Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:20 Hey everybody, welcome to Chuck Yates needs a job, the podcast. My guest today is Seth Miller, and when you get a text intro to somebody from a friend of yours that says you need to meet my mad

0:34 scientist buddy, the answer is always yes. And so I said yes. So welcome on Seth. Thank Chuck, thank you for having me. Happy to be mad, if not terribly angry

0:50 Perfect, well tell the audience real quick your background because I don't think I can do it just as we talked the other day on the phone. And I think you said everything but professional race car

1:01 driver but maybe you're holding that back on me. Now there's, I promise you there's nothing, there's nothing held back. So you guys talk a lot about the intersection between energy and finance on

1:12 this show. And a lot of, there's a lot of interest in technology, right? I come at things from a technology perspective. So I got a PhD in chemistry back 25 years ago. And I started out actually

1:25 in Dallas in the semiconductor industry working for Texas Instruments. My wife grew up in Colorado. She convinced me to move out here. And at the end of 2008, I found myself in the Great Recession

1:38 after having left a startup. And well, technically they let go. They made the step to let go of me. I had to figure out what to do with my life and I became a consultant. And so like a lot of

1:50 consultants, it's really hard to have a simple story about what I do, but there are three pieces. One is I do technology consulting around, especially batteries, but also other areas in renewable

2:02 energy. The second is I do innovation consulting, helping folks figure out how to deploy their innovation dollars, innovation investments towards building new technologies. And then the third, I

2:15 guess I'll just sort of throw into translation and that's like doing diligence for venture capitalists, working with attorneys, trying to help make sure that people understand technology and are

2:26 able to sort of make rational decisions based on what's actually going on on the ground. So that's where my interests are. I do a lot of inventing and patenting, and I think that's where the mad

2:37 scientist thing comes from, but mostly I'm just a technologist who happens to like finance and energy stuff on the side. Oh, that's cool So you were kind enough to send me an article you had

2:51 written about climate change and maybe a framework for how to think about it and how to study it and say, Is it actually happening? Is it not happening? We don't have to read the whole article out

3:08 loud, but do you mind kind of just summarizing a bit? Because when I was going through it, I maybe level stuff for the audience because I had some questions it really fascinating and very

3:17 constructive. Well, first, I'm glad you like it. And this was inspired by the fact that, you know, back, this is where I wrote this in 2016. I was doing quite a bit of blogging back then. And

3:32 I was unsatisfied with the idea that because 97 of climate scientists believed in global warming, that we should just listen to them, right? I'm not really great with listening to authority

3:47 generally speaking. A lot of inventors have that character trait. I love that. Yeah, and so pushing back on that, trying to scratch it, that what is it exactly? Because look, I'm a scientist.

4:01 I know A, that scientists can be wrong, and B, that frankly, entire fields of science can sometimes wander off of the edge, right? There was a story that I wrote just prior to this one about how

4:15 physics in astronomy turn of the last century. So, the end of the

4:23 1800s, beginning of the 1900s, we honestly thought that there were a lot of respectable physicists thought there were canals on the moon, like channels on the moon. And I'm sorry, on Mars, my

4:37 apologies, channels on Mars. And the idea that the challenge was that they were looking into telescopes and they were looking in the same kind of telescopes at the same resolution. The channels

4:47 that folks saw and they really did see these things turned out to be optical illusions that had a lot to do with the exact magnification of those telescopes. And folks later figured out where the

4:59 errors were. But when everyone is using the same tool, folks can become, you know, go down the wrong path. So science can do that. How do we know they're not doing that with global warming, I

5:12 wanted to have a more formal a better understanding of how to address that question than just listening to scientists. And so I started to dig in.

5:22 'Cause, you know, one of the points you made that I've always had the question of, and maybe level setting from my side, I always think that the observation ought to be able to be seen by a whole

5:36 lot of people in the data, right? Just, we all know that the apple fell out of the tree Now we need Newton to tell us about gravity and that's why. So I'm all four scientists explaining it why.

5:50 And when I've looked at the data on climate change, I saw something that you brought up in your article, so I'll lay it out there, is yes. It looks like temperatures have risen, call it a degree

6:03 and a half, two degrees since 1850, but it also looks like CO2 has risen, but CO2 is rising in front. of temperature. And to me, an observation is I have a cold Coca-Cola sitting there in ice,

6:23 and as it warms up over time, it gets flat, right? The CO2 bubbles out. So I've always kind of said, how are we not sure CO2 is first? I mean, temperatures first and CO2 follows versus what we

6:39 think today is CO2 up, therefore temperatures out So, like this is actually a great question. And 'cause if you look at the history of the data, if you go back a century or so, what you'll find

6:52 in the data is that as CO2 started to rise, temperature was actually rising before CO2 did. And they didn't cross over until it was maybe the 70s, I think where you start to really see CO2 rising

7:04 and outstripping the temperature gains. And it looks more like CO2 came first And that is a significant challenge that you have to - willing to reckon with. Now, there's a longer answer and a

7:19 shorter answer to that one. And I'll give you the shorter answer, which is that when the CO2 was rising in the 1920s and 1930s, and we first started to have combustion engines and whatnot, it

7:31 wasn't rising at an incredibly high rate. And so the natural variability of temperature was greater than the forcing from the climate that CO2 was creating. Starting in the 1970s, those things

7:42 flipped, right? The forcing and the humans would create ends up outstripping the natural variability. So it's not nuts to see something like this. We should be pretty rigorous and make sure that

7:53 we're doing things logically. But it on its own isn't enough to be able to say one way or the other. We need to look at a broader set of data, right? So and now I'm going to go in a weird

8:06 different direction. But this is fascinating to me and I appreciate you humor in me. How good is our actual data? 'Cause when I go back and read about data and I have not deep-dived it, so I

8:17 should not be held out as an expert in any way, shape or form. But you hear about how back in 1930, we took temperatures, you know, 50 miles at sea and now we take it at land. We used to take it,

8:31 you know, the airports. We moved them out to the airports where there's more concrete, maybe it's warmer. Do we have confidence even that we're looking at good data or do we know? We have very

8:44 good data. So let me back up a second and I want to let the audience know. So my background is a chemist. I'm not a climate scientist full time. I do a lot of science communication. And so a lot

8:55 of what I'm doing is pulling in strands of evidence that are coming from lots of different fields, right? And again, we have lots of different strands. So very specifically in the article that I

9:06 wrote, I talk about something called Hills Criteria, which is a set of criteria that we use to assess whether or not we understand something. there are nine of them. We'll talk a little bit about

9:17 what each of those are. But the type of criteria that you're talking about are things like consistency, right? So we see a temperature change on a mountain in Hawaii, for example, that's one

9:31 piece of data. But also we see a seasonal change. We see the growing season lengthen in the US. We see the growing season lengthen in Japan We can see evidence of migration of animals. So there's

9:47 not just a single temperature measurement that we're relying on. There needs to be some sort of conciliance of all of these different strands before we actually start to all converge on the same

9:58 source conclusion. So yes, there is a dramatic amount of evidence. It's literally all over the map. It comes from climate scientists, but it will come from folks in a lot of different fields.

10:14 at the same direction that, yeah, that the earth's warming. There's pretty much no doubt about it. Yeah, okay. No, I mean, fair enough. I had read some place, and

10:26 for all I know it was off Twitter, so it may be 100 garbage, but I'd read if you looked back kind of over time and you looked at what I'll call the extrapolation of data, I, we used to take the

10:41 temperature at 10 in the morning, now we do it two in the afternoon and an adjustment factor is at a degree and a half or whatever. You know, anytime we kind of manipulated data to corresponding to

10:54 changes in methodology

10:58 that versus just a raw temperature reading that had been consistent over time, we actually find that most of the rising is attributed to the interpolated data, not the raw data,

11:12 My point about that is not that global warming isn't happening. It could be way worse than we think, because who knows if the interpolations are right. But - Yeah, I mean, if your data sucks, I

11:23 mean, you should always, always, always look and challenge to see whether the data is robust, right? Like, I'm totally in favor of that. And, you know, there are - like, when I wrote this

11:35 article, I can't remember what the number was, but it was well over 100 independently measured strands of data. The independence is huge. You don't want it there to be a change in protocol, which

11:47 affects all of your measurements at the same time, right? It's like you change the CPI, and now, like, you know, you don't think - you don't look at things the same way anymore. You have to

11:57 recognize and write that down. You want there to be independence of these things. And again, this is kind of like - you know, it's not just guys with thermometers. It is farmers It is, you know,

12:11 zoologists, plant biologists. It's Geisenat and Antarctica and Geisen Hawaii. This is where that famous 97 number starts to come from is that you do a Google Scholar search and you put in climate

12:28 change in quotes and you look at the conclusion, you have some poor graduate student, look at the conclusion of all of the papers and classify them And that's how you end up with these kinds of 97

12:42 numbers, but it's every field, everyone working at the same time is coming independently, right? And it doesn't matter what country, it doesn't matter what their grant funding source was,

12:54 they're all looking at different sets of data and coming to the same conclusion. Yeah, yeah, gotcha. Gotcha, so if you were kind of summarizing your article and your thoughts on it, and I'm

13:05 curious and I'm, just 'cause I haven't studied this as much as I should. I always say on the podcast. We ignore this phenomenon at our own peril. That being said, I just don't know how much

13:17 certainty we have around the link to kind of man-made hydrocarbon burning leading to the actual increase in temperature. Do you have kind of an opinion on where that shakes out? Because you're a lot

13:33 smarter than I am. I am certainly a guy who spends time doing thinking about this stuff more than I get paid for, more than I should. I

13:43 always say my podcast is my nonprofit endeavor, so I understand. It's a little - blogging is the same way. I don't do this because I want to make money writing. I am happy when it gets read. And

13:57 this blog post has been used. Like, I know somebody who is using it to teach classes at Columbia University, right? I mean, I was very happy with the response to it But I'm doing this because the.

14:11 because I believe that this matters, right? And I believe that looking at this rigorously and rationally matters and skeptically and carefully, all that stuff, I'm a technologist and a scientist,

14:23 but also like the way to think about this as an actuary, like this is insurance. This is what we're talking about here. And so one way to interpret your question is like, what's the insurance

14:34 premium that we would wanna pay against a future of climate change, right? What is, so there is a term of art in the environmental world called the social cost of carbon, I don't know if you've

14:46 ever heard of this. It's, you know, and even in the name is kind of airy fairy, the derivation is hard and subject to some error. But the point of it is that, hey, we're adding carbon to the

14:59 atmosphere. There is, if you look at the IPC reports, there's an estimated answer as to what the forcing is because of this carbon, there's error bars, right? The error bars all, more or less,

15:12 tell you something's going to happen when you add the CO2 to the atmosphere. How much is not always clear, so making a 2050 prediction is hard, but we have error bars. An actuary knows what to do

15:25 with that. They can calculate a premium. If you think about what the costs are to human health, the costs are to lost real estate if you happen to live in Miami or in Jakarta In the world, most of

15:39 our real estate is on coastal lands, and a lot of that's going to be imperiled by climate change, by rising oceans, that's the classic answer. But of course, there are effects on crops, and

15:49 there are fires in Colorado and Canada because of this, and the smoke causes health damages, and it goes on. The number that the best science comes up with right now is 190 a ton is what the

16:05 estimate is Government is using a number closer to 50 a ton. when it's officially assessing damage. But the best science analysis number is about 190 bucks. That's an extraordinary amount of money

16:23 when we start talking about multiple gigatons of CO2 that we are releasing every year. So billions of tons of CO2 every year, tens of billions of CO2 every year at the cost of 190 per ton, right?

16:42 So I think the number is on the range of somewhere between 40 and 50 billion is what society combusts every year. So yeah, you start to get up into trillions of dollars across per year and that

16:55 effectively we're spending this, that that is a cost into the future. There's a discount rate. It's not like you got to think about this further, but yeah, it strikes me that's all about right,

17:08 honestly. So, you're the technologist. I have an opinion, so I'll just say it and you can tell me you're an idiot or take it wherever you wanna go. My sense is that we have a fixed amount of

17:27 money. That's just kind of life. Unfortunately, my kids have a budget. They can, they're allowance, they can spend that. I'm unemployed. There's only so much money around the Yates House that

17:39 we can spend. And the world is that way. I don't know that we have the technologies available today to

17:50 really do anything material against

17:55 carbon being spewed out to make that much of a difference. So with my limited money, I'm looking for next generation technologies to do something about this Is your sense we have this to do today?

18:11 'Cause I think at the end of the day, our discussion should really be about, kind of the water balloon we push here, this side pops up. How should we be going about dealing with this

18:24 carbon issue? Yeah, so, I mean, the dumb answer is why not both? I mean, yeah, we have limited resources, but you spend a little bit on today and a little bit on tomorrow. The idea that you

18:39 have that we should invest in long-term technology is I'm 100 aligned with that. And look from a political standpoint, if we just like ignore all of the theory stuff and say, hey, if we make

18:52 people's lives materially worse, they are going to vote us out of office, so stop it, right? Like, I'm a big fan of simplifying assumptions and that one gets you to, I would like to make people

19:05 have cheaper energy. I can get solar and wind as great examples, cheaper than coal and natural gas than everybody wins. So let's invest in trying to make those technologies better for everybody. I

19:21 can make a good argument that EVs are just better vehicles than combustion engine vehicles. We can get into arguments about it, but they got a little bit of pickup. Oh, I drove in Tesla for six

19:35 years It was an amazing car. There it is. Zero to 60 in 29

19:40 seconds. That computer screen was amazing. The fact that I could push a button and have any seat make a fart noise to embarrass my kids was priceless. Yeah, well, I don't know how much you pay

19:54 for that, for the fart noise. Is that a standard option? It was a free download that came with

20:02 145, 000 Model X that I owned, you know, that I bought seven, eight years ago. I just want to say the technology is great. Yeah. Look, the other thing about EVs is that we frankly already

20:15 passed the point where the long-term total cost of ownership of EVs is lower than internal combustion engine because EVs famously have far fewer parts. You don't have all of these mechanical failures

20:27 in EVs that you do in internal combustion engine vehicles. So while the sticker price of EVs is higher, the total cost of ownership when you include the fact that electricity is cheaper than

20:38 gasoline and the repair costs long-term for these EVs are going to be lower. You have a good value for the customer and that's just going to get better as we scale these technologies and cost readers

20:50 them further. That's a great platform for a lot of the problem. It doesn't solve everything, right? If you look - And let me cut you off real quick that throw one fact that you.

21:06 I'm totally okay with letting the market compete, and if it ultimately is true, or I always think economics went out. Volvo did a deep dive, it's on their website, it's 150 pages long, it put me

21:18 to sleep three times, but I have made it all the way through it. And we can fight about all the assumptions they made, but at the end of the day, they kind of have the break over point for an

21:30 internal combustion engine, carbon footprint, and an EV carbon footprint at anywhere from kind of 72, I think, 90, 000 kilometers. Which, look, most cars are on the road, 150, 000, 200,

21:46 000 miles, 'cause they all wind up in Latin America. We always joke that the greatest advertisement for a Toyota truck is the fact that, anytime you see anybody in the Middle East driving an old

21:58 car, it's a Toyota truck.

22:02 At the end of the day, we're gonna spend trillions of dollars to convert to internal combustion engines, I mean, to convert to EVs with charging stations, et cetera, is that really worth the

22:16 money to do? Or should we be investing that money elsewhere? All right, so I'm gonna break this up into two parts. Okay, fair enough. Okay, so 70 to 90, 000 kilometers, we'll call that 80,

22:28 000 kilometers, which is 50, 000 miles So if you have a turning point in costs at 50, 000 miles, then yeah, you're better off with a battery electric vehicle. If that battery electric vehicle

22:40 costs as much as an internal combustion engine. So that's actually not inconsistent with my idea that, hey, battery electric vehicles are more expensive today, but they will be longer term cheaper

22:52 over the lifetime of that vehicle. Totally consistent with what Volvo reported. Now, when you get, and when you get into the details what all those assumptions are. The numbers that I've heard

23:03 from other folks who have, I don't know, long physicist beards and teach academic stuff. Their numbers are in the 30, 000 mile kind of number. They get to assume a future grid, which is greener.

23:19 They get to assume a future battery supply chain, which is greener. And those things are probably not wrong. So, but whether it's 30 or 50, I don't know if I care, bottom line is that, yeah,

23:32 total cost of ownership is gonna be lower, right? That's number one. Now, the second one, and this one I know you're going to love, there are other

23:45 mitigating factors, new technologies that are going to arrive. And everybody's favorite punching bag for technologies that haven't arrived right now is self-driving vehicles, right? Elon Musk

23:56 being the classic example of somebody that hasn't delivered, right? He's been promising for a long time. Self-driving is turns out to be really hard. It's being done in San Francisco right now.

24:07 There are limited pilots, but it's happening slower than everybody predicted. Having said that, if you are an environmentalist, what you want more than anything in the world is a self-driving car.

24:20 Because a self-driving car changes the business model of driving from one of home individual ownership of a vehicle to a different one, which is transportation as a service. And when you move to a

24:34 transportation as a service, now the economics of a business matter. And they are very used to an amortization curve and figuring out what the lowest TCO is and minimizing their long-term costs. If

24:51 we get self-driving vehicles, they'll all be electric. Every single one of them. So I will give you that point and I'll even make your case for you. as I'm ducking my oil and gas guys taking shots

25:04 at me, but if we just didn't accelerate at every green light, like we were 17 years old driving a car for the first time, that would do a lot. And so having automated driving, we will not be

25:18 accelerating, you know, and even if you have an internal combustion engine, if you're slotted in the auto drive cars, you're gonna drive more rationally So I'll give you that point, the pushback

25:31 I have on just EVs is we're gonna spend trillions in creating charging stations. We're gonna have more road repair work 'cause EVs are heavier than normal vehicles. And I have not done this math

25:47 except after two bottles of wine. So take that with a grain of salt. Yeah, this is definitely a two bottle of wine kind of conversation, and technically it's mid afternoon for both of us right now

25:58 and I've been drinking water.

26:01 But I honestly think to get all the rare earth metals that you're gonna need to have all of these electric vehicles and such, that stuff's in the middle of nowhere. You're running that off diesel.

26:15 And a lot of the parts in the electric vehicles are plastic made of petroleum products. I'm not sure we've really minimized the amount of combustion that happens by going to electric vehicles And we

26:30 haven't even touched disposing of these batteries yet, you know? All right, so hear me out. Oh, the future. So if you try to look at the intersection of these technologies, and that's sort of

26:44 what I do for a living is think about the, think, think about again, how to deploy technology investment dollars, what technologies are going to be coming down the future? How is that going to

26:54 intersect with your technology? What's going to substitute for what? If I can substitute home ownership with a vehicle that I can summon on demand, my CapEx utilization for my car in my garage is 6,

27:13 you know, 4. I don't even like, I don't even commute. I work in my basement, right? This is, hello, right? I barely use this vehicle and it is dumb at some level for me to go mine all that

27:27 lithium and nickel and cobalt and put it inside of a metal box, inside of a bigger box inside my house, right? That's not very intelligent or efficient utilization. If I had the ability to just

27:39 summon a vehicle and it was economically competitive to do so, then this would be a solution because we would need 10 X fewer or 10

27:50 of the vehicles, 10 of the batteries So less sheet metal, less lithium, less nickel, less cobalt, right?

27:57 That's the best answer that we can have. A lot of the environmentalists who I know who are very much in favor of transforming the economy in other ways, they get a little bit itchy about

28:09 self-driving vehicles and about those kinds of societal changes. But the software issues around being, what software allows you to do is efficiently use resources. Right? At the end of the day,

28:23 that's what all the software revolution is about If we push that forward and we were a little bit more aggressive in encouraging allowing self-driving vehicles, it would have huge knock-on effects

28:36 for

28:38 the transportation sector and for carbon. Yeah. All right. No, I'll get that. And I actually, I'll buy into that. I don't know two things. And I think five to 10 years ago, I would have made

28:55 this first point. very passionately. Now I will make it very meekly on a post-pandemic. 10 years ago, nobody on the planet wants a self-driving car. They want to drive a car because the whole

29:09 reason to have a car is so you can woo beautiful women and you know, you don't want a self-driving car doing whatever. I don't know. I've softened up on our ability on our resolve to remain

29:22 independent here So I think that's kind of one issue. The second, it's going to be fascinating to watch the regulatory environment try to sort all this out because at the end of the day, who's

29:38 responsible for what when a wreck happens, I actually think that's way more the limiting factor than the actual technology. Yeah, which is to say that as society, we have some say in this, right?

29:49 We could as a society decide to allow this to happen faster or slower. And we will make decision. I would like to see some competition between societies. I want someone out there to, I don't know,

30:04 to be captured by the automotive apparatus and allow this. I

30:10 want somebody to do the experiment. The sad truth of the matter is that very much US regulatory structure gets mimicked worldwide. And so folks, you do not have the situation where the Singaporean

30:26 government is like, woohoo, let's get ahead and allow this first. Although you would think of all countries in the world Singapore is really well placed to be like, here's what the rules are going

30:36 to be, guys. And we're going to do this first, and it's going to make not just personal transportation cheaper and better, but also, I mean, like, okay, deep breath.

30:49 We forget about buried pipes. We forget about infrastructure in the United States. of infrastructure. You're an oil and gas guy, so maybe you haven't forgotten the way that other people have. But

31:03 one of the biggest barriers to economies of scale is having to physically co-locate different pieces of manufacturing equipment, right? If you had self-driving vehicles effectively robots that can

31:15 go from business to business and take a load from one machine to another and be able to allow what's effectively an API call in the physical world, if you would, that would be kind of cool, right?

31:27 That would kind of be revolutionary for the cost of building things. We can't do it because it costs too much to pay a team store to take the load. If it's all automated, you get some other

31:38 benefits. So there's all of this knock-on effects that you get from making a core transportation or distribution technology cheaper that are phenomenal. And I'm 100 of the belief that, yeah, you

31:53 know, as much as, as much as, Cars are sex and whatnot. The kids aren't having sex today anyway, so apparently they're not gonna save it. Thank goodness, I have three daughters, so I'm glad to

32:04 hear that. Yeah, I worry a little bit, but nobody's leaving the house, and I'm pretty sure that's a precursor to actually meeting somebody. The,

32:15 you know, if it's cheaper, it'll happen. Self-driving cars would be cheaper. It would be cheaper than owning a new car in your own garage with the cost of insurance and car payments and

32:27 maintenance and gasoline, right? So the value prop is potentially there for society. I would love to see us double down. I'm a minority opinion here, I'm fine with that, right? But it's, you

32:41 know, going back core principles from my perspective as an environmentalisttechnology guy, make people's lives better and they will be, They will welcome the change. invest in the technologies

32:55 that will make their lives better, give them more in cheaper energy, give them more in cheaper transportation, and you will see them switch over to the things that you want. But if all you can do

33:07 is tell people that they're bad if they don't change, they will just get angry. And like, I'm not as interested in that. And I think when you and I were talking the other day, I think I said kind

33:22 of the same thing, but just in a little bit of a different way. If our solution to climate change from Europe and the United States to China, India and where the vast majority of the future

33:40 population is coming from Africa, if our solution to climate change is let them eat cake, I, you need to suffer with more expensive energy or whatever, I just think that's gonna be. fundamentally

33:53 really bad bad things will happen the history of the environmentalist movement has been to say no to things Right, that's been like we are going to try to to throw as much debris as possible into the

34:06 gears of capitalism In order to be able to slow it down. So we stop polluting right now The the the the perspective is a little bit different now We have solar technologies things that are green the

34:18 greens some of some of the greens are like Hey, actually like this whole building permit thing. Ha ha just kidding. We now are against building permit We're now against permitting problems. Also.

34:28 We want this sped up, right? And I'm in that camp where I'm like Oh, yeah, no, like build things, right? Everybody should build, but there's a real Philosophical break inside of the

34:40 environmentalist movement between Folks like me who are like build more faster. Just do a green this time and folks who are like no We have to stop capitalism Yeah. And if I'm, yeah. I actually

34:56 don't think we're that far apart. I think where we would get potentially far apart is how much are we willing to use the stick of the government? And I'm

35:09 very much a libertarian and let markets play out where they may. And I also have this strain, and this is my British girlfriend hates this, but I have this unbridled belief that when a crisis

35:23 happens, nobody steps up and deals with it like the United States. So if we really are dramatically changing the planet, at some point, we'll get our act together, we'll step up, we'll handle

35:34 the crisis. So I sleep well at night, letting the market just do what it wants to do. But us handling the crisis is the government getting involved. Like that's exactly what it looks like. This

35:45 thing, this is actually happening, right? I would I would love it if we could have a carbon tax and get everybody the hell out of the way. Like, I would totally, you know, a carbon tax is like,

35:59 there was a period of time where Republicans, this was maybe 25 years ago, the idea of a flat tax. Do you remember that conversation? And hey, we're gonna get rid of the income tax and we're

36:12 gonna put in a value out of tax or something like that. And a carbon tax is a VAT, right? A carbon tax is a flat tax, but it's on carbon instead of on dollars It's the same thing. I would love

36:25 for a world that would allow us to converge on that as a solution. It does not appear to be this world. Maybe in a different simulation, we could have that on the - So I will make ground here. I

36:40 will

36:43 actually agree with you on that. I, because even if you are 100 don't believe Don't believe climate change, that it's natural. CO2 does pollute. I mean, you just have to go to a big city with a

36:58 bunch of card running around. There is some pollution there. So it does have a cost. And, you know, I mean, my two issues with the carbon tax is one, I'm not for unilateral disarmament. So if

37:10 China and India aren't signing up for this, you know, it doesn't really help us.

37:17 And two, I just hate the slippery slope nature of it. It's carbon tax. It goes here It goes there. But yeah, if I can give you a reduction on your income tax and we're going to charge you as

37:27 carbon tax and we'll be revenue. I mean, there are ways to frame this. There are solutions to these problems. As it stands, we've gone a different route. We've done the inflation reduction act

37:38 and we are going to spend, I don't know, trillionish to trillion. I'm not sure what the latest numbers are on green technologies and some of it's going to be wasted.

37:53 And I know it's terrifying. Oh, I'm sorry. Some of it's gonna be spent on technologies that didn't work. It's not efficient, but also probably almost certainly better than not. And so that seems

38:08 to be the way that we're doing it. It's we are weirdly paying down our future carbon bills by creating loans which our descendants will have to pay down instead. But if the cost of those interest

38:24 payments loans are lower than the cost of the carbon, then I guess that's okay. So the math works and I'm not going to be like a philosopher. It's like, dude, whatever works, let's just get this

38:39 started. And again, you know, we're gonna, for a lot of this stuff, we're gonna make people's lives better by doing it. That's the hope So I'm gonna totally. kind of close this segment, if you

38:54 will, with a question. I have been so vastly impressed by you, and I have been conferred the honor of bestowing upon you, energies are the world. So whatever you say goes, we all have to listen

39:12 to it, we all have to do it. Give me kind of

39:17 the plan, the bullet point version of the plan you put in place to get us where you want to go. Do I get to have a beer first? Sure, you can have a beer, you can have two bottles of wine,

39:30 whatever, but putting you in charge, what are the two or three things you're doing? All right, so as energies are of the world, I feel compelled to give this a total of about 28 seconds of

39:40 reflection.

39:43 Yeah, that seems to be all right. What do we do?

39:51 The way that I look at this is that there's a cost of carbon now. The damage from CO2 adds over time. So if I release a CO2 molecule today and it absorbs light and it absorbs infrared and doesn't

40:07 allow it to escape and remits it to the ground, that's how this process works. And as long as that CO2 molecule is there, it's gonna keep doing that with new photons. So it's integrating, right?

40:19 You wanna do as much as you can right now. At the same time, you also are going to be accelerating exponentially, your capabilities going forward. So you gotta invest in both, right? And so, if

40:33 I were the czar, yeah, a carbon tax is probably the most economically efficient. I would figure out a way to make people want to tax the tax as a solution. I'm not sure how I do that I mean, look,

40:48 like soda is bad. hypnosis may be the way I mean, I mean, you know, you would think with all of the attention that people give to 5G in mind control, we would have a solution to this. And yet we

41:01 fail. The, um, like we can't even do a soda tax and make it stick. Like France can't even do a soda tax and make it stick. Like we, it is, we are literally killing ourselves with sugar. There

41:17 is no, like people do not argue about this. It tastes good though. So please get out of my way. And, and so this, this human nature is hard. Um, but I would want there to be a carbon tax. I

41:28 would want to set a price of carbon. I would want to set it low at first. I would want to slowly raise it. It's going to take time to establish accounting methods. And you have to be realistic

41:38 about the pace. I do not want to see us move so quickly that we accidentally move into a crisis of I do not want people to die because they are shivering in the winter or they can't get cool in the

41:56 summer because we moved too quickly. So I want to be responsible about it. And

42:02 let me cut you off and just say to oil and gas folks that are listening to that. That's a true belief you have 'cause we talked about that the other day. And that was one of the things I was gonna

42:13 bring up is you I think are very pragmatic about it in terms of what we were talking about the other day of. Hey, we can't cause death today and oh, by the way, we're actually gonna have to be

42:25 intellectually honest that we go to solar and wind. We don't have dispatchable power like we do today if we replace and we've got to be honest and navigate those treacherous waters too. So I thought

42:38 you were really fair on that. Yeah, and I'll tell you just straight up, like I hang out with climate activists who hate the fact that we're gonna be having build a lot of new gas plants. capacity,

42:50 in order to turn on and off quickly, in order to be able to match the high solar and wind loadings that we're going to have. And that last 20 of electricity, we just don't have an answer for it.

43:01 And that's real. And we should respect that reality while trying to invest in solutions that will get around it. But yeah, having said all of that, look, where does the CO2 come from? It comes

43:13 from the electricity sector, so you shut down coal, and that's happening. It comes from burning natural gas, and most of the base load natural gas is probably going to go away on its own, because

43:24 it's not going to be long-term cost competitive with solar and wind. But that last 20, I don't got a solution for, and that's going to be gas, right? Until we have another, an alternative. I

43:37 would, you know, obviously move from EV, from internal combustion engine to EVs, and I would ideally do it as self-driving cars because.

43:50 they will have less of a resource requirement. And again, they'll make people's lives better when you do it. Everybody can still, you can still keep your car, your Aston Martin from 1968 in your

44:02 garage or whatever, and go to the mountains fine. I don't care, right? Like, I don't want this to be everything. This isn't about regulating everybody's individual behavior. This is about

44:14 giving people options that don't create this long-term debt overhanging in terms of climate. By the way, 20 of the problem is agriculture and land use and of CO2 emissions. A lot of that comes to

44:31 deforestation in Brazil. So yeah, Azar, I'm also trying to figure out ways to incentivize folks in the global south to stop cutting down trees, and that is really hard,

44:48 The problem is that the job of a cow is to monetize land and the reason why people chop down those trees is because the trees aren't monetizing the land. And so figuring out how to get people money

45:02 to stop that without incentivizing weird behaviors is hard. But I think about it.

45:11 There are, there's

45:14 the rest of it ends up being a lot of software, like I'll give you an example of a way we can do things smarter. Steel right now has a huge concrete footprint, sorry, carbon footprint, when we

45:29 make steel, it's something like 7 or 8 of global CO2 emissions is basically steel, or steel and concrete. So these infrastructure projects are a big deal. And the concrete emits carbon dioxide not

45:45 just from having to heat it, but chemically. you take calcium carbonate and you turn it to calcium oxide and carbon dioxide comes out. Figuring out ways to use these things more intelligently is

45:56 important. If you had the ability when you took down a building to take the I-beams and inspect them and put them somewhere so that you could use those same I-beams when you designed a new building,

46:10 that would be kind of clever. And that's in principle possible with better software, but in practice too hard for us right now, but it seems kind of within reach. So there's all sorts of other

46:21 little things that I would just figure out ways to incentivize. So my, I will give you my thing if I am made, energies are the world, my first priority, I'm going to spend 500 billion

46:36 incentivizing whales

46:38 to have sex because - Oh yeah, I understand in front of sex, in favor of sexy whales. because I, so I'll start and you take over, 'cause you probably actually know the real facts, I don't. But,

46:51 you know, you look back 200, 250 years ago, we had four to five million whales on the planet. Today we got about a million four they talk about, and it's because we were killing whales for oil,

47:04 as well as nowadays, we hit 'em with ships. Baby whales are curious about a ship, they submit. And if you look at a whale, when it dies, it has on average, I think 33 tons of CO2, and it sinks

47:19 to the bottom of the ocean, and we don't see that CO2 again for years. But more importantly, the greatest source of getting rid of CO2 is, I think it's what, plankton is 40 of the photosynthesis

47:37 that happens on the planet, and so the greatest environment for plankton is whaleship. And so I want more whales out there. So I'm 100 aligned with you. So let me tell you a story. So one of the

47:51 blog posts that I wrote was on what happened to the whales. Do you know why we killed the whales, what we used that oil for? I mean, blubber, right, to light lamps so we could read it, right?

48:01 We solved the blubber problem in the late 1800s. You know, it was first coal oil and then obviously petroleum, right? Much better than whale blubber It was margarine. Really? We killed them to

48:15 make margarine. No way. We killed the whales, we rendered them and because whale blubber was slightly less expensive than these things like safflower oil and cottonseed oil and such that was

48:28 relatively new. We didn't have an agricultural system. We had a rapidly industrializing world. We didn't have enough butter The margarine was cheaper and the big damage that we did to the whales

48:42 since the 1980s. 20s and 1930s. This was at the global hunt was to feed oil for margarine.

48:50 There's no good reason why we killed the whales is what I want to say. And in fact, in the 1950s, it was worse because by the time that the Europeans had largely dropped out of the whale market and

49:01 it was the Japanese doing it for tradition and the Russians were literally doing it in the pursuit of Stalin's five-year plans. They would render the whales, they wouldn't even be using these things.

49:15 It was on a record somewhere and you did not say no and so the Russian ships continued. It was an enormous amount of destruction. But when I believe, I think it was

49:31 trying to remember if it was the Norwegians or the Swedes who were the leaders in the whaling industry. So the US at the end, and God, I'm so sorry, but you just have to up with this story. At

49:45 the end of the 1800s, towards the end of the 1800s, the US was the world's whaling nation. We were the superpower. But we ended up having high labor costs because we had a lot of economic growth.

49:58 Didn't happen elsewhere. So the US economy is great. You have all these folks who previously would be willing to put up with a whaling ship and now we're demanding huge salaries. So the US

50:08 effectively got out of the whaling business.

50:12 The Northern Europeans got into it. And for the next couple generations, they led it. And there was a real question once everybody understood that in fact, the whales were being depleted. This

50:24 was a limited natural resource. We were going to have to stop, right? They started to invest in converting their cities and towns that were whaling towns into other industries. And they did it.

50:36 And it didn't, it didn't destroy the economy. It was okay, right? Um, They recognized that what they were doing was long-term, unsustainable. They made a conscious effort as a society to invest

50:51 in change, and there really wasn't an economic reckoning. Do you know where I'm going with this story? I am so impressed, 'cause not only are you a mad scientist and all that, you just

51:04 out-podcasted me. That was awesome. That was good stuff This is a story like I was, I, I, again, this was back when I was doing regular blogging and it was wild that we all knew that we killed

51:19 the whales and nobody that I would talk to knew why, right? And that was a story for me to try to go figure out what the heck happened. But there are lessons in that forest because we had peak

51:33 blubber way before anybody talked about peak oil And it's a great example of a natural resource that we actually did deplete. But if I go all the way back to your point that actually sinking whales

51:46 to the bottom of the ocean is an incredible way to store carbon, that's true. And actually fertilizing the ocean to encourage microalgae to grow is a great way to also true. And if I had Viagra for

52:01 whales, maybe that is what I should be focused on. Like, there are a lot of people out there who are trying to figure out if there are ways to store CO2 in the ocean. I haven't heard anybody say

52:19 Viagra for whales yet, and maybe they should.

52:24 There's a huge opportunity there. You can get carbon credits, man. See, if you can create, just get a new bill, Steve Scalise now, the head of the speaker of the house, Float in the idea, see

52:39 if they'll support it.

52:41 I actually would want to do it just to say, I saved the planet by having whales have sex. I mean, I just think that would be a cool story. I mean, hoodies made up saying that. I think we could

52:52 try to raise some money just by selling the hoodies and see if we can't do some experiments and get this thing going. Perfect. Hey Seth, this was a ton of fun. What I would love to do at some

53:06 point, if I haven't totally repulsed you with doing these things, is I'd love to have you back at some point 'cause we didn't even scratch wild technologies. And my sense is you and I could spend

53:19 an hour talking wild technologies out there. So I'd love to have you back on at some point into the future to do this 'cause this hour is flown by and I really enjoyed it a lot. I appreciate you

53:33 coming on. Well, Seth, I've had a lot of fun too I would love like, so this is the stuff that I've done as a writer and a lot of this climate this. I'm very passionate about it, obviously. The

53:42 technology is what I do for a living. So I'd be happy to come and talk about that too. And there's a lot of neat opportunities to, again, I'll say it one more time to make people's lives better by

53:56 changing the kinds of technology that they use. That's really cool. I'll even throw this out there. Is there a field trip that could show us a lot of that stuff? Because I'd bring a camera crew

54:09 and walk around some place with you hooked up with microphones, because I think that would be cool if there's a convention somewhere or some demo of something. Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. I

54:22 would love that. I personally would like to visit one of these fusion companies, mostly because I want to believe, I don't quite believe yet, but I really want to believe.

54:36 But there are, man, it would be, it would be just to even see if folks would allow us to see the inside of a battery manufacturing plant as an example, right? The scale that we're operating on is

54:50 sometimes bewildering. When we talk about this, people don't really understand how many square meters of building these things are. And when people talk about direct air capture as a great example,

55:05 yeah, let's go down to visit Occidental. There's your field trip. What is this? I don't know when they're going to have this thing built, but I do one of the things I do is techno-economic

55:17 analysis. I've got a spreadsheet somewhere on my laptop here that tells me how many square meters of fans that those guys are planning on putting in. And

55:31 carbon

55:33 is 004 of the air. CO2 is points. And so it's a lot of fans. I mean, like, it's a mind-blowing amount of fans. It is hundreds of millions of dollars. And they're not like little house fans,

55:49 but you can, they're not that different from little house fans. And I wanna see it 'cause I can't wrap my brain around that. Well, I'm throwing it right out there. Hey, Vicki, Seth and I wanna

56:03 come see it. We'll shoot content for it. You'll have a traditional oil and gas Pro, bro, on one side and a technologist, environmentalist on the other side, and we'll come see it

56:17 and check it out. If Vicki sits down with me, I'm gonna have such a hard time talking to my friends. Totally, Vicki, bring it 100. I'm there, I wanna see, right? I wanna see if these things

56:31 are real. Awesome, well, Seth, how do people, find you if somebody wants to reach out. You on LinkedIn, Twitter, any of those spots? Yeah, Twitter. Is that what it's called anymore? I'm on

56:44 LinkedIn. Yeah, no, there was a period where I thought I was gonna be on Twitter, but right now, Seth Miller, easiest way to find me to look me up on LinkedIn, and I'm happy to talk to,

56:53 obviously I'm happy to talk to anybody.

56:57 If there are a friend and listener of Chuck, even better. So please feel free to reach out, I will engage. You're too kind, you're too kind. Well, again, appreciate you coming on.