Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to the Call It Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to consider this premise that we've been seeing bubbling up on occasion that environmentalists may actually be holding us back as far as our society's ability to do better on the environment.
And later on, we're going to discuss whether we do in fact, live in extraordinary, unprecedented times, or if that's just what humans have been or are conditioned to think, the way our brains operate. And actually, we don't live in extraordinary times.
Joining me today is a man who, if you ever see him wrestling with a grizzly bear, you probably need to help the bear. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde, are you ready to be put on the spot here, man?
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah. You just did, man. Just gave away my secret that I know how to handle a bear.
The cool thing is now I won't have to prove it to anyone. So that's cool.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Let's just accept your facts here.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: It's been established.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Yeah. These are not alternative facts. I do wrestle bears.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: There you go. There you go.
Now we're recording this on October 24, 2022. And this week we took a look at a couple of pieces, one from the LA Times and the other from the Atlantic, that both illustrate how people who want to do better in terms of how we treat the environment may be going about it in a way that undermines the ability of our society to truly make progress or to really move things along incrementally. In the LA Times piece, staff writer Russ Mitchell interviewed Vaclav Smil, who is an economist, a professor emeritus at Canada's University of Manitoba, and really a student of the history of energy, and discussed within the belief that most people fail to realize how slow solving our energy and environmental problems will actually be. And the Atlantic piece, the author, Jerusalem Dimsus, I hope I pronounced that right, presented the case that the permitting and approval process for energy infrastructure, with it being open and allowing people to have a legitimate say in it, actually in many cases prevents progress, because for a lot of times, the reasons people try to stop things are dubious or kind of myopic and not really looking at the big picture. So we wanted to talk about these two together, just to look at that theme of are the people who are trying to push this stuff forward? It actually is their process part of the problem we need to be dealing with? So to get us started, Tundad, I just want to throw out the general theme. You know, we see in these pieces. What are your thoughts on this thought that environmentalists may be undermining the environmentalism or the progress on environment. And you know that when it comes to environmental progress, these mindsets are maybe or may be at least what it's holding us back.
[00:03:14] Speaker B: That's a great question. I would say at the 30,000 foot level, of course, I wouldn't be surprised if people who are passionate, energized on any cause might have their own blind spots like everyone else does. And their zeal to find as fast of a solution for the issues that to them are most prominent could create hurdles at the same time that they themselves might not either see or even want to accept. And I think that's why it's not. I say it that broadly on purpose because like we spoke privately in preparing for this, it reminded me a lot of when we did the podcast about Prohibition and the fights between the Wets and the Dries leading up to Prohibition in the 1920s. And the dries were very rigid and they had a good cause or sorry, a good case to make for how alcohol was damaging society for the prior hundred years. But in their zeal, they moved so fast and so quickly that they didn't see that they had the potential, which they did, to create a whole nother set of problems, which was things like basically the prohibition building, organized crime in an underworld and. And that these were things that were just offshoots that also eventually were going to be a problem. And so we could pick a lot of different topics. That's why I say It's. It's at 30,000ft. I think it's a battle between passion and those who are very passionate and energized about their topic versus those who may recognize that incremental change may be the way to make change that lasts. And yeah, I think it's a good question to ask as relates to the environment, because I think most people would agree whether they believe in the solutions to problems with our environment and the climate.
Most of us would agree that it's important to make sure the earth is healthy, I think where the disagreement becomes at the speed at which these changes are made. So.
[00:05:22] Speaker A: Well, I don't know that everybody agrees though. I mean, and that's.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: I said most. That's what I mean. I mean, not. And I'm not saying this, I'm not saying everybody agrees about what the problems are even. Right. I'm just saying that most people, if you really sit them down and say, do you think you need clean air and clean water to live as a human being. I think the majority of people would say, yeah, they begin to differ as to what their solutions would be to fixing them. But yeah, and I think it's. Well, yeah, just to finish off that the environment is very, it can strike a lot of emotions too, because it's something that's important.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I thought the, the, particularly the LA Times piece was interesting in that it framed it as that. The debate from the environmentalists a lot of times is dominated by one of two camps, people who just see catastrophe over every horizon and also the people that they called the utopians that think there's gonna be some eureka moment, that everything's gonna be smooth sailing after that. I look at conversations like this though, and think that they missed the boat by and large, because this is akin to making the argument that abolitionists are preventing or standing in the way of, or making it less likely that slavery is going to be abolished. Like these people are. Their tactics are ham fisted and definitely aren't optimal. Like if you want to say that environmentalists are not optimizing how we're approaching the environment, I'm all with you. But to say that they're standing in the way of progress. I think actually the problem in this situation is the incrementalists. The incrementalists, the people who under normal circumstances I would consider reasonable people, but they're like, yeah, we got it, we got to move on this, but we have to be measured about it. They get lulled to sleep too easily. And so the environmentalists are in these positions where they're not just trying to make the case that this stuff needs to happen, but they're trying to spur people into action as well. And so their, their job though in my view, the agitators shouldn't be looked at as the level headed people that are going to come up with the real solutions. That's the incrementalists, that's the people who can see these things level handed, but it's them that's dropping the ball here. And because the incrementalists are dropping the ball, they're not sticking with it, they're not coming up with real solutions and then pushing them through, through the opposition that you're going to get from industry and so forth. They're easily, I don't want to say bought off, but I mean it, I like the way I said it before, kind of lulled to sleep, like, okay, well maybe we'll deal with this next time. Maybe we deal with this, that and the other Time. And so it puts the environmentalists in a position where they're the only ones that are even pushing in this direction. And so then we look at them and say, yeah, you guys are crazy. The way you're pushing in the direction is completely out of whack. Probably true. But the problem is that they shouldn't be leaving that charge. They should be leading with the passion. They should be making everybody aware of the problem. And then the thoughtful people, they need to be coming behind them with the thoughtful but consistent and persistent attack ways to attack this. And that's what I see as missing more than anything.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to unpack here with this one because there's a lot of moving pieces. I mean, this article is pretty enlightening with certain things. I mean, I think the problem is, it's like anything else. Cause it reminds me a lot where I'm going with this right now is like the school board stuff as relates to how our kids are educated in the national debates right now.
Because what happens is you have things like the National Environmental Policy Act. Sorry, the nepa or nepa. Yeah.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Which was detailed in the Atlantic piece, by the way. Just go ahead.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And what happens is the public has a right to have a say in certain projects that happen in their backyard. And there's another term, nimby. Right. Not in my backyard. And a lot of people feel that way. And so they give it good examples about how certain wind projects in Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard are being voted down by a very small, select group of people because they just don't want those optics in their area. They're worried about it affecting maybe the price of their properties and things like that. But the article goes on to cite it. Yeah, this small group of people. It's kind of an undemocratic thing that they're small.
[00:09:37] Speaker A: Just to add in. It's not that they're. It's not getting voted down. It's getting held up in courts by small groups of people. And, you know, but if you look, if you take a vote of the whole state, for example, they wouldn't necessarily be the.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: It might be power and 5 million homes, those. Those wind farms. So. So in a. And that's kind of what I got out of this article. More so is that I'm sure at the beginning, obviously, you need certain laws in place. Right. So I'm sure the National Environmental Policy act was started in a way to say, okay, let's just make sure that we have an idea of what's going on when new projects hit ground. People aren't using asbestos and arsenic and poisoning groundwater that's going to be drank by Americans and things like that. That's all important. But what I find is also, I'm sure that there's a part where the large corporate America, the kind of the industry and large capital side of it, benefits from the bureaucracy. Because you know, average, the average project requires 1600 pages of, you know, kind of dealing with this National Environmental Policy act that's going to keep a lot of little guys out of it. Right.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Because they're not going to have those impact studies that they, that they were discussing, you know, in terms of how voluminous they are. And you know, like they, yeah, they, they, they, they take years to, to complete, so to speak.
[00:10:58] Speaker B: Well, that's what I was like in that I'm sure like in other industries there's a cottage industry of now offshoot economies. Right. I'm sure law firms, there's big law firms, you know, that, that, that sit there and make sure they have these environmental divisions that can rake in millions of dollars in fees a year by, by doing this and that and being the bridge between the local politicians and the corporations and all that.
[00:11:18] Speaker A: Let me give one example on that real quick. Just, just an example that everybody is familiar with. The IRS has created a cottage industry of tax preparers. You know, like in the sense that H and R Block and Jackson Hewitt, all these places that because everybody has to do a tax return, then it creates an industry where all of these people can, can service that. You know, and then, and that's not to say that that stuff doesn't have value. It's just a, it's part of whenever you have these requirements, so to speak, then you're going to have service providers that offer them. And then as things go on, they get stacked up on top of each other more and more and they become more and more complex and it becomes just this self fulfilling prophecy where everything is just all the paperwork is endless.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's why one of the things that I found interesting that they cite in the article is because again, if you're just looking at this at 30,000ft on the surface of how we have our discourse today, a lot of people think of President Obama as a liberal person that's on the left and who would be supportive of clean energy and things like that and maybe changing how we have that kind of infrastructure in this country. And it's interesting, it says I'm just going to Quote, a little bit from the article here that President Barack Obama promised that the American Recovery and Reinvestment act would kick off a series of shovel ready projects. Later he admitted that there was no such thing. And what it goes on to say is that his own act wound up being bogged down by more than 192,705 NEPA reviews. And it's just like, I mean, 100, almost 200,000 of anything when you're trying to deal with something to get done in a timely manner. So it's shovel ready and all that, that kind of gumming up the works is too complicated. It slows everything down. And what happens is, I think, and this is where I think you'll appreciate what I'm gonna say, the public sees that nothing is getting done and gets apathetic. And it got me thinking, James, of the stuff you like to talk about, like back in the 30s when you had the New Deal. And one big part of kind of all this spending back then was the Works Progress Administration and a lot of the infrastructure spending that they did around the country. And I started thinking about that like, you know, I under, like, obviously there was no EPA back then and all that. And I appreciate why all these things were created. So I'm not saying we should go away with, you know, regulating kind of general things like emissions and kind of how the environment is dealt with, but I do think there needs, we need to look at some sort of better equilibrium where some of these bigger ideas, like whether you want wind farms or solar, like that they don't get bogged down and take 10 years to build. Because I think that's the issue with a lot of the passion on the environmental side is whether they're right or wrong. They think that this problem's imminent so they're not going away. You know what I mean?
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Well, let me say this because I think that I would raise the point like, similar to what you just did as far as Obama. Like people like to reduce all of these things to two dimensional kind of issues. And so like people say, oh, Obama, he's a Democrat, so that means he's on the left. That means he's in favor of, he would want to bog down all this stuff. He wouldn't want to come up with shovel ready projects. But actually he did. He was in this stuff. Actually these statutes stood in the way of things he was trying to do.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: But yeah, that's basically what I was saying.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. No, so I, but I want to piggyback on that and say That I think that with a lot of these issues we should also shouldn't make that same mistake of saying okay this entire like we, we don't want to make this two dimensional is the National Environmental Policy act. And these environmental impact statements, if we make that two dimensional that they're just always bad, then it doesn't allow us to like some of those times there I'm sure there's some large scale projects that probably do need some more additional consideration and then there's probably some that we should be able to fast track. Interestingly enough, you know, Joe Manchin actually just pushed one or tried to put one through and it was, it was shot down by many of his Democratic colleagues and then some Republicans. But basically I don't think this is not one of those issues that you can just top level it and say okay well we just need to make it easy for all of these things to go through. Nor which the current situation, which I don't think is good either is that we just make it difficult for everything to get through. And so right now we are in an extreme and so I would support saying okay well we need to figure out a way to identify high impact things and maybe suggest submit them to a less or a more streamlined approach. Some of what Manchin tried to do was to limit the amount of time these things can sit in, in limbo and so forth. But and I'm not saying his bill was the end all be all, but I'm saying there are types of solutions we can do to try to maybe for higher priority things get them out of just the bog down and so forth. But I don't think this is one of those where we can just say it's all one thing or all something else because that's where you get into trouble. And again that's part of the problem that we are seeing now when we look at and right now we're talking specifically about the piece in the Atlantic talking about how many of the projects that are being held up are projects that would help us meet our nation's admissions goals. For example, the author quotes or notes in the piece that it's the demise of permitting reform and that's revealing that many people in the environmentalism movement are undermining the nation's admissions goal just to make sure that people locally are able to have input, which again people locally having input isn't a bad thing per se. But maybe what we don't have is what maybe we're not at the right. We don't haven't found the right line on how much input they should have relative to everyone else. Because that's what we're doing with a lot of things that we're doing is, is we are balancing how much community input versus how versus national interest or regional interest. And maybe right now the balance is, is too far to one side. I can hear that argument. But what I would caution against with this is just trying to say, make it two dimensional and say, okay, well, where we are is bad. So therefore we need to go the exact opposite way. People hopefully get no input.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Well, no, I mean, obviously I think you're right on that. You wouldn't want to give up the ability for people in the local communities to have a say in what happens in their backyards.
But I do think that, look, this isn't like, I already feel like this isn't going to go well. Right? Because this really would take two things that probably aren't going to happen anytime soon within our greater discourse as a country. One is the ability for everybody to compromise on a subject like this because no one's going to have what they want 100% anytime soon. Then the second thing is the culture, because part of this is we need to look at ourselves as Americans and we have a culture of waste. And that's why I always say, you know, climate change becomes the big pinata everyone wants to talk about when you're dealing with environmental stuff. But the bigger thing is just pollution. Like you know, the amount of plastic in the ocean when oil spills happen and you see, you know, the seals covered in oil. That doesn't have anything to do with climate change. But that's dirty, that's not good. So part of, part of the discussion and how we relate to everything has to change if we want to see changes in the direction that would better things like pollution in the environment. Because I don't think anyone can deny that, like forget about what you feel. Not you personally, but a listener, right. Culturally. And what makes you feel good, whether you pressing a gas pedal of a car with an eight cylinder engine and hearing that roar and all that, yeah, that feels great. But I think we can all be honest and acknowledge that fossil fuels are dirty, wind and solar are not. And so if we can transition over time, again, not within two years, but over a certain period of time, we should be able to make some meaningful change versus the incremental change. I was kind of saddened to see that since 2000 we've gone from 86% of all energy in the world being fossil fuel. To 83%. You think about all the attention that renewables have had in the last 20, 22 years. And I think part of it, I'm sure there's a lot of reasons, but I would assume that this slow roll in this bureaucratic red tape to just getting new projects done could be part of it.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Yeah, but I mean, it's difficult to state how much of a part that is, because also there have been a lot of new projects that like this is a worldwide number and a lot of new projects that have been created, if you're looking around the globe, that aren't renewable at all. So it's not that there aren't, there hasn't been. There may have been more progress than that in, let's say, the U.S. but it was offset. But I think what we have to ultimately get to, and I want to look at that LA Times piece as well, because that talked about something you just touched on in terms of our. Maybe we're focusing too much just on the climate change piece and the electricity generation and transportation and stuff. But one thing I want to mention here, which I think is there are a lot of parallels in history that we can look to for this and that is this kind of all or nothing mentality that you see people have a lot of times with progress where people who are on the side that something needs to happen don't want. And this goes to even your Wets and Dries thing where it's like, well, if they're offered some type of incremental piece, they're like, no, we don't want that. We want it all. And the thinking behind that is that if we don't get it all now, we need to keep agitating for the big change. Because if we do, if we agree to little changes, then basically the momentum will dissipate. We just won't be able to do it. And so whereas the incrementalist views things in a way like, okay, we can do one step, then one step, then one step. You build a wall one brick at a time, so to speak. There are people who believe and they can justify this with history. You know, they were like, look, if we don't make, if we, if we give up little, little things here and there on our way to the change, we're not going to get to where we're trying to get to. Like the thing that always comes to mind for me with this is like when you look at civil rights and you look at the Martin Luther King's of the world, who was looked at More as an incrementalist, particularly as time went on, versus like a Stokely Carmichael or Kwame Ture, where it's like, oh no, no, no, we need to up in the entire system. If we make incremental changes, then we're going to lose our grounds to be able to flip the whole thing over and we're going to stay in a really bad spot. I mean, you can go back even to WB Du Bois and Booker T. Washington for the same kind of thing. So anytime you're trying to change the way society operates that there's going to be resistance and there's going to be for different mentalities, different approaches, people who look at it more of an incremental thing and people who look at it more of a it has to be all or nothing type of thing. Because without. If we don't do all or nothing, we won't get there, so to speak.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I think the reality is that anything complex, I think those who are in the positions of trying to make change shouldn't approach it with any certainty, at least at the beginning. Because anything complex, you got to allow for some wiggle room.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: Yeah. And actually that sets up well. We're looking specifically at the LA Times piece and the environmental historian, excuse me, energy historian, smell that was interviewed and he talks about how. And it. This what's happening in terms of our. The way we are using the environment, so to speak, the things that we're doing. And you talked about it before how waste, you know, is. Is so common and so forth, like it would be impossible. Like the people who think we can, we can flip all this stuff in a short period of time are delusional anyway. Like it's not going to be possible. Because he expands out the analysis beyond just the, you know, just electricity generation, fossil fuels. He's looking at things like, you know, in terms of. He calls them the four pillars of modern civilization. Ammonia, plastics, steel and concrete. And he's saying our dependence on our reliance on these for our way of life and the amount, how energy intensive it is to create all of these. Like it's not just something that, oh, okay, you have a electric car, so you're doing your part. Like, well, hold on. There is a lot that went into making that steel for that car, all of the parts and so forth. Like you're still contributing to the spoilage of the earth, so to speak. So do you think that it's a problem that so much of our focus as far as protecting the environment is so narrowly focused on the things I guess that we see with electricity generation and transportation. Do you think we're focusing on too much or what was your general reaction to this?
[00:24:02] Speaker B: I think we are, but I'll explain it, right, like, it's not that I'm saying we are all focused on just electricity and the fossil fuel stuff from an energy standpoint, just because people that are doing that just, you know, don't want to be agreeable with the other side of the argument or whatever. I just think that this is another example where, I mean, this is complex stuff and it is true that most human beings do want to reduce things to their simplest explanation and they want to have things explained to them very simply. And in our. Everything we've talked about at length on various shows, right, Our modern media ecosystem, the way we're all distracted by having to work and live our lives and run around and chase kids and all that. The point is, what I'm saying is to really get into where we're about to go in this conversation about the four pillars and all that, I mean, just takes. It would take a majority of society just stopping and really getting educated on how our system works, which most people don't understand and some don't care to learn. And then that's what I'm getting at, James, with. I'm realizing, reading this, it's really like many other things is going to take a change in culture. And it's interesting because I thought about, like you've brought up like the civil rights era and stuff like that, and it's very similar, right? And it goes back to the book we did, even with Martin Luther King, you can't legislate what's in people's heads, right? So the, the culture over the civil rights era and after the 60s into the 70s, it was about a cultural shift in the country as much and more so than it was about legislative shifts because, you know, people also had to then be on board after the laws were passed to. To behave certain ways and not behave the way they did in the 50s and 40s and prior. And I feel like this is the same thing, is that instead of telling people that they're just bad if they only use fossil fuel cars or they're bad if they have their food wrapped in plastic, we got to figure out how to change the culture of how we look at all this and then how we relate to it. Like one example in the article, it cites that we waste about 40% of our food.
And then you figure, like you just said, we don't think about how Much energy is used to produce our food. The amount of fresh water that's wasted, the amount of everything. Right.
[00:26:10] Speaker A: And then the fossil fuels that's needed to produce the ammonia that's needed for fertilizer.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Correct? Yeah. And so, and so if we're wasting 40%, that's a cultural thing. Why are we wasting so much food? Why are we throwing away food? And then little things like it was funny, just even preparation, I guess for the show. My mind was thinking about it and I drink tea and I showed my wife, I was like every single tea bag in the packet I bought is wrapped in its own individual plastic bag.
And I just thought of little things like that. So if there's a billion of these tea bags made and sold around the world, there's a billion one time used plastics that's now going to be thrown in the ocean. And why do that? Why not take 30 bags and put them in one big plastic bag, you know what I mean?
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Depends on my green tea comes in, it has I think 20 in one, one plastic bag.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: But what I'm saying is you gotta.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Buy somebody else's tea bags, man.
[00:26:57] Speaker B: No, but see, to me, without getting into wanting more bureaucracy, right, that's where something like the government could come in and say, look, no more plastic bags at the grocery store, right? Like how come Whole Foods got paper bags but my other supermarket has plastic. My point is, is that the trillion plastic bags made every year still end up somewhere in landfills in the ocean. So why not just say everybody can go paper?
[00:27:19] Speaker A: Yeah, never heard of cultural. And then a lot of that's will, just will of. Because this is where I push back when you say that everybody recognizes that's a problem because people may recognize it in the abstract, but in terms of making changes to how we live, I don't know that people do recognize that.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: Let me be careful. I didn't say everyone recognized the problem. I said I think everyone recognizes that the environment is an important topic. That's why I said that.
[00:27:45] Speaker A: But again, I don't know that that's true though, because remember, there is a kind of philosophy that's relatively prominent that is all about how people need to dominate the environment and how we don't owe a responsibility to the environment. But in fact we need to tame the environment, we need to domesticate the environment. We need to make it like we need to control it. And not that it's something we need to work.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Well, that only comes up when I'm mowing my lawn, sir.
So.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: But that's the kind of cultural change you're talking about, though, like, because that kind of, you know, cultural, you know, thought process came up in a time when human beings had, weren't able to affect their environment to the same degree that we are now. And I would say this, like, when I read this piece in general, in terms of how so much focus goes into, I do think there's a reason for why so much focus goes into the, the, you know, like the cars and kind of, you know, power plants and stuff. And I think it's because that's what we see. Like, and you kind of alluded to this before, we don't see how, how they make the ammonia and then how much of that is put on our food. Although I will say, and depending on the circles you're in, like the circles I'm in, I hear a lot about regenerative farming and how bad it is for the way we use fertilizer and so forth in our environment or even, I mean, and if you really go to more of the extremes, how us damming up rivers, you know, so that we can don't have floods and stuff like that or whatever messes up the soil's ability to regenerate itself, you know. And so like that stuff is out there as far as, with the, you know, as far as how that stuff goes with, you know, the, the, you do see it with plastics as well. People do talk about the plastics. You and I have talked about it in the ocean. I would agree. We don't hear much about our overuse of steel or concrete and so forth and how that may be something that can, that these are these, these mountains of problems that we just continually, in a wasteful way, continue to build. But the bigger takeaway from this to me was actually a discussion on the scale of the change that we would need to make. And because the point of smil is that, you know, like people saying that we're going to be able to make these changes quickly are in, in la la land, like they're delusional, like the changes aren't going to be able to happen. And he's saying, he actually says, or it said in the, in the article that evolutions are always preferable to revolutions, you know, and that the, and that goes to what you're saying as far as culture change, where we approach this in a way that instead of saying we're just going to do something cold turkey, we just need to start changing what we're doing, changing our habits and so forth, which makes a lot of sense but to me, like I said, the bigger thing is it's just jarring and it actually can be paralyzing. And this is what you have to be careful with. And this is where I think the interim incrementalists, you know, going back to our earlier discussion, may have a hard time, is that if you actually look at the scale of the things we have to change, you might, you might just throw your hands up and so, like, but the discipline is to just try to make one step and then try to make another step or try to put one brick down and try to build another. Put another brick down, you know, because this is one of those things where you're not going to be able to build the Great Wall of China and a year.
[00:30:52] Speaker B: Yeah, no, and I think it's, you know, that's why it's a great quote. Evolution versus revolution. And evolution is probably the direction one wants to go. And that's why it got me thinking. Evolution is the incremental change over time. Revolution is ripping the band aid off and going for some big, huge, you know, trying to hit a home run every time. And. But I think going back and more.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: Notable in here, like, and actually standing in the way of smaller steps, because if we do these smaller steps, and I think I'm worried that people won't follow through.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: The extra zealous environmental types, number one, don't really, I think a lot of them don't really understand what this guy got into in terms of the size and inertia of our energy infrastructure system. Because it's interesting. I mean, the article cites, you know, without modern nitrogen fertilizers, we could only feed about half of today's humanity. And so ammonia is made from. Synthesized from natural gas. So the point is, is that, you know, this just brings up other kind of, okay, you want to rip the band aid off and just stop that. Then, you know, you're ready for 4 billion people not to eat. And we saw how risings that.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: That would.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That's my point about. That's a good point. I wasn't even thinking that far about uprisings. But that's the kind of disruption you would have if you ripped the band aid off. You see, instead, if you didn't go incremental. And we just, we saw this year how important one little country named Ukraine and another larger country named Russia are to the world's ability to get grain. And all these countries that don't have enough food just because of these two countries having an issue. So imagine if you said, okay, we can't do fertilizer or like think about this. Petroleum makes plastic. So if you shut down all oil drilling and all fossil fuel companies from doing what they do, it's not just about emissions from automobiles. You'd be shutting down the ability to make plastic and get plastic. And you know, even though I've about plastic and you know, covering certain things in one time use, the reality is it's necessary for certain sterilization for our food. And then you think about hospitals and all those other areas where plastics are very important for sterilization, all that. So then you would have more disease and all that if we didn't have the ability to sterilize and protect ourselves. A lot of people don't realize steel comes from smelting of coal into something called coke, which is not Coca Cola or cocaine, but a different type of coke. And so that's what I'm saying and it's interesting because the article size, then I'll hand it back, is making, I'll quote, making just these four materials. What he talks about, meaning the ammonia for the fertilizer, the steel and you know, and the iron stuff for the metals. The synthesis of plastics through oil and this concrete. Making just those four materials requires nearly 20% of the total world's energy supply, generating about 25% of all greenhouse gas emission.
So it is true, like you can't say I want to fix the planet tomorrow and get rid of all this stuff without acknowledging that you would have to get rid of a lot of things that would be very painful for our society in a very short time.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: It would be fundamentally destabilized. Destabilizing to most, if not all society.
[00:34:13] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying. Instead of saying, okay, let's have a 50 year game plan or something like that to just incrementally make these changes and have, you know, because then you could say okay, maybe 20, in 20 years, going from 86 to 83% of total energy consumption being fossil fuels, you know, maybe we can ramp that up, that in the next 25 years we're from 83 down to 70. You know, maybe some more realistic goals that are incremental and not saying, oh, in 20 years we gotta go from 83 down to 10. That probably won't happen.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: We do see that. But this is again why I focus the I train. If we're, if we're apportioning blame pie, I put more of that on the incrementalist because we do see that. We see corporations setting, you know, Carbon neutral, you know, in 20 or by 2040 or something like that. So we do see people setting goals and you know, the goals definitely aren't in two years or four years or whatever. You know, we see California right now is talking about, you know, whether they're going to allow new gas cars, you know, within. I think they may be 2030 or 2040 or something like that. And so we do see that. But I think the problem is, is that the environmentalists, the passionate ones, the ones that are running hot are, they are filling too much of the vacuum, the void, so to speak. Because the incrementalists haven't been, like you pointed out, we've gone from 86 to 83. The incrementalists have been too easily distracted or they've been too easily kind of, oh well, we'll deal with it later. We keep putting it off and so forth. Because while Smil talks about how evolutions are preferable to revolutions and so forth, what he does talk about is that what it said is the quote is. Or what he says is the old Romans knew it well. Where difficult matters are at stake, the change is best affected by slow but relentless progress. And so where I see what's missing is the relentless part of the incrementalist. The incrementalists are, oh, we'll get to it, you know, in five years or whatever. They're not, they, they're, they're, they may be right in terms of the kind of mindset that we need to have because we can't just flip the table over and have everything be okay, but it needs to be relentless as well. And so that's what I see as missing more than anything is that the level headed people, so to speak, are too. We're so easily distracted. We jump to this, we jump to that. And now we're concerned about whatever the issue of the day is and we lose sight of the big picture with these things. Because what we have to keep in mind, and I bring this up when we talk about a lot of these big swings, so to speak, or these big problems or big things that we have to accomplish is that in this instance, unlike for example, when we talked about the moonshot that, or the, the, the, the space race or whatever getting to the moon, when we talked about the cancer moonshot and how, you know, like that's a little different, there's industry, there are people, there is entrenched people who are making a lot of money on things not changing, that will be standing in the way. It's not one of those things that as long as we, we can just keep moving and there won't be resistance, there's going to be resistance. And so the incrementalists need to be able to step up and stay relentless in the face of that. And when they don't, what ends up happening? The signal that the incrementalists are dropping the ball to me is the fact that we hear about the environmentalists, the people who are running too hot and want to flip the table. We hear about them too much because the incrementalists are like, oh, yeah, we'll, we'll, you know, I'm good with, you know, I got, got some money from these lobbyists. I'll be good for now, you know, like, type of thing. So to me, that's why I point that finger there. But, you know, I'm not going to. Well, I probably already did belabor the point, but going to belabor that point anymore. But did you have any more final.
[00:37:54] Speaker B: Things before we move on? I mean, I, I would say I disagree with that sentiment only to the fact that I do think that there are people that are extreme on the environmentalist side who don't want to compromise either. Just like something.
[00:38:12] Speaker A: Correct. And what I'm saying is that they're too pro. Like, because the incrementalists aren't pushing relentlessly enough. Those environmentalists are too prominent. I'm just saying we shouldn't hear about them as much. And I don't think we would hear about them as much if the incrementalists were doing their job.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: But I think the problem is that the incrementalists also don't have like a. Like, the problem is, is that there's too much bureaucracy, too much red tape, and there's no one with a game plan. Meaning, like what we read earlier about, like President Obama's own plans had a 192,000 of these reviews. I mean, 192,000 of anything for people to try and get through in a short period of time is not gonna happen. You know what I mean? And then, so what happens is, I think.
[00:38:53] Speaker A: And he was an incrementalist.
[00:38:55] Speaker B: Yeah. But my point is that everyone begins to give up and get a little bit apathetic. Cause then you're right, the more extreme on the environmentalist side, they get a little bit fed up and start wanting to get more extreme. And then the incrementalists kind of throw their hands up and kind of, oh, well, you know, this is just, this is how it is. And no one really gets the job. Done. And I look at someone like Joe Manchin as part of more of an example of an incrementalist. And then when his stuff gets, he wants to put his stuff to the floor. The extreme side is so rigid that they won't allow any, let's say speeding up of certain things because it might involve a fossil fuel concern as well. And that's all I'm saying is that that's an example how nothing's going to get done because.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: And that's how these two topics tied together, so to speak.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: Because you agree, because the LA Times article, the guy does a great job. That's why those four pillars thing and the way he just cites it is we're not getting off of fossil fuels anytime soon without massive disruption to humanity. I mean just learning that natural gas is what's needed for ammonia, which is what's needed for fertilizer. And if you take that out of the equation, you half the people don't eat. That's a, that's a big deal. So that's kind of where I'm at is I think that it's just like a lot of other topics, this one a little more serious because this involves our. Everything, right? Food, everything. Yeah, like literally those four pillars are like, it's like yeah, concrete, steel, I mean it's everything. So I get it that this is very important, but I think this is where the lack of compromise and like you said, I'm not going to deny of course that there's huge gobs of money that are at stake and there's lobbying, there's industry. I mean this is one of the most probably the biggest thing that's going to be dealt with this century. Right. The whole how we deal with our.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Environment to that point. It wasn't all environmentalists that stood in the way of the things Obama was trying to do. Some of that was industry. And so, but that's, it's to your point, you know, you got the industry standing in the way. So the environmentalists, it could be more harmful some the things that they do a lot of times because hey, we already are catching this fire. We're going to catch this fire. We being the incrementalist from the, from the industry who actually does stand to lose market share or money if we get this thing through. And then if you were getting it from the other side as well. Yeah, that, that's a, it's a crossfire. It makes it very difficult to get deal with. But ultimately that's where to me the term that you come Away with. Is that relentless term? Because that. It's slow. It's okay. Slow might be preferable, but it has to be relentless. And so you have to deal with it when you get. When you're taking the fire from both ends.
[00:41:39] Speaker B: Who was successful at that recently?
[00:41:41] Speaker A: Who's that?
[00:41:42] Speaker B: The people that didn't like Roe versus Wade.
[00:41:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: They were. They were slow and incremental and they were relentless for 50 years and they made it happen. So that's my point is. So it's not to agree or disagree because I'm pro choice. It's just saying that, hey, when you're slow and relentless, you get rewarded when you know you have a game plan.
[00:42:02] Speaker A: Yeah, like you said, I'm not. That wasn't something I was in favor of, but it's a really good point of. Because that was something that many people thought would have been impossible for them to do.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:42:10] Speaker A: You know, like. And in public support, like, more people don't want that than do, you know, but they were able to do it nonetheless because it was slow and relentless progress. So. But I do want to move to the second topic. You know, it was an interesting topic. We, we saw Neil DeGrasse Tyson and you know what he was saying? And he was doing an interview and he was talking about how basically we're conditioned to believe that we live in extraordinary times like that Everybody did every, you know, people a thousand years ago thought that they lived in, you know, the most amazing times. We look back at it like, you guys weren't doing anything. And so. But it's actually a very interesting way that he breaks this down and he talks about the pace of discovery and how discovery. The pace of discovery keeps accelerating so much, like it's exponential how much more we're discovering. If you look back, you know, like, we've learned more in the last 20 years than we did in the, in the 50 years before that, so to speak. And then it keeps growing like that. But our, our perception of these things is linear. Like, so we don't see it as exponential growth. We see it as, as more of a, A, just a slant, you know, like so. Or a slope, I guess, you know, the proper way to say it. And so. But what were your thoughts on this in terms of just kind of how the way we perceive things. We don't recognize how, like, everything that we think is amazing right now is going to be like if it was 20 years. It took us 20 years to get here. What we're going to get in five more Years is going to be crazy compared to that.
[00:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I think it speaks a little bit just to pick up from the last discussion about the complexity of life today. And I think this lends to that, that. Because here's an interesting thing that's up your alley. I thought about you when I was reading this.
[00:43:47] Speaker A: Patent one.
[00:43:47] Speaker B: Yeah. So I'm gonna throw it to you on that now. I'll throw it to you. Is this interesting? Between 10, 2010 and 2020, the number of patents granted in the United States was greater than the number of patents granted between 1960 and 2000.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: So over the last 10 years, more than over 40 years. And that's. That's what I'm saying. So clearly, that means there's a lot more complexity in how we're dealing with things. If that many more patents were given in 10 years than, you know, more. More in just the recent decade than in 40 years or prior, you know, in the last hundred years.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: And let me say something on that real quick, because this is, I think, the key to this, and they call it exponential growth. Because what it is, basically, is instead of growing in two dimensions, like, you consider, like, you know, I don't know if people remember, you know, like, just kind of, you know, you have the slope, you have the x axis, the y axis and stuff, and you have a slope. You're growing up like that.
[00:44:40] Speaker B: But what it is trying to be in geometry class, you're not trying to do that, but you better speed it up.
[00:44:46] Speaker A: But the point being is that instead of just sloping up like that, it's actually going up and spreading out outwardly as well. So everything is growing, and we're not just growing in one direction. We're growing in all directions. And so, yes, like, I. I started practicing doing what I do in 2008, and, you know, we're getting patent number 6 million or something like that. Now I'm getting patent number 11 million. You know, like there were 6 million from the beginning of the country to, you know, like, to. When I started doing this, you know, it was in the fives and the six millions. And now we're. We're pushing 11. And it's like, wow, like, that's just since I've been doing this stuff. And so, yeah, like, it's. It's amazing. And again, it's not because there were two times or three times as many discoveries in one area of technology, but it's that each area of technology opens up three more lenses, three more lanes. Excuse me. Or opens up four more Lanes for you to go down. And so yeah, that growth. And we can only keep so much stuff in our head at any given moment. You know, it's like. So I mean, it was interesting point, but go.
[00:45:48] Speaker B: No, well, that's, that's why I think it's because it's funny what I wrote next to one of the. Because it's funny. I've always felt this. It's almost like that Moore's law with the microchips, right. Every two years they get more. And it's like the same thing happens with humans in terms of. Not that our brains are more powerful. Right. But like you said, like, I don't have to worry about creating the theory of relativity because Einstein did it. So with that discovery, there was all kind of other scientific and practical discoveries and outcomes for our bride. If you don't. And they even say if you don't have the theory of relativity, we don't have gps, you know, and there is.
[00:46:26] Speaker A: A millions between theory.
[00:46:28] Speaker B: We don't have the space race. We don't have any of that. And so. And you know, it's an interesting period because we talked about this on the show before that usually things like war. It was, I think, a show we did on Covid.
[00:46:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:39] Speaker B: When you, when you're in an extremely stressed period of time where you have to come up with solutions no matter what, humanity is pretty damn good at doing that. And I know in that show we did, we talked about the record of getting a vaccine for the virus. And it's because basically the whole world's scientific community was like on a war footing. And one of the things I think I cited then was the second World War and the amount of technology that that came about. If you look from just the late 30s to 1945, you know what I mean? I mean, we finished the second World war with jet aircraft, you know, and with ballistic missiles that could go to space and come back down and all that stuff when just 10 years before none of that existed. So, and, and so what I wrote next to this on my notes was Ancient Aliens.
Remember that show? That's stupid show that I always say that I can't stand. No, because what it reminded me was I've seen shows where they. Where they speculate that the Nazi technology was alien driven.
[00:47:37] Speaker A: Oh my goodness.
[00:47:38] Speaker B: And, and no, but people believe this stuff. Right? And that's my point.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: Hey man, people believe a lot of stuff, but you're right. Go ahead.
[00:47:43] Speaker B: But it's enough that it got on channels like the History Channel, which I Thought was a legitimate, you know, outlet. Up until it was.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: Well, they were at one point.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: Yeah, up until it wasn't. When they actually used to show documentaries and boring stuff that's supposed to be, you know, you can learn. But then when they started entertaining the conspiracy theorists, I had to.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: They went into straight fantasy in order to, I guess for ratings like I guess the boring stuff that you and I would have watched.
[00:48:06] Speaker B: But that's. But I bring it up for a reason to cite it, that. And again, I'm not going to knock people that believe that aliens created the pyramids or that aliens gave the Nazis the technology.
[00:48:16] Speaker A: But what I will knock those people.
[00:48:18] Speaker B: I'll let you knock them. I'll be the nice guy.
[00:48:20] Speaker A: But consider yourself knocked if that's you.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: But the reason why it made me think of that is because like either those mindsets, the people that want to believe this stuff or that stuff, I should say either are totally ignorant to what we're talking about, that they just haven't comprehended that if certain things are already done by the time we're born in terms of discoveries and all that we don't have to work on discovering the same thing. Right. We can take that information and build on it just like. And it's not just scientific as long.
[00:48:55] Speaker A: As it's passed down. That's the key. And that actually is talked about by Neil Degrasse Tyson as well in terms of the publishing of scientific research. Because one of the things, I mean to your point, one of the things about Egypt is that most of what we know about Egypt was filtered through what the Greek, you know, because the Greeks, the Egypt kind of begat the Greeks, so to speak, in terms of it jump started them with technology and then the Romans and then, you know, so all of that stuff built out of Egypt, that what we learn about a lot of the Egypt stuff, and then that's before, you know, a lot of the things to be able to preserve that stuff, you know, like in terms of the knowledge that it becomes and then eventually filter through, you know, the Arabs and so forth, of the Muslims, I should say, you know, in terms of, you know, where that knowledge went, that we hear about it third hand, fourth hand, and then it's hard to disseminate what exactly they knew, what all they knew and so forth. Whereas now what, what is talked about is all the publications that we have. And that's another thing where you can see the exponential growth is scientific publishing, Scientists publishing new research is something that continues to grow. And so for that reason yes. Everyone now who's in, in those fields stands on directly stands on the shoulders. They don't have to go find it in some, you know, like go, go into some cave and try to find these tablets or something like that or worse, have to learn it firsthand.
[00:50:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:16] Speaker A: And then, you know, try to preserve it in that way. And so our ability to, to, to keep these knowledge, keep this knowledge passed along and give it to the next generation to be able to stand on the shoulders is also optimized right now.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: Well, it's interesting because as you say that I'm thinking of a real simple example that I think most of us can appreciate, which would be airplanes. Aircraft, right.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:50:37] Speaker B: For anyone, I think a lot of people probably listening to have seen by now the, the, the Top Gun Maverick, you know, the, the newer one. And you know, at the beginning there's that, what they call.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: Here's your spoiler alert.
[00:50:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, this is definitely a spoiler. The Dark Star that basically the plane they declassified for the movie and it goes Mach 10 right now. That's 10 times the speed of sound. Is. That's what I'm thinking. Like. Yeah. Literally just over 100 years ago, you had the Wright brother brothers trying to take off on the beach in North Carolina and they flew for like 11 seconds and that was literally the first time a plane went off. And then like we said 10 years later you got World War I and there's biplanes with machine guns on them. And they figured out how to. First the machine guns were cutting up the propeller and guys were dying.
[00:51:22] Speaker A: And they figured out, and they figured.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: Out how to deal with that and make the bullet, you know, shoot every time the propeller was turned. And then fast forward 20 years, you got literally aircraft carriers with the propeller planes, you know, taking off, you know, fighting in Japan, you know, against the Japanese in the Pacific Ocean. And then fast forward 20 years, we're putting space stuff into space. And just 25 years after the Second World War, we got Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. And so what happens is to your point, it's not like the engineers and the guys doing the research to build that declassified plane that was in Top Gun this year had to sit there and invent how to fly a plane. Right. And how to figure out all those aerodynamics and all that they were, they were, they built this new plane based on all the accumulated knowledge from, you know, the last hundred years. And I think that's pretty much every topic of anything in humanity. And your point is well taken about it. Needs to be carried on. Because I think Europe is a great example since that seems to be the most dominant historical stuff we deal with now, which is, remember Europe had a period that they call the Dark Ages, right? Because what happened is you had the Roman Empire which was a lot of technology, a lot of advancements and by about 500 AD.
[00:52:44] Speaker A: Let me, let me, let me remember the Roman Empire subsumed like took in technology from. Because I'm going to make this, you know, I'm going to get into this in a second. Once again, they took in the technology from Egypt, they took in the tech, they were able to communicate with India took in the tech mill too. So they're getting stuff from there, they're getting stuff from Greek, Greeks, you know, and so they, they had all this knowledge and then when they ended though it did not get passed on directly. Like the closest you got was again the, the Muslims were able to get a lot of that. They either recreated or were able to get a lot of that stuff either from its original places, but not really from the Romans, a little bit from the Ottoman or you know, from, you know, the Constantinople and stuff, that area. But that's where the, the, the, the bulk of the knowledge was versus then you have like China. They weren't really sharing what they knew with anybody and so it could easily be lost if, if a generation does the wrong thing with these things. And so, you know, to your, or just, you know, I'll shoot you back or shoot it back over to you. But the thing is, is that what's so unique right now is that all of these advancements now we're all able to, wherever that advancement comes from again, except confidential start, you know, things that are classified or everybody's able to keep building on these, everybody's aware of them and it's not like oh, this guy died, you know, and so now we lost this tablet through, this ship sank and then we lost this, you know, these papers and so we just can't do this anymore. Like that doesn't happen.
[00:54:05] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I mean I'm sure that has happened many times in human history that something that was created or invented was actually literally lost like that. Like sitting at the bottom of the ocean, it might have taken and it.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Might be a thousand years before people were able to figure that thing out.
[00:54:18] Speaker B: But I'm going to, I'm going to stand you correct, I'm going to stand to correct you one time, sir. Remember, don't forget the Chinese did give the Italians noodles, which then became my.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: Favorite Even then, you're still talking about.
[00:54:32] Speaker B: Beef and a bolognese sauce with some rigatoni. You know, that's. If it wasn't for the Chinese, sir, I wouldn't be eating great Italian food right now.
[00:54:40] Speaker A: Or it might just be something else. But no, I mean, I think the big takeaway of this and just kind of the thought process is how fast knowledge is growing. So if you think we're looking at something right now, basically the point is, is that you ain't seen nothing yet, because what's going to. What we're going to see, I mean, look. Look at the iPhone. You know, something like that. Like, you go back 20 years. I mean, I thought we were doing. Doing big things, man.
[00:55:03] Speaker B: 20 years ago, Motorola Razor. That was when you can see the number on the outside and all that kind of stuff.
[00:55:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:55:10] Speaker B: And, you know, it's cool. In 50 years, someone's going to think that it was aliens that invented the iPhone.
[00:55:16] Speaker A: Of course, of course.
[00:55:18] Speaker B: There's no way people could just have a touchscreen out of nowhere, you know, like.
[00:55:21] Speaker A: Of course, of course. And on that note, on that note.
[00:55:24] Speaker B: We'Re going to, you know, Steve Jobs is going to be some secret alien, you know, so.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: But now we appreciate everybody for joining us. This episode of Call It Like I See It. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review us, tell us what you think, send it to a friend, and until next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:55:40] Speaker B: I think I'm going to be an alien, but I'll be tuned in probably another 100 years. Kind of cool. Yeah, maybe I'll be. I got to invent something, though. Someone to call me an alien.
[00:55:48] Speaker A: That's high praise. Yeah. I don't know, man. You still got work to do. You're not. They're not going to make you an alien. Just wrestling grizzly bears.
[00:55:53] Speaker B: I'll make a new, like, paper airplane or something complicated like that.
[00:55:57] Speaker A: Take a few hours and so we'll talk to you next time.
