Episode 17
Transcript
Good afternoon. Good evening. And good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now, January 27th, 2021. 2021, sounds like the future. Doesn't it? Too bad we're still living in the goddamn 50's. Right? Especially when it comes to human rights and intelligent economic application. Please excuse me today. I'm a little under the weather. If I sound a little lackluster, I'm going to try and spruce things up as I go. But it is interesting if you go back to the mid 20th century and look at those film reels on the future, and what it was supposed to be, it's kind of fascinating how we ended up in a completely different place instead of using our technological capacity to create an efficient and sustainable abundance to stabilize human society, to take care of each other. We have instead monetized that economic efficiency that we've created, to rather produce a Legion of billionaires and more caustic inequality, while half the world lives in absolute poverty or dangerous relative poverty on less than $5.50 a day.
And as I talk about in my book, one great myth of capitalist evolution, particularly during the rise of the anti-capitalist sentiment and the existence of socialism and communism by whatever historical definition in the mid-early 20th century. It was that, if we just let capitalism continue with its brute force innovation process, the abstracted scarcity forcing everyone to compete, and therefore innovation will prevail and therefore efficiency will prevail. We will have a more egalitarian reality. This was actually argued as a counterpoint, as a counter-argument to people that were professing interest in socialism and communism. Literally, they said, "Oh, well just let us do this for a while. It's going to get more egalitarian out there." Which is a half-truth at best. It may be true to a degree, but whatever material progress has occurred is quickly overwritten by the vast socioeconomic inequality and the physical and mental sickness and destabilization that comes from that. Setting aside the tremendous habitat burden that this, brute force scarcity based economy has fostered with every single life support system in decline, all to feed the machine of cyclical consumption.
Our civilization has evolved to become increasingly more commodified and marketized as well. Things that were once sacred held away from the derogatory evaluation of money, have been slowly eroded. Embraced by the pattern of putting a dollar sign on literally everything. So much so that, people's very identity has become lost, and they just don't know who they are anymore because of the restructural relationship of the market itself. We have been commodified. We view ourselves as economic instruments and value ourselves as such, at least the majority tends to by a force of culture. I mean, we know that, for example, social media in its current state, monetizes people, you are the product on social media. And that's almost a kind of matrix metaphor. Isn't it? Yet it's just another kind of level to the evolving social cancer, we wrongfully call economics, because we don't have an economic system.
We have an anti-economic system. In truth, you are just a product. You are a cog, you are a mechanism and nothing more. The market religion has its priests and its servants all worshiping the same structural reality, praying that the market god will grant good fortune to them. Which is ultimately a random kind of distribution, when you look at who's successful and who isn't in this society. And as is consistent with general religion, since market economics is a near zero sum game. Where for one to be extremely wealthy, it requires others to be extremely poor. The market god blesses those who adhere to the religious tenets, while punishing those who decry them. And needless to say those that decry those tenets, are the ones with the true moral compass. The ones that have not become victim of the soft sociopathology that defines our culture today. Those that choose not to aspire to acquisition and human exploitation as a mode of conduct, as an ethic and pride themselves on abusing people, which is what our system does.
Those that refuse to accept as normal, the systemic abuse of everything, our habitat, all for the sake of keeping the consumption machine going, and the narrow narcissism that comes along with that. A system structure based on an infinite growth incentive, which means everybody has no sense of security. Those that actually do care about their family, and society, and the world are the heretics of the market religion. While those that achieve and hoard great wealth; flaunt their gaming prowess, as they strategically try to undermine and exploit everything and everyone around them for personal gain in the game of business, which is what it is, are a sadly enough, the ones that yield power and control in our world. The billionaire class has no discomfort with the fact that they are billionaires and people aspire to these conceptions of success, of course, showing the degree of mental illness as we ping the absolute worst characteristics of human nature by the incentives and procedural dynamics of the social system we have.
Status advancement, materialism, insatiable acquisition, which all leads to a propertied and groupistic mentality. And hence leads to the perpetuation of sexism, racism and general out group indifference. Charles Darwin's concept of fittest, has been bastardized and distorted to mean the most strategically competitive. In tandem with the perverted mind of Thomas Malthus and his influence as he concluded that there simply would never be enough to go around. Therefore, war is inevitable. This bastardized Darwinian worldview, coupled with the Malthusian perspective, is what the dominant economic and social philosophies of our world today are underscored by. And it is my hope that podcasts like this along with other thoughtful media, by which I hope everyone attempts to make a contribution. Along, of course, with various strategic development and activism focused- will begin to shift the sick value system disorder, pushing for change in the very structure of our social system. We either do this, or we perish as a civilization.
All right. Opening monologue aside. The subject for today is Post Scarcity Potentials, as briefly touched upon in the prior episode. What I'm going to do is go through some research that I've written about prior as a general overview, and then give some more modern trends and ambitious potential trends that we are seeing mostly coming from the entrepreneurial community, of course. I point out the entrepreneurial community because that is of course the nature of how our system today attempts innovation, even though it's all very unfortunate and wasteful. As I've said before, if there's going to be any intelligent future, we're going to have to abolish corporations and the very practice of business and trade in general. It's incompatible with sustainability by its very structure. And in this transition, it's my view that the new hub of strategic innovation, problem solving and overall industrial development will be the university system.
The university system is already set up to take over all of commercial society, if we let it, linked together globally in open source. Instead of people going to college being put into debt. So they are forced to specialize with the incentive to basically make money and not necessarily contribute to society, that proxy relationship. We don't actually contribute anything. We assume that if we make money off of something, that means it must have some type of value, which is far from the case in many circumstances. So the university system becomes an integrated developmental think tank for all things human related. Imagine going to a university as a student, young, and instantly you're in the actual field of development that has real world implications, not just training for some financially motivated profession.
And suddenly you have a world where people are actually engaged in interests and disciplines they find interesting and hence are motivated to do, which only saves wasting people's lives, due to the current systems, perpetuation of artificial scarcity, where nobody is taken care of by its design and the grand mythology of freedom. The collective innovation potential due to the sharp focus allowed in this circumstance would no doubt exponentially catapult problem resolution to any issue we wish to solve.
So let's start with energy. Needless to say, an abundance of energy allows for an abundance of productive capacity. It's hard to imagine what life was like before the industrial revolution and the dawn of the hydrocarbon based economy. In the same way, it will be hard to imagine what modern society was like when we finally pioneer and prevail with a new renewable energy infrastructure transcending, the hydrocarbon based economy entirely. And I think the key word when discussing renewable energy potential is system. By system, meaning the attributes that are integrated and how.
As of today, there is no Holy Grail, while each renewable potential is extremely strong, the complexity of region and factors such as intermittency means a highly inclusive system design is extremely important. A mixed use system of renewables, coupled with other kinds of reuse mechanisms instituted on all feasible levels with strategic design. It's all about strategic design. And when you put it all together, you begin to see that there's no reason for any of us to use hydrocarbons for anything today, with perhaps the exception, in the meantime, of fertilizers and very large airline travel. Which I think should rightfully be replaced by bullet trains and as far as fertilizer, well, the entire agricultural revolution is for another discussion.
My favorite example of this kind of thinking is, the power generating gym. There are some small scale versions of this, believe it or not, out there and they're even bikes, I think you can get for your home that will power a battery when you use it. It's pretty smart, even though a little gimmicky. But the sheer concept of harnessing human energy in a reuse philosophy is something I don't think many people think about too often. There are so many examples of this. Such as on the side of the highway, there are these things that were built that spin as cars go by and they generate power. Electric sensors that capture kinetic energy on sidewalks or in roads generating power as people drive by or walk.
And while such examples may produce small amounts of energy, it may seem very marginal. If you make a strategic attempt to really incorporate recapture, what may seem like a minor effect could quickly become quite major. In fact, that is probably the ultimate engineering angle when it comes to efficiency, by the way. And again, I'm going to talk about base load means in more serious applications in the second. But I think this is important thing to think about. There's even a guy I read about recently that was capturing kinetic energy from his children's teeter-totter or the Seesaw. It may again seem all very minor, but this is the way everyone should be thinking when it comes to reuse. And it's not just about electricity or energy, it's about all things, water and beyond.
Now that aside. A core concept that I think most are familiar with when it comes to renewable energy is net energy or net energy gain. This is a subject of debate today and was talked about a great deal, for example, in Michael Moore's poorly produced documentary, Planet Of The Humans. Net energy gain has to do with how much energy and resources go into the production of something such as a windmill, versus how much energy can be produced by that windmill. Obviously, if it takes more energy and resources to produce something that, that something can't produce back in surplus, it's not worth doing. This has been a long standing argument, for example, in the peak oil community. Before the rise of nonconventional oil sources, which have been harvested with great aggression through fracking and so on, the question was always, if we're going to use conventional oil, how much energy is it going to take for us to find that oil and get it, versus how much we actually get out of the oil itself in terms of energy.
On a broader level, it's also worth thinking about how the net energy gain concept can relate to society itself. As Buckminster Fuller in his book, Critical Path wrote. I don't have it in front of me at this time. So I'm going to be paraphrasing this. Basically, he points out that people going into cities, pushing paper around in office buildings all day, actually don't produce any significant wealth. They are wasting energy with the lights and the gas in their cars to do intangible business oriented things for money. And he actually points out that it was more efficient for these folks to simply stay home because they're just wasting resources in their business activities. So the net energy gain, so to speak in the broad conception of wealth creation, was put on trial in his view, which I thought was very appropriate. This also applies conceptually to a statistic I've talked about before and is in my book, which notes that, when you consider major industries and the negative externalized costs, we find that no company on the planet is really profitable at all.
When compared to the damage done, the negative externalized costs. And that's by the standards set forward by the market economy itself, profit versus loss. In other words, if this is unfamiliar to you, the negative externalities, the costs that are not factored in the price due to things like pollution that has to be cleaned up, when taken into account as a whole, the negative costs that need to be paid by someone, at least in principle, actually exceeds the general profitability of everyone. In other words, everyone would be in the red. If we actually accounted for the negative externalized costs and hence the damage we were causing to the planet. Trillions of dollars, trying to clean up the oceans, trillions of dollars, trying to resolve air pollution. Trillions of dollars, trying to counter biodiversity loss, et cetera. In fact, you really can't put a number on any of this when you think about it.
I mean the total ecological costs downstream externalized really is probably in the quadrillions. Again, it's preposterous systemically to even try to put a value on. Now, moving on. Energy is probably best thought of in two ways, base load, which is very large grid generation that serves perhaps an entire city, in contrast to localized. Localized being things such as putting up solar panels on your house and installing a heat pump, perhaps a small wind generation device on your roof. And perhaps even some kind of kinetic energy capture. I briefly touched upon before in this kind of recapture mix use conception that I think really everyone should think about, in a strategic way, not only on the micro level, but also the macro level.
Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro, (water driven) have both base load and localized potentials. In my book, The New Humans Rights Movement. I go through each, in terms of base load potentials to show a crude yet revealing set of statistics. By the way, I'm not going to include things like biofuels or nuclear here, because I think they are inferior; dangerous. So I don't really think they're necessary in this equation, though I'm sure others will argue for them in some way. So let's start with geothermal, which no doubt has the strongest baseload potential since it is using heat being generated by the earth itself.
The amount of heat within 10,000 meters of earth surface contains 50,000 times more energy than all the oil and natural gas resources in the world today. The most notable user of geothermal is of course, Iceland. 90% of all homes in Iceland are powered by geothermal in a base load way. Iceland is unique and its geography of course, because the region has tectonic plates, which allow for easier access to the heat, versus other regions where drilling would have to go far deeper into the Earth's crust to access the same amount of heat. And the 20 or so countries that are currently harnessing this technology tend to be near these fault lines that allow easier access.
On the global scale today, however, geothermal accounts for only about 1% of source energy, and while there are problems associated with geothermal, as we know it, including the potential for earthquakes and some pollution, there is nothing on the scale of the negative problems with hydrocarbon production. And the question of what really holds this development back comes down to investment. In today's world, investment means money as opposed to scientific investment, which is about learning and getting things done. If you're an investor in a commercial sense, your interest is to make money off of your investment. That is the principle motivation that we have in our society with the secondary motivation to try and help the world. But that is not the priority, going back to this capitalist proxy incentive problem. From a financial perspective, if you analyze the growth, so to speak, of geothermal potential, economically in a financial sense, you get a very, very small percentage return each year when compared to other renewables, such as solar. While solar, of course has great use and potential and is showing some exponential increases in efficiency.
It is still a fairly weak base load mechanism as compared to the vast potential of geothermal. And yet solar is currently a better investment in terms of the return someone can gain financially based on the numbers. In the same way, an enormous amount of investment is still going into hydrocarbons with fracking and other nonconventional that are harming the planet, because the business numbers make more sense, because the infrastructure's there, et cetera, and so on, easier to make profit off of these things, which sadly enough, displaces focus on things that really need the most focus and development. So keep that in mind.
Now, as far as where we are today, technically the modern application of geothermal is called EGS or Enhanced Geothermal Systems. And there are a few variations of this technology. As time has moved forward, we have seen great improvement in the mechanistic requirements of this approach, such as deep drilling potentials in regions that do not benefit from the relational tectonic plates. We can dig a whole lot deeper and a whole lot more efficiently now than we did say 10 years ago. But it's still rather cost prohibitive when compared to other financial investments once again. And that is just sad. If you associate the research and development toward the goal of globally harnessing geothermal energy safely, with financial costs and prospective gains, if that's your MO, we are never going to see this technology rise as rapidly as we need it to, as the hydrocarbon pollution crisis continues.
The fact is, of all the literature I've read, if there is any particular area that needs to be rapidly developed, it is enhanced geothermal systems. As the core of base load earthly means of energy production. The potential is simply too enormous as a base load energy source. Today the world uses about half a zettajoule a year. 0.55 to be exact. Based on statistics from a few years ago. An MIT study found that, 13,000 zettajoule of power are currently reserved, hence only 0.0004% needs to be captured to power the world for an entire year. As far as what is practically accessible, with some technological improvements, according to MIT, 2,000 zettajoule are available. And again, we only use 0.55.
So, abundance potential is an understatement. No intermittency problems and the idea of depletion of such a vast source of heat is not an issue. Geothermal also uses much less land. A typical geothermal facility is about 404 square meters of land per gigawatt hour. While a coal facility uses 3,632 square meters per gigawatt hour. If we do a basic comparison of geothermal with coal using this ratio of square meters to gigawatt hour, we find that we could fit about nine geothermal plants in the space of one coal plant. Furthermore, if you take the thousand megawatt power station example to which there are a few with geothermal, operating at full capacity, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would produce 8.7 million megawatt hours a year. The world's current annual usage in megawatt hours is about 153 billion, which means it would take an abstraction about 17,500 geothermal plants to match total global use.
According to the World Coal Association, there are over 2300 coal plants in operation today. And using the aforementioned plant size capacity comparison of about nine geothermal plants fitting into one coal plant. The space of 1,900 or 84% of total coal plants in existence would be needed. State that again, 1,900 coal plants can contain 17,500 geothermal plants. Also, it's worth taking into account that coal today only accounts for 41% of the world's energy production. So we could be producing 59% more than that in this scenario. And again, this is a very raw abstraction, but it gives you a sense of potential. By the way, if you're not familiar with the megawatt versus megawatt hours, technical distinction: A megawatt is a unit of power, and a megawatt hour is energy capacity. In other words, energy is the amount of work done, whereas, power is the rate of doing work. So, for example, a generator with one megawatt capacity that consistently operates at that capacity for one hour will produce one megawatt hour of electricity.
So returning to this, geothermal alone could power human civilization for literally millions of years, if proper scientific energy was put forward along with proper industrial mobilization. And yet once again, what holds all this back is the process of investment and return through market gaming. And the same market gaming that has slowed to a crawl general renewable development, because everyone wants to invest in the existing infrastructure of hydrocarbons, not to mention the cartel and crony relationship of the oil industries of the world with governments of the world, hence legislation, hence lobbying and all the other interferences that stop general human progress.
Remember, this is the true free market. To be able to buy anything and everything, including legislation to help your industry. Long story short, geothermal energy is where everything should be focused on right now. And we're seeing very little interest or investment. Now, let's move on to solar. As we all know, more energy strikes the earth surface in about two hours than total worldwide energy consumption for a year. The problem with solar of course, is the intermittency and to a degree, net energy gain issues, which are always debatable. The most recent research I found, notes that photovoltaics lasts about 20 to 25 years. And the energy put into creating those instruments takes about one to four years to pay back depending. The other part of the argument has to do with the materials used in photovoltaics, such as the semiconductor silicon. Silicon is the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust.
The silicon that goes into photovoltaics comes mostly from quartz as of today, which is mined, but a shift has also been made to quartz rich sand as well. And as some may know, there is a lot of debate about sand basically becoming scarce, at least in its most refined form. I don't think that the silicon semiconductors required for photovoltaics is going to reach extreme scarcity anytime soon. Plus I think new processes will emerge, but I do think innovation is required to look for other alternatives as we always should. One innovation to replace silicon is, perovskite. Perovskite cells, which have shown to convert with an efficacy of 22%, which is right up there with silicone-based cells. But as an update to this innovation just a few weeks ago an org, out of the UK called Oxford PV, claims they're using perovskite cells to achieve 30% efficiency. Also overcoming some of the practical issues with perovskites itself, as it has some temperamental properties.
This is just one progressive example, and anyone can punch this up. And since solar is by far right now, the most popular renewable, most likely we're going to see exponential advancement of this efficiency over time as investors pile in, because they see dollar signs. And I think in another stage of progress, which is already on the table will be nanotechnology development. And you'll have things like film on your windows or constructed directly into your home in various practical matters, converting sunlight to energy at 40 to 50%. Vast mass produced and ideally extremely recyclable. So these important minerals are simply not wasted. But of course, once again, if we're using the game of markets, which sadly we are, all of this will move about a 100 times more slowly than it actually should due to competitive market dynamics. All of that noted, if we step back to where we are now in terms of traditional usage and think about the potential, ignoring these future improvements in design and efficiency, even though they are inevitable. The Ivanpah Solar Electrical Generating System in California is a good basis for analysis.
And we find that in order to meet total global demand, about 500 million acres of solar fields, based on the Ivanpah model would be needed. The Ivanpah solar field is about 3,500 acres with a stated annual generation of about 1.1 million megawatt hours. Which means about 141,000 of these fields or about 500 million acres once again, would theoretically be needed to meet current global energy based on its output. That in the broad view is about 1.4% of total land on earth, which of course has a huge amount, yet if storage and infrastructure was improved, making location less critical, only 4.1% of the world's desert land would be needed. Desert land that is currently not used whatsoever. Again, I'm not advocating in such an extreme project, a true base load sustainable infrastructure is going to be a combination of sources, network together, strategically taking into account the benefits or lack thereof of any given region.
It's a chess game. But it's not completely inconceivable, technically, that the world's deserts could be used, generating enormous amounts of power incorporating of course, storage technology where energy produced in say, a desert in California can be driven deep into the country or exported. And the best solution for that seems to be hydrogen, as opposed to lithium ion battery storage. You can use the hydrogen gas as the medium to contain the energy from the solar panels. And then you can ship that gas like anything else. It can be stored for years and so on. For those unfamiliar with that, it's actually quite common. There are actually people out there that have built their own solar to hydrogen storage systems for their own homes. They have solar panels on their home, and then they run them into hydrogen tanks where a process occurs and the energy is stored.
And it doesn't matter when nighttime comes, because the energy is perfectly stored. One website that I recently posted on social media, which I thought was minimalistic, but still cool in terms of principle is called the hydrogenhouseproject.org, hydrogenhouseproject.org, and the framework that he puts forward, even though he spent a lot of money on this, shows the actual potential. He is able to generate in three months, all the power he needs for the entire year, completely off the grid independently with his own technology. The point being, it's completely conceived that you could have vast fields of solar that run this power into hydrogen. And then that hydrogen is moved around just like natural gas has been. And of course, hydrogen comes from simple water. And the final subject I will cover for this particular episode, which I will continue next episode is wind power.
A Stanford University study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, found that if only 20% of the wind potential on the planet was harnessed, it would cover the entire world's energy needs. According to the international energy agency, offshore wind now, has the potential to generate more than 420,000 terawatt hours per year, worldwide. More than 18 times global energy demand today. Like solar, it has intermittency problems and technology could use some substantial efficiency improvement as with anything. The net energy gain according to a 2014 study called comparative lifecycle assessment of two megawatt wind turbines found that two megawatt wind turbines installed in Northwest USA, paid for themselves in about five to six months with a 20 year life cycle. And all of this once again, will continue to improve if proper focus is kept. Remember the general law of exponential technological development, once data sets are allowed to be computed by machines, the exponential properties of Moore's law by force of calculation power, translates into information technology in general.
Once you link the processing power of computers to information technology, you have the potential for exponential development in any given area as incorporated. Whatever problems people complain about with respect to the creation of wind farms or the use of turbines will decrease over time, no doubt. As is the case with solar, geothermal and everything else. And to give yet another crude example of potential here. The 9,000 acre Alta Wind Energy Center in California, has an active capacity of about 1300 megawatt hours of power. Using that plant as a basis, a theoretical annual output of 11 million megawatt hours is possible. This means 13,000, 9,000 acre wind farms would be needed, theoretically, to meet the global output of 0.55 zettajoule a year. Which also means of course, that 119 million acres of wind sufficient land would be required. This amounts to 0.3% of the Earth's surface.
And again, this is all a theoretical abstraction. It's not to suggest an ideal circumstance just like with the solar wind farms. Yet again, of course there's great potential, especially if you used hydrogen storage once again. However, as touched upon before, one of the more unique realities arising is the potential for off shore harnessing. Compared to land-based wind, offshore wind has an average a much larger yield as wind speeds tend to be much higher. This reality also alleviates land-based pressures, given land scarcity and regional restrictions. According to the assessment of offshore wind energy resources for the United States, 4,100 gigawatts of potential wind turbine capacity from offshore wind resources are available in the United States alone.
Assuming this power capacity were consistent for a year. We end up with an energy conversion of 36.3 billion megawatt hours a year. Given the United States as per 2010 statistics, we find that offshore wind harvesting alone would exceed national use by about 10.6 billion megawatt hours or 41%. And extrapolating this U.S. capacity to the rest of the world's coastlines, taking into account the aforementioned land-based statistics that showed that we could power the world many times over onshore as well, the possibilities of wind based energy abundance is exceptional.
And now I'm going to stop here for today and highlight the fact that, naturally we don't need any of these extreme applications of either; solar, wind or even geothermal, even though geothermal really should be the focal point. It's all about integration and system design practically regionally like a chess game to figure out what the greatest application of efficiency would be. Again, networking these things together. I haven't talked about hydro or water yet, which I will the next episode, but it also has great potential. It's easy to theorize things like energy islands off of the coastlines that have solar, wind, and hydro, powering into hydrogen cells or some other equivalent kind of storage, pumping that energy back to the mainland, not to mention all the other things that you can speculate upon.
If anyone wants to look at the numbers of any of this, most of this stuff is in the appendices of my book, The New Human Rights Movement. That all stated, next time, I'm going to talk about, desalination, purification, and food production, and try to incorporate all this together into one sort of train of thought. The show is brought to you by my Patreon. I'm still working on the event for late March for the lecture. I'm having a hard time finding any kind of venue that's willing to tolerate it because of the COVID stuff, but I'll keep everybody apprised and stay safe out there. And I'll see you guys in two weeks as I need to free up some time so I can get some of these other projects off the ground. All right everybody. Take care out there.