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VALERA ZAKHAROV: Hello, welcome to our Green At Google
and Authors At Google Talk Series.
My name is Valera Zakharov.
And today, we have a pretty uncomfortably exciting talk
for you today.
We have with us, a local San Francisco-based
author, Ozzie Zehner.
And the book is called "Green Illusions--
The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of
Environmentalism." And the book has been causing shock
waves, as "The Sunday Times" reported recently.
And it's been pretty eye opening actually, and
interesting to follow some of the debates raging out there
on various internet resources.
Meanwhile, Ozzie has been busy with his book tour.
So he's done a lot of appearances on environmental
segments, some of which would have been featured on CNN,
PBS, BBC, and Public Radio.
When he's not on the road, Ozzie is a visiting scholar at
the University of California, Berkeley, where he researches
the social, political, and economic conditions
influencing energy policy
priorities and project outcomes.
I'm also proud to say that Ozzie a fellow engineer.
He has an engineering degree from Kettering University and
a graduate degree in science and technology from University
of Amsterdam.
Before we get started, let me do a little poll.
How many of you guys own an electric or a
hybrid vehicle here?
So that's great, because Ozzie is not planning to talk about
that part of the book today.
But I think it's going to be a pretty relevant
talk to all of us.
We at Google are committed to building a sustainable future,
both as individuals and as a company.
And at the same time, we love and we believe in technology.
So with that in mind, actually Ozzie told me that he's really
looking forward to our perspective and so he's
looking forward to your questions and feedback at the
end of this talk.
So without taking any more time away from that Q&A, I
would like to welcome to Google, the author of "Green
Illusions," Ozzie Zehner.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Thank you very much, Valera.
And thank you very much all of you for coming today.
I really appreciate it.
And thank you for those tuning in online as well.
I'm going to speak for about a half an hour and then take
questions and answers.
So I know you're all very busy, so if you want to leave
after the talk, that's fine.
If it's that bad, you can leave during the talk.
This is not going to be a lecture about how we must
think or how we must talk.
Rather, I'm going to consider how we might think and talk
differently about our energy challenges.
Now, you will all be designing the built and conceptual
environment that we live in.
And as such, I suspect you will be answering a lot of the
questions that I'm struggling with.
And so the story we will lay bare
today is far from settled.
And it really is my hope that you will help complete it.
So let's get started.
The premise of my book, "Green Illusions," is essentially
that green technologies are not what they seem.
They might not be what you think they are.
They might not be the saviors that they're made out to be.
And I argue that alternative energy technologies rely on a
way of legacy thinking.
But anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself.
So I wanted to start actually with a little
bit about my history.
I wasn't always a green energy questioner, I guess.
It actually was just the opposite.
And I once founded and operated a vertically
integrated wind power operation in Michigan, when I
was 12 years old.
And I was very stylish at that time.
And I ran my short-lived wind power operation out of my
parents' house.
And behind our house was a garage, and inside that garage
was a turbine, thanks to my dad's job at an industrial fan
manufacturer.
And I found a rusty steel pipe to kind of use as an axle.
And I had to build a kind of a wooden frame.
My parents had neglected to teach me to weld, so I had to
go with wood.
And I also had not secured any funding for a tower and so I
used a picnic table.
And then one windy day, I hauled the contraption out,
onto the picnic table.
I lifted it up on there.
I weighed it down with bricks, inserted the turbine assembly.
And there was very little time to appreciate my work, because
it started spinning,
uncomfortably fast, very rapidly.
And at that point, it had become apparent that I had
neglected to install a braking mechanism.
So I grabbed a brick and I shoved it against the axle.
And it was like sparking and hissing.
And the steel sails just effortlessly accumulated
greater speed.
And in a sense, I had created an upended lawn mower, that
was kind of thumping with an increasing rhythm.
And at first, the frame was vibrating and then the whole
picnic table started vibrating.
And really what happened
thereafter can only be deduced.
Because by that time, my adrenaline-filled legs had
already carried me halfway around the house.
But when I returned, I found an empty
picnic table, in flames.
So this was the first of many failures in my life, actually.
There was another one, we don't have to go
through all of them.
But what I was 17, I build a hybrid electric car, that also
ran on natural gas.
And it was not very fast.
I'm pretty sure it was not safe.
And it got stranded in the halls of my high school and so
forth, but not before I got a photo op with the local paper.
And after that, I went to engineering school.
And I worked in green tech in Europe for several years.
And when I moved back to the United States, I decided to
start a green architectural firm in a historic district of
Washington, DC.
One of my first clients was a diplomat, who wanted to live
in a solar house.
And of course, I loved solar cells, so it
seemed like a good fit.
And he already had the building.
It was this 100-year-old house that had seen better days.
And about the same time the house was built, someone had
planted two oak trees on the western side of the house.
By the way, would anyone like to guess why they planted the
oak trees there?
AUDIENCE: To block solar cells.
OZZIE ZEHNER: To block solar--
this guy's thinking ahead.
AUDIENCE: Privacy.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Privacy.
I heard a lot of people say shade.
I think you're absolutely right, for all of these
reasons probably.
Well, actually I have no idea.
I wasn't there 100 years ago to witness who
exactly planted the trees.
But I can guess that that was probably the reason.
But regardless, these trees were great.
Because they blocked the summer sun.
And in the winter, the leaves would fall off and they will
allow the Sun to shine through the branches and warm the
home's exterior.
And this kind of passive solar technology is eons old.
So as a result, the annual utility bills for this house
were thousands of dollars less than a house that was just
down the street that was brand new.
And these trees had been doing this every
year, for 100 years.
And as a green architect, my first job was
to chop them down.
And the solar cells demanded it, as this man pointed out.
You can't put solar cells on the roof of a shaded house.
And I would soon find out that this was first of many demands
that the solar cells would make.
And demand number two, was for lots of money.
And if you read anything about solar cells these days, you'll
likely be left with the impression that solar cell
costs are dropping and the price curve looks
something like this.
But over the past decade, the installed cost of solar cells
actually looked like this.
So why is there such a discrepancy?
Well, part of the reason has to do with subsidies.
Subsidies give the illusion of a price drop, when really just
someone else is paying for it.
But there's a little bit more to the story than that.
Journalists, for instance, point to the price of
polysilicon and the technical components of solar cells.
And indeed, those costs are dropping.
But polysilicon for instance, represents just a fifth of the
cost of an installed solar system.
The bulk of a solar system is low tech things like copper,
glass, aluminum, framing, transportation, installation.
You'd still have to pay for all of those, even if the
price of polysilicon were to drop to zero.
And so those things get pretty expensive, especially when you
start getting into things like the rare earth metals and
heavy metals, which incidentally brings us to our
next demand of solar cells, is that they require some pretty
toxic stuff.
Now, solar cell manufacturing involves the use or release of
numerous compounds explosive, compounds and toxic, compounds
like the cell here, which contains cadmium, like most
thin-film technologies, which the EPA recognize as a toxin.
Now, what happens with this at the end of its life?
If we incinerate this, it goes up into the air and eventually
into the waterways.
And if we bury it, then it can leak in
the groundwater supplies.
And not very much of this is biodegradable.
So today, that's not a big deal.
Solar cell generation is tiny.
In fact, the supplies is less than 1/10 of 1%
of America's power.
If this bucket represented US energy consumption, then this
is what the solar cell share would look like.
Now as social production grows, then so will the
associated side effects.
But to my dismay, the demands of the solar cells did not
stop there.
The United Arab Emirates recently conducted one of the
largest cross-comparison tests of solar technologies to date.
And they did so because they were building this
eco-metropolis called Masdar City.
You might have heard of it.
For this test, they gathered a whole lot of solar cells from
a lot of different manufacturers.
And their goal was to find which manufacturer had the
best solar cell.
But once this test begin, it drew attention to something
else, which was the disadvantages and limitations
that all of the solar cells shared in common.
So a desert might seem like the best place
to put a solar cell.
And indeed, it's one of the best.
But there were problems.
The first was haze and humidity, which reflect and
disperse the Sun's rays.
The next was dust, which technicians had to scrape off
almost daily.
And in other parts of the world, you have to deal with
pollution, hail, snow, ice, these sorts of factors.
And the third was heat.
So right in the middle of the day when the solar cells
should have been producing their highest output, they got
incredibly hot, which hobbled their output across the board.
Now, in addition to all of these
effects, solar cells age.
And their output fades by about 1% a year.
The newer technologies degrade even more rapidly than that.
But an even larger surprise awaits solar cell owners.
After about five to 10 years, their solar array will
suddenly stop producing power.
And that's because a key component of the solar system,
the inverter, will eventually fail.
Now, solar cells can last 20 to 30 years,
something like that.
But inverters don't.
The inverters have to be replaced about two to five
times during the life of a solar system.
This is by the way, what one looks like.
Fortunately, any electrician can easily swap
one of these out.
But unfortunately, each one costs about
the same as a furnace.
And incidentally, there's one more reason I'll mention why a
solar array can stop working.
This is Glenda Hoffman's roof.
She woke up one morning to discover that thieves stole 16
panels off her roof as she slept.
And in fact, solar thefts are on the rise nationally.
And the cost to replace her system chimed in at about
$95,000, an expense that her insurance company covered.
But nevertheless, she intends to protect
the new panels herself.
And this is what you told the "New York Times."
Now, a lot of people say that these demands are worth it.
If solar power yields less CO2 than fossil fuel power, then
does this offer justification for subsidizing solar cells?
Well, first we have to consider costs.
Even some of the most expensive options for dealing
with CO2 would become cost competitive long before
today's solar technologies, making solar cells perhaps
seem like a rather wasteful strategy.
Why would we for instance mitigate one ton of CO2 using
solar, when we could mitigate five tons or 10 tons elsewhere
for the same cost?
Secondly, solar cell manufacturing involves the use
or release of other types of greenhouse gases.
And these are used to make solar cells.
And they make CEO seem harmless.
These greenhouse gases are 10,000 to 25,000 times more
potent than CO2, according to the IPCC.
And we are now learning that one of the fastest growing
emitters of these gases is the solar cell industry.
So I was in the position of having to explain
all this to my client.
And I didn't really know where to start.
But I had to like list off these demands.
I mean they demanded that we retrofit the
roof, first of all.
They demanded that we purchase lots of insurance.
The solar cells demanded regular cleaning.
They demanded expensive inverters
every five to 10 years.
They demanded a lot of money.
They demanded an expensive funeral.
They demanded to be buried in a specially sealed, toxic
waste plot.
And of course, they demanded that those pesky trees would
have to be chopped down.
Now, think for a moment what would you have done if you are
in my position?
What would you have advised my client to do?
Well, here's what the numbers looked like.
For every $100 he spent on solar panels, he would produce
this much energy.
For every $100 that he spent on LED lighting, he
would save this much.
The value of the trees, the added insulation, and the
efficient appliances would be even greater.
In the end, I advised him against a solar cell
installation.
And instead, told him that he should keep the trees and
spend the money on energy efficiency and energy
reduction techniques.
And the long story short is that I was fired.
And that's because he had already made his decision.
The solar cells were going to stay.
And the trees, well--
Now, my experience was not unique.
For instance, an old grove north of here was chopped down
to install solar cells.
And the oil company BP, chopped down 42,000 trees
outside Brookhaven National Laboratories for solar.
And the oil--
a company, not an oil company, but another company in New
Jersey, took down about five acres of trees to build a
solar array that would power a facility to make plastic bags.
I kind of think that puts a new spin on
paper versus plastic.
Again, we might think it's worth it to
offset dirty coal use.
But it's important to note that none of these solar
projects will offset the CO2 debt from clear-cutting the
forests that they sit on, for reasons we
will come to shortly.
The solar cells also will not replace the other benefits of
the forests, such as things like air cleansing, water
filtration, and trails, and other benefits.
But the fate of these trees is ultimately a casualty of a
certain way of thinking, a presumption that the way to
solve our energy problems is to produce more energy.
The ethical implications of this remind me of a movie that
I just saw last month, a classic film, "2001, A Space
Odyssey." Has anyone here seen the movie?
Oh, wow.
Let the record show that almost every one
raised their hand.
So you might remember a computer named Hal.
Hal was programmed to carry out a certain mission.
And he followed that mission without consideration of the
changes around him or respect for human
life, as it turns out.
Hal thought if the astronauts are endangering the mission,
then turn off their life support.
If the trees are blocking the solar cells, then
chop down the trees.
This is a kind of mission-directed ethical trap
that we sometimes fall into because we're human.
And that's typically because we think we have a good idea,
a good sense of our ethical bearings.
And our job is to apply them to our daily life.
But as you all know, ethics can often be more than that.
You'll recognize this motto, I'm sure.
Now as you all know, Google ventured into China, for
instance, to expand its mission of bringing more
information to more people.
But in order to expand its mission, it was required to
censor search results.
Now, Google refused to censor the search results.
And this is a good example of how ethical reasoning is more
than just applying our ideals to the world.
It's more than just a mission.
It also involves looking at the world, seeing what we can
see, and then letting those visions
inform our ethical thoughts.
But there's a lot that can get in the way.
For instance, when I spoke with my client, I made the
mistake of thinking that the facts could speak for
themselves.
I made a mistake of thinking that my crude calculations
would be enough.
But this wasn't about the facts.
This was about something else.
Now, we've been told that solar cells are clean.
And we know the energy from the Sun is limitless.
And we've been promised that they will be cheap.
And we've been seduced by solar cells.
And this isn't the first time that this has happened.
For generations, our energy bucket has been leaking.
And the leaks here represent energy waste.
And in the United States, most energy does nothing
productive at all.
It just leaks out, according to the Department of Energy.
But that's not all, the leaky bucket is also getting larger.
And that's because we love cheap energy.
Politicians subsidize energy production.
And when cheap energy is available, demand of course
goes up, because people want more of it.
And so it brings us right back to where we started, with
so-called insufficient supply.
And this applies to alternative energy, as well.
And in fact, there is no evidence that alternative
energy offsets fossil fuel use in the United States.
I know that doesn't seem to make sense at first.
But consider the expansion of hydropower and nuclear power.
They would both presumably decrease coal use.
As recently as 1950 in fact, hydropower filled a third of
the nation's electrical grid.
That's hard to imagine today.
But they did not quench increasing demand.
And demand increased.
And the United States met that demand by building more fossil
fuel plants, not fewer.
Today, hydropower fills just 7% of the electrical grid.
This is a boomerang effect.
The harder we throw energy into the grid, the harder
demand comes around and hit us on the head.
So larger solar cells and taller wind turbines are just
ways of throwing the energy boomerang harder.
And in fact, the history of energy in this country is very
much a story of throwing the energy boomerang harder.
Long ago, whale oil was considered to be clean, cheap,
and limitless.
I mean one whale might contain three tons of oil.
Who could want more than that?
And we poured into the leaky bucket.
And eventually, whales were in short supply.
And they were expensive.
But explorers had found something better.
Their fossil fuels were cheap, they were cleaner than whale
oil, and as any driller could tell you, they were limitless.
But that was still not enough for the leaky bucket.
And physicists had found something else.
Nuclear power was clean, it was
cheap, and it was limitless.
Well, of course that turned out not to
be the entire story.
But the bucket was still growing and really leaking.
Which brings us to the next.
Now, there are ways to stop the boomerang effect.
And there are ways to lower fossil fuel demand and we'll
consider those soon.
But first I have a few questions for
you about this bucket.
What amount of solar energy would fill this bucket?
Will this much do it?
What if we double or triple the solar cells
in the United States?
I mean it would be possible.
It would cost a lot of money, but it's possible.
What if we multiply solar cells by a 100, which would
incidentally bankrupt the federal government.
And then we added in 10,000 utility scale wind turbines,
would that fill the bucket?
Or will it fuel the bucket's growth and make us even more
reliant on fossil fuels?
Now, common knowledge presumes that we have a choice between
fossil fuels and green energy.
But alternative energy technologies rely on fossil
fuels through every stage of their life cycle.
Most importantly, alternative energy financing relies
ultimately on the kind of economic growth that fossil
fuels provide.
Alternative energy technologies rely on fossil
fuels for raw material extraction, for fabrication,
for installation and maintenance, for backup, as
well as decommissioning and disposal.
And at this point there's even a larger question, where will
we get the energy to build the next generation of wind power
and solar cells?
Wind is renewable, but turbines are not.
And although alternative energy technologies rely on
fossil fuels, they are in essence a
product of fossil fuels.
They thrive within economic systems that are themselves
reliant on fossil fuels.
Now, I'm no fan of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuel are finite.
They're dirty.
But we use them for five principal reasons.
Fossil fuels our dense.
Their energy is storable, portable, fungible, which
means they can easily trade it.
And they are transformable into other products, like
pesticides, fertilizers, and plastics.
Now, these qualities cannot be measured in kilowatts.
So what happens when we spend our precious fossil fuels on
building alternative energy?
Well, then we get energy that is not dense, but diffuse.
It's not easily storable.
It's not portable.
It's not fungible.
And it is nontransformable.
Now, to increase the quality of the energy we then have to
spend more fossil fuels to build batteries, to build
back-up power plants, and other infrastructure.
And of course, this is incredibly expensive.
And ultimately, that expense represents the hidden fossil
fuels behind the scene.
Now, there's an impression that clean energy can supply a
growing population of high consumers.
There's an impression that alternative energy can
displace fossil fuel use.
But the evidence doesn't show that.
Now before I move on, I should mention at this point in the
story, my architectural firm is toast.
It's gone.
But luckily, I'm somewhat geeky and willing to spend a
long time in front of a computer.
I don't think I'm the only person here that fits that
description.
And when gas prices rose from 2003 to 2008, they shot up.
You might remember that.
Then I stayed safely in a library.
And as part of my academic research, I studied a data set
of 50,000 articles that were written over that period of
time when the energy prices were going up.
For every doubling in oil prices, coverage of solar wind
and biofuels shot up 400%.
But I also looked at energy reduction strategies, things
like home insulation, light rail, LED bulbs.
We've witnessed the impressive pay0ff of these technologies
and so we might expect the coverage of these technologies
to also be relatively high.
But this is what the media coverage looked like.
And this was not just a media phenomenon.
Does anyone recognize this building?
It's quite a ways from here.
This is a green building in Chicago's Millennium Park.
And to be a green building, the architects might have
superinsulated the building, but they didn't.
They used glass, which allows the building to bake in the
summer and lose heat in the winter.
They might have outfitted the building with
energy efficient lighting.
But they didn't do that either.
They might have incorporated overhangs to block the high
summer Sun, but allow the winter Sun to shine in.
Or they might have used light shelves to toss more light
into building's interior.
But they did none of things.
This building is a green building because
it has solar cells.
The California Academy of Sciences, just up the road
from here, has solar cells in one of the foggiest
microclimates on Earth.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has solar cells that are
partly shaded by the structure itself.
This BP station has solar cells and some don't
even face the Sun.
There are solar cells right here in Mountain View, being
consecrated in this photo.
They also don't face the Sun.
In fact, none of these buildings has solar cells that
face the Sun.
But you see, that doesn't really matter.
Because these architects were not building buildings to be
energy efficient.
They were not building buildings to reduce fossil
fuel years.
They were building temples.
They were building temples to technology, temples to solar
energy, temples to the idea that the way to solve our
energy problems is to produce more energy.
Now, consider for a moment that solar cells were a puppy.
So maybe a [INAUDIBLE], maybe a furball like this one.
If solar cells were a puppy, I imagine that this is kind of
what they would look like, not real big, not real smart, but
super cute.
And we all like to take solar for a walk.
And academics get grants for walking solar, industry gets
good PR for walking solar, government enjoys being out
with solar as well.
And when elections roll around, all the more reason to
take solar out for a stroll.
And media likes to walk solar and so does the public.
Well maybe, depending on their political
affiliation these days.
But even I'm fascinated by solar.
And I'm not the only person here that is.
And sometimes being just a puppy, solar gets tired.
But there's always someone around to pick solar up and
keep going.
Even if it's just to walk to the park and walk in circles.
Now, let's consider a walk with energy reduction.
Now reduction is a huge dog, with a lot of potential as we
have seen, although walks with reduction, differ from walks
with solar.
Reduction's walks include many more stops to pee, which is
made up all that more difficult without the trees.
So why go for walks with reduction, when the walks with
solar are so much more fun?
And that's what we need to understand.
We need to understand and figure out ways to organize
walks with reduction that are more fun and interest all of
the dog walkers.
And that's going to be a lot more exciting
than you might think.
For instance, how might we plug the leaks
in that energy bucket?
I'd like to consider for a moment, junk mail.
The junk mail industry claims 100 million trees a year,
which producers must grow, cut, haul, process, print, and
then ship to homes, where they are usually immediately thrown
away, hauled, processed, and finally dumped.
Now, one study equates the energy bill of the cycle to 11
coal-fired power plants running continuously around
the clock, at full tilt.
And all of these power plants go to power something that
most people don't even like.
So in Germany, this is what they did.
They created this little sticker that says no
thanks to junk mail.
And I have one right here.
And this sticker in Germany is legally binding.
So most Germans choose to put this stick
around their mailbox.
In the United States, these stickers would help to patch a
small hole in our energy bucket.
And you might think that's no big deal.
It's just junk mail.
And in fact, it probably isn't really that big of a deal.
But it's important to point out that these stickers would
have a greater energy impact than all of the nation's solar
cells, planned and existing combined.
We don't have an energy crisis.
We have a consumption crisis.
And a lot of that consumption goes toward things that don't
make us any happier or healthier.
Let's consider the growth of that bucket.
Much of this results from
unsustainable population growth.
But how can we achieve and ethically achieve a
sustainable population without infringing on the reproductive
rights of individuals?
Now, we know that women who are entitled to civil and
economic rights, who are in control of their own bodies,
can enjoy the freedom of bearing children at their own
rate, at a pace that is actually
perfectly sustainable overall.
But consider this chart in the United States showing
pregnancy and abortion rates.
Oh, so this is the population chart of pregnancy and
abortion rates in several countries.
A girl growing up in the United States is four times
more likely to become pregnant than a girl
growing up in France.
And an American girl is three times more likely to have an
abortion than a girl growing up in France.
And among industrialized nations, America's teens are
the least likely to use birth control due to stigma, lack of
health care, and high costs.
And we are now treading in territory where environmental
and social problems converge.
And that is a vast unexplored wilderness.
Lowering teen pregnancy rates would greatly benefit the
nation's girls.
There's no doubt about that.
The energy and environmental benefits could be a welcome
side effect.
So how do we stop the growth of the bucket?
Solar cells, wind turbines, and biofuels can't do it.
Health care and human rights can.
And as unlikely as it may seem, universal health care
would have a greater energy impact than all of the
nation's solar cells, wind turbines, biofuels, and
geothermal combined.
And it would cost less too, a lot less in fact.
In fact, none of these proposals cost much money.
None of these proposals leads to lower standards of living,
just the opposite actually.
And while they are not high tech, they rely on the same
foundations of human ingenuity and creativity.
The real clean energy is less energy.
But this is a shift in the way of thinking that is not
available to many people, because you cannot see energy
savings in the same way you can see and even worship a
solar cell.
I set out to build a solar house.
But what I did not initially see, what I failed to
recognize, was that this shabby house with its two oak
trees was already a solar house.
Alternative energy fetishes have so greatly consumed the
public imagination, but the most vital, endurable
solutions go overlooked and underfunded.
But therein lies the opportunity for you.
You may be asked to think of environmental solutions in
terms of energy production.
Perhaps you already have.
And when that happens, you might be willing to think, or
ask, is that part of the solution
or part of the problem?
If we are to understand the ethics of alternative energy
technologies, then we must first see what they do.
Alternative energy technologies
don't clean the air.
They don't clean the water.
They don't protect wildlife.
They don't support human rights.
They don't improve neighborhoods.
Alternative energy technologies do
not strengthen democracy.
They do not regulate themselves.
They do not reduce consumption.
They don't reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.
They don't stop the leaky bucket from growing.
Alternative energy technologies produce power.
And we generally associate more power with greater
prosperity.
But in fact, if we look to the world's 10 happiest countries,
they use less energy than Americans do, 40% less.
So these happy countries value things like architectural
techniques that make buildings more efficient and
comfortable.
They also prioritize walking, biking, and public transit.
And finally, successful regions value human rights and
health care.
In contrast, alternative energy technologies yield low
quality energy and they rely on fossil fuels.
They also create a host of negative side effects.
But they don't always only rely on fossil fuels, they are
based on fossil fuels, from their financing, to their
decommissioning, and eventual replacement.
Alternative energy technologies are essentially
rebranded fossil fuels.
Now, what will people think about alternative energy 10
years from now?
Will they think of alternative energies as clean or will they
see them as the next round of ecological disaster issues.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I don't claim to know all the answers.
I'm just another member of the search party, like you.
But it certainly seems that there are a lot
of unanswered questions.
In fact, it actually seems that there are a lot of
unasked questions.
And by asking the hard questions, you will be better
prepared than anyone else to address the rocky times ahead.
And as energy prices become more volatile, you will have
the conceptual tools to make a difference.
You will find your skills to be sought after.
In fact, they will become necessary.
It's not a question of whether or not we have the technology
to create an alternative energy society.
The real question is the reverse.
Do we have a society that is capable of being powered by
alternative energy?
And the answer today is clearly no.
The bucket has too many leaks and it's still growing.
But we can change that.
As the illusions surrounding alternative energy
technologies continue to unravel over the coming years,
you will have some choices to make.
Will you remain rigid in your defense of the
green legacy empire?
Will you turn off the life support in order to protect
the illusory mission?
Or perhaps you will adapt your thinking to the larger
challenges that we face.
Or maybe you will go beyond that adaptation and anticipate
those challenges and be an innovator in the next green
movement, a green movement that is not simply a
receptacle for energy firms and car
companies to plug into.
A green movement that looks beyond the eco-gadgets on the
stage, to consider the social and environmental injustices
behind the curtain.
Clean energy is less energy.
And the future of energy will not be a story of wind
turbines, solar cells, and biofuels.
It will be a story of livable communities, improved
governance, health care, and human rights.
And it is not enough to say that we would benefit by
shifting our focus.
Our relevance, your relevance, may very well depend on it.
Thank you very much.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
First, thanks tremendously for your talk and for
writing this book.
Google's [INAUDIBLE] energy issues have been on the
website called The Oil Drum for many years, where we are
commonly referring to alternatives as fossil fuel
extenders, not replacements.
So thank you very much.
I look forward to giving your book to other people to help
them, educate them.
But I would like to ask a somewhat
personal energy issue.
I'm building a home right now.
We're in the rural part of the island of Hawaii.
A grid connect is extremely expensive,
prohibitively expensive.
And even then, the grid is like 70% naphtha burning or
something like that.
So I can do obvious things, like LED bulbs and the like.
And in fact, the fact that I'm choosing not to use propane
for most of my say hot water needs, whatever, is viewed as
insane by the status quo, all the electricians and plumbers
you might be able to hire anywhere.
And now, my concept of using solar for hot water, which is
limiting solar for solar electric, has just been shot
down in flames by your presentation.
Have you got any advice?
I'm not alone in this.
There tens of thousands of us off grid in the
western United States.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Sure.
I'd be happy to comment on it.
Obviously, my research is in the larger social scale and in
political context, not in individual projects.
So I can't really make that much of a comment on that.
But I can say that it probably doesn't really matter.
Because if it's a vacation home or a home on the Hawaiian
island and it's far away from civilization and is
disconnected from the grid, there is probably no way you
can make that green.
So I mean that's just an unfortunate kind of reality.
I mean unless you were to move there and sell all your
possessions and just eating the food that falls off the
trees in your yard.
And of course, this is the problem that
everyone runs into.
None of us can really make our lives totally green.
And so that's why I feel that we need to concentrate on
those ways of moving forward that bring a lot of people and
bring a lot of interest in.
And actually when we look there, when we start to look
and think about solutions in those terms, we find out that
a lot of the solutions don't really decrease living
standards and require sacrifice.
They just require coming back to basics.
If you were at buildings, that might be the basics of solar
insulation and using passive solar techniques.
And if you're considering the larger scale, things like
health care, like I discussed in the talk, would have
massive benefits for the environment and for human
population.
So they are not always against one another.
The two can work together.
And that's where we find the sweetest opportunities.
AUDIENCE: I totally get your point about how handling
consumption is much more important than generation or
much more impactful.
That said, I wanted to just get your ideas on a few things
in terms of three questions that come to mind.
One is in terms of the solar panel for providing energy
versus just using direct heat, for example hot water
heating and so on.
That must be, I'd imagine, a lot less environmentally toxic
and fairly efficient.
The second one would be, when you use these energy efficient
things, such as fluorescent bulbs and LED lighting, I've
been concerned about the amount of pollution that come
from the fluorescent bulbs.
And I would assume the LED lighting has its
own types of things.
The LEDs may last almost forever, but I'm sure all
sorts of other things in those lights break.
And then, that's toxic waste, right?
So I was wondering if you'd give guidance on that, the
solar water heating, the energy efficient lighting.
And the third thing is the electric vehicles.
When I look at whether to buy a high efficiency combustion
engine versus to use something like a hybrid electric
vehicle, I see that they have a lot of problems with the
recycling of the batteries.
Some amount of it enters the environment.
There's the production of it.
Or even if we consider just holding on to your old car for
longer, if it's within emission specs, you avoid
putting all that energy consumption into
creating a new car.
So I've never really been convinced that going out and
buying a new hybrid electric vehicle is going to be a good
thing to do.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Yeah.
Thank you for those questions.
So for your first question, solar hot water.
That's a perfect example of a low-tech option that makes a
lot of sense in a lot of locations.
It doesn't have a lot of the side effects
that solar cells have.
It has side effects of its own of course, but they're minimal
compared to the benefits that you get.
So your second issue was with other types of light bulbs and
energy efficiency.
And energy efficiency becomes even an larger issue than what
you're bringing up with the toxins in the light bulbs
themselves.
Because we have rebound effects that occur with energy
efficiency.
As things become more efficient, people use more of
them and it can overall increase consumption.
So that's another side of the energy efficiency story that I
didn't have time to talk about today, that I
cover in the book.
And then there's the issue of the light bulbs.
And of course, LED light bulbs also contain all kinds of
nasty stuff and so do mercury, compact fluorescents.
And I use LED as kind of a comparison in my research
because in many ways they're similar to solar cells.
They're high tech.
They were both developed around the same period.
They were both used in the space programs.
The were both the associated with a lot of high-tech
industries.
And they both contain heavy metals and toxics
and things like that.
And so there's no easy green fix to that.
It's just weighing one set of side effects against another
set of side effects, and that's really difficult to do.
And this also speaks to the electric car issue that you
talked about.
Because when we look at electric cars, we
see the same thing.
We're used to looking for side effects in one location, which
is basically out of the tailpipe.
But the side effects in an electric car
happen somewhere else.
And so it's very difficult to see them or account for them.
And so we assume that the electric car
is clean, of course.
But the National Academy of Sciences did a study, a life
cycle analysis.
This is the broadest life cycle analysis done on
electric cars.
And they found that the harms stemming from electric cars
are a little bit larger than the harms stemming from a
regular internal combustion engine of a car the same size.
And in fact, the only way that we can really find that
electric cars are cleaner, is if we narrow our research to
just one metric, like CO2.
If we just narrow it to that one metric, then we might be
able to make an argument that electric cars are cleaner.
It looks like it might depend on where they're charged and
it starts to get murky after that.
But if we look at the whole life cycle-- if we looked at,
like you were saying, what do you do with the batteries
after, or how much energy is used to get those batteries,
what are the side effects, what are the epidemiological
impacts of the pollution.
And this is what the National Academy has looked at.
They actually went county by county and did epidemiological
studies and figured all that out and accumulated it all.
And they said, you know what, your electric cars, they run
on ***.
AUDIENCE: So I've been writing about a lot of these topics
and saying many of the same things that you did in the
first half of your talk, for a long time, about the megawatts
and the bad math that a lot of people do
about alternative energy.
But I've not come to the same conclusions you have.
And I'm wondering what you use to back up the idea that it's
likely we could conserve our way through a crisis?
Is there any examples from history of people doing that,
being able to solve problems like this through conservation
and greater efficiency, rather than what's usually happened
throughout history, which is new technologies coming along
and changing the equations?
It's obviously difficult to say with any accuracy what
exactly the technology of the future will be.
But it's always incorrect to say the technology of the
future will be the same as the technologies of today.
And that makes this prediction difficult.
An example of you making one of the same mistakes you
accuse everyone else of making, I saw on your chart,
talking about light rail as an energy efficient technology,
light rail is the least energy efficient per passenger mile
of technology we use for transportation
in the United States.
It's worse than an SUV in terms of the amount
of energy it uses.
And yet you put up as here's an example, why aren't people
writing about this.
We make these mistakes all the time.
But back to basically the question is, what examples
from history can you show of conserving to
get through a crisis?
OZZIE ZEHNER: OK, thank you for asking that.
Well with regard to light rail, the benefits from light
rail come in the context of the
communities that they enable.
So it's not in the light rail itself, but it's in the
ability for people to live in a dense urban context.
Dense urban contexts are a lot more energy efficient, because
people with a smaller buildings, are closer
together, they're not losing as much energy for heat.
So you have to look at the whole context for light rail.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
OZZIE ZEHNER: Oh, yes.
AUDIENCE: This technology, which means people could
deliver themselves.
They can take people to [INAUDIBLE].
Is it really going to change how people move in cities
[INAUDIBLE].
And nobody thinks about it right
now as we start planning.
So it's not exactly [INAUDIBLE].
OZZIE ZEHNER: So the future changes of technology is
certainly something that I'm aware of and I embrace.
I mean the technology will change.
And we have to be prepared for that, as well.
But ultimately, a lot of technologies rely on energy.
And so energy becomes a road block that's very difficult to
get through.
I just listened to a talk, actually from Bill Gates,
where he makes this point.
And he says, energy is not high tech.
It's not Moore's law.
Moore's law does not apply to energy.
It's because you have to deal with physics.
And unless you can find a way around the physics, you're
still left with any technology, any growth in
society, any growth physical--
from a physical perspective--
is going to have to be powered in some way.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
OZZIE ZEHNER: Yes.
And so of course, Gate's solution is to have the
nuclear reactor.
Exactly.
So the problem is you either have to believe that infinite
growth is sustainable over the long term, an infinitely
growing population is sustainable the long term, or
we can look to what examples are there of dealing with the
whole issue with conservation?
And there really are no good large-scale examples of that.
I mean we're watching it happen with Japan right now,
which is probably the place to look.
And one of the other speakers that was here at Google, James
Howard Kunstler, I was recently on a blog cast with
him in which he mentioned something really curious.
And he said, he thinks that--
I says all kinds of fascinating things
that make me think--
and he said Japan is basically going back to a craft society.
He uses this kind of a thought experiment to say, look what's
happening in Japan.
Their population is rapidly decreasing and they're
changing their societies in ways that have never been done
in advanced industrial societies before.
And so I think we can maybe look to countries like that
and see what might be happening and what might come
several decades down the future.
But no, you're right.
There's no good for it.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for speaking.
I think your points about reducing consumption are very
interesting.
But it was interesting because almost every single statement
you made in your talk, I wanted to ask a follow-up
question to it, to understand better, which was provoking.
The one that I think is perhaps the most important to
me to clarify at the moment, you said a lot about how green
technology and alternative energies, like solar panels,
require fossil fuels to build and deploy and recycle.
And do they require fossil fuels per se or do they just
require energy?
Like if we had hydro and solar, you could presumably
just take the same electricity and build
the plants with those.
They don't logically require coal.
We just don't have enough existing infrastructure yet.
Am I right?
Or are you saying something that I didn't understand?
OZZIE ZEHNER: No, that's a really good point.
And this is another big question that I can't fully
answer because in a way, in many ways, it's unanswerable
about what might happen in the future.
We need the energy.
Yes, you're right.
The problem is that certain types of industries rely on
certain types of energy.
So it's difficult to explore for copper and bring the
trucks out there, if they are only running on electricity.
So that's why we use the fossil fuels for that.
And so the cost ends up going up significantly if you try to
replace certain types of energy for other types of
energy in different contexts.
But yeah, ultimately it's the energy.
But there's also qualities to energy that go beyond
kilowatts or the amount of energy, like I brought up the
fungibility and the storability and the transport.
And so these are all qualities that we have to keep in the
back of mind.
And it's difficult to really put those in a spreadsheet,
because how do you measure those and how do you compare
them across different energy technologies.
AUDIENCE: So let's say you're declared the dictator of the
United States tomorrow.
OZZIE ZEHNER: It would be a sad day for the United States.
AUDIENCE: Oh, that's a better goal.
Or the world, whatever your prefer.
What changes would you make to the existing system, let's say
policy changes or something like that, to make people move
in the right direction?
So for example, like let's say removing the subsidies and
making technologies reflect what they truly cost
throughout their life cycle, might be something.
But you show that it doesn't work, because solar panels
really aren't as effective as just reducing your usage.
So what kind of changes would you make, if
you were the dictator?
OZZIE ZEHNER: Whew, well--
AUDIENCE: Sorry, loaded.
OZZIE ZEHNER: First of all, there would be Lucky Charms in
all of the restaurants.
I think probably universal health care would be the
number one priority.
I feel like universal health care has so many benefits.
And we often hear people say oh, I don't really want to pay
for that person's health care.
And it's just like that person is going to go to
the doctor too much.
Well, first of all that kind of like a remarkable breakdown
in civil society.
It represents a kind of remarkable drawback from that
perspective.
But also, most people don't recognize that we already have
an emergency universal health care system
in the United States.
When a homeless person goes into the ER with pneumonia
because they didn't have health care, they end up
spending a lot of money on bringing that
person back to health.
And of course, that system is incredibly expensive.
And that's why we could actually save money by going
to something like a universal health care system, like the
ones in Europe.
And there's nothing about the health
care systems in Europe--
they're not perfect, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
But you also don't see Germans in the streets protesting for
an American style health care system.
And I think that's something we have to keep in mind too,
in all the rhetoric going back and forth on these issues.
The other things that I would enable, to make a short list,
is a kind of energy efficiency enabling
technology or research--
a Department of Efficiency instead of a
Department of Energy.
And also things like removing zoning restrictions that
prevent density in certain urban contexts can end up
having a big impact.
And so that's probably the direction I would do.
AUDIENCE: Hey, Ozzie--
OZZIE ZEHNER: Yes?
AUDIENCE: --thanks a lot for your wonderful talk.
I really enjoyed most of the talk, especially the fact that
you've taken such a radical approach to what the
common belief is.
And you're being successful in conveying the point, which is
very scientific and well-grounded.
So I really appreciated the point that you mentioned the
real crisis is a crisis of consumption, not the
production.
However after that, I didn't quite follow how you link that
to the population management.
About that, just from what you said, I would like to share,
like for India as country, the population has been mostly
huge for thousands of years.
And I usually read a lot of Sanskrit literature from
ancient stories, like ancient history of India.
It's been a vast population all the time.
And it's been sustaining.
All the problems that you mention having to do with
electricity and fossil fuels, that all started like in only
the last 100 years or so.
But prior to that danger, civilization has been running
for years and years and years without any of these problems.
So I'd just like to point out that it's not necessarily the
population.
But it's under a dimension that I would like to just kind
of hint at here, which you might be interested in
pursuing for further, which is actually the concept of
consciousness, like who we really are.
What bring satisfaction to us as a person, as a individual.
So the Indian culture is kind of focused on that spiritual
dimension, which provides the higher level of satisfaction
so that you don't depend on gadgets and material
technology to fulfill your demands constantly.
Which is what that the vast majority of the consumption
comes from.
So without providing an ultimate higher way of
enjoying your life, you cannot really take away all the
gadgets and say that be [INAUDIBLE]
and solve the energy problem that way.
Rather, the Indian culture is focused on the aspect that
you're a spiritual being and you can be satisfied by other
means spiritually, compared to you using gadgets.
That's one of the main reasons that civilization has
sustained for so many years.
So I'd just like to comment on that and see if you have any
thoughts about that?
OZZIE ZEHNER: Well, I should make a clarification that
probably our views are not incongruent, in that I'm not
for population control.
I should say that right off the bat.
In fact, I think the idea of population control within the
environmental movement, and there are some people pushing
for population control, and I think
that's a misguided effort.
And that's because I do think it tramples on the ability for
societies and for individuals to have a free life and
procreate how they choose to.
But we find that actually coercion is not
necessary at all.
If you look in China, the lowest birth rate is in a
place where the one-child policy does not
apply, in Hong Kong.
And we find that throughout the world.
Actually Shanghai, also.
It doesn't apply and Shanghai also has a low birth rate.
We find that really by just instituting human rights and
health care, it allows people to have the number of children
that they want to have.
And that number happens to be sustainable
over the long term.
And so really the trick I think is just delivering human
rights and health care in the first place.
I really see population growth as a symptom of suboptimal
social conditions.
So the real thing to do is to just satisfy those social
conditions and the population growth will
take care of itself.
AUDIENCE: I have one other question.
I think we're getting low on time.
But I was curious what you thought of the work of like
Professor Jacobson at Stanford, and others, who have
come out and said, look, we have the technology, we have
the resources to power all of the energy in the world today
with existing known technology, for
wind, water, and solar.
And how you compare that with your graphs of showing the
tiny drops compared to very large buckets?
Do you think his analysis is wrong or do you agree with it
and were presenting something different?
OZZIE ZEHNER: I was actually just on a radio show, NPR,
last week, and he was on the show.
And the issue with this report which you're referring to, for
people who don't know, is that basically there's these ideas
that there's enough solar energy in the Mojave Desert to
power the entire world.
There's enough wind power to power 100 times what we need
and these kinds of things.
And really, these are just a failure
in the way of thinking.
I mean of course if you ask a ridiculous question, you can
find a ridiculous answer.
And I mean the Mojave Desert may be the
Saudi Arabia of solar.
But if we were to cover it with solar cells, and cover
the world's deserts with solar cells, it would destroy
civilization as we know it within a single generation,
just because of the toxins, the fossil fuels that would be
required, the other climate gases that are produced, that
are many times worse than CO2.
If you take that little dot of solar energy that we get
currently, or wind power that we get currently, and then
multiply those side effects by something like 10,000, that's
what you're looking at.
So you just get another set of side effects with alternative
energy technologies.
And they all rely on fossil fuels.
Thermal solar has the same side effects.
When you get back down to it, you end up with the same types
of side effects.
The high cost of thermal solar reflects the fossil fuels that
are behind the stage.
AUDIENCE: So is it accurate to say that you think in that
report, they didn't do a proper life cycle analysis?
OZZIE ZEHNER: I don't think they asked the right question.
AUDIENCE: OK.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Yeah, that's what I don't think.
I mean maybe their findings are correct.
I could ask the question, how many threads of linen are in
this carpet.
And I might be able to find an answer.
But is that really a meaningful
question to be asking?
AUDIENCE: In a Google [INAUDIBLE].
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi, there.
Thank you.
Great talk.
I'm not as well read as some of the other questioners.
But I'm curious why nuclear is not mentioned anywhere and
whether you think that there's a place for it
in the future world?
Thank you.
OZZIE ZEHNER: Thank you for asking.
That's an excellent question about nuclear.
A nuclear would be a whole series of talks,
aside from this one.
Which is why I didn't talk about it here.
I do talk about it in the book.
So if you're interested in my views on nuclear power, you
can look there.
But nuclear is a fascinating case because it is something
that is actually scalable and there is a lot of fissionable
material on the planet.
And that can be looked at as a blessing or a curse.
And there's people that look at it from both directions.
The issue with nuclear power is that we have yet another
set of side effects and limitations and consequences.
Some of them, we know very well.
Some of them are risky situations, that are growing
and accumulating over time, such as that with waste
disposal and access to proliferating
materials like plutonium.
And the nuclear armaments industry has even tested
byproducts from the thorium cycle in anticipation that
there might be a thorium push in the future.
So we will look at conflict.
We look at potential for materials getting diverted.
We look at long term storage of nuclear waste.
We look at the potential for explosions or
like Fukushima disasters.
And so, we just get another set of side
effects with nuclear.
But the big issue with nuclear that shouldn't be
underestimated is that there is a lot of fissionable
material on the planet.
And we're going to run into different types of barriers
with nuclear than we're
encountering with fossil fuels.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
OZZIE ZEHNER: Oh, I'm not the right person to ask about
either projects and the fusion reactors and things like that.
Fusion has been kind of 30 years in the future now, for
very long time.
But we're now kind of finding that the future isn't what it
used to be.
And it's getting more and more difficult to really see a way
forward with things like fusion.
I mean maybe it will happen some day.
I don't really know.
Thank you very much.