Episode 18
Transcript:
Good afternoon, good evening, good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph, and welcome to Revolution Now, February 14th, 2021. Sorry for the delay in this upload. I had a dramatic series of unexpected domestic and technical problems over the past week. And if it isn't all indicative of how terrible my social life is, yes, I'm here on Valentine's Day, a $20 billion a year highly profitable commercial spectacle that, of course, continues the general degradation of human relationships by associating it with property and commodities and vanity and materialism. It's one thing to have shared cultural traditions that help create social capital and human bonds. I think it's wonderful when you see celebratory things happening across a singular culture. But the pollution inherent to a commercial society pretty much ruins everything.
Now, before I begin, a few quick program notes. I'm still working on the late March lecture titled On the Future of Civilization. I'm trying to find a decent physical space. I was hoping things would ease up a little bit regarding COVID and enable some kind of live audience with questions and so on, more of a community feel, but that looks unlikely still. So it looks like I'm going to get a smaller space and do a live stream and a pre-recorded edit, and just make it look really nice.
And for those that aren't familiar with the program, I want to outline not only a basic diagnosis of what we've been seeing and a prognosis of where we're going, but most importantly, introduce a comprehensive activist platform, a sound approach that works on multiple levels. Working not only to counter current trends, but also build a new community with new economic behavior, new values, in fact, that can have a short-term and long-term effect in shifting the tide. Activists today need to figure out a contrary way to organize and live building out a new system from within.
As far as other projects, I'm sitting on Culture and Decline season two, episode one script right now, and a new outline for the new season. It's tough given budget restraints, but I'm doing my best. I'm also sitting on a whole stack of Medium articles, by the way. I haven't been able to get these things done due to changing conditions, which is really frustrating. I actually can't believe how fast time has gone by. But I'm going to get the sources cleaned up and there's going to be an onslaught of these fairly soon.
In concert with that, I'm also developing a new book. One of the things that's struck me throughout the years when I talk to people is that they would say something to the effect of, "I really thought I was going crazy until I experienced what you've been talking about in this information." So in this book, I want to express not only critical understandings about what's happened in our cultural evolution, but also show the morality gap, the fact that our society's assumption of normality is effectively sociopathic. And that's not some opinion, by the way, it's actually quite measurable.
We live in a world that structurally antagonistic to our habitat while structurally engineering antagonism between individuals and between groups. And yet on the whole, society just doesn't see it, and we reward destructive and antisocial behavior by our economy. And if that isn't sociopathic as a general condition, I don't know what is. Where you're doing something over and over again that's causing harm. You don't recognize it, nor do you feel it. The fact that you can't be truly caring, ethical, and moral in a really deep human way, that is a truly dark place.
That isn't to say that there are not generally thoughtful, moral people out there, of course. In fact, I'm stunned that people are as moral and as ethical as they are, given the incentives around them. People certainly try, but the limits are set. The contrived, competitive scarcity based structure directly limits our ability to be truly honest and truly compassionate. The bar is simply lowered by, of course, the system's incentives and conditioning. And of course, it snowballs, like everything when it comes to generational culture. If this wasn't the case, I don't think any human being would allow themselves to walk over homeless people on the street without instantly seeing them, picking them up, and trying to help them. Likewise, I think if we didn't have this socio-economic climate, structurally induced, people would not be so fundamentally dishonest as they are, as they engage to promote themselves and to angle for their own satisfaction and personal gain in the commercial world as required.
I think there's no greater barometer to the callousness of modern culture and its sociopathic nature than the tolerance we show of all of this suffering and the casual acceptance of the general dishonesty we see everywhere that comes in the form of strategic gaming. People today don't even know they're being dishonest. They're just trying to win. So in this new book concept, I want to highlight that feeling of alienation.
I don't know if anybody saw InterReflections, because I know a lot of people really don't like it, but I like it. But there's a silent film portion that's a horror movie where a girl is followed named 23, and that's what it's all about. It's her experiencing the horror show and the alienation of contemporary society. I honestly think a lot of depressive, addictive, antisocial behaviors we see comes from a place of deep moral alienation in regard to all of this. Not to mention, of course, the deep sociological ramifications of socioeconomic inequality once again. Which, of course, is one of the largest drivers of mental, emotional, and physical health disorders systemically, as many epidemiologists have studied and proven.
We live in a society that's simply not designed to care. It's like a parent that doesn't take care of you as a child. What does that do to your psychology? Parallel that the society itself. We all know what happens to children when they undergo familial neglect. What about societal neglect? What happens to people when they feel like no one cares about them, like they don't matter, born into this social condition? And it takes a deep, psychological toll, I think, on people intuitively. And they don't know why they're depressed. They don't know why they feel this way. So anyway, I hope to try and frame the book from that angle.
All right. All that stated, let's get into this. We're going to continue our prior discussion on post scarcity potentials. In the last episode, we started with renewable energy, including geothermal, solar, and wind power from a base load standpoint, meaning large-scale application, in contrast to mixed use localization, which is also critically important, not only for efficiency, but redundancy, as I hope to talk about later as well. But what we find is that geothermal solar and wind, each and of themselves, could power the world many times over. The secret, once again, is strategic integration. You have to combine these things because of the intermittency problems and negative retroactions. And as also emphasized, geothermal really is where most research and development should be occurring today because there's outstanding potential. But sadly, it really isn't due to the financial investment focus, as was also touched upon.
The way business unfolds with the primary incentive of seeking market share and profit excludes things by force of that pursuit. Why things do and don't happen through the market mechanism really gets to the root of why we have not seen a renewable energy revolution yet, and why we probably will not see a holistic one. It's going to happen in pockets here and there in Europe and beyond. But we're not going to see a holistic one probabilistically anytime soon because of these very dynamics once again.
Industrial action today is based around private enterprise and the gaming strategy of trade through competitive markets. That's what moves the world. And the logic is internal to itself, not what is scientifically appropriate to solve social problems. So what the game carves out as far as where money is put to work is not optimized, and the system paralyzes progress, and hence, problem resolution on many critical levels. Similarly, it's worth reiterating that the same incentive and dynamics actually reduces output integrity. In other words, it draws down quality due to the competitive environment, in stark contrast to what market propagandists would like you to believe.
I've talked about this before with respect to what's called intrinsic obsolescence, which is parallel to planned obsolescence, which I hope most are familiar with. Intrinsic obsolescence is the fact that by nature of the competitive environment, optimization is restricted due to the need to cut costs. This occurs not only with individual good production, but also when it comes to broad investment. Which is also why I disagree with the pursuit of nuclear power, by the way. It would be different if we lived in a world that wasn't constantly cutting corners in this competitive game in the quest for market share and future profitability and gaining investment and beyond. But market dynamics will tend to not produce the kind of integrity really required to secure nuclear power without fear of problems. Obviously, problems can arise within any energy system, but nuclear has a particular danger that I think we're all familiar with, and that danger structurally rests in what we know as cost benefit analysis. It has to turn a profit like everything else.
Obviously, this is the rule of all business behavior. And as serious as a nuclear power plant is, it is still subject to the rules of the market. Investors have to be brought in. Capital costs have to be covered. Typically, the state is involved in some way when it comes to such large scale energy projects. But remember, the state itself, even if it intercedes market dynamics, is still subject to the same basic dynamics. The state is still a business in form, as are all related regulatory agencies.
So I'm starting to run this into the ground, but I think it's very, very important that people are aware of this element, this dynamic of the system. If it's more expensive to build a nuclear power plant as compared to, say, a coal plant, arbitrarily, if the money that has to be put into the construction of something does not result in a relative financial gain by comparison, market logic dictates investors are going to move forward with what is cheaper and more profitable to do, regardless of secondary considerations, such as ecological footprint and beyond, unless there's massive regulatory oversight that overrides it. And in this, and this is my point, investor capital pursuit, is a competitive endeavor. Hence, there's an incentive to seek cost efficiency to make what you're offering the investor more competitive. Meaning figuring out ways to cut corners to save on materials and labor in order to make one investment competitive against another investment once again.
This creates a structural efficiency problem that is really quite terrifying when you think about it. As the old cliche goes, "we produce the best possible goods at the lowest possible prices", as you'll find in your Economics 101 textbook. Yet that very equation, that very propagandized statement, actually means it ensures instantly inferior outcomes as a mathematical inevitability.
As commented before, there's technical efficiency and there's market efficiency. The myth is that they're one and the same. That's what people are taught in classic economic study. But if you follow the laws of cost savings through competitive market dynamics, what the system outputs isn't most optimized for the moment at all. The truth is a science-based approach to creating a given good or output is extremely different than a market-based approach. This is that proxy relationship I always talk about. Market efficiency is efficiency through cost benefit analysis. Technical efficiency is efficiency through strategic design engineering, and system science ultimately in and of itself. So what we have in market efficiency really is technical inefficiency due to the competitive framework of things.
So I hope that's clear and the myth is ever apparent. This whole idea that price and supply and demand and these limited frameworks that we know inherent to market behavior somehow translates in the most optimized use of resources is simply ridiculous.
So coming back to nuclear power, I don't think it's needed if we transcended what we're doing now, when we apply the systems as noted. But if you're going to build a nuclear power plant, I would prefer to see it be built somewhere that isn't run by this kind of system.
And as a final point on this issue, I've talked about this technical efficiency versus market efficiency before. And inevitably, someone comes to the conclusion that it's all about using the most insanely strong and accurate resources arbitrarily, meaning it's just, well, this is the best as we know it. Therefore, it has to be applied to everything. "Let's make everything out of diamonds. Let's make everything out of titanium." That's not what's being implied here. The idea is to make the best possible something in terms of strategic durability, interchangeability, standardization, everything that would create longevity and compatibility for the future as predictable. And it's not an easy equation. This has been talked about in my lecture of Economic Calculation: A Natural Law Resource-Based Economy. And of course, it's in my book. And it's something that needs to be expanded upon because how we actually create a new economy is still open to question, even though the fundamental principles are there. The actual system is not. That's something else I hope to talk about in my lecture, getting people together to finally build out a model for this kind of economic management.
So my point here is that no good is created in a vacuum. If you look at the resources of the world and how and why they're distributed to manufactured products, it's really one giant equation. It's not an individual company's good, it's not an industry sector's good. It is a good that can only be most optimized if all the considerations surrounding its use, related scarcities, potential substitutions are taken into account. A giant chess game looking for efficiency. A truly efficient industrial system of scientific economic management can only take a total inventory perspective breaking down and comparing the functionality of resources and beyond. And of course, it's virtually impossible to do that today, given the fact that the world is controlled by private enterprise that do not network, that have proprietary knowledge. And instead, it's been collapsed down into this myth that all the efficiency we ever need in our world is contained in the price of something and the dynamics therein.
So I hope that's clear. We need to live in a world that's based upon scientific technical efficiency and how we navigate utility, production, distribution and beyond, needless to say. The moment you introduce the dynamics of price through markets is the moment you have immediately decreased efficiency, opening the door for future problems due to vulnerability. And I won't even bother talking about the downstream negative externalities, such as pollution and beyond.
Now, before we jump into the more boring technical stuff with respect to renewable energy once again, I did get a question regarding Jevon's paradox. I'm not quite sure if it's actually pronounced Jevon. I want to say it's pronounced yet Yevon, but hey, let's go with Jevon. Anyway, Jevon's paradox is an economic observation and general theory put forward in the late 19th century. And the observation is that when society increases economic efficiency, technically, we also tend to see an increase in related consumption. And if consumption increases enough, the footprint of that consumption effectively voids the value of the efficiency that made it possible. Hence, the paradox. I hope that's clear.
For example, car companies have made their vehicles more fuel efficient, reducing the cost to power the car and generally reducing pollution, which is important. And yet the public, experiencing the cost reductions, recognizing them, taking advantage of them, then increase demand. More cars are bought and more miles are driven, possibly negating all of the environmental benefits of the efficiency increase by such use. So the extreme argument that has been made regarding this observation is that it's basically pointless to increase efficiency, particularly with respect to the environmental impacts, the footprints. So if we continue to do more with less, lowering costs and increasing efficiency, people with less will simply consume more, negating the ecological benefits. And while I agree, this is a real phenomenon that is observable today.
I completely disagree with this theory of causality. While economists who have discussed Jevons paradox certainly don't fall victim to the fallacy of singular causality, they don't make it this simple. The general idea that regardless of the kind of economy you have, its structure and incentives, regardless of the values of the civilization, any increase in efficiency will be countered by increased consumption is deeply truncated in its reasoning. It's not taking enough into account. The real question that needs to be asked is would Jevons paradox occur in a non-capitalist, non-economic, growth-based system, such as a post-scarcity one? And I think the answer is clearly yes, but only to a degree with very specific conditions, and nothing like we see today. I think the most notable potential for the paradox to express itself in a post-scarcity society is when a breakthrough is first made, where a given inhibiting scarcity is overcome through efficiency, now allowing for the production of a relative abundance in that area, with hence, people able to resolve their deficiency.
For example, let's say you have an island of 1,000 people, and half of that island is just barely surviving, dying prematurely due to malnutrition. They keep reproducing, they still have the same general population, but there's this constant suffering and die off for half the population. In this circumstance, naturally, any efficiency increase to then support the nutritional requirements of those suffering would, of course, result in increased total consumption immediately. Jevon's paradox could very well show itself in such a scenario. But the idea that this efficiency increase increases demand universally is ridiculous when you account for the fact that the market system of economics is explicitly based on cyclical consumption and economic growth to operate. It can't operate any other way. That is really why Jevon's paradox is common today.
If a company can make something cheaper, it's going to incentivize people to want to utilize the new found efficiency to increase activity for expansive economic gain. That is how the business side simply works. While on the general public side, the consumer side, the entire goal of marketing and advertising is to perpetuate increased consumption, to make sure everyone wants to "keep up with the Joneses". If efficiency increases were, in fact, not met by increased consumption, we wouldn't have economic growth, and hence, the market economy would stagnate. Again, markets hate efficiency, so it has to be countered by more consumption. Hence, Jevon's paradox will always emerge in capitalism because there is no incentive for the opposite at all. It's a dynamic between the materialist, non-minimalistic values system disorder present, and the very nature of the economic system itself and what it requires to operate, once again.
So in other words, this is a business side effect. In a society economically based on strategic exploitation of resources for competitive gain, where every human being is forced to sell something to someone else in order to survive, you're never going to have a circumstance where equilibrium is achieved to compliment efficiency increases. This is why people like Peter Diamandis, the Singularity Institute, Ray Kurzweil, Jeremy Rifkin, are generally wrong when they talk about potentials for the future, when they talk about post-scarcity. They're not accounting for the disorder that's inherent to the system. They don't seem to understand that business is never going to adapt properly, regardless of how efficient things become. There will always be the next level of forced consumption, so to speak.
All right, let's jump into hydro or water-based power. Water-based renewable energy extraction generally has two sources, the ocean and river type flows, the gravitation of falling or flowing water, as we all know. The latter is generally referred to as hydroelectric, the hydroelectric dam, et cetera. And today, it's a pretty significant part of the entire existing renewable energy infrastructure, I think accounting for about 70%. On the other hand, the vast potential of the ocean has yet to be harnessed within a fraction of its capacity. As many studies have shown, it's not far-fetched to suggest that ocean power alone could power the world many times over. This could be done through intelligent harvesting of both the various mechanical movements of the ocean, as well as exploiting differences in heat, known as ocean thermal energy conversion, and other means.
I think the most pronounced sea-based potentials at this time appear to be wave, tidal, ocean current, ocean thermal, and osmotic. Waves are primarily caused by winds. Tides are primarily caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Ocean currents are primarily caused by the rotation of the earth. Ocean thermal results from solar heat absorbed on the surface of the ocean. And osmotic power is when freshwater and saltwater meet, exploiting the difference in salt concentration. So let's quickly analyze each one of these, denoting some standard statistics.
Wave. It's been found that wave power is usable global potential, usable meaning reasonably accessible, is about 26,000 terawatt hours a year, assuming constant harnessing, as reported a few years ago, which is almost 20% of total global use. Wave farms, or the construction of wave harnessing plants off of coastline, have seen limited large-scale application at this time, with only about six countries sparsely applying the technology. Locations with the most potential include the western seaboard of Europe, the northern coast of the UK, the Pacific coastlines in North and South America, Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand.
Now, in terms of emerging technology, there's a company called AW Energy, which is producing a technology called Wave Roller. And the company itself, even though it's operating for its own self-interest, does give a stronger terawatt hour reality potential, which is 32,000 terawatt hours of potential as they see it. And basically this mechanism, the Wave Roller, sits on the ocean floor near the coast and moves back and forth with very little environmental impact, and obviously no CO2 emissions of any kind. And you could channel it directly back to the shore or you could store it in what they call green hydrogen. Of course, since the source has no carbon footprint, that's the terminology that's used.
So if you look at this, it's actually quite preliminary in its development, with enormous potential when you look at the scale of our oceans, with great reason to be very positive on it if properly harnessed. And there's actually a solid move toward it, meaning transcending the financial and competitive market limitations that restrict or create such a molasses flow. It just takes fucking forever to get any of this stuff applied because of the dynamics of the market economy.
Next up we have tidal power, and it has two subforms, if you will, range and stream. Tidal range is essentially the rise and fall of areas of the ocean. Tidal streams are currents created by periodic horizontal movement of the tides, often magnified by the shape of the seabed. Different locations of earth, of course, have large differences in range. In the United Kingdom, an area with high levels of tidal activity, dozens of sites are currently noted as available, with one forecast at 34% of all the UK's energy could come from their own tidal power alone.
Globally, some studies have put tidal of capacity at 1,800 terawatt hours a year. And it's interesting to note the efficiency of the mechanisms as we know it, because tidal power can usually convert about 80% of the kinetic energy into actual electricity, as opposed to coal and oil, which converts only 30% of the energy held within. So the net energy relationships are actually very positive, but it's not as powerful as wave. And based on the statistics that I ran, about 7% to 10% of global energy demand could be met through tidal alone. But because of how region specific this tends to be at this time, you really don't see as much investment as you would expect. I think the biggest tidal plant in the world is in South Korea.
Next up, ocean current. Similar to tidal streams, ocean currents have shown great potential. These currents flow consistently in the open ocean. And various technologies already exist, and many emerging technologies are coming to harness this largely untapped medium. In the past, it was established that you needed a water flow of about five to six knots in speed to create something that can be harnessed, and most of the earth's currents are actually slower than three knots. However, recent developments have revealed the potential to harness energy from water flows of less than two knots. Given this, it has been extrapolated that ocean current alone feasibly could power the entire world.
As far as the technology itself, generally they are turbines that are placed in the path of the current, on or above the ocean floor. Now, I spent a lot of time looking for some ocean current advancement data as far as modern technology. And since ocean current often is associated with tidal behavior, even though it's not exactly the same or it's not necessarily required, you have an overlap in the analysis that you see. And it reminds you that this all needs to be approached holistically, because these dynamics are all interweaving throughout ocean behavior.
Next up, osmotic. Osmotic power, or salinity gradient power, is the energy available from the difference in the salt concentration between seawater and river water. The Norwegian Center for Renewable Energy, the SFFE, estimates the global potential to be about 1,370 terawatt hours a year, with others pulling in at around 1,700 terawatt hours a year. That's the equivalent of half of Europe's entire energy demand. While still largely in its baby shoes, osmotic power harnessing through advancing technologies is very promising. Power extraction plants can be built in principle anywhere fresh water meets seawater, and they generate power 24 hours, seven days a week, regardless of weather conditions.
As far as modern applications and advancements, there's a new membrane technology that was introduced in the fall of last year, which is different from the "pressure retarded osmosis", PRO they call it, that was used prior. And it shows much more efficiency potential.
Next up, and final in this list, is ocean thermal. Ocean thermal energy conversion, OTEC, exploiting the differences in heat existing on the surface of the ocean and below it. Basically, technology uses warmer surface water to heat a fluid, converting it into vapor, which expands to drive a turbine. The fluid is then cooled using cold water from the ocean depths, returning it into a liquid state so the process can start all over again. It's very interesting.
Of all the ocean-based energy sources, OTEC appears to have the most potential, believe it or not. It's been estimated that 88,000 terawatt hours a year could be generated without affecting the ocean's thermal structure. In other words, not harming the environment. While this figure may not express total usable capacity, it implies that well over half of the world's total energy consumption could be met with OTEC alone. In recent times, most of the existing OTEC plants are experimental and on a small scale. However, a few major industrial capacity projects have been set in motion, including a 10 megawatt plant off the coast of China and a 100 megawatt plant near Hawaii. In fact, one single 100 megawatt offshore plant can theoretically power Hawaii's entire "big Island" alone.
Now, let's step back and think about the past two podcast episodes. We've covered geothermal, solar, wind, and ocean and all of its variants, and hydroelectric in passing. These are enormous potentials. Some of them are advanced to a degree. Hydroelectric has been around for a long time. In fact, even things like tidal have been around for a long time, but they're used in very primitive ways. Having a little mill that's next to a building that's sitting halfway in the ocean, stuff like that. We've intuitively harnessed a lot of this. But then there's more sophisticated things like osmotic and heat differentials. This stuff is modern science. And what we see across the board is that there is enormous potential. There's no need for concentration in one area. You need a mixed use system. You need a systems-based approach to harness these, overcome intermittencies, and create total energy abundance.
In the next episode, I'll talk more about mixed use strategies and localization, and talk about vertical farms, food and water, purification, desalination and beyond. But I need to emphasize here the fact that what you really need is a systems approach analysis to all of this. There needs to be a literal team that examines, region by region, combining all of these potentials of all of these renewables, to play the chess game to figure out what the most efficient approach is, networking this across the entire globe.
Am I the only one stunned that that has not even been done? Have you noticed that? Nobody has taken on that simple logical process. "What if we combined all the renewables that we know about, and analyze and strategically apply all that stuff across the world region-specific, finding the way the network connects in the giant chess game so we can actually paint a real picture about what's actually fucking possible in terms of global renewable energy production to create a post-scarcity abundance", of course. Yes, you have people finally talking about energy islands off coastlines and stuff like this. There's a lot of emerging conversation. But this should be one of the most important things. There should be a website that's literally designed like a SimCity where you figure out how to calculate exactly the best place to put stuff to achieve the most efficient ends in terms of energy potentials as we know it. That would actually be a great software program idea, if someone wants to jump on that.
All right, everybody. This program is brought to you by all you kind people through my Patreon, if anyone wants to support me. I will be back on the 24th with more noise. So you guys be safe out there and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.