[Scott] On this surprising episode of "Energy Switch," we'll hear some unconventional wisdom.

- We do have an interesting moment where I think all of us who care about climate will have to decide we're more committed to solutions than battles, and that is actually a non-trivial decision to be made.

- Yeah.

- In the United States, people don't really care or vote about climate, and as countries become less wealthy, they will vote the incumbents out to people that will give them cheaper energy.

You're seeing that in Europe, you're seeing that all around the world.

And so, the only thing that is an answer to climate change is using less.

And I don't think our economic system is going to choose that.

[Scott] Coming up, unconventional thinkers on energy and climate.

[Narrator] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

Arizona State, The New American University.

[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Conventional wisdom is that oil and gas companies are against decarbonization, and that solar and wind will eventually replace them.

One of our guests argues that oil companies must be part of decarbonization, the other, that solar and wind can't replace them, and that we don't value energy or our environment enough to take meaningful climate action anyway.

You may not agree, but these are deep thinkers you'll certainly want to hear.

They are Nate Hagens, he's the executive director of The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, and host of the popular podcast "The Great Simplification," with degrees in finance and natural resources.

Tisha Schuller is the CEO and founding principal of Adamantine Energy, an author of two books on the energy industry, and a strategic advisor to Stanford University, her alma mater.

On this episode of "Energy Switch," you'll hear unconventional wisdom.

I'm really glad you're here, Tisha, Nate, some of my favorite energy thinkers.

You both have platforms, you podcast, you've thought about these things deeply, you studied them deeply.

So why is it important to push past what we might call conventional thinking?

Why is that so important?

- Because conventional thinking is leading us towards a cliff.

We have standard neoclassical models that say our wealth and productivity are just based on human ingenuity and technology when it's actually the unpaid-for ecosystem services of the earth, coupled with energy and minerals, which we are drawing down millions of times faster than Mother Earth put them there.

So we definitely need unconventional thinking to get us through what's coming, in my opinion.

- Interesting.

- I'm actually more invested in the human ingenuity component.

So for example, my interest in the oil and gas industry is you have some of the brightest minds in the world, you have some of the biggest R&D budgets in the world, letting oil and gas companies be central to solving some of the world's greatest problems, whether it's getting energy to impoverished nations or if it's about decoupling resources from the quantity of energy that we all get to use, I want everyone to have a seat at the table as a solution to offer.

And I think that takes unconventional thinking because right now we think of energy and climate as there being good guys and bad guys.

And we only want some of the guys at the table.

Well, I want all the brightest minds, all the world's resources at the table in service of solutions.

- Yeah, let's have the dialogues, right?

- Right.

- So Nate, you've talked about the public being what you call energy blind.

What is that, what does that mean?

And go there.

- So our society, our culture, not only in the United States, but in the world, misunderstands the importance of energy to our lives and our futures.

There is not a single thing that contributes to GDP, the size and scale of our economy, that doesn't require energy, and yet we are extracting the majority of our energy around 85% of our energy globally, and that's been the case for the last 40 years, from fossils, from things that were trickle-charged by the sun over millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of years.

- Right.

- Our culture is drawing that down and treating it in our stories and in our expectations as if it were interest, but it's really a bank account that we're drawing down.

- And so, you feel even the educated world, the developed world, we're pretty blind to all of that?

- So here's the thing, I have a master's from one of the best business schools in the country.

They never mentioned the word energy once in the two years I was there.

- Yeah.

- They treat the story of our productivity as labor and capital, and energy is not included in that.

So about three percent of our jobs in the United States is energy-related and food-related, but we can't have anything without energy and food.

So if the energy sector disappeared, we would lose three percent of our GDP, but we would actually lose 100% of our GDP.

[Scott] Correct.

- One more example, which is just striking to me, the average American household has 60 items in their house plugged in 24/7, even if they're not turned on.

[Scott] Right.

- That itself, even if you're not using them, that's like a 12% draw of our national electricity use.

- Yeah.

- And it's like magic.

This stuff is indistinguishable from magic on human timescales, and we're just burning it without any appreciation for its preciousness.

- That's really well said.

- I had never thought of it as magic before.

So I find that compelling.

- Well, let me explain.

So a barrel of oil has 5.7 million BTUs worth of energy, which is 1,700 kilowatt hours worth of energy in one barrel of oil.

Any of us working a full day will do 0.6 kilowatt hours worth of energy.

So one barrel of oil, which right now costs $70, does the equivalent of four and a half years of our physical work, so that's what I mean by magic.

- It's amazing, yeah.

- Because we-- - It's essentially free.

- It's essentially free.

We pay for the cost of extraction plus a little profit.

- Nate, many environmental activists kind of talk about ending fossil fuels, is it possible?

How do you see it?

- I mean, if you look at the, the real serious climate scientists, they think we need to stop burning by 2030 or 2040 and reduce towards net zero.

From a current standpoint of looking at the system, there's zero chance that's going to happen because who's gonna get rid of this magic?

Who's gonna voluntarily get rid of the magic?

I think we are gonna be dependent on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.

- Yeah.

Tisha, kind of conversely almost that, can fossil fuels contribute, for lack of a better way to say this, to a cleaner environment?

- I'll tell you about my journey, because when I started, I didn't know.

So if you remember the short chapter where natural gas was a climate solution supported by the Sierra Club and other groups, that's when I went to head up the Colorado Oil & Gas Association.

But then the Shell Revolution happened and Colorado became an oil producer.

And I had a crisis.

I didn't come to run the Oil Association.

I came to run the Natural Gas Association.

So I spent several weekends doing as much math and research as I could assemble to understand, can we solve climate without oil and in this industry, and if we can, I'm gonna quit my job.

And so, my conclusion that I came to, not only, same as you came to, Nate, that we're going to need oil and gas for a long time, we don't have viable alternatives, but also climate solutions require scale and investment.

And so, it's my working hypothesis, right?

This is all in motion, that the oil and gas industry is actually central to solving the world's biggest problems, including providing affordable, reliable energy, but also reducing that footprint.

And so, that's where I work.

Now, when that's not true anymore, I'll be back here working for the nuclear industry.

- Hmm, maybe in parallel.

- Right, maybe both.

- When they hear the word clean, I think a lot of people in the rich world think emissions to the atmosphere, CO2 methane.

Do you think broader than that about the environment?

- So the environment for me is something spiritual and very personal.

In the context of the work I do, environment is many kinds of footprints, water use, waste, actual land footprint.

Interestingly, in our public conversations environment has come to mean almost exclusively carbon emissions, which I think is shortsighted and doesn't take into account the very, very many trade-offs that all our energy sources require.

- Yeah, yeah.

[Nate] Yeah.

Can I chime in there?

- Oh, absolutely.

- Some people have carbon tunnel vision that they think the environmental problem is just climate.

It is so much beyond that.

We are losing insects at one to two percent a year biomass.

We've lost 70% of the population of reptiles, birds, fish, animals since 1970.

There's a list of environmental problems as long as my arm that are not related to carbon per se.

And so, the issue here is there's different layers in this conversation.

And of course, oil and gas are important for economic growth.

Economic growth is our cultural goal.

We don't pay the prices of the negative things that I just discussed.

- Right.

- I mean, most of us really do like green spaces and animals and birds and wildlife, but our system doesn't include that in our incentives, our prices or our values.

Because if we did, oil would be three or four or five times more expensive, and that would ripple through the entire economic system.

- Right.

- And we wouldn't be able to afford just basic necessities.

- I do think if we put humans at the center of our energy and environmental planning, such that emerging economies, which have by far the highest birth rates and also the lowest historic environmental footprint, if we put those emerging economies at the center of our planning, if we invested in them like we've been investing in climate action, for example, globally, then those economies would become more interested in environmental protection, would likely have falling birth rates such that the population would peak, and then we could attend to reducing our energy footprint, increasing our energy density.

- Right.

- And things like innovation around nuclear, you could imagine a world with a stable or shrinking population, and decoupled environmental footprint.

- Right.

- From energy consumption.

- Energy centric, of course, I agree with that.

Human centric, that's what got us here, is we're so anthropocentric, we put humans at the center of everything.

We are part of the web of life.

We're part of a living planet, the only planet in the known universe to harbor life, let alone complex lives.

- Well, we think we're complex, who knows?

- Exactly, there's a hubris involved in this that doesn't respect the ecology.

And we are in a period of ecological overshoot.

Given our amount of consumption, given our amount of population, given our amount of resources and impact, something's gotta give here.

But I do think the anthropocentric, looking at everything from human and human value, is part of the problem.

- I would like to add to that because I think your characterization of me is fair because in my heart, when you talk about the global system, I feel it, I feel the ache.

And I agree with your perspective, and I think to solve the world's greatest problems, we have to do it in a human-centric way.

- Right, Nate, can solar and wind actually decarbonize us?

- Solar panels and wind turbines are rebuildable, they are not renewable.

We have to rebuild them every 25 years.

So there's a metabolism to this system that solar and wind are just adding to the metabolism.

- Right, you mentioned nuclear earlier.

Is nuclear the answer here, what's its role?

- So I agree that with energy density and the depletion of fossil fuels and the addition of carbon from carbon based fuels, that nuclear would be an answer and we should pursue it.

But at a wider boundary sense, if we were to suddenly have nuclear fusion and it was almost free, that would be the equivalent of giving machine guns to chimpanzees because we would scale everything.

And so, there would be massive depletion of ecosystems and growth and sprawl and environmental impact.

- Interesting, do you agree with that or?

- No, not at all.

I think at its heart there might be a core difference, which is a kind of maybe pessimism, but I wanna give you a chance to reframe that because when I think of unlimited nuclear power, I think of how we can-- that humans will then choose to value nature and humans will choose to value each other.

I do agree that we have a problem of solving for an economic model that relies on growth, but I think we're gonna have to sort that out in the next 20 years, one way or the other.

But I'm curious, Nate, is that just a fundamental characterization?

I'm gonna look at everything and see an upside and you're gonna look at everything and see chimpanzees with machine guns?

- No, but I think there's a fundamental question here about what we ought to do or what is, and I'm looking at the reality now and we are not valuing nature, and we are running into limits and we're papering them over with more and more debt and short term rule changes and things like that.

So my main point is that we're gonna have to prepare for a period, a long period with less material and energy throughput than we've come accustomed to in our generation.

- I just wanna say for the record that I wanna live in my future.

[Scott laughing] - I wanna live in your future too.

I just don't think it's plausible.

- The oil industry, we burn coal, we earn oil, we burn gas, it puts CO2 in the atmosphere, and we leak methane.

Does the industry itself have a role to play in decarbonizing the the emissions stream?

And what is that, if they do?

- The first step is to reduce the carbon intensity of the current systems and to continue to innovate in that way.

Then there's a lot of oil and gas, what I would call oil and gas adjacent solutions.

So these are things that are subsurface, like geothermal or carbon capture sequestration.

Using the experiences of the industry, the talents, but also the actual physical infrastructure for lower carbon.

So I think the oil and gas industry has a lot to offer for repurposing, but also just the scale.

[Scott] Yeah.

- And then ultimately, the ingenuity of the industry cannot be underestimated because the oil and gas industry wants to solve the world's biggest problems, and climate is one of them.

- I mean, right now, climate seems to be polarizing, at least in the rich world.

Do you think it's possible to begin to unify around climate?

- All of us who care about climate will have to decide we're more committed to solutions than battles.

And that is actually a non-trivial decision to be made.

- Right.

- Because as soon as climate doesn't become something that exists or doesn't exist, depending on if you're a Republican or Democrat, as long as we are living in that world, we're not gonna make progress.

But if we unite on the fact that we should be reducing the carbon intensity, we should be reducing the environmental intensity of our energy system, then there's nothing political about that.

Now it's about innovation, it's about evolution.

And anyone who isn't evolving is a part of the past.

And if you're a business, that's just a recipe for failure.

- Yeah, do you think, Nate, we can unify around climate action?

- No, probably not.

If you look at how our society is organized, we have outsourced our wisdom to the financial market and what's good for the citizens and what's good for the environment, including climate change, are at the bottom of the rung.

So I think it starts with a recognition of our values.

Like, what do we really care about?

I mean, in the United States, people don't really care or vote about climate.

And to your points, as countries become less wealthy or they were wealthy and they're becoming less wealthy, they will vote the incumbents out to people that will give them cheaper energy.

You're seeing that in Europe.

You're seeing that all around the world.

And so, the only thing that is an answer to climate change is using less.

And I don't think our economic system is going to choose that.

- Yeah.

- I'd like to offer an alternative perspective, which is we did have, for example, in the U.S., a system of elites that valued environmental impacts and climate.

And we put a whole bunch of regulations in place.

When we had the power to price in the externalities, to factor in all the environmental decision making, we blew it.

We blew it by making it too bureaucratic, too cumbersome.

And it became a system of no.

So I wanna offer an alternative, which is not that we have to go backwards and not care about the environment.

We have to care about the environment better.

We have to have a way to get to, yes.

And I think that that's a less, it's a different, we need a different environmental orthodoxy.

- Again, I agree with you, and I don't.

Everything you just said is true, but we need a systems view, no matter who's in the White House, we need to look at the whole thing as a system.

Let's say, oh, we care about climate change, so let's outlaw natural gas stoves.

That makes no sense because natural gas stoves are part of the current economic system.

So I'm not here advocating for the silly climate policies that have evolved.

- Right.

- That all these countries in the world have signed on to the Paris Agreement and we're still making record emissions.

If we really care about climate, nothing that we've done has changed emissions globally.

We're at all-time highs.

So we need to look at this from a systems perspective.

Energy is central, human behavior is central, the ecology of the earth is central.

But these things that we're talking about, Scott, these things are rarely talked about in the mainstream media.

- No, they're not.

[Nate] Because they're difficult.

- They're hard.

- 'Cause there aren't any easy answers, which is why your show is so important because people need to understand these core issues underpinning our future.

- It's been a wonderful dialogue.

Given what we've talked about, where do you see you and Tisha agreeing and disagreeing?

- I think we agree that the environment is important.

I think we both agree that energy, especially oil and gas, is indistinguishable from magic for what it provides humans at human timescales.

I think we agree that humans are likely to choose access to cheaper energy, whether it's oil or gas or anything, before they're gonna make some hardships or sacrifices on behalf of the environment.

I think where we disagree is on the severity and immediacy of the cultural transition ahead of us, where a lot of these, like standard oil gas climate narratives are no longer gonna be on the table.

So I actually think we agree on most things, but I'm just trying to take the longer term, wider boundary perspective.

And yes, her future she's describing is much more appealing and able to look forward to than mine.

And I don't like being a pessimist.

I'm really kind of a, if people knew me from my high school, I'm kind of a clown, I like to make jokes and stuff, but I see this coming and I can't help but try to warn people about it.

- You've studied it deep in your PhDs in systems level thinking and you just really understand it well.

And I don't know if I would use the word pessimistic.

You're not as pessimistic as you claim to be.

I'm gonna give you more-- - Thank you.

- In that, agree and disagree.

- I think a place that we differ is the role of human agency and I am optimistic that people will make better choices and that in a world where I also see the growth of energy consumption, but I imagine it being decoupled both from growing population, which I think will peak, but also from its environmental footprint.

And in that, I would bet on the people to make wise, thoughtful, generous choices.

- Hmm, you have time for a couple final thoughts.

A hundred million educated households out there.

They've been listening.

What would you wanna leave with them, Tisha?

A thought or two?

- I don't see anything in what we've talked about that isn't solvable through humans working together and being ingenious together.

Now, there's a couple things that underpin my philosophy.

One is that at the end, this work is about individuals and there's no media campaign, there's no religion, there's no social movement that will depolarize.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of individuals that choose solutions over problems.

And this is a choice that we each have to make every day, that every one of your viewers has to make every day, which is the choice to show up with kindness, see the humanity in each other, and choose to connect for what we have in common and not what we have apart.

The second thing that underpins my philosophy is that incremental change is change and that every baby step is a step forward.

And that anything we can do, whether it's working on this project that the three of us are here doing together or each of our individual research and contributions, that small change is positive change.

And so, I think of course we can overcome polarization, but we need a whole lot of people to show up.

- Okay, excellent.

Couple final thoughts, Nate.

- We don't need all that energy and stuff to be happy.

We've become accustomed to getting dopamine in our evolutionary neurotransmitters for more consumption and more stuff, and we have to decouple that.

We have to decouple our own experiences from more and more throughput, and remember that after basic needs are met, which as you know in the 60 countries you've been to, for a lot of people in the world, they haven't been met.

- Right.

- For after basic needs are met, most of the best things in life are free.

That's one thing I would say.

The other is that we've retreated to our little castles and we've lost the social interactions with our neighbors.

We're going to need relationships in our community, and the more that we can build those relationships now, the better outcomes there are gonna be in the future when things get tougher.

- Yeah, I mean, it's kind of back to Maslow.

There's physiological in safety and security, and you work your way up through love to, you know, eventually self-actualization.

- And on his deathbed, he had a manuscript, Abraham Maslow, that he said that was wrong, that above self actualization was doing something for the pro-social at a larger level than your own life to do something in service of a greater good.

- Well, thank you, yeah.

Nate, it's been wonderful.

- Thanks, Scott.

[Scott] Thank you, Tisha, terrific.

- Thank you.

- Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

My guests had quite a bit in common, but had one fundamentally different view of our energy and climate future.

Tisha hopes for more human focus, where all parties contribute.

Oil companies have bright minds and great technology.

We need their help to reduce our carbon intensity while continuing to provide the energy that drives the global economy and could lift more people from poverty.

Nate worries that human focus is the problem.

We take for granted what energy and the natural environment provide for us.

Instead, we're focused on labor and capital.

He believes that only culture change will reduce carbon emissions, but that we won't choose to deprive ourselves of the magic of fossil fuels.

As a result, he predicts energy shortages and environmental problems as soon as next decade.

But no one can see the future.

It likely lies somewhere in between.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, addressing critical challenges toward a future in which all living things thrive.

Arizona State, The New American University.