TED Four: "Winning the Oil Endgame"

After seeing last time that moving up in the world is closely correlated to both smaller family size and bigger carbon footprints (shoes to bicycles to cars to jets, etc, to say nothing of consumerism and increased consumption/waste), the obvious next step in the process is to look at ways of breaking the world's addiction to oil so that living standards can increase without killing the planet.

The first talk today is from Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, whom I would rate as arguably the most innovative and realistic American scientist in the field of new energy. I first learned about him by reading a profile of Lovins and his incredible house (it is entirely self-sufficient and works on biology and sunshine; he's able to pick a banana in his living room in mid-winter in Colorado) in a magazine. Incidentally, I've always gotten a chuckle out of his dead-ringer resemblance to my high school physics teacher, who also has negative electricity bills every year by virtue of the small windmill he's installed behind his house.

But that's neither here nor there. Go ahead and watch the talk, which is sort of the "inconvenient truth" of our current energy scheme.

Pretty cool stuff, right? Especially the carbon-fiber McLaren that destroyed the conventional car that t-boned it! To be sure, most of us will be buying those snap-together carbon-fiber cars, but -- if it's not too materialistic of me -- I can always aspire to the McLaren...

The big points to take away from Lovins's work and talk are similar to the ones we've seen before this week: changing our energy situation is going to require "changing our game" in the ways in which we think about energy usage; we already have most of the answers and will only see increased efficiency as technology evolves; and we're facing an immediate and global problem that will require co-operative global solutions (and yesterday).

There are two special insights that we need to take from Lovins, however. The first is that the biggest hurdles between us and the future are political rather than scientific. We already know how to engineer our way out of the current energy crisis using current technologies and energy resources, we're just waiting for national and global politicians to find the courage and commitment to implement this knowledge. It's going to require politicians to sell funny-looking cars and trucks, lifestyle changes (the technology of the bicycle is pretty old, but remains vastly under-utilized, especially in the U.S.) and some social discomfort and "growing pains" as we transition the national and global economy from fossil to future energy sources. Sure, that super-efficient truck Lovins shows in his slides looks weird to our eyes, but that's only because we're so accustomed to Macks and Peterbilts. It will take dogged political action to convince people that making transitions to odd vehicles, wind farms, solar roofs, etc is a moral, social and ecological imperative. (Pay attention, you will see this material again in Sunday's concluding talk.) The transition itself will require some real "game-changing" thinking in re-imagining the future, and especially in making the requisite investments to get there. Again, the current crisis and unemployment debacle might be a good opportunity...

Along those lines, too, keep thinking Darwin: sure, that truck looks dodgy enough. But it's really not much more than a Model T on steroids, right? Some wheels, an engine, a steering wheel, blah blah blah. The design is kooky, but the beast itself would be instantly recognizable to Henry Ford. Think about that: everyone thought we'd be living in the world of the Jetsons sometime within the last 20 to 30 years, but we're not. What happened? I'd argue that a variety of factors, mostly stemming from Conservative White Male-ism and its attendant defensiveness and political/institutional sclerosis, have basically stopped our moral and technological evolutionary curve. Far be it from me to say whether or not flying cars would be more efficient than the ones we've got now or even Lovins's super-cars, but fighting tooth and nail to prevent even taking steps in that direction just because it's not what we're used to (see: GM, Chrysler, Ford pre-2008) is no longer tenable. Think flying cars would be nuts? Imagine what the first cars (travelling at the blistering speed of 10 mph or so) looked and felt like to the buggy-drivers they shared the streets with.

The second big point we need to hear from Lovins is that the answer is biology. This has been true in every other area of human endeavor till now, and it's time we applied biology to energy production. As I saw in another talk yesterday, the basic progression of human control over nature has been from hunting and gathering to harnessing nature itself (early agriculture) to "brute-force" techniques (industrial agriculture) to practices in harmony with biology (the green revolution). Once again, that's a very quick overview that I take some issues with, but think about energy in the same way: we're now in the brute-force industrial stage of drilling deeper wells in harder-to-reach places to provide the energy needed to power our ridiculously inefficient vehicles and machines. This is the Cartesian strategy: killing nature faster and more efficiently to power our current lifestyles. Darwinism would rely on biological approaches: gosh, nature's been around for a while and turns out to be really, really good at turning sunlight into energy (think of leaves as solar panels and you'll get this idea pretty quickly), so why don't we try to co-operate with nature and emulate it instead of trying to subdue it? After we implement Lovins's ideas to break the bonds of oil now, we'll need to get really good at bio-energy to fuel the future.

Now let's take a look at the global picture. Lovins has told us that it is possible to change our game and start fixing our economy and our world, now I'll present another fun Swede, Johan Rockstrom, to tell us that we must change it. He'll sketch out the current state of the battle between people and nature and show in the most emphatic terms that "the challenges we are facing are so large that business-as-usual is not an option."

So there you have it. The world is simultaneously a scary place and an exciting one, and we've certainly got our work cut out for us in the next decade and beyond. And once again, "the unifying theme -- the red thread -- in all of this is the necessity of a change in mindset." Change your mind -- and bend the curve.