Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
All of us, all of us in this room - in fact, all of humanity
is on the same journey together,
a journey to a future without fossil fuels.
It's kind of like we're all crammed onto the same bus,
and not surprisingly, it's not going so well.
We're getting a lot of arguments,
a lot of disagreements,
and I think a lot of that is because we don't have a map.
We're not really sure how to get there.
In fact, we don't even know what the destination looks like.
And so that leaves us vulnerable to the naysayers, the detractors,
and I think you know who I'm talking about -
they're the guys in the back of the bus.
They're the ones that, frankly,
didn't even want to be here in the first place:
"It's a stupid trip. Why are we doing this?"
Or they think the trip is going to be too inconvenient.
Or too expensive.
Or my favorite, they're certain we just can't get there from here.
So, lacking a good vision of where we're going,
we're really forced to take a leap of faith over a chasm of doubt.
So what I'd like to do today is help fill in that chasm a little bit;
I want us to help develop a shared vision of what that destination looks like.
And to do that, I want to develop what I'm calling an "alternate present":
one that got us to where we are without the benefit of fossil fuels.
I want to see if we can develop a vision of a high-tech society,
full of the conveniences that we're used to,
but one that got here without coal or petroleum or natural gas.
So we're going to go back in time a little bit;
not too far, it turns out.
It's the 1880s.
That was the time when fossil fuels
really started changing the arc of human development.
It's when we started the electric grid.
So what was life like then?
Well, the United States had already been established across the continent.
We understood the fundamentals of electricity, magnetism, genetics.
We knew the fundamentals of how matter was made.
We had started to develop the periodic table of elements.
Before that,
we had enjoyed the benefits of the Greek philosophers,
great literature, Shakespeare,
all the things that came out of the Renaissance.
We had all these things already for us.
What was the energy scene like?
Well, Thomas Edison usually gets credit for inventing the grid.
He started the Pearl Street Station in Manhattan in 1882.
But like a lot of stories about invention
and like an awful lot of stories about Edison,
it's a little more complicated than that.
It turns out that three years earlier,
1879,
a man named Charles Brush,
in that hotbed of technology development,
Cleveland, Ohio,
(Laughter)
deployed the first commercial outdoor lighting system,
using arc lights and electricity.
And that was so successful, within three years,
that system had been deployed in every major city on the continent.
He wasn't just a businessman;
he was an inventor, he was an engineer,
and one of the things he spent a lot of time on
was improving the machines that turned mechanical work into electricity.
At that time, they called them "dynamos."
We call them "generators."
And his generators were being deployed
in other facilities,
brand new technology facilities around the country
called hydroelectric facilities -
in Minneapolis, in Michigan, upstate New York
and all the way to California.
In fact, by the end of that decade,
there were 50 hydroelectric generating facilities
either under construction or operating
across the country.
Well, how about wind and solar?
Would we have to wait 100 years to make use of that?
Turns out, no.
In that very same decade, the first solar cell was demonstrated.
And that created quite a splash.
The top physicists of the world said,
"What's going on here?"
They wanted to figure it out, explain it,
and one of them did,
and his name was Albert Einstein,
and he won a Nobel Prize for that.
And of course, wind had been around for millennia.
There's evidence that the ancient Persians used it to grind grain.
Certainly, everyone knows about
the windmills of Holland pumping out the water.
But certainly, wind to make electricity - that's a new invention, right?
Let's go back to Mr. Brush in Cleveland.
He had a big mansion on Euclid Avenue;
he's a very successful man.
I don't know what his neighbors thought of this,
but he built this in his backyard.
(Laughter)
And to get a sense of scale,
that's a person in the lower right-hand corner.
This windmill, they called it then -
we would call it a wind turbine
because it wasn't grinding grain or sawing logs -
it was hooked up to one of his dynamos, and it's making electricity.
And that electricity was being used to charge batteries.
And that system he developed
was capable of lighting
and providing other uses for electricity in his mansion
for two decades without interruption.
I think this bears repeating.
In 1888,
we had a wind turbine making electricity, charging batteries.
Now, if that sounds familiar, it should.
But it took us 130 years to get back to that future,
and that's what we're doing now.
We're deploying batteries on the grid
to help take up the excess in the variable energy of wind and solar.
And this is best illustrated by the big battery farm
that Tesla installed in the deserts of South Australia
just two years ago.
So we had all the pieces in place for a 100% renewable grid,
way back then.
But we didn't do it.
And we didn't do it because coal is just too good to ignore.
It is an incredibly dense fuel;
it burns really well.
It stores forever.
And so that's the route we took,
and we developed our technology around coal.
But absent of coal,
we still would have wanted the things that we expect from the grid.
We want refrigeration, we want air-conditioning,
we want lighting.
So that intellectual power
that went into developing the coal-centered grid
would have gone into developing a different grid.
Because we know
through the history of humanity and of technology development,
to turn around a well-known phrase,
necessity is a mother.
(Laughter)
So all the pieces were in place; we were on our way.
But we took a different route.
But had we not had coal, we would have had solutions,
and our society today would be recognizable
as a high-tech society, full of conveniences -
probably different conveniences.
And yes, some things we've taken for granted now
we wouldn't have.
An example of that would be plastics.
We can synthesize the polymers for plastic
and then find it from other sources,
but the reason plastics are so pervasive is it comes from petroleum.
Without petroleum, we wouldn't have had plastics.
So we would, as part of our thought experiment,
we would have to imagine life without plastic.
But of course, that also means life without those annoying plastic clam shells
that we all love,
or without plastic pollution,
or, for that matter, we could imagine life without smog or oil spills as well.
And true, some of the things
we've gotten used to having machines do for us
that out grandparents didn't have, or our great-grandparents didn't have.
We wouldn't have that;
we'd have to do some of that work ourselves.
But I would argue that's a good thing.
The history of human technology
shows us that increased access to energy resources
tracks with increased quality of life.
But only up to a point.
If anything the last several decades has shown us,
it's that we can have too much of a good thing.
Like too much food,
too much energy is not working well for us.
For example, in 2015,
the United States was one of the highest users of energy per capita
in the world,
and yet we were 29th out of 35 developed countries
in child mortality
and 26th in life expectancy.
And we got to that unenviable place
by spending more of our income, more of our GDP,
on healthcare
than any other country on the planet.
More energy isn't making us healthier.
It's not making us happier.
So Hans Rosling's great project,
Gapminder,
lets us compare data sets of different things.
So I'm going to look at per capita energy use
and an indicator of health, general health,
and what we're going to look at is child mortality,
number of children aged zero to five who die per a thousand live births.
As we might expect,
in 2015, the United States
was fairy high in energy use and fairly low in child mortality.
And if we looked back in time at the data,
track back in time,
and look at other countries in different arcs,
different positions in their development,
we might expect them to lie along a line that looks like this.
So if we have low energy use, we expect high child mortality;
high energy use, low child mortality.
And it's true, there's a correlation there,
but it doesn't look like this.
Let's look at other countries; let's look at Egypt, for example.
From 1971 to current times,
we saw a rapid decrease in child mortality
with only modest increases in energy use.
Moving on to Spain, we see that the train continues,
but it turns a corner.
And if we look at Australia and the United States,
we see that line has flattened out.
If we take the data for all the countries we have data for - dozens of them -
put them on that screen, it'd be a really messy plot.
But you could draw a line through it that looks something like this
and capture the majority of the data.
And so that tells us
that going from a small amount of energy to a little
is correlated with a significant increase in quality of life.
But going from a little to a lot doesn't.
It's not making our children healthier,
it's not making us live longer, and it's not making us happier.
So where does that leave us?
Because we're not in the alternative present;
we're in this present.
We got here on our bus with our own torturous ride,
fueled by fossil fuels.
And we can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.
But I think we can use this beginning of a vision
as a template to compare,
to lay out and compare our own thoughts, our own decisions.
I think it's important that we become more mindful about our energy choices.
You know, the grid was designed to be invisible to us,
to be taken for granted.
But if we lived in a remote cabin with solar panels and a battery,
we could still enjoy the conveniences of modern life.
But if we didn't know we're up front,
within three or four days, we would know our choices hadn't had consequences,
and we could have a cold beer, and we could have Netflix.
But not an infinite amount, because our resources would be finite.
The current grid makes us feel like our resources are infinite,
but clearly, they're not.
We all live in the same cabin.
We just call it planet Earth.
We should also make sure we don't fall in the trap
that this current system we have is the best system
or the only system.
And that's where a lot of the discussion, a lot of the discourse,
around renewable energy comes from
is that we want drop-in replacements.
We want to not see a difference.
We are going to see a difference.
We should see a difference,
and we should embrace that because that future is going to be better.
The noted sustainability expert and famed architect and author
Bill McDonough
coauthored the book "Cradle to Cradle."
He said this once about recycling,
but I think he'd agree it applies equally well to energy.
He said, "We should not confuse an act of doing less bad
with one of doing good."
And to help understand that, he uses a metaphor.
So, let's get back on our bus.
But this time, we know where we want to go.
We want to go to Los Angeles,
for some reason,
(Laughter)
and we're on this bus
and we're flying down the highway at 80 miles an hour,
but we're looking at the signs and out the window,
and we realize we're headed to New York City.
We're going the wrong way.
So we elbow our way through the bus to the front of the bus,
try to get the driver's attention and tap his shoulder
and explain the situation to him.
And he listens and he nods;
he says, "Okay, I get it."
So he slows down to 40 miles an hour
and keeps going.
(Laughter)
It's not going to get us to our destination.
We should definitely celebrate
every time we shut down a coal power plant,
but if we replace that generating capacity with a natural gas power plant,
we're only doing less bad.
It's long past time to turn the bus around,
and if we can do that,
then I'm sure we will get to our destination.
Thank you.
(Applause)