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Nov. 7, 2023 - Epoch Times
44:40
Is California’s Mission to Reach Zero-Emissions Possible? | Mark Mills #californiainsider
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There's no such thing as a zero-emissions vehicle.
Electric vehicles also cause carbon dioxide emissions.
Depending on where you drive them and how they're made, today they can't emit to the planet more carbon dioxide than a conventional vehicle well over its life.
California is planning to spend $10 billion on battery-powered vehicles and ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
But is this going to make us greener?
But even if the United States and the world follows California and we get several hundred million electric vehicles in the world, there's about 10 million today.
So that's a big increase.
That doesn't cut global oil consumption by more than 10%.
My guest today is Mark Mills, physicist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Today he'll explain how shifting to zero emission vehicles might not be as green as we think.
So what you're doing is replacing the environmental issues associated with getting natural gas and burning it with environmental issues associated with digging minerals out of the ground.
Lots of them.
Lots more of them.
Not 10% more.
Not twice as much, but 1,000% more.
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I'm CMI Korami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Great to be here.
We want to talk to you about California, and there's a new rule about zero-emission cars.
We want to go all-electric by 2035, and electric and hydro, but it looks like electric is much more advanced here.
It's much more adopted.
What are your thoughts on this rule?
Is it practical to do it now?
Well, we can make this whole discussion easy with the two-letter word, no.
Why not?
Well, first, there's two problems.
There's the impracticality problem.
Can you actually...
California or any region with, say, 40 to 50 million people or a country with 400 million or nearly 400 million and the world with billions rapidly replace the internal combustion engine with batteries?
Is that practical?
The answer is no.
I'll explain why.
But the more challenging problem is sort of a...
I'll call it the hidden elephant in the room because it's only hidden from public discussion.
It's not hidden in the real world of physics, engineering, geology, geophysics, chemistry, and the technical literature.
And it's that there's no such thing, of course, as a zero emissions vehicle.
You could have nothing coming out of the tailpipe.
There's a lot of ways to achieve that, not just with electric cars, but you can have an electric car.
It doesn't have a tailpipe, obviously.
And the real question is, where are the emissions associated with the infrastructure of the electric car?
Because what you do with an electric vehicle is you don't eliminate emissions.
You shift where they are.
You export them somewhere else.
And the somewhere else is not only somewhere else, like to a power plant, but to somewhere else in the world.
So most people, they say the obvious.
First, let's stick to that.
I like electric cars.
I'm impressed by what Elon Musk has done.
Not only building the first successful car company in a century, no one has managed to compete in the automotive industry.
And you can't compete just with subsidies.
So set aside for the moment.
And it's a lot set aside, the subsidy argument.
There's billions of dollars that is going into subsidy right now.
There is, but it's not enough to force people to buy a Tesla.
You know, if you're a Tesla buyer, you don't buy a $100,000 car because it's $15,000 cheaper if it's a piece of junk.
It just doesn't pass the laugh test.
It's a good car.
It's an amazing car.
And he has engineered his team the most amazing batteries anybody's engineered so far in the world.
Tremendous kudos.
But this is not what this is.
And also kudos for him for changing his resonance.
But that's a whole separate discussion.
Yeah.
The issue here is to be honest about supply chains.
We've learned about supply chains again in the great lockdowns and how important they are.
Supply chains exist for everything.
Everything is everything in the world that's part of civilization that we manufacture for a product or for a product to provide a service.
Everything in the world involves digging something out of the ground first, mining.
You have to get materials and make something.
So the thing you need to know is that the battery in an electric car weighs about a thousand pounds compared to your fuel tank in your car, which when it's full would weigh about a hundred pounds, 120 pounds.
So you're replacing 120 pounds of fuel with a thousand pound battery.
The electric motor is a little lighter than internal combustion engine, but not a lot lighter.
So the question now, from an emissions perspective, and it's an amazing matter, just let's We could talk about what the batteries really cost.
The emissions part is the important part.
Where do the materials come from and how many materials do you need to mine to make that 1,000-pound battery?
Now, for calibration, you have to dig up somewhere on Earth, and it's not in America, because America is hostile to mining, about 500,000 pounds of materials, earth, rock, and dirt, to make a single car battery.
Wow.
You have to process that material.
Using chemical processes to convert the rocks into refined minerals, the refined minerals into a mineral product that's useful to make a battery, and then you assemble the battery.
All those steps involve machines and energy.
It takes 100 to 300 barrels of oil equivalent of energy to manufacture a battery that can hold one barrel of oil equivalent of energy.
So we know very accurately the carbon dioxide emissions from building a car and driving a conventional car.
Let's say in rough numbers it's 30 tons of CO2 over the life of a car.
That's approximate.
Is that right?
30 to 40 tons.
Depends on the car.
Depends, you know, how you drive.
It's that kind of number.
When an electric vehicle is delivered to your driveway, Let's say it's fully charged for the sake of discussing.
It's like the gasoline.
It's also delivered with a carbon debt to get it there.
Now, just manufacturing the battery can have a carbon debt ranging from 10 tons to 40 tons of CO2. So essentially it's the same?
It's the same amount of emissions that have already happened somewhere else.
To make this car?
To make the battery in the battery-powered car is the internal combustion engine will emit over its entire operating life.
So it comes with a debt.
So we're transferring these emissions to the production of the cars and somewhere else in the globe, wherever we're doing the mining.
Right.
In Africa, if it's got cobalt in the battery, you've exported the emissions to the electric grid, which is two-thirds coal-fired in China, because China refines 70% of the cobalt that's mined in the world.
Or you've exported the lithium emissions to Chile or Argentina or to Australia where the mining of raw lithium.
Then you've exported the emissions, say, to Russia for the nickel that you use in your vehicle.
Some of the biggest nickel mines in the world are in Russia.
Nickels used in all vehicles.
So those emissions are real and they're global.
They occur somewhere else.
We don't see them here in California.
Well, they're out there.
But we're talking about global issues here.
So when a Californian drives their electric vehicle, they have already a virtual purchase in that vehicle contributed to substantial amount of energy use and carbon dioxide emissions somewhere else.
The least of it is associated with assembling the vehicle, whether it's in California or in Texas makes no difference.
Most of it is associated with the chemicals and materials and minerals needed to make the battery.
Then the second biggest proportion is obviously the electricity used to charge the battery.
So people say, well, I want to charge my battery on solar power.
Okay, some people can.
But on average, the batteries are not charged with solar power globally because on average, solar electricity is a very small percentage of the planet's electricity.
Certainly true even in California.
And if you happen to charge your battery at night, obviously you're not charging it on solar power.
If it happens to be a night when it's a drought time and you're not importing hydropower from the north, From Oregon.
And if you're running either on gas-fired turbines in the state of California or importing coal-fired electricity to the neighboring grids, California imports nearly a third of its electricity.
The neighboring grids use lots of coal and natural gas to produce electricity.
So the specific time of day And the specific location that you charge a vehicle determines the actual emissions that vehicle causes to occur.
Most calculations disingenuously don't look at that.
What they do is they assume either a future ideal grid that's got no emissions, and that doesn't exist today, so you're assuming a future as opposed to a present, or they assume an average ideal Which is fine for a gasoline powered thing, as I said, because whenever you drive your gasoline car, whenever you fill it up, your emissions are exactly the same.
But the emissions you cause when you drive an electric car are determined entirely by when you charge it, where you charge it, and opaquely, where all the materials came from to fabricate its battery.
That's a long disquisition, the point of which is There's no such thing as a zero emissions vehicle.
Electric vehicles also cause carbon dioxide emissions.
Depending on where you drive them and how they're made, today, they can emit to the planet more carbon dioxide than a conventional vehicle well over its life, or they could emit less, as much as half as much.
If you drive your car to Norway and the materials are all sourced from places you're aware of that low carbon energy production, which does not include China, you can cut emissions in half, not to zero.
The important point is the zero myth is a complete fabrication.
And it might actually be an increase.
So we're actually transferring the emissions to the production part of the battery of these electric vehicles.
And also, at the same time, we're transferring the emissions to the grid where we are charging the vehicles.
And we assume that those parts are going to get fixed.
But we don't see them, right?
It's out of our sight.
Well, that's usually the response.
We'll fix that, right?
Okay.
Fair enough.
They've been trying to fix that in Germany for 20 years.
Germany famously gets over a third of its electricity now from wind and solar, which is a lot, a lot more than America does.
And if you do a life cycle emissions calculation for an electric vehicle in Germany, it doesn't save any carbon dioxide over driving a standard vehicle in Germany.
So it's not just the grid, about which we know a lot and how long it'll take to, quote, decarbonize the grid.
It'll take a very long time and will require nuclear power and hydro dams, not solar arrays and wind turbines.
It also is recognizing not the battery production, it's the mining of the minerals.
It's the mining activity.
Global mining right now uses almost as much oil as global aviation.
And the plans that are in place to increase the use of batteries will require an increase in production of minerals like lithium, cobalt, zinc, nickel, aluminum, manganese, whole sort of soup of minerals.
The demand for those minerals will increase between 400% and 4,000%.
The world is not now building enough mining capacity to do that.
We know that because it's in the International Energy Agency data.
So as California and the United Kingdom, which are the two big jurisdictions eager to ban internal combustion engines, chase a requirement that everybody only buy an electric vehicle, just for those two jurisdictions, Isn't it enough mining in the world to make enough batteries for that many people for their cars?
It's not happening.
And it takes an average of 16 years to open a new mine globally.
In the United States, time is approaching infinite these days.
When we're talking about electric cars, the battery itself is not really recyclable, right?
The nasty for the environment is not really good, right?
It's not that nasty.
I mean, if you want to talk nasty, it's the chemical processes to melt rock to make the battery.
You have to literally melt rock with chemicals.
You have to be very careful doing those things.
They're kind of nasty.
You know, fuming nitric acid and sulfuric acid, these are nasty chemicals.
Who wouldn't admit that?
The problem with the battery, there's not much lithium in a lithium battery.
It's 15, 20 pounds in a 1,000-pound battery.
Lithium is a very active chemical.
The problem is it's a very complicated machine.
People think it's like a box of simple goo.
It's not.
It's a complicated machine with thousands of welds, thousands of parts, cooling systems, control systems, structural systems, safety systems, electronic systems.
It's a machine just like an engine.
And every one of them for different manufacturers is different.
So you can't, you know, a steel engine is basically made up of steel and a couple other metals.
You could just take it, crush it, melt it, and recycle it pretty easily, which we do.
The battery you have to disassemble very carefully because in a sense it's You know, it's very electrically active.
So you see pictures, if you Google a picture of somebody trying to recycle a battery, they're wearing a hazmat suit.
It takes, you know, half an hour, hours to recycle one battery, take it apart.
Then you have to figure out how to get all the chemicals separated.
It's not easy.
So I wouldn't call it a nasty process.
It's very difficult, very expensive.
So the world's going to generate millions of tons.
Millions of tons of waste batteries, which would be very expensive and very difficult to recycle.
We're already on that path.
Based on what you're saying, the policymakers are focusing on solving this problem, but it doesn't look like it's going to solve any problems.
At the same time, do you think we're making some mistakes with our energy policy in California?
Well, sure.
We'll call it myopia.
We have to first, again, be honest about the fuel cycle, where things really come from, who's making them.
China has global dominance at the moment on the supply chain of minerals needed for making batteries, solar panels, and the like.
They're the dominant player.
They have greater dominance than OPEC does on the oil side.
Just for a calibration point.
So we're not being serious about competing there because apparently the American policymakers don't like those industries.
So we don't encourage them.
We drive them out of the country.
So we're imposing on consumers policies that will do several things.
Export jobs as well as export emissions.
Increase geopolitical vulnerabilities.
Degrade our position on the world stage.
Increased costs of the vehicles.
These are more expensive vehicles.
They'll get more expensive in the future, not less expensive.
Because the demand for minerals is going to be so high, it causes an inflation in the price of the minerals.
They're not going down in price, they're going up.
And we're decreasing the reliability of one of the most critical infrastructures in the world, which is the electric grids of the world.
Reliability goes down, costs go up.
All this, of course, is in service of cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
But even if the United States and the world It follows California, and we get several hundred million electric vehicles in the world.
There's about 10 million today.
So that's a big increase.
That doesn't cut global oil consumption by more than 10%.
This is neither an existential threat to the oil industry.
So they should relax, I guess, right?
They're not in danger of becoming extinct.
But nor is it a path to zero emissions of carbon dioxide in the elimination of oil.
Do you think there's any consequences for us focusing on this problem versus other problems that we have in energy space?
It seems like the solar and wind energy that we've invested in is not very reliable compared to other sources that we are not investing in.
Other sources that we're shutting down, we're going to shut down the Abdo Canyon, the nuclear plant.
We also are not very sure about our hydro power.
Do you think there's consequences that we may face?
Well, sure.
I mean, the consequences that politicians care about is a public revolt over higher costs and lower reliability, which is one of the key consequences that's coming.
We saw what happened in Europe.
We call it a wind drought, right?
The massive becoming of the North Sea that occurred last fall resulted in very little wind power for about 10 days.
That resulted in astronomical increases in electric costs.
Hundreds of percent.
I mean, it didn't go up a few percent.
We had costs that would be measured in single dollars going up to hundreds of dollars, right?
Profound increases.
Yeah, only for hours or days, but you get those kind of cost increases for hours and days, and it doubles or triples people's electric bill for the month or even for the year.
So those consequences are beginning to happen.
It's why Europe recently decided to...
Label nuclear power and natural gas as part of the, quote, green transition, which of course has a lot of environmental groups upset.
They're doing that because people want their lights on, obviously, and their heat in the winter, but also for manufacturing and the processes that depend, everything depends on energy.
You have to have both a supply and a price people can afford.
So we are making a mistake not by embracing the fact that solar and wind are cheaper than they ever were.
And there's a huge market to use a lot more solar and wind still.
There's not a rollback needed.
And there's a huge opportunity for electric vehicles to play a very significant role in the global transportation markets.
The lithium battery is an amazing, it's a Nobel Prize winning invention, right?
This is consequential stuff.
It's made a lot of things other than just smartphones possible.
The Tesla's an impressive vehicle.
There's lots of electric cars coming.
All that's happening sort of organically and naturally.
The mistake is to act as if that the energy sources for the future are monomaniacally focused on three things.
Wind, solar, and batteries.
Batteries for the grid, batteries for cars.
This is not only not possible, It's economically destructive to push it too hard, and I think it will have political consequence.
The, you know, citizens are pretty tolerant up to a point, right?
They believe the story.
The story is the stuff is cheaper and better, and it's new.
Well, it actually isn't.
It's cheaper than it used to be, but it doesn't result in cheaper electric rates.
California has some of the highest electric rates in the country, and they're going up and everywhere.
Everywhere in the world, where solar and wind are being added aggressively by mandates or subsidies, electric rates are going up.
Just do the thought experiment for a minute, at the broad level of abstraction, because electricity is so important.
70% of America's electricity, roughly speaking, is produced by natural gas and coal, as it stands today.
The cost of natural gas and coal has collapsed in the last 20 years.
Because of the shale revolution.
But the cost of electricity in America on average has gone up 20%.
What happened?
How can that be?
It should have gone down.
And California still uses lots of natural gas and imports natural gas-fired and coal-fired electricity.
Electric rates are soaring.
It's not just the taxes on the bills.
It's the cost to accommodate episodic power.
If you think about it, you don't have to be an engineer to get the point.
If you build a system that's designed to run all the time and you need power all the time, That is a specific cost.
If you take the engine that could run all the time away and put it instead in place an engine that runs some of the time, and when it's convenient for the engine to run, not when you need what the engine's doing, which is wind and sun, you have to do other things to provide power.
The other things are all expensive activities of essentially abusing the existing grid, an underutilized conventional grid.
Germany has built two grids.
In order to make this possible.
It's obviously more expensive.
Their electricity is even more expensive than in California, about twice as high.
The solution we're being told is to put lots of batteries on the grid.
Well, this is the same...
Now we're going on the same path we just talked about with batteries for cars.
These are just like Tesla batteries.
They can be made.
They're possible.
The world is not making enough minerals to build enough batteries to store enough energy to make up for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.
It's just physically not happening.
No one is building it, and it's not possible to build it in the timeframes that are being proposed by politicians.
Now, do you think we're going to face an energy shortage at some point in the future based on the way things are going, the way we've been planning?
Well, Europe already is.
And the only reason that they didn't have massive blackouts is that they hadn't decommissioned some old coal plants and old oil plants.
And they even switched fuel from natural gas to burning oil all over Europe.
That happened in New England this past winter, too, that you have dual fuel power plants.
You can't get enough natural gas there, you burn oil.
That's the dual fuel.
So we haven't...
There's no such thing as an energy shortage from the viewpoint of the physics of energy, right?
This is a political and engineering challenge.
Engineers can build enough machines to supply energy society needs.
So any shortages that are coming, and we will face shortages in the form of outages.
That's a shortage, right?
It's a shortage providing it when I need it.
So more rolling brownouts are coming to California in the future, especially if the Abdel Canyon is shut down.
You have to build power plants to replace that that can dispatch electricity when you need it, or build more transmission lines to get power from neighbors when they have spare to send to Californians.
If you take power off the grid and think you can supply all of California with wind, solar, and batteries, there'll be far more outages.
And what about the demand side?
We're hearing we want to go green, so we're trying to replace what we have with green energy.
And it looks like it's not as efficient.
And I always question how green the green energy is because they have consequences too.
But what about the demand side?
It seems like our consumption is going up at the same time.
Sure.
Well, first, to your point about, you can question correctly how, quote, green green energy is because To the point I made earlier, everything begins with digging something out of the earth to build machines.
It takes a thousand percent more concrete, steel, and glass To build solar and wind machines to deliver one unit of energy to society or a mile of driving or an hour of heat or an hour of zooming, a thousand percent more concrete steel and glass per unit of energy with wind and solar compared to a gas turbine.
So that has an environmental consequence.
It also takes somewhere between a thousand and seven thousand percent More mining of minerals to build those machines than building a gas turbine.
So what you're doing is replacing the environmental issues associated with getting natural gas and burning it with environmental issues associated with digging minerals out of the ground, lots of them, lots more of them, Not 10% more.
Not twice as much, right?
1,000% more.
So those have environmental consequences somewhere.
And if they're out of sight, apparently no one cares.
But they're also qualitatively different, obviously.
One is CO2. The other is actually maybe destruction of ecosystems in Madagascar that some people used to care about.
The question you ask about demand is the right question.
The most important question Issue in energy is you produce it to meet demands.
So if you're thinking about the future, will the future have more or less demand for energy?
And this sort of gets you into the macroeconomic question.
Will there be more people that will be wealthier?
If there's not that many more people, California is shrinking, not growing.
Because people are leaving, apparently.
But the nation is growing.
The world is growing.
Wealth is going up.
In fact, wealth is going to go up faster, in my view, in the future.
As I've written in my...
We're not talking about my book, but I'll...
I'll self-promote my book, The Cloud Revolution.
I'm very bullish about the next decades, economic growth, global economic growth, especially U.S. economic growth.
Economic growth brings increased energy demand because more people can afford a car who don't have one, or if they have one, they buy two.
More people can take vacations, more people buy bigger houses, or they buy a house if they've never had one.
These are all energy-consuming activities that come from wealth.
So the real question you want to have in one's head is, you know, what are the wild cards I'm not guessing about future wealth creation?
I think they're manifest in the tech revolution that's going on.
And then you have to counter that with, well, we always get more efficient.
Cars, lights, motors, refrigerators, computers get more efficient in the future than they've been in the past.
This is true.
So the issue is just sort of an arithmetical one.
Does demand grow faster than efficiency gets better?
Well, we know the answer to that through all of human history.
We're far more efficient now than any time in history and use far more energy.
So both happen.
So usually what you hear is people, oh, we can solve the demand problem.
We'll make things more efficient.
That doesn't solve the demand problem.
That increases the demand.
Because on average, there's enough other people who have nothing.
And when you make it more efficient, you've done something that in economics is called making it cheaper.
Efficiency makes it cheaper because you have less energy used to produce the service or product.
So the cost of the product or service goes down.
So people who couldn't afford it before now buy or use it.
And there are a few things where that efficiency effect doesn't happen.
You know, the so-called rebound effect, if you like.
But most things in the world, if you make them more efficient, increase demand because people want whatever the product or service is, whether it's streaming movies, which use energy.
What we're doing now in Zooming give you a sense of new demands create new energy.
You and I probably aren't going to drive a lot more in the future than we drive today.
The average American drives, you know, the number of miles they drive and spend a car each year is not going to go up a lot.
This is indisputable.
So if I get a more efficient car, my fuel use goes down.
But if I buy a more efficient, bigger car, my fuel stays the same.
Because the bigger car is heavier.
Well, that's what's been going on in America now for 30 years.
75% of vehicles purchased last year in America were pickup trucks and SUVs.
They're bigger, heavier, they're far more efficient, but they didn't reduce fuel use.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, wealth goes up, people buy a net new car, and that increases fuel use.
So that's sort of the...
Energy demand dynamics of all existing products.
Well, then what engineers do is they invent new products.
Let me state the obvious.
Before the car was invented, there was no energy demand for cars.
Before the airplane was invented, no energy demand for airplanes.
Before the computer was invented, no energy demand for computers.
Computers globally now, the cloud globally, uses twice as much electricity as the country of Japan.
So there was no demand for electricity for the cloud pre-cloud.
Zooming, which took off, as we all know, roughly in March of 2020.
The Zoom platform is one of many teleconferencing, video sharing platforms.
There's lots of them.
But Zoom publishes their data because they want people to know how successful they've been and how many Zoom minutes their platform carries.
So as a calibration for us, we all know this, right?
The pre-COVID lockdowns, Zoom was a very successful company, growing rapidly, and they had about 100 billion Zoom minutes on their platform globally in January of 2020.
And by April of 2020, they were at 2 trillion Zoom minutes.
So I sort of did some, you know, I'll call it back of the envelope, but it's roughly accurate.
Every thousand Zoom minutes of Zooming is as much energy as 10 minutes of driving.
Now, it uses energy.
We're using energy all over, you know, stretch all between you and I, all across the infrastructure of the internet on the transport networks to make the systems operate in the data centers, the machines on both our ends.
So, 10 minutes of driving per thousand zoom minutes.
It's pretty efficient.
That's 100 times better than the driving per minute.
But we're talking trillions of Zoom minutes that never existed before.
Driving is also just going back to where it was before at the same time.
The demand side, and I'm just using a simplistic example, this is true of everything from gaming to game parks, to just-in-time delivery of food.
I mean, delivering food with one click and DoorDash.
You don't have to be an expert to know it's more energy intensive than driving to the grocery store, buying big bags of stuff and cooking it at home.
But why did you trade?
You traded energy for time.
Convenience, the most precious commodity in the universe, is your and my time.
I'm willing to spend energy to preserve and use it for other things.
That's what inventions do.
So...
And I write about this a lot in my book.
I'm very bullish about where technology is going in terms of wealth creation for the world broadly.
But it has energy implications.
The world's going to use more energy.
And which would bring us to, this is not about wind versus coal or solar versus natural gas.
At the macro level for civilization, it's going to be, we're definitely going to need all of them.
And we should hope there's lots more electric cars to relieve the demand pressures from another billion people.
Who don't even have a car or want one.
Mark, one question that comes up is, we are in California, we care about the environment.
It's hard to understand that the policy makers are not seeing that they're shifting these emissions somewhere else.
Yeah.
Is that not happening or is that the scientists are not involved?
Is the community of people that are making these decisions, why do you think they're doing that?
So now we're going to switch from me answering a physics question to answering a psychology question.
So I do play psychologist on TV sometimes.
I'll tell you my opinion.
But it's an opinion on the why.
I think, to be fair and honest, a lot of people just haven't thought about it.
They just don't know.
It's a classic case of, and I mean this in the semantic, not insulting way, The definition of ignorance.
They just don't know.
They're ignorant of the facts.
They don't know that so much mineral, so much, since a large quantity of minerals are used and required, that they're in fact exporting pollution and exporting energy use and exporting carbon dioxide emissions.
And frankly, exporting social challenges and problems, the pressure and tensions to open these minds in fragile parts of the world.
By that, I mean not just fragile environmental systems, fragile political systems.
There's epic stuff going on for people who care.
They don't know.
I think in some cases, to be unkind, they might know, or if they're told, they don't care.
I mean, this sounds like I don't mean this is an insult to anybody in particular, but I have talked to people when you explain this to them, they just don't care.
It's somebody else somewhere else.
It's not in my backyard.
I don't care.
There's some of that.
We know, to be honest, there are people like that.
Most people, when they know, do care, I find.
They're often shocked to learn they're exporting so much information.
Let's say such an incredible environmental burden in a literal sense.
And also if they're worried about carbon dioxide emissions, they're shocked and actually don't believe the numbers.
So that's why I point people to primary research and literature.
These are indisputable facts.
You have to mine the stuff.
It's big trucks.
They burn oil, they emit carbon dioxide.
You have to ship them, grind them up, takes energy.
You have to dissolve them with chemicals to take energy to make.
These are just physical processes.
They're shocked to learn it, shocked to learn the scale.
I think there is some increasing awareness of this, certainly in Europe, surprisingly, where they're trying to encourage domestic mining on the European continent.
Unsuccessfully, environmental groups who are proposing there be more electric cars are the same groups that oppose the new mines being opened.
Our administration here wants lots of electric cars and electric car chargers that takes lots of copper and nickel, right, minerals.
This EPA under this administration just canceled a longstanding, very difficult, expensive permitting process in Minnesota to open a new American mine to mine nickel and copper.
But you need to make electric cars and to make wind turbines and to make solar panels.
So there's a sort of intellectual schizophrenia here, right?
On one hand, I want this stuff.
On the other hand, It's kind of infantile.
I want unobtainium to build it.
You know, a mineral that weighs nothing, that appears out of thin air, doesn't cause any emissions to create.
And when I build it, it runs forever, never breaks down, doesn't create waste, doesn't require disposal and replacement.
I mean, it's...
Infantile.
Do you have any recommendations for the policymakers?
What can they do about this?
People that are watching this that might be interested in making a change or making a difference in this space?
Well, I think the recommendation is whatever one's aspiration is, you have to be honest about the consequences, the decisions you're pushing.
So my first recommendation is to push harder to get answers to the supply chain questions.
Know what you're asking for.
We did this with conflict diamonds.
So policymakers are very familiar with the conflict diamond challenge, right?
Because of abusive labor and slave labor practices and mining diamonds.
We can ask the same kind of questions about the equivalent of conflict labor to get minerals, also hidden emissions, hidden poor labor practices, hidden environmental consequences from the demands we're making here for our stuff.
Ask the questions.
So people are making...
We're making the claims should be held to account to answer the question of what are the upstream consequences?
What's the trajectory for those upstream consequences?
Who makes these things?
What's the effect on America's trade balance?
We're exporting jobs, not just emissions and environmental challenges.
What are the consequences?
We should ask these questions.
I mean, just getting transparency to the process as we struggle with people's aspirations.
I would like to have energy systems that emit nothing, not just carbon dioxide, but nothing.
Well, who wouldn't?
So what are those?
What are the ones that emit the least?
What are the costs?
Who can build them?
The top of the list is nuclear power, but here we have...
California is going to turn off another nuclear station.
This is moving in the wrong direction.
What we should do, if I was making a specific recommendation, is to quit subsidizing yesterday's technologies, which are mostly what wind and solar are, and invest more, not in subsidies, but investment in basic research to come up with a new class of nuclear power plants.
Qualify the ones that are being designed and invented by all kinds of entrepreneurs today.
Put basic research into new classes of technologies available to do extraction and mining of minerals with a smaller environmental footprint.
But these are long-term projects which are very, very unexciting.
For policymakers who want a short-term solution.
So it looks like we're solving a problem by putting another electric car in the road with an EV charger.
No, you're not.
You're just moving parts around.
And they might be slightly lower at a great cost.
It might actually be slightly higher emissions.
But we should be honest.
So I would say transparency is my recommendation, which is always...
A good thing to bring to politics and honesty about the real world of the physics of energy systems should be brought to the game.
And this isn't about pro-oil or pro-gas.
Gas and oil are used because they have an extraordinary economic utility function.
Not because of magic promotional capabilities of the oil companies.
In fact, I would argue they have the inverse of good PR. They've more or less abandoned the field for the last several decades.
Now, what about the people in California?
Because we are willing to pay more for a lot of things in California.
Apparently, a lot more.
A lot more, and we are willing to go green.
I mean, everybody is pro-going green.
Sure.
But it seems like we're told a story that somewhat is not true.
You know, we're told that we're going to be green, zero emission, this, zero emission, that.
We're spending money on this, we're spending money on that.
This project, that project, but we're not really doing it.
Well, you're not.
What should people do?
The policies that are putting in play now will not result in reduced carbon dioxide emissions at all when it comes to electric vehicles.
That would be my calculation.
Only minimally because of pushing wind and solar.
Some reductions.
Increased but at a great cost.
So people who want to go green, and we all want a cleaner, better, safer environment.
All human beings do.
The question is never, do we want that?
What do we pay for the unit of gain that we're seeking?
Are there better ways to get it?
And are we in fact getting what we're being claimed?
So your point is I think there's a certain amount of either myopia or disingenuousness about whether or not we're getting what we're being promised.
The other is just ignorance that haven't looked at it seriously and honestly.
And the third is that it's very hard, right, to do some of these things.
There's no magical easy solution.
I wish there were.
There's no unobtainium that's perfect element that can make everything, you know, zero harm.
So we deal with these trade-offs all the time.
Society's always done that.
And it's It makes some people uncomfortable.
They don't want trade-offs.
So that's, again, that's sort of infantile.
You have trade-offs.
That's the responsibility of policymakers is to deal with these trade-offs.
So the right path, and it's a truism to say it, societies that are wealthy are far more able To achieve goals for reducing nature's insults on us, protecting us from nature, whether it's storms or bacteria or viruses, and far easier to reduce environmental impacts, our footprint on the earth takes wealth.
And wealth does not come from squandering it to get the same product Exactly the same product that's no better than the previous product, but paying more for it.
So electricity, let's say the mile you're driving in a car, an electric car, that you believe is getting you a net benefit, but you're willing to pay more for that car.
But if in fact that mile of driving doesn't have any significant net benefit, you've paid more for nothing.
That's what's going on.
I know we talk about virtue signaling.
Some of it's virtue signaling.
People feel proud, but that's because they believe it's true what they've been told, or they think they've been told, or the headlines they saw.
They're not trying to virtue signal a myth in their mind.
It is true that there's a huge benefit to admitting nothing in dense urban areas.
So exporting pollution to power plants or remote mines is a good idea in that case, because I don't want it in a densely concentrated area to create smog, that kind of thing.
But carbon dioxide is a very different beast.
It's not smog.
Carbon dioxide is the state, and obviously it's essential in the atmosphere.
It's what plants eat, plants eat.
Plants eat carbon dioxide.
It's their food.
So we have to have it.
We don't know how much is a perfect amount in the atmosphere.
We've got more of it now.
Human beings have added a lot to the atmosphere.
Okay.
It's indisputable.
But that's a very different discussion than what people think is, quote, green.
Green used to mean all the other attributes of making sure the environment is cleaner and safer.
Green has come to mean solely and monomaniacally less carbon dioxide.
And once you go down that route, life gets complicated, to my point, that the EV that you're driving probably is not cutting global carbon dioxide emissions, could easily be increasing global carbon dioxide emissions and causing other problems besides that in other countries that you might care about if you were told about them.
Now, do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
You know, I love California.
You know, California is a magnificent state physically, the entrepreneurial environment.
I mean, who doesn't love California, really?
We love to beat up in California's politics for good reason.
Years ago, I testified before the California Energy Commission.
Several times on issues like this as the world is beginning to embrace the idea that we need to build more wind turbines and solar panels.
I guess I would leave you with this thought.
We're on the cusp I think, and again, promoting my book here, I think we're on the cusp of one of the biggest efflorescence technology the world has seen in a century.
It's extraordinarily positive for the world.
Its epicenter is not just Silicon Valley, it's America.
Other countries are doing impressive things, but the epicenter of the technology revolution is America, which will bring far more wealth to far more people.
Far more exciting services, better healthcare, more interesting entertainment, more fun.
Not perfection.
Humans will still be mean people.
We'll still do stupid stuff.
We'll still have wars.
We'll still have stock market crashes.
Just like from 1920 to 2000, a lot of bad stuff happened.
The world got a lot better off in that 80 years.
The next several decades look a lot like The beginning of the 1920s, which is why the subtitle of my book is The Roaring 2020s.
No accident.
So I'm really optimistic where we're going.
And I think we can tolerate the mistakes we're making, the economic mistakes we're making of spending too much on energy.
And we are making mistakes.
But, you know, that's what we do.
In a democracy, we make mistakes.
It's better than having an autocracy and ordering people around.
So I'm okay with the mistakes being made.
As long as we're willing to have a kind of discussion, figure out what the mistakes are, and then correct them, it'll have cost us some money, but...
Who hasn't had that happen to them in their personal life in the first place?
Governments are no different than that.
So, the aspirations I don't disagree with.
The ideal of, I want a greener future.
Well, yeah, use a technical term, no duh, who doesn't?
But when it becomes only about carbon dioxide, then you have to be very careful about where you count it, where it's coming from.
Because this gets you in a very different universe of unintended consequences.
Well thank you.
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