Scott Tinker
speaker
207 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Scott Tinker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And then we went from 1 billion people to 8.3 billion people in a couple hundred years. The hydrocarbon age kicked off. Then oil, again, carbon and hydrogen, natural gas, mostly methane, or mostly hydrogen and methane.
So this was the accelerator of human development because now we had an energy source that could do useful work for us and humans didn't have to labor and toil ourselves or with a plow animal of some kind.
At least, in the rich world. Yeah, in the rich world. So think about density. We've gone from that. Coal is denser by weight. Oil, denser still. Natural gas, by weight, denser still. And then the magic uranium and thorium radioactive elements come along, and they have a density per unit weight a million times more than wood.
A million times. Yeah. So... All a nuclear reactor does when you put, I say all, you put little uranium pellets that are about a centimeter tall, I've held them, you know, that wide, stuff them into these fuel rods, you activate them, basically you split those things, fission, and that creates a bunch of heat. And those are sitting in a...
Pool of water, the water starts to boil, make steam, turn a turbine, run a generator. It's just a different source of heat than burning coal or burning natural gas or burning oil to make electricity. Different source of heat. And by the way, the sun at the towers, that's heat too. All that's doing is boiling water with a bunch of mirrors.
So along comes uranium and thorium and nuclear, and this changes things. We can do a tremendous amount of work. Let me give the listeners a feel for that density in that little uranium pellet. there's enough energy contained in there to the equivalent energy to drive my car from New York to LA, back to Dallas, one pellet. Think of the gasoline that would take a lot and gasoline is very dense.
Think of, so you start to extrapolate, this is the energy density, certain forms of energy just won the physics game, uranium and natural gas, basically.
That's the first principle. Energy underpins healthy economies. And, and we'll come to this, healthy economies can afford to invest in the environment.
Yeah, we should talk about some of those things. And I've probably been talking about that little triangle for 25 years. Energy, the economy, the environment, and all those investments. The cleanest air in the world, not talking about atmosphere, but the stuff we breathe, particulate matter 2.5, is where it's rich. Right. The worst air in the world is where it's poor. Right.
They just can't afford to clean it up. So this is a fundamental... And it goes that direction. Energy, the economy, the environment.
And ironically, kind of an important point here, if you want to... Clean up the atmosphere emissions as well as the land, the air, and the water. You have to accelerate economic development. You have to accelerate human flourishing.
Not push it down.
And it's not just the billion who are in extreme poverty. Let's call them the emerging world. It's the next four to five billion people that have intermittent energy. Their power comes and goes. Their fuels vary and are not reliable to them. So it's this whole three to four billion people kind of emerging, another three to four billion developing, and 1.4 billion developed.
That's an energy transition hierarchy. That's a global health hierarchy. Right. That's an access to food hierarchy. That's a clean water hierarchy. That's a clean soils hierarchy. That's a clean air hierarchy. Opportunity for your children hierarchy. It's everything. Right. And so if you could picture the average of the wealthy world, 1.3 billion of us, consume about 50 megawatt hours. Right.
And we make about $50,000 per person. 50 megawatt hours per capita, $50,000 per capita. That's the average of the wealthy world annually. The US is higher than that. 50-50, that's kind of convenient. At the end of every year, I tear apart a bunch of data for several weeks. It's my fun. And so I kind of was working on population data, economic data, and energy data at the end of last year.
And this is cool. Conveniently cool. 50-50. Yep. All right. Sticks in your head. 50-50. Seven billion other people in the world are below that. Some way below it. Now, it's not, well, there's a bunch of folks here and then there's some here and then here. It's a complete continuum, all right? But for convenience sake, there's 4 billion people emerging, You know, we have 50 megawatt hours.
They have five or three or one. And proportionately about $1,000 to $5,000 per capita.
Nothing.
Think about that. That's a couple cups of Starbucks or something a day. Yep, yep. And then as you come up through that, there's the developing world and then the developed world. Lumped all these 7 billion people. And they're stuck. Right. They're kind of stuck here. They haven't moved much. They're getting a little bit more. While the wealthy world, we consume more energy,
and we're getting a lot wealthier. Now, we're consuming less energy per unit wealth, which is cool. That curve is flattening. It's really cool. Yeah, that's great.
Showing 41–60 of 207 · page 3 of 11
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