, talk about the role of government.

I know this is something that is a particular interest to the Manhattan Institute. What do you see as the effect of government on this push for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables? Why, in your view, doesn't that tip our audience into thinking that this transition is inevitable when the full regulatory power of the state? is going to come down behind renewables and against fossil fuels. Governments can do a lot to create, destroy industries. It doesn't necessarily what they're doing is right. But government policies do matter, which is why I said at the outset, that one truth that we do know is true, and we probably all agree on this conversation,

is that governments are going to mandate, subsidize, and push a faster, or harder, quote, transition. But scale matters here. Let me just give you a sense of what governments can't do. You could accept modeling a grid where you only need, quote, unquote, 12 hours of storage. Let's use that number for the sake of discussion. That's a half day instead of a whole day storage. That's only 250 years of production from a gigafactory.

Point of that is you could say, well, build 200 gigafactories and run them for a year, and then you replace the batteries every decade or so as they were out. But 250 years with the production from a gigafactory is an astonishing amount of material. And I'm going to come back to that. Quantity material is epic. It is far greater than the sheer weight of oil or gas or coal that would be used to produce the same energy. The stuff has to be dug up somewhere, turned into batteries. Could they be recycled?

Some can be. Most materials are not recycled easily that costs money to recycle most of this stuff. So the subsidies hide all those things. They encourage those things. When we bid out projects in the United States, we have explicit and implicit subsidies going on. The bottom line here is that resorting to the fact that things will get cheap, in the future is not a way of explaining what it will cost if we build with the technology that exists today. 40% of the United States electricity is from gas, 10% from wind and solar.

So if we want to flip that, we'll essentially double or triple the cost of the gas-fired electricity when we call on it. We could say that's okay, and policymakers are allowed to say they want that to happen. But we have to be honest about what it does to the cost of consumers. That's what's not going on here. We don't have honest analyses of what the costs will be, not in some theoretical future where some magically better batteries appear and better batteries will appear, but with the solar arrays we have today, it will make the grid more expensive, less reliable, more difficult to manage. Well, two answers. First, every mining company, and I talk to these mining companies, extensively, companies like Rio Tinto and so on, they are all going electric in

their minds as rapidly as possible to reduce cost. That is a big push that you, we will see. Two, this notion that we can't count on things to drop in price or that we have to pay everything to today's price, it doesn't make any sense because, A, of course, it's going to take years and years to deploy this technology. It's going to be a multi-decade transition under any situation. And to say, oh, the cost might be different than they are now, or they might not be, Look, in 1975, a watt of solar panel, a solar panel with one watt output cost more than $100. Today, it's 19 cents, and there's no sign of that declining, or no sign of that slowing. And similar things are happening in batteries, not to mention newer battery chemistries that don't even

use lithium, that just use abundant materials like sodium, for instance. So there is every indication that all of these prices are going to keep declining. And to build a new natural gas plant or a new coal plant now, you're just building a stranded asset that will be economically inviolable as these technologies keep getting cheaper. I don't see what's hard to understand about this. Okay, let me finish up, guys, before we go to closing statements here, the discussion of climate change. And, Mark, what is your argument to push back against the listener who's saying, okay, I've heard all these various arguments, but at the end of the day, climate change is an existential crisis.

At least that's my view as the listener. And simply, this transition has to happen. It's not a question of economics. It's a question of survival. What's your view on that, Mark? Well, first, let me just make one quick point. Rom said there's no sign of solar cost declines slowing down. I beg to differ, the costs have slowed down.

and the National Renewable Energy Labs forecasts, every forecast has shown it's on an asymptote. Costs will continue to go down, but they're on the law of diminishing returns because we are, in fact, approaching physics limits now on what you can do with these technologies. But we're not even close. This is my area's specialty, and we are not even close.

We can agree to disagree, but I would direct everyone to use their magic Google machine to find out what the NRL is showing, which is a pretty reliable forecaster on this. And REL is also a conservative forecaster. We always come in at lower costs than NRL's most aggressive forecasts. So look at what you can go read an article in my post on my site called Solar Futures Insanely Cheap, and it assesses the past track record of forecasters.

I saw it, Ron. I would just say that you're, you, I recognize your view. It's an outlier view that we have 10x cost declines. There's no 10x left in the cost declines for solar that just don't exist because the material costs. materials are commodities. The commodities are all mined at scale already in the world. There's been no time in human history when we increase the demand for a commodity when it's already at scale that its cost suddenly decline. So we're doing wishful thinking on this stuff. But let me answer the climate question. Because it's a fair question to ask. I sort of take the same position as Bill Gates takes

and frankly that the position that Microsoft takes to the extent that we want to decarmonize the future. and I'll quote, the technologies don't exist today to do it. And they make that statement unequivocally. I was at this conference in New York, I won't name it. And they were saying all these financial guys got on stage and said, oh, we're going to rate companies in terms of their CO2 output. And I was like, okay, how do you make steel? Where's the fertilizer, cement, plastic, where's it going to come from?

There is no substitute for how the industrial economy. economy runs today. And I agree. So then the question would be, what do you do? What you do is, well, I, and again, I agree with Bill Gates and it. He's been lobbying on this for several years. We need to increase funding for basic research, not subsidizing yesterday's technologies, the basic research to look for the kinds of breakthroughs that everybody wants to have for a different kind of energy future. I'm bullish, for example, on the idea of ultimately finding a low-cost room-temperature superconductor, which would be a way to trivially store electricity as cheaply as we store oil.

That would change the world in profound ways and unimaginable ways, science fiction kind of ways. But that technology doesn't exist today. Could it ever exist? Well, sure, I believe it could. But we need to do basic research on that, not subsidies. Ramez, what's your view on living in a climate-constricted world and the necessity for a transition from fossil fuels to renewables? Is this simply a moral imperative that trumps any economic argument? It is a moral imperative. It doesn't mean it trumps any economic argument,

but any way that you calculate the damages of climate change, you just find that it's a dramatic and truly staggering consequence. In some ways, it's hard to actually look at what the costs are. when half of the corals in the Great Barrier Reef are dead because it's had an unprecedented three bleaching events in the last five years. When we see the fires sweeping California, we see the incredible fires that swept through Australia,

we see the most active hurricane season in the Atlantic we've ever seen, and all of that with just one degree Celsius of warming. It's clear that we need to get off of fossil fuels. And I support, you know, what Mark just said, that we should be fundamentally increasing R&D spent. Absolutely, 100% agree. Nevertheless, in addition to that, we should be deploying the technology we have in part because one of the most reliable predictors of cost decline of clean energy technologies has been deployment. And I make this point again and again and again.

Every doubling of the amount of solar deployed in the world has brought down the prices by 30% quite reliably from more than the last decade. Every doubling of battery deployment brings down the prices by 25 or 30%. So R&D is not the only way to drive innovation or better economics. We owe it to ourselves, to people in least developed countries and to our future children to get off of fossil fuels and stop climate change as rapidly as we can. Thanks, Ramaz. Let's go to closing statements. This has been a terrific debate. Mark, we're going to put two minutes on the clock. This is your opportunity to kind of sum up, take on for the last time any of Ramez's key arguments, and reinforce any of the points

you would like to leave listeners with. These are important debates, not so much for the future, but for the present. Let's set aside the aspirational and sort of moral claims and focus on the issue that matters is that there's nothing that, nothing exists, nothing operates without using energy to power machines and processes and to fuel people, feed them. The technologies that exist today to supplement that demand, wind and solar, are meaningful supplements, are not trivial. We're at barely a few percent of the world's energy coming from wind and solar today. We'll increase that probably tenfold, in my view, which is an astonishing increase, but it doesn't eliminate the use of cost-effective hydrocarbons. In economic terms, the foundational energy productivity

of the world has skyrocketed. And what that's done, and that's the core reason that humanity's had more time and money to do other things like health care, education, and entertainment. And the critical thing here is we haven't finished inventing new ways to consume energy. So the demand for energy, I think, in my worldview, which is different than a lot of forecasts, is much more robust than what most forecasters put out, simply because of the unexpected demands that will come from new things that society will want. I'll give you a couple of obvious examples. The digital economy, the cloud, has been growing. It didn't exist 30 years ago. Its infrastructure globally uses twice as much electricity as the country of Japan. And that we have just begun building out. We need to fuel it.

We need to fuel it reliably as we run 24-7. And we'll use a lot more energy and electricity in the future than it does in the present. One other example is the infrastructure of manufacturing pharmaceuticals, which is a timely industry. That industry is going to grow. It's not going to grow just because nature will keep throwing viruses at it. It will grow because it's become wealthier. We care more about things that can make us healthier. Pharmaceutical manufacturing is 10 times more energy intensive than manufacturing almost anything else that we build in the world. There's a lot more growth in demand for that than almost anything else other than the digital domains. For forcing the use of more renewable machines on the world by mandates because of a putative future

long-term costs and to make the world today less productive than it is. And by that I mean energy productive is a formula for economic and social disaster, frankly. We're going to increase the inputs of materials, increase the inputs of land, increase labor inputs to get the same output. This is anti-productivity. It's regressive, not progressive path for the future. So I don't think the world is going to pick that path ultimately. We will reach a form of peak subsidies long before we see wind, solar, and batteries get cheap enough to replace hydrocarbons. Thank you, Mark. We're going to give Remez here the last word. Remez, you've been arguing in favor of our motion for this terrific debate. The end is in sight for fossil fuels. The future of energy is renewables.

Let's have your closing statement. Well, the end is in sight for fossil fuels. It will still take a number of decades. But coal has hit its peak and is in terminal decline, and oil is near to its peak, and then will be phased out rapidly as the economics of electrification of transport just make it incredibly more productive. At one point, renewables were in their first phase of existence, where they were entirely policy-dependent, where they were more expensive and had to be subsidized. Then they entered a second phase in the middle of this past decade, where they were sometimes competitive for new power. But then you see in a third phase where renewables are so cheap in many cases that it is cheaper to build new renewables than here to operate coal or even gas plants. And you see this in Europe.

You see it in countries like Spain. There's been a staggering surge of new unsubsidized solar being built there because the cost of electricity from these solar power plants is lower than the fuel cost going into a natural gas power plant. And on virtually every continent around the world, you see this. And so that is one reason that we will see fossil fuels received and renewables rise. And similarly, with the incredible price advantage that electric vehicles, much simpler vehicles than gasoline vehicles have, you will see increasingly a switch over to electric vehicles. But we'll see a second phenomenon, which is that the political winds are also clear. Because every large nation on Earth effectively, and certainly Europe as a continent, certainly

China, the largest energy consumer in the world, and certainly India, the rising energy consumer after China, all of these nations are committed to deploying more and more clean energy and more electric mobility because they see it as essential for either solving air pollution or reducing their extraction to fresh water or the big one addressing climate change. And that deployment will just bring the costs of these technologies down further and further. And that, in turn, will lead to larger and larger markets for them, which will lead to more price declines. And that virtuous cycle is unbeatable. And that fundamentally is why fossil fuels, the end is in sight for them.

Rames, thank you. And Mark, thank you, too. You know, occasionally on this program, we have these types of debates where the format of debate is just such a powerful tool to reveal a subject to help us all learn, to help our minds wrap themselves around these complex problems. And both of you have just been fabulous guides for us, bringing your obvious passion for this topic to bear for our audience. And on behalf of the Monk Debate community, thank you so much for coming on the program. Well, thank you and thank you, Mark, also. Thank you. Thank you both. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our

participants, Ramesnam and Mark Mills, they certainly gave us a lot to think about. That Monk Debates is that special place for civil and substantive conversation on the big issues of the day. To listen to more debates on everything from climate change to religion, to geopolitics, to the future of human progress, visit our website, monkdebates.com. You can also find detailed show notes on today's debate. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of public debate. one conversation at a time. I'm Rudyard Griffith.

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