The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Does a Green Future = Lower Energy Usage? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Some European economists came up with a super-duper-hyper-revolutionary solution to the green problem...just use less energy! Crazy, right? Before we write off this idea completely, let's break it down. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/does-a-green-future-lower-energy-usage

Everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from San Francisco Bay, where I'm cooling my heels waiting for my flight. I've been here for the last several days, and as you might guess, I get a few more environmentally themed questions in California than they do other places. The one that I got that I found most interesting, however, came from a series of economists in Europe, who were talking about how the solution to the climate crisis ultimately may well be that we just need to use less. The idea is if we're using X number of amount of energy and that's too much and solar and wind and the rest are just not ready for prime time, then perhaps they didn't stick their reputations on this, and then perhaps the only way to go is to go down.

Maybe, here's the thing. There's a direct correlation between economic activity and energy use. So while you can make efficiency gains, they tend to be incremental. And we have made a lot of those over the last 30 years, things like ovens and dishwashers, and refrigerators use about half the energy that they did back in the 90s. But that's a relatively small fry.

The real issue has to do with location. If you're living in a place where climate control is required for daily life, I mean, it's really hard to use less. So let me kind of give you an example here that puts some numbers behind this. If you go back to World War II, the populations of Iowa, Minnesota, and Florida, were all between two and three million. But if you fast forward to today,

Florida has over 21 million, Minnesota has about six, and Iowa's still below three. The difference is climate. Say what you will about the Midwest. It tends to have summers that are not too oppressively hot and winters that are not too oppressively cold. And so if you're in the middle of it, like in Iowa, climate control is nice to have, but it's not required for modern life in the same way that it might be, say, in hot, humid Florida or frigid, frigid, frigid, frigid Minnesota. But once the Minnesotans could have heat, and once the Floridians could have air conditioning, the math changed. Well, that means that living in these places generates a lot of energy demand in order to get the concentrations of populations and the economic activity we have now. So to those economists, I could say this, you know, yes, we could all use less, but that would mean that we all have to move to Iowa.