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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So a really smart guy that I respect tremendously. I was with him in D.C. earlier this week named Jesse Ausubel. He's done so many cool things. Really smart thinker. Jesse Ausubel.
He'd be a good guest. He'd be a great guest. Okay. And he could talk about, he started many things, but one of those was this thing called the Deep Carbon Observatory. And he got for a decade a bunch of smart people together to look at whether there's natural gas, carbon, deep in the earth that couldn't have come from organics. And they concluded, yes, there it is.
And there's a lot of work to be done, but there's natural gas in the world still from other terrestrial things that you can make CH4. It doesn't have to be organics in that sense. Carbon is a pretty common element and so is hydrogen. So that work show, we got a lot of thinking to do and that's here on earth. And I might sound a little sanguine about oil and gas.
It's there at the right price for the right needs for molecules and then nuclear for electricity.
So we come back to the original piece here.
We should.
Okay, so... Yeah, so that's this thought that... and I've been in 60 countries in the world, I've been lucky into them, the worst environments in the world, the physical environment, where the worst soil, the worst water, polluted water, local air is where it's poor.
Correct. Right. So your local resources can have limits, right? And gathering of wood, for example, deforestation can have limits. In Nepal now, we take in our second film, Switch On, they've had to restrict gathering of wood. But a lot of people can only cook with biomass. And this is where LPG is so critical to them and induction cooktops because the forests are literally being destroyed.
harvested right and and uncontrollably so so another thing they grow but natural gas is an excellent substitute for deforestation oh completely right right saves the forest so so okay and oil oil saved the whales we used to use whale oil to light our homes and for other uses and then along comes this natural thing and it really it was kerosene that came out of oil for initially and we put that in lanterns and boy it burned and it didn't wasn't explosive like refined
Gasolines are another thing. So there's this wonderful technological transition that happens with energy, energy systems, where we keep getting denser, cleaner, and ironically, more reliable, and in many ways, more affordable, especially if you adjust for the time value of money. That's why we can do so much work with it. Now, What prevents that?
You keep going back and saying, damn it, Scott, why aren't we doing this?
Right.
Marxist.
Let me support that for a second. Hold that thought for a second. The substrate switching that's going on right now with wealth... So if you look at, and there's reasons this, preface it, some of this might not be good in terms of outcome, but here's what's happening. So I'm going to describe it. Fertility rates against wealth.
If you look at that, highest fertility rates down to the lowest, wealth going this way. The wealthiest countries over here and our fertility rates are below replacement of 2.1.
The poorer you are, the higher your fertility rates are. Because you need kids for one thing to do the basic agrarian kinds of things and they die of a tooth infection or diarrhea. It's morally awful in a modern world, so-called. But it isn't fertility rates driving wealth. It's wealth pulling down the fertility rates.
And part of the reason that's happening is, you just described it, we have a brain. People are saying we choose not to have as many kids. Morally, religiously, we could talk about that and you'll be better than me, but this is just what's happening. So the fertility rates in almost every country in the world have been plummeting in the last 30 years, except Africa.
So the point you're making is that- Is population in 50 years, and here comes the last 50.
50 megawatt hours, 50,000 bucks. In 2075, most demographers agree now, given the current trends in fertility rates plummeting, population in this world will peak. And it won't plateau, Jordan. It plummets. It plummets.
We're going to be going, whoa, this has got to... 2075, my kids will still be alive. And so why am I not concerned about resources? Well, I kind of believe that's coming and there may be a human super cycle. Who knows? We may choose to have more kids and not go extinct. I think we're going to choose to have kids personally. I think so too.
Showing 161–180 of 207 · page 9 of 11
← Previous
Next →