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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Appearances
Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you plateau. And some of it is, well, you don't need any more stuff. You know, there's that reality. But we're making better things, more efficient things. There's a rebound effect.
An economist back in the 1800s, Jevons, showed, well, if you get a really nice, efficient, let's call it a refrigerator, and you're using a lot less energy and it doesn't cost as much, you're gonna get two. And we do. Two cars, two TVs.
Yes, it does. And the removal of choice and basic human freedoms and liberties.
Let's kind of set the idea that we could tell people what they can do aside for a second, even in places that tell people what they can do. I see behind me the Soviet Union post. I went there in 82 for three weeks when it was still the Soviet Union. The Cold War was on. We were behind the Iron Curtain and I was out of college. And it left a huge impression on me.
I saw what it was like to live without liberty. In a command economy. It was very intense. And I went out when I shouldn't at night from hotels and met with young people my age, 22, 23, invincible. These are embedded forever. These are memories that are embedded forever of the look in young people's eyes who are now in their 60s, if they're still here. So what that system does, it doesn't work.
You can't tell people that.
how's that working yeah we'll eventually come back there you know yeah but but getting back uh kind of this dialogue yeah energy economies and that gives you the wherewithal to invest in cleaning up environments and we see that in all sorts of different right and that that final 50 50 50 50 that's the bottom half of the world well no oh okay yeah it's it's uh
So you say, okay, here we are with this continuum, and there's the 50-50. And I ask myself the question, why are we considering light bulbs and mud huds, which I've done, electrified? The world organizations say, well, that's electrified. No, no, that's a light bulb and a mud hud. Right. And it's more than they had. They can read at night. Yeah, yeah. Et cetera, it's a start.
If we had a light bulb in a mud hut here, we'd call it a brownout, Jordan. We would be in a brownout situation. We'd be one lamp. So what would it take really to lift seven billion people in various stages to 50 megawatts, hours, and 50,000 bucks? So I ran the numbers. And then by when? So it turns out the world today, all in, let's call it primary energy consumption.
And these are the fundamental inputs we've been talking about. Biomass, coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, big dams, and waves and tides, potentially all other, this little teeny thing today. So those are the, these are what come into the system. I didn't say electricity. You have to make electricity. Electricity is not primary energy. We make it.
So the things that make electricity. If you look across the world today, all in, we consume about 620 exajoules of energy. That means nothing to anybody. What's an exajoule? It's a big number, okay? 620 exajoules powers 8.3 billion people to varying levels. just take it as 620 something, some unit, to lift everybody up to 50-50 would take almost three times that. Almost 1800 exajoules.
For the oil and gas people, that's about 1,800 trillion cubic feet of gas a year, equivalent. Other units of energy measurement that are used. Tripling, though. So 3x. Now, that's not scarcity. That's not saying, hey, we're running out. Everybody's got to conserve. You can only have one pair of shoes and two pair of clothing. No, no, that's saying...
We've got to find out how to make triple our energy, our primary energy in the world. Is it there? Some worry about that. Well, yes. The answer is there's a lot of energy in the world. It's in a variety of forms. But the density, here's where density comes back in. If I'm going to make another 1200 exodules or up to 1800, I've got to use the densest forms of energy.
That little uranium pellet, uranium oxides, thorium, another radioactive element. These are both fission inputs. And in the next period of time, we're not that far away from fusion working, not commercial yet, but fusion, that's hydrogen. It's a pretty common thing.
So we've gotta go, we've gotta get our heads around this idea that to literally lift the world out of poverty and all the good things that come from that, we gotta go dense, dense, dense. You're not going to be doing it with low-density forms of energy. There'll be good pieces of that portfolio, the optionality and energy. I don't mind solar and wind where it's sunny and windy.
You got a lot of sun here. Use it, you know, in places that make sense. It's a really, a very efficient use of the sun when you've got great sun. You know, you're in lower latitudes. You don't have many clouds. Winter doesn't happen much. Da-da-da-da. That's a pretty good... Use of sun and that use is called capacity factor.
So if I've got 100 units of sun and I can make it generate 30 units throughout the year, that's a 30% capacity factor. And that's pretty good for solar. Nuclear, 90% or more capacity factor. Nuclear is always on.
But there are no energy poor countries.
And a lot of other things, petrochemicals and all sorts of things that we use. fossil fuels for that most people don't know.
So let's separate again our thought of electricity and molecules. That's just the simplest form we can do, electricity, molecules. Electricity is used for quite a few things and more things now. We need it. Electrons are very useful things and electric motors are actually very efficient machines. More efficient than a combustion engine, the motor. The battery isn't.
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