Hello, everybody. And welcome to the Decouple podcast, where we explore the science and technologies that can Decouple human wellbeing from its ecological impacts, and the politics that can make decoupling possible.
Welcome back to Decouple. Today, I'm joined by returning guest, Mark Nelson, who really needs no introduction. This is probably episode 11 or 12. I've lost count, I've stopped counting. Mark, I kind of got you with a self introduction trick last time. Let's just keep it to a brief update on sort of what you're up to these days. And then we're going to get on to a really exciting episode. I think people that follow the podcast know that we are chatting Amory Levin's today. But first off, Mark, just give us a quick update on your exciting life what your what you've been up to the last time since we since we last talked to
Chris, I've been chilling out and taking it easy.
Nice, nice. It's the season to do that, I guess. And and dodging the runner. In reality,
there's a bunch of weird emerging issues with energy in Europe. We we talked about some of them in previous episodes, but it's a very dangerous but fascinating real time experiment, not just physically, like, Where can the power come from? Why are liquefied natural gas tankers doing 180 degree turns 1000 miles out in the Pacific when they get a higher price from Europe suddenly, instead of Japan, we've things we've never seen before. In some ways, the future is emerging now for energy in Europe. And another thing that's interesting that takes up my time and attention. We're seeing what happens when energy bills jumped by 50 or 60% in a year without that money, going to pay for the things that would make them go down in the future.
Reminds me a lot of sort of the the Coronavirus, Coronavirus, stimulus spending where I think governments are stepping in to take the bite off of those higher energy bills, but it's, you know, going to leave us with some long term consequences that's not sustainable forever.
I disagree. It's not the same. Okay, um, Chris, the Coronavirus thing is because people weren't working as much even though a lot of the critical factories and utilities and energy suppliers were all continuing to work. And in fact, many of them just weren't getting paid. Because demand was lower, but they had fixed costs. Now this is this is a little bit different. This reflects something fundamental about the amount of energy supply there isn't the world compared to the amount of demand for it, that there is in the world. Which really brings us to this this episode.
I was gonna say, I was gonna say that's a perfect tie in. And Mark, I've got you know, I've been doing a lot of research for this episodes, I've certainly got a lot of questions I'm going to want to bounce in and out of but I also want to give you you know, your free rein to make a nice introduction of this. But maybe I will just start you know, I was you know, my motivations for wanting to do this episode. You know, Emory Levin's is a figure that that I haven't understood or looked looked into an a lot of depth. But the more that I started researching, the more I found that he was really an intellectual godfather of what I'll call the energy prophets. I think people are familiar with that wizard and Prophet metaphor, that was a big theme going back to the very beginning of the podcast. But you know, a very influential figure, someone who's influential here in my, my home province of Ontario, you know, and really radically shifted our energy policy away from nuclear large hydro towards our wind and solar build out. You know, I think I had a bit of a caricature understanding of the man and when we when we were planning this episode at first, I thought this would be and I'm glad I think it's gonna be way more nuanced than we thought I've developed some sympathies. And I do think there's perhaps as a synthesis of the best of Amory Levin's with, you know, the kind of energy humanism that that you and I are famous for. You know, just again, by way of introduction, Emery Leavens, you know, while not having any formal academic accolades, holds 10 honorary doctorates. And I thought the funniest thing was that he has received the Buddha's Viridian crits which is the officers Cross of the Order of Merit from Germany for basically being the intellectual architect behind the Energiewende. But Mark, I'll let you sort of flesh out that introduction some more, I just wanted to provide again, that context of why I thought this was such a vital topic and real personality to cover. The soft energy path has indeed been so influential in exactly ties into what you're talking about in terms of these questions of supply and demand. So Mark, take it away, flesh it out for us a little bit more.
Sure. And it's interesting to hear about that award considering Where Germany's going I suppose there's a there's a history of brilliant breakthrough individuals getting awards from Germans just before. It turns out that it's not that great the institutions giving the Americans the awards. But that's just part of the strange relationship of ideas between America and Germany. Here's what I found when reading about Emory Levin's so many energy thinkers that were important in the 70s 80s and 90s, did not have his lasting power. Because in the end, Emery loves nice things. He loves people. He has no problem at all with capitalism. He sees capitalism as a dynamic system that can produce a better world that that he believes in. He also was so young, when his important breakthrough articles were published that he is still healthy and around and active. And he had a really broad education, a very well rounded person, which meant that critics were going up against somebody critics of his work were going up against somebody who often just had more horsepower than they did.
You know, Emmet Penney and Edgardo Sepulveda just recorded a really important podcast that I would suggest people maybe even pause this and jump back to listen to, again for that context of the moment in which Amory Lovins is emerging. And I think why his his message was so compelling and sought after and even lucrative, I mean, this guy's made a lot of money. Both, you know, I think, Rod Adams did a little kind of expose a of sort of his income from Rmi, the Rocky Mountain Institute, which he directs, you know, probably about 300,000,
does not direct. In fact, he seems to have almost never directed it.
Okay, anyway, pulling big consulting fees. But so like, why? You know, for me, the question was, like, you know, why was this man's message both so compelling and so lucrative to him? And, you know, I'm going to give my sort of course understanding of this, when I used to think about the energy crisis in the 70s. I just used to think about OPEC and petroleum getting expensive, but there was this sort of crisis of the regulated monopoly utility model, which was just add power plants, add energy, build up the grid, you know, continue that incredible. build out right from the early days of Edison, electrify everybody. And then, you know, moving from extensive electrification to intensive and the utilities being stuck in this model of just, you know, add more capacity at a time when, when demand was being saturated. And so there was a crisis in that model and insteps Amory Levin's with, with his message of efficiency, which again, I find quite compelling. So I think that context is really important in terms of of that, that kind of a crisis in terms of our energy system and how it was designed. But maybe you can expand a bit on that more. So we understand the context of why this man became so influential.
Emory was born just after World War Two in Washington, DC, in a time and place that was achieving a material standard of living that had never been seen before on planet Earth. It was a time when American population was booming. He's a quintessential late 40s, baby boomer, and changes that were occurring were often unsettling to those who had achieved a certain standard of living that allowed them the comfort and the freedom to reflect on where we were going for Levin's as clearly a precocious young person, a very accomplished musician, it seems from other people's accounts, I don't couldn't find any videos of him playing piano, reading and so many subjects a fan of nuclear energy in the early 60s, as described in an article I found is delighted to have won an award presented by Glenn T. Seaborg. Discover plutonium. And as somebody who had the world on a platter, it seems what what issues was he seeing that caused him to be worried about saving energy rather than growing energy, about efficiency, rather than then mere wealth? So one of the things I found he wrote this seminal article, everybody calls it seminal. Everybody says it changed the conversation. An article I saw described the publication of this, of this soft energy path article as him versus the world in the 70s. Part of his staying power to come back to that is that he described a lot of fascinating, slightly counterintuitive things as a path that we should take or could shake, take. And those things ended up happening. Whether or not he was just an academic want to be teaching birds to fly. It's not clear, but he described things that were seen as improbable or unlikely or unrealistic. And then those things occurred. Here's one, he described that utilities would have big problems with their growth models that ended up happening. He described a world that was horrifying with way too many power plants and, you know, 450 to 801 gigawatt reactors, which is close to what was planned by year 2000. He was describing this quarter century before, by year 2004 50 to 800. Nuclear reactors, which, with the benefit of hindsight, would have made America France in terms of emissions in terms of lack of space taken up for energy systems. But putting that aside, here's the critical thing that I saw that you might call it, one of Emory's two colossal mistakes from my point of view. But in this case, this mistake, I don't think there's anybody reasonable who disagree with me that the mistake in that early article, the seminal article was him saying the hard energy path of just building a bunch of power plants and wasting more and more energy, more and more capital, and having less and less efficient society with ill matched energy, he was describing that as the hard path, he described another path, this is the framing for the entire article. And it became the framing for the message he delivered for the rest of his life. So far, the soft energy path where you burn oil in your own home, you perfectly match little energy sources to little needs. You do things locally, you do things small, you don't live poorly, you live well, but you do it with exactly the right match of the fuel source with the energy service needed. He called that the soft path. And here is the fundamental error that helps steer his entire life. He said that the two paths were mutually exclusive. He says they are mutually exclusive paths. And that's one of the most important things he needed to tell people in this seminal article. Which, of course, no, that's not true at all. That's one of the that's a colossal error. They're not they're not incompatible. In fact, one and the other go together brilliantly, extremely efficient, large, centralized stations, on a minimally complex grid, that matches heavy demand on one side, with intense and heavy production on the other with very little loss in the transmission of electricity goes beautifully with perfectly sampled perfectly matched energy supply for exactly the energy service needed. In both dense living situations where most humans are now finding themselves in cities, and in more spread out situations like his home in Colorado, for example, that that misunderstanding that there had to be a soft path that was mutually exclusive from a hard path. Even in this seminal article itself, he makes multiple weird, just, he would have known at the time they would been errors. If only somebody had pointed it out, well, maybe they did. Evidently, there was a giant volume 2000 pages of criticism that he responded to, in the Rocky Mountain Institute at one time, maybe it's still there. But this saying that you can't get more efficient, unless you stop growing was bizarre, it was wrong at the time. And he would have had decades to correct it. And it's not clear that he did certainly Rocky Mountain Institute stopped saying that utility scale solar is bad. Because that was that was part of the criticism that he had at the time, because utility scale solar was big, wasteful, and on the grid. All of this how you could make this pack mistake, this fundamental error that's so trivial, not trivial, and its implications was so easy to see. It's in the first like, couple paragraphs of the article, how you could make that brings us to the second fundamental error that derails the soft energy story.
You know, I think what you're what you're saying is there's the potential for the synthesis, particularly with the best of the kind of efficiency measures that Amory talks about, he's been called the, the Einstein of efficiency, but with with the kind of generation that I think you and I favor, part of what seems to be his objection, because I'm really trying to understand, you know, what's this? What's this attachment to small as beautiful to decentralization? What's where does the hatred of nuclear come from? And one of the things I was reading, you know, again, in this context of decreasing demand, and the you know, the utility model, just being build, build, build more and more and more, was his critique that hey, the utilities are just, you know, trying to find more More and more ways to waste electricity. They're not focusing on efficient, you know, drying machines and things like that, but also that they're potentially looking for markets such as electric heating. And he has this kind of revulsion, I think based on sort of thermodynamic first principles, and you know, the waste of heat. He talks, for instance, about how the French are growing their nuclear feet, and they're using that electricity to heat buildings. And of course, you know, from, from, again, first principles argument, you're creating a very high quality form of energy and then degrading it through just a resistance heater into one of the lowest quality of energy in terms of just heat out there. It doesn't make sense in the 70s, when we're not worried about climate. But what's interesting, and I think Edgardo, you know, coined this term for me, or he's the person that brought into my, my attention is this. We're in this electrification 2.0 At this moment, where all of a sudden, we're talking about electrifying everything to deal with climate change. And we need to maybe return back to that model of adding, you know, 567 percent of generation to the grid per year, in order to double our grid within 20 years. And,
Chris, we may even need to build four or five times the amount of generating capacity, nameplate capacity that we said, and then we need to down convert it and not A, not a 60%, or 65%, wasteful process like nuclear steam to electricity, we got to do renewables stored in batteries, or converted to gas, and then that shipped and burned or burned again, and he plants then toss out 60, where you end up with like a 10% efficient process, and the need for a super grid that isn't as efficient as the one that could just connects load and supply. It's wild, that you can follow the logic all the way back to the most extreme reversals of almost everything that he was against, except for the one big thing that was the second second fundamental air
like 1970s Amory would hate what's what's the kind of contortions the Rube Goldberg grid that's needing to be constructed? Now with long transmission lines, huge wind and solar farm installations? Like it must be very interesting. Not sure. It's not that man, we don't have
to speculate the dude's alive. His institution trucks on hiring colossal numbers of people 1000s of people, it was only 19 Back in the 80s. It's 1000s of people now. Okay,
so hit us with the second major fault in the article, then you just hinted at it is life, not lifelong. He was a fan of nuclear energy in high school, it sounds like or maybe his early college days.
In the end, he doesn't like nuclear and thinks it's gonna destroy us all. And that this is that's not the mistake. A lot of people think that, I suppose. I mean, I disagree with it. But you can, you can follow the implications all the way back. And if that if nuclear is his asteroid, that in the end is just gonna be something that at its core is a matter of faith? Do you believe in humanity? Or do you not on the subject of our own asteroids that we cause I happen to believe in humanity, he thinks will destroy ourselves with that. So let's not debate that thing. The fundamental error is that he lifts the nuclear fear above every single other possible goal or risk, every single one. In other words, there is nothing that he supports that is ever good enough to support it. If it was good for nuclear or relies on nuclear. There is no problem bad enough on planet Earth, in human society. That's bad enough that if nuclear would help with it, he would be for nuclear. Do you see how that's not quite the same as saying that nuclear is bad? Or it's that it's that there's a supremacy of the nuclear problem that leads very directly to almost all of his other errors unless we think that he was just careless and dumb, which, like we said, he's not careless and dumb, smart dude. Did that told mutually exclusive thing that may have been politics or that he's just a fundamental err, I think it was politics. There's some evidence for this. In some of the interviews that I saw, or the prefaces, I saw on a special edition of The New York Times printed to reprint the Foreign Affairs article, where people say, Amery, you may have exaggerating he said, Well, I was trying to illustrate so clearly the two paths. So he knows he was like doing some stuff to make clear illustrations. That's fine. I do stuff to make their illustrations. It's just it was in service of a false dichotomy that seems to have been driven by a need to avoid anything that led to a logic that said that you could pursue love in this world, even more effectively, which with nuclear. And, you know, I watched some of his I watched some of his TED talks where he's like, lightweight cars, super lightweight cars would reduce a lot of the oil we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And heck, you can go further and say electrified cars, but maybe he never arrived there. I don't know. I haven't seen any recent work. So let's say you were going to save a bunch of oil with lighter cars. How on earth Earth is that incompatible with having big nuclear plants? It's not, he doesn't then say, Oh, if you do lightweight cars, that means you save so much energy with just a few nuclear plants. You're Sol, you're done? No, because the nuclear must be excised. First he, this is common, by the way with a lot of academic modeling. Like a lot of PhDs. A lot of people do this where they claim, well, first, let's knock out nuclear because it's bad and ugly, then let's make a lot of changes in society that would leave a tiny number of nuclear plants as all we need. And then we live happily ever after they don't go backwards and check. I've seen this stuff from like MIT where I was at MIT a few years ago. And yeah, helping review their big nuclear study or something. And they had these scenarios where it's like, this scenario is the high renewable scenario, you know, sort of the Levin's path, but more utility scale, this is the blended this is the high nuclear. And they would do things like put cars in this one, or you know, they would build in assumptions. MIT didn't do it quite this badly. But I saw a study with some other mainstream economists funded by Bloomberg and a few other rich New Yorkers, I think Bloomberg sigh or somebody else anyway, where they assign technologies that would work brilliantly with a full nuclear grid. And they assign it only to the scenarios without nuclear in it, to show that nuclear just fundamentally can't do it. Like they'll do a high nuclear scenario, but not allow electric cars in that one. They put electric cars in the renewable scenario, because it's needed. Effectively, you got to borrow everyone's cars storage. Yeah. So then they put the synthetic fuels or hydrogen cell or something like that in the nuclear and they're like, it's just so expensive to do cars this way. So nuclear is just an expensive path, and we can't do it. So Emery does that sort of thing, too. With the MIT study. They're like high nuclear study. It's good. But then they don't, they kept the high nuclear and the high nuclear study at Waibel of levels of tons of countries. But in the high renewable study, or even the mid renewable study, they had more renewables than any country has. And they don't see that as incompatible. Emery just had a much severe version of that, where here's an example, I was reading most of this seminal article, the soft path, hard path.
And I was like, wow, he says that you have to burn oil and buildings to get the heat. So you shouldn't use grid electricity, because it's wasteful. Hasn't he heard of heat pumps. And then later, he's like, Heat pumps are good. And I'm like, how, because he's, he's lobbying car manufacturers that make you know, small power machines like the engines, and he's saying they're getting into heat bonds. And I'm like, wait, hold up. This bro just went to heat pumps. After saying that grid electricity is wasteful and bad. Heat pumps, Chris are, of course, naturally just driven by electricity. And you could do it with a grid. And then your efficiency goes back to higher even than the efficiency of a oil boiler and the vast majority of cases and fits with every single other one of his, his statements, but he has to not get there too early. Because he has to disable this hard path that would work so brilliantly, with almost every single technology he recommends for final energy consumption.
So let's get back. Let's get back to a little bit of, for lack of a better word, some psychoanalysis, because I'm really trying to understand what drives his motivation towards Antinuclearism, as we said before, and I think as rod Adams said, you know, explored really well with Emmet Penney again in a recent nuclear barbarians episode, like the 50s and 60s, you know, all of the brightest minds were not all of them. But many of the stem brightest minds were going into nuclear because this was just a fascinating phenomenology, this ability to produce enormous amounts of energy, you know, all sorts different reactor designs, it's kind of where a lot of I think the minds go towards fusion now or go towards figuring out how to build a Rube Goldberg grid. So maybe he was part of like, that's part of the reason he was drawn to it. You know, for me, from my my cursory you know, examination, it doesn't seem like he's driven particularly by, you know, weapons fears. Like it seems to be more a philosophical objection to something that's large and centralized, and people don't understand. Well, that's a technology that you can't fit in your backyard. Like, is that overly simplistic? Or what's your best understanding your most charitable understanding of why he has developed this extreme prejudice against nuclear energy?
Let's just call it Nelson's razor from now on. If in doubt, is the bomb. It's the bomb. He mentions in his horror scenario, a terrible scenario of a hard path. USA 2000 with you know, year 2000 where you're just plagued the USA is burdened by 801 gigawatt PW ours? No. He says they're going to be a bunch of fuel recycling and there's going to be fast reactors. He assumed that that was was a pact that was reasonably possible if bad. He says it would be expensive, it would be burdensome, it would be bad because we'd all knew each other. But like, it's possible like that's in the end. Nelson's razor is if you're trying to figure out why amor is Amery, or the Germans or Germans, it may not be because of the bomb. But you should have extremely strong, very specific evidence that can't necessarily come from the conscious statements of the person you're talking to, is probably probably nuclear weapons. Germans are like, Oh, my God, the nuclear waste for millions of years, and we won't even be able to read and they'll be crawling, you know, sub humans like LA in pain through the deserts of former former, you know, Bavaria. Yeah, that's a nuclear bomb fear that has nothing to do with storing chemical chemo toxic or radio toxic waste, it's just, it's just a bomb. You know, so I gotta say, is probably just the Cold War. That's probably it.
Certainly, his justification is a lot of them have to do with with markets. And with, you know, he's just nuclear is not profitable to him anymore. And I mean, I guess there's, there's been some truth to that, again, because of reaching this satiation of demand in the 787.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, he described a soft energy path, where you keep inventing and improving, getting better and tinkering. And it's always like, both cheaper and more efficient. But he doesn't realize that that, of course, could be implied applied at industrial scale energy. And that thing is the returns to applying efficiency gains tinkering, and improvement at industrial scale, your savings are industrial scale or not artisanal, your savings are insane. I mean, when he's describing electricity as bad, he couldn't have envisioned and none of us would have been able to that natural gas turbans would improve from 30% efficient or whatever they were they originally when they are built, they're like 10 15% efficient, and conversion of heat energy from natural gas combustion into electricity. So nowadays, the newest gas turbines are like sick above 60% efficient in operation, and giant Industrial Resource research groups, and some of the biggest power come heavy machine companies in the world are dedicated to squeezing one or 2% more efficiency 6364 65 They're good. Like, they're right there. When I visited Mitsubishi Heavy Industries back in Japan, in college 2020 10 They were so proud to show this this colossal facility for working on their newest state of the art, big natural gas combined cycle plant design that was gonna squeeze like they're going to set the world record for highest temperature at the at the leading edge of the the right after the combustion stage. And that was going to allow them to get 65% I think it was something like that 6465 If you apply small savings on an industrial scale, you end up with colossal gains, which is one of many things that many intuitions that Amery didn't get right, or couldn't get, right, because it implied that there was a lot of hard energy path that had positive characteristics of the soft energy path, just fewer changes required.
You know, I think one of one of the memories, one of the terms he's kind of famous for is this idea of integrative design, and he does consult with a lot of heavy industry. You know, this guy, this guy's all over the world, traveling, you know, puts a lot of air miles on certainly consulting with governments and industry, but this idea of integrative design, I mean, one of the things that caught my attention was just, you know, he's very numerous guy, and I'm gonna fail at this, but he's talking about how much of our, you know, electricity generation goes towards industry, and what percentage of that goes towards pump and pumping, you know, fluids and air and just, you know, by creating pipes that have less bends and a greater diameter and are shorter, you know, we can drive great amounts of efficiency make smaller electric motors consume less electricity, I mean, that that makes a lot of sense to me. And, you know, getting back to this wizard and profit model, certainly, you know, in the wizards of Ecomodernist camp, you get this message of, sort of, it's all about just energy abundance, make lots and lots of energy, you know, efficiency, energy savings, less important right in the Prophet, that archetype is much more on the Emory loving side of things. I am I am attracted to this idea of of synthesis between that sort of best of the two camps. And I think that's what you're alluding to as well, in terms of your understanding of, you know, the gains to be made from efficiency. You know, Edgardo Sepulveda and I did an episode on carbon abatement costs. You know, certainly it's it's hard to go into every home in America or the UK for that matter, those famously drafty houses and you know, patch up every winter Doing spray insulation everywhere that can that can actually be quite costly. And I like this carbon abatement cost as a metric because it can really guide us in terms of, you know, what are the the highest yield investments, in terms of how we spend the limited resources and capital, we have to get the greatest bang for Decarbonization buck, and that might be in just building a bunch of nuclear plants and wasting some energy without you know, while being decoupled from air pollution and carbon emissions. Or it might be doing a lot more insulation and efficiency or a combination of the two probably there is a I generally find myself really annoyed by what what about both isms? Because I find their way to avoid, you know, having difficult conversations and assessing things on their merits. But really, there seems to be a What about both ism here and I think we keep returning to that as a kind of theme in this interview.
Well, look, I would be remiss to not mention that I am not an original in finding a gaping hole and Amery Levin's entire worldview. One of the big intellectual energy debates at the dawn of the Ecomodernist movement is when breakthrough Institute and others pointed out that Emory Levin's had fundamentally misunderstood rebound, which was the new rebranding of the Jeavons paradox. I don't know if we talked about Jevons paradox here on the show. So just in brief, Jeavons was a economist and thinker from the Industrial Revolution in the UK, he noted the apparently counterintuitive fact that if you quadrupled the efficiency of a steam engine, you would likely radically increase the amount of coal demanded, because the number of uses to which you could profitably apply since since an realized profit will use profit, right, so profitably apply steam energy, steam engines from coal burning to a vast array of new services. And that means you would need more coal because steam engines can do a lot more. I'm not original. And in critiquing him for that, he got it wrong. And it's one of the reasons that the soft energy path was always being pursued the entire time, even though he described it as something that would have to be chosen. He described something that had to be chosen as something that had always been occurring. And he contrasted that with something else like building more power plants, and said that you have to choose efficiency, because it will save money or something like that, where it's it gets kind of shaky, where you know, and also there's saving money in the short run, and saving money in the long run. There's also saving money, the way Erekat did on winter preparedness, and then having to spend it all 100 times over again, when you have a disaster. So I would say there are the set of two leave critiques that seem to leave level critiques of Amery, we're even have to leave it and come up with the thing, he would, he would definitely be one of the most important popularizers of some of these concepts. One is the teaching birds to fly, where he thinks you have to teach people to choose efficiency, instead of that being one of many concurrent processes happening in fits and starts all over. Another thing, I mean, summon more in some places than others. I think one of the reasons that Japan has been such an incredible force in the industrial world is that they've almost never had sufficient space or fuel. Right, they almost never had enough trees, they almost never had enough fuel, they almost never had enough space. They have almost never have enough in any of the raw materials, meaning everything that has comes out of serving the energy and the the industrial needs of the Japanese people have to come with limitations, right. And in America, we didn't have a lot of those limitations. So if your hammer legal, Emery Levin's and you see the wasteful America on the cusp of losing its dominance in a range of industries right at the time that he wrote his article, just kind of interesting, then you can you can see how he might critique that and then miss the Jevons paradox that's happening. happening constantly in many other places more so than in the US at that time. So sorry, I'm sorry, I started that thought. Some other things on I guess you might call to leave critiques. It's the it's that Turkey problem of ERCOT where every day are caught showing that it's the cheapest way to manage electricity until one day Chop, chop Thanksgiving comes and all your data every single day leading up to Thanksgiving that you're going to be fed and taken care of by the butcher. It all came to a very violent harsh end. And now that you have new data, you can update yourself but you're dead. So ERCOT saving money. So that's a lot of the Emory soft energy pass that I'm seeing where it's like, you ship buckets of oil to an apartment building and pour it in and then burn that when it's cold and stuff like that. Like, even if he updated that sort of thinking, it ends up being terrible in certain categories of shortages and crises, a lot of his thinking is things that were best illustrated on the scale that he did it extreme custom luxury, not saying that some of the things that he built in his house aren't possible at bigger scales, in fact, in lots of other countries that had tighter demands on energy space material
that occurred, right. So for example, for decades, France has pursued a soft energy, conserve energy path. Now, they've also completely failed to cherish and sustain their nuclear fleet. So you see how the choice that he described is not a good thing for it to be a choice. It was an awful terrible thing where a Europe influenced by the soft energy thinking failed in the most fundamental demands, it maintaining your bulk energy supply, because they thought that if you just use less, that's the same as providing it at all. That brings us to a massive risk asymmetry. Massive. Here's an to leave talks a lot about some of these asymmetries. here's the here's the big one for Levin's. He critiques surplus, without realizing that the cost of a bit of deficit, especially a surprise deficit is horrifying. Now, you might say no, Emery is so worried about us overdoing it. Because if there's a crisis and we have a shortage, then we're not ready to live within our means or something like that. But he's not an austerity guy's not really live within your means quite so much as saying the soft energy path is literally cheaper, and it gets you ready for providing all of your needs just with less waste. So, you know, this is an area where I kind of agree with him, he loves the good life. I like the good life. So fair enough, right? But just like people who critique 20 or 25%, food waste, having no knowledge or understanding of what 5% Food deficit would do, to so many people around the world, or within countries with inequality, he doesn't he you can only critique 20% Extra from a position of extraordinary privilege.
A couple of thoughts. I mean, in terms of that, that rebound effect or Jevons paradox. I mean, Jevons was writing, as you're mentioning, kind of early on in the industrial revolution, like Have we reached a kind of energy society where that rebound is going to be less impactful simply because we're reaching a level of societal wealth, where we're unlikely to, you know, at a certain point, as a society, we're gonna have more and more electronic gadgets, and you know, but there's probably heading towards an asymptote there. So is that part of his argument for why rebound isn't such a big deal in advanced economies?
To some extent, we were already reaching that that level when Emery was writing. Yeah. And I think that I would prefer the energy extravagance of maglev, MagLev, you know, 300 mile per hour trains around the country, when you know, 200 would do and take up tiny, you know, a fraction of the energy, a quarter the energy or something. I definitely want a world where I can fly just the way I do now. But we're using those big wasteful nuclear reactors that he hates to make synthetic fuels that give us an option of when and where we travel. So I could definitely see some big energy increases, that would be great. But we're talking about the rich world, Chris, for a lot of the world, for a lot of the world. The energy needs are not even close to what America was, in the time that Emery says we're wasting and making too much. He might say the soft energy path is one to choose in those developing countries. I think that one of the worst, darkest aspects of his legacy is that it's not clear yet that even rich countries can dehumidified to softness, much less poor countries get to a soft, beautiful future without going through a hard stage. Those are two different questions. Can Europe get through its energy crisis and solve it with more hard or more soft or Well, we'll see things are getting pretty ugly, even though they're getting incredibly lucky with the weather. So fortunate with the weather, not just their own weather, but other places that don't need as much of the fuels that are now headed to Europe. Right. Well, that's one question. Can you start with the wealth of hard and go soft? After, or soften completely, shall we say? It maybe maybe not looks a little shaky at the moment. But I know smart people disagree with me. We'll see what shakes out this winter. And then next one. The other question is can you go without with nothing but the soft energies of soft cow dung and other things like that? Can you? Can you take that soft wood that local artisanal energy, that I mean, I was struck by the fact that Nigeria's present situation where they have something like 11 or 12 gigawatts of generation on their national grid for a population of hundreds of millions, how how it's a land of 20 million 30 million generators, we have no manifest that tells us how many private generators, I was like, wow, it's the soft energy path. It's bad, Chris, it is not good. It is bad. And they have it. They have it now. And it's not clear, they can turn it into something better. And in fact, it matches a lot of the vision he had at that time. Obviously, he's updated his vision, no doubt, Rmi has updated their vision. But that is a soft energy path. That is a bad trap, a really ugly trap. And you know what's awful. Nigeria can't even fuel most of these generators from its own massive energy supplies. They don't have a reprocessing industry. Heck, everything about Nigeria, having a reprocessing industry to supply its own in building in neighborhood, local artisanal generation that doesn't have the heavy overhead of the billing department and marketing department and lines and cables and wires, all things that he continuously attacked for decades on electrification, why electrification itself was bad, including a big solar farms. Well, they don't have that Nigeria. And the result is that they don't have the factories, they don't have the good permanent jobs. They don't have an ability to process and make the highest value exported version of their own natural abundance, that soft energy, and it's a really soft economic outcome.
Yeah, it's it's, it's interesting, because I mean, his ideas must have morphed over time, especially with climate becoming a concern. And now this contradiction of, you know, electrify everything and needing to maybe change the model a little bit in a way that does not reflect his 1970s thinking. It's also interesting, you know, seeing Germany working to impose its soft path on countries like South Africa, for instance, which is something that we've we've covered, particularly in Jessie's Decouple studios episode.
They have the money from their ultra hard industrial energy sources. They're incredible grid with excellent reliability, massive coal mines, you know, huge build out of gas turbines that's coming colossal, hard energy pipelines straight from Russia. It puts them in a great position not to dictate, as you said, instead, they have the cash from their heart energy economy. What are you what are you going to do if you're South Africa and you want an easy exit, that's not hard, you want to soft energy plan, you just say take Germany's hard money, it's easier than restoring your own power plants to the level of German power plants. It's easier than expanding nuclear when Germany won't help with that because they kill their own nuclear without killing hard energy, just the clean just just to clean hard energy that didn't kill the other hard energy, of course, and almost everything about the way Germany claims it needs to build renewables to follow Levin's his dream again, Germany, a country that has its entire energy program. Inspired by a translation of an Emory Levin's quote, they're going harder and harder in their soft energy path, including needing to chop down forests that Amery would never want to see chopped down if they're around his, his beautiful mansion in the right outside of Aspen, Colorado, like he wouldn't like that. But Germany by following the soft path is having to make brutal hard choices. And boy, if there's a people that's ready to make really awful hard choices and pursuit of dubious aims, it's Germany and there will see the current government. The current government of Germany says they need much stricter laws to force wind into every forest. So all people suffer equally. And there won't be a feeling of unfairness just because your forest gets cut down for wind power and not your neighbor's forest. Right. Like you need equal suffering under the soft energy path with the giant industrial equipment being installed because and you realize if he's updated, it's not clear. In fact, the most recent thing he's published, Chris, we should
talk about, yeah, hit me.
What does that publish an article pushing back on the recent rush of many formerly nuclear agnostic or Even anti nuclear organizations to realizing that if you're going to do the hard energy path of a big grid that is low carbon and supplies energy for everybody, without like destroying nature, you probably should reconsider nuclear. Well, the younger generation coming into Rmi, his own institution, like the pro nuclear people are coming with inside that Rocky Mountain Hut, you know, they're almost everybody, I would guess, who's who's our age or younger at RMI is not particularly anti nuclear. I've talked to many of them, okay. And some of them start. And they're like, Well, I don't really know why we're Anti-nuclear. I'll ask my boss. And I'm like, careful, don't ask your boss too much. Maybe let me do that you might do better not asking your boss because sometimes you hit a level where you ask the wrong boss, and you're tagged as somebody who's fundamentally not with the program set by Levin's right, but he doesn't set the program anymore. Question is, what's the attitude there? Because Levin's comes out. And he says a bunch of you know, he's supposed to be the data and the science and the physics guy, and that may have Razzle dazzled back when he had a better education than a lot of people. But his fundamental mistakes and lack of updating them, there's two big ones, the one not the other, and the Anti-nuclear Above all, they're leading to really embarrassing and stupid takes that are completely consistent with that original vision of forcing Hard and Soft into different categories, and then elevating anti nuclear above any other harm that comes from it. And his article is just like, oh, it costs so much blah, blah, blah. He's out of touch with how much it costs to run and operate nuclear plants. Rmi has recently in recent years have put out deeply flawed studies that assume you have to shut down all nuclear plants. And there's no such thing as upgrades. And we cover this on a nuclear immortality episode. No reason you can't keep going on almost every plant in the world except for the British ones. But he doesn't update any of those priors, because he must have a world that satisfies his original mistakes.
He wrote an interesting article recently, with a Canadian, I think his name's RV Ramanna, which was discussing the the myths around the so called myths around renewables. And obviously, you know, problem numero uno is the intermittency problem, which he dismisses as not being an issue. And he makes some arguments that I think as you're saying, probably the younger people at Rmi, scratched their heads out a little bit, which is, you know, he claims that intermittency isn't an issue and that wind and solar are actually more reliable, because weather prediction is more reliable than unexpected outages that at large facilities or even planned outages, which again, are often done to coincide with periods of low demand. As you know, as we do in Toronto, we have outages and spring and fall and we don't have a high load demand. You know, are you feeling like you were sort of hinting at that, but do you feel like things are getting a little bit increasingly desperate, and again, I'm just really struck by this era that we're entering into again, that Edgardo is referred to as electrification. 2.0, where we're going to, you know, the consensus is we need to electrify everything, we're going to need to build more generation, even if we get, you know, more efficient, maybe the Emory has options is we just need to be more cutthroat and get ultra efficient, but but even so we have a lot of carbon intensive generation to replace if we're to even stay at contemporary demand and Emery certainly for building out a lot more wind and solar. He really celebrates, you know, that we added, like, how much did we add last year? You know, we're doing huge add ons of you know, industrial wind and solar every year. That's that's part of the rationale for why nuclear is getting more
expensive. So that's not gonna be they're gonna have to drop that little one. But yeah, they are adding more and more.
Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of, you know, very simplistic talking points I pick up from his his talks these days. But, you know, one of the big ones against nuclear as well we add this much wind and solar this year and nuclear only grew by two gigawatts or something that met nuclear went down this year went up only slightly
Emory's to be applauded, in cooperation with many other forces in society, he helped achieve exactly that, as he stated explicitly was his goal and preferred outcome. So when he gloats about it, he deserves to gloat. He helped do something but because what the outcome is now by modern lights really bad, because it'd be amazing have a lot more nuclear plants that are effectively immortal, the cheapest marginal cost of clean, firm power, etc, etc. takes up almost no wilderness area. Incredible jobs for high school grads, like stuff like that. That's all good. By modern lights. I mean, it would have been good in the past, but it's very obvious now. He has to continue gloating, that it's not expanded. Without realizing that that is the world he he wanted, that he wouldn't be happy if it expanded that he helped bring about a world that was shrinking. Yes, I think they're acting like you're disinterested scientific observers just preposterous at that point, are you so I am guessing I sort of cut this off, but I'm guessing where you're going is, what is the intermittency problem? What does it mean for Emory's vision. So Emrys vision is that like you have a bucket of oil at the ready, import into your apartments like thing or whatever. And that district heating might even be good. Now, almost every nuclear plant being built in the Eastern Bloc at the time that he wrote that articles was including a district heating system, he just doesn't, he keeps the nuclear on the hard path and the district heating on the soft path. And never the two shall meet. It was wrong then, but maybe you couldn't know maybe it was very secretive. And you couldn't figure out what Eastern Bloc cities were doing with their nuclear plants from the Soviet Union, right, or, you know, Finland or other places like that. Fine. Well, in terms of the intermittency part in his world, that's just a matter of being so efficient, that you can just ride out cold spells right out hot spells, rearrange your needs in certain ways. At this point, it really betrays the vision of somebody with extreme resources, absolute control over a property, far away from people with the ability to do whatever you need to ensure that the test of your vision is of having enough energy even without barely any heating just from the Rocky Mountain Sun streaming through your massive windows like, that doesn't scale as far as we can tell, and his freedom to make a career saying sitting around and think if we ride through this cold spell, that's going to give me more time to give me more material for my speeches. Most people have lives that aren't about making some sort of dramatic and very well paid point about what your house does.
And it's a different it's a different test. It's a different form of living. The the timing problem, specifically, when you need energy, and you don't have it. And if that starts to stack up, it starts to seriously affect everybody's ability to cooperate, fundamentally to cooperate. The grid in the end is a colossal cooperation with astonishing little losses, which is one of his other mistakes, he was thinking of a big, ugly, inefficient system that was ever more expensive to maintain, rather than ever more cheaper to build and maintain until his vision started truly winning in America, around the year 2000. Electricity was getting cheaper per kilowatt hour, delivered against inflation from a basically 1900 to 2000. And although some of that would have been from stopping some inefficient build big construction projects during a time of high inflation, a lot of it's just because it turns out he was wrong in his intuition grids are pretty crazy efficient, which is why RMI is turned around on them being good, not bad. The timing issue, though, comes in whether it's soft energy from renewables, or hard energy from renewables, the thing he used to fight. And that is, if you get it right 98 times out of 100, that just is not good enough. And at the point that you're tying all the soft energy, wind and solar to a big hard energy grid, the demands of revenue that the soft energies have in the good times when they're producing takes away from what there is to support the hard energies that hold up the grid during the time when the renewables aren't producing. And since you can always blame consumers for wanting energy at the wrong time. You always have a moral backup that Emery doesn't, in his defense, he doesn't escape and say, well, the people were wrong. What he says was, we didn't build a system that made them have abundance the way they should. But almost everybody who's a fellow traveler of his world, is right there ready with their economists, with their smart meters with their software people to blame the individual for wanting or needing energy when nature didn't provide it to the increasingly large wind and solar systems. The way this turns out is a paradox where you insist that this off energy path is totally working us, you parasitize a hard energy system with it. And then if the heart energy system fails at a point that the soft energy completely failed, you blame the heart system and say somebody should have spent a lot more money on it, even though it should go away forever. We're seeing that now in Europe, where the timing problem is that if you don't have wind for the right part of winter, it's it's one thing to say well, you should have stored up wind from when we had it back in, you know, late September. But this that storage part is not only extreme hard energy, it's unbelievably expensive and thermodynamically wasteful, which gets us back to the Levin's being wrong because each he starts with a conclusion and then traces down all the logic that gets there rather than that reverse and any amount of thermodynamic as well as waste is worth it to follow a efficient, soft energy path. I think that's where we get to.
You know, in our preset, you talked a lot about wanting to sort of start off a little bit abstract in discussion about entropy. And I'm curious about, I don't know, a follow up on that. And again, because I'm just trying to identify what are the primal drivers of Levin's philosophy, particularly the the soft energy path, as elucidated in 76? Is that is that a natural tie in right now?
Probably not, especially this late in the podcast, we'll lose people. I'll just put in this little this little technical note. In the end, entropy is, I think, best expressed to lay audiences order versus disorder. Amery only ever understood the parts that pitch that supported exactly the arguments he wanted to make. And if he understood it at a better level, especially as it applies to human needs and human society, he either didn't understand it didn't mention it. It was what I mean, timing. And the ability to know at high level of certainty that you'll have energy at a certain time is an extremely important part of the order versus disorder question, part of the order in the somewhat I mean, thermodynamically tropically, wasteful conversion of nuclear heat to steam to electricity, as that you're making electricity in a very predictable manner, on a highly ordered system that accumulates everybody's needs and desires all at once, then optimizes if you still have utilities that can build a nuclear plant and and price the average out the cost among the entire system, a very efficient and cheap way to make your energy. I think that's why my the way I would describe this seems to be going around on Twitter, what I the way I say it is, nuclear energy is a costly way to make cheap electricity. And soft energies, wind and solar, are a cheap way to make very costly electricity. And you can add in an entropic waste thing there where technically because the wind comes in with this amount of disorder and then goes through a wind turbine and only increases its disorder a little bit. Going through, you can either call that wasteful or not wasteful, that goes on to the electricity grid. As long as there's a bunch of things that aren't wind and solar on the grid, to hide the hide the ups and downs, the disorder from Nat nature's energy supply, then you can you can trick yourself into thinking you keep the orderly electricity without the disorderly waste heat from the nuclear plant. But what you're losing is the order of the very high probability that the nuclear is going to go at a certain level in the next hour, next day, next month, which to be fair in Emory's time was not for sure, utilities were definitely building nuclear plants bigger and faster than they fully understood that in the end, Emery might have been right, we might have never learned how to operate our nuclear plants Well, right. And if you if we didn't, if we only had the example of France or South Korea, where anti nuclear executives and anti nuclear policy sabotaged previously functioning fleets for a long time, we might say that he was right in the end, and that nuclear doesn't work out that well. Fortunately, we have counter examples that know that that itself, that's the real societal choice to mess up your nuclear fleet or not. That's the real choice, not hard, soft energy. It's whether you get the nuclear built that you need, and whether you operate it well, or you don't
I want to, you know, we have a bit of a smorgasbord of things to cover here. But Amy wrote a book, I believe it's called Natural Capitalism, he very much identifies as a capitalist. And I wanted to explain to what degree his his ideas of, you know, running a pretty lean system played into electricity market liberalisation and wholesale markets. You know, you were touching on that with ERCOT in Texas and, and running very lean margins, that that seems to fit into Emory's ideas quite nicely. Is that part of why he's been so influential and popular? He's synergize. Well, with the the prevailing political winds of the time,
yes, even though liberalization of electricity grids was only partly about putting more soft energies on it, because again, the big grid and the power plants on it was something he thought was wasteful and inefficient. And I don't know if in the time that 70s When he was blooming, he would have thought that if you just have a ton of entities planning electricity or failing to plan it, that would totally be more efficient. Or if you had, you know, like in the UK 50 marketing departments selling different brands of electricity to the same wires, that's totally going to be more efficient. I don't know if he ever thought that. But he saw the breakup of the only companies big enough and rich enough to build nuclear as a fundamental good if you hate the grid, partly because you hate the nuclear going on the grid, the nuclear that needs the grid to distribute it to not just 100,000 customers for nuclear reactors designed in 1960. But a million customers for reactor for nuclear reactors designed 10 years later, if you hate the grid and hate the nuclear that grid, that that needs the grid, then in the end, you want to destroy the entities that are making grid that are powerful enough to big, big, big power plants. It turns out that the experiment of electricity markets is failing, it's failing for fundamental physical reasons, in my opinion, that the interconnectedness of electricity requires something like a firm to efficiently control and design. And when you break out something so physically interconnected, so my newly sensitive, instantly connected into end of continents, into a bunch of different firms, none of which is really responsible for it, and you oversee it with politically elected bodies, that is really dangerous compared to a single firm that answers for the price and quality of the whole service, overseen by politicians, they may or may not be able to bribe or buy it, at least they have the capability to coordinate, they don't even have to hire the best or be that effective to beat an electricity market system. That's what's so horrifying without even saying like I do that. Nuclear big nuclear plus storage is the end solution. Even if you disagree, and you say whatever mix of whatever How is in like New England right now, that's totally where we're going. And that's good. Even if you say that, and you disagree with me about the end point. You can't argue that it's like, saved money or something. And his success in breaking it up, I don't think is inconsistent with his vision that was killed nuclear above all else, and force a choice that isn't there. I think that messing up electricity was consistent with that. It's inconsistent with maybe Rocky Mountain Institute's outlook now, but that's the problem with electricity. Electricity, especially plus markets is so complicated, that for people who go in knowing the right answers, renewables, they only have to learn like one electricity topic, every time there's a crisis to explain why their previous conclusion was fine. I saw some real dumb tweets recently from some Professor Doctor guy and in carbon brief in the UK, where he's like, see, electricity prices going up, because wholesale prices going up. That proves that whatever I decided before is totally true. His point being that electricity markets were good when they were leading to tons of new subsidized renewables on them with the whole with a wholesale price that was so low that it was killing the power plants that are now leading to something of a shortage of options other than expensive gas. Now, he's saying that the wholesale prices are to blame. And that even though the wholesale prices are just passing through the cost of expensive gas that the wholesale market chose when gas was cheap. He's saying now effectively, you have to stop this, stopping that wholesale market would involve like, just getting rid of this 30 years, 20 years of electricity market thing and saying that one firm should have a brain and know how to build all the renewables and carefully optimize the collection at lowest cost. But that's what utilities were doing in the first place. They were just doing it with nuclear brings us bout back full circle,
probably time that we start wrapping up. But again, as I was saying, Levin's really is an intellectual godfather for so much of what I see coming out of the environmental movement about a and from their sort of energy policy, think tanks. Locally, we have this group called the Ontario cleaner Alliance, which in the early 2000s, you know, was lobbying for the building of gas plants in densely populated urban settings, using that sort of Amory Lovins logic of we'll build these smaller gas cogeneration plants in these communities will build nice tall smokestacks and despite being a Clean Energy Alliance or clean air Alliance, we're kind of fine with that. Because you know, it's it's better to produce electricity very close to where it's consumed, you know, there's there's not transmission losses, and now 1520 years later, there, they're anti gas and their their plan involves building massive and long transmission lines from you know, our hydroelectric stations in Quebec to bring that electricity over to Ontario. So it's it's interesting seeing these contradictions kind of mounts as as the material conditions change and as or climate concern grows. But I think that's kind of the fundamental thing for me is that that we've moved from an era where we needed to build up the grid. We satiated demand Levin's his ideas came in and were popular and made sense to a certain degree. You know, as there was that crisis amongst the regulated monopoly utilities with their growth only kind of model, but now we're in, you know, electrification 2.0, where, where we sort of need to harken back to that model, but perhaps where there's an opportunity here to synthesize, to find some middle ground between wizards and prophets, and take the best of that sort of efficiency model and combine it with the best forms of generation and a sort of, you know, collective grid that can look after us all and most effectively combat climate change. That's
yeah, the synthesis is to abandon the single most important things to Amery while keeping the things that have built up at Rmi, over time that he hated at first you know, so like Levin's what Levin's became, but without the things that he predicted and without the things that he still is,
I suck at abstract thought so just just put that in concrete terms.
Okay, sure. Things that were happening anyway, that Levin's said we should choose are probably good and now they've occurred the things the alternative need to return the construction of the correct type and quantity of power plants for the lowest price service for the most to save money since he loves saving money so much.
And the the chickens are coming home to roost in Europe and particularly Germany where the man who received the I guess it's a knighthood from the states from the from the German state for being the intellectual author of the Energiewende is you know that models running up against a bit of a brick wall,
you will win second pin out next to the reward the printout from the electricity map website showing their filthy emissions compared to the neighbors who ignored him. In the end, I think that's the legacy no matter the local optimum, the local optimum that he may have found, no matter the bigger issues he may have pointed out in the in the results are following Levin's Levin's stated goals the active part of acting on Levin's not the passive things like the Jevons paradox taking care of efficiency. The active part of Levin's goal ended up being the most destructive,
interesting, interesting, I feel like we could have a follow up episode just on on some of the things we've we've talked about today to flush them out but we're gonna leave it at that for now Mark thank you again for for coming on Decouple it's always a pleasure to have you. And usually I like to try and give you an assignment for the next episode just to make sure we book in another month. But is there anything that that you're wanting to talk about or address? You know, probably when you come back in a month's time?
Yeah, we should talk about the soft energy things that he said that are actually really awesome, like heat pumps and done right. Some of the attributes that I love about Levin's philosophy, like he called himself a social conservative, he in many ways. He loves craftsmanship. He loves beautiful grand pianos, like there's a bunch of things to explore that are part of a beautiful world powered by nuclear, and I think we could do that.
Alright. We look forward to that. Thanks again, Mark. Thanks, Chris. If you enjoyed the podcast please make sure to subscribe, like and review us on your podcast platform of choice. Until next time, guys