there have only been three technological revolutions in human history that have actually
changed the relationship of a society to its economy and a society to its
geographic positioning sedentary agriculture deep water navigation and the industrial revolution
the digital revolution is real it is changing many things about how we live and how we earn income
but it is dependent upon the industrial revolution
it is not a fundamental quantum leap beyond it so if you break down the energy system of oil and
electricity there's nothing in the digital space that works and i would argue that we're going to
see a great deal of de-industrialization around the world in the next 20 years well let's start
with battery systems green tech in general and just to establish my bonafides here i've got a
solar system on my house i believe in the climate change uh data i'm not i'm not a skeptic on that
uh i'm a skeptic on the technologies that we seem to have all latched on to to fix it
so whether you're looking at wind or solar whether you're looking at evs or e-trucks the
materials that you need you're talking in excess of an order of magnitude more in order to build
the stuff compared to conventional tech so for example your conventional car has about two pounds
of copper maybe five or six pounds of nickel your average electric car needs geez 130 of each
it needs all kinds of materials that we don't normally put into vehicles and they have a global
supply chain and global sourcing most of which are in very uncomfortable places so you know 60
of the cobalt comes from one place and the second biggest source just went offline in russia
so while we can't have inexpensive oil without the russians we absolutely cannot have the green
transition without the russians and that plays for almost every piece of everything in the western
hemisphere to a degree this is less true because a lot of those raw materials are sourced here or
maybe in australia i expect that to still work but if you're in eurasia or africa no absolutely not
and i'm not saying that the germans are stupid they're using more coal than they've ever used
and that was before the war they now get uh their single largest fuel source is lignite their number
two source is coal their big mistake was shutting down nuclear if your goal is to be carbon neutral
they live in a very difficult neighborhood and anything you can do in that neighborhood to make
one neighbor hate you less is generally a good thing and whenever the germans and the russians
hate each other things gets very real very fast so i understand why they did it but i would hold out
germany as the shining example of how green tech doesn't work in most places
because they've built out a hundred and i think they're up to 155 percent
in terms of generating capacity 155 percent of their peak demand in generating capacity from wind
for salt and wind and solar but only generates about seven percent of their actual electricity
because germany is neither sunny nor windy our politics is uniquely qualified at getting in the
way no problem there uh but the problem is with green tech so you know i live in the highlands
of colorado i'm at 7 500 feet my solar panels do great if i were to take those same solar panels
and put them in ontario they would generate 18 of the electricity that i get here what you described
with having a house with solar and a battery system that might work for about a tenth maybe
maybe a tenth of the u.s population we're the first world country with the best solar profile
but if you're not in a kind of a belt from central texas to
los angeles roughly you're not going to have enough solar intensity to be able to power a house
also remember that if you've got a 6 kilowatt solar system which is about as big as you can
put on most houses it's going to take three days to charge your tesla assuming you're not
using the power for anything else i mean i think these are all interesting technologies i just
don't think we're there yet this is another area that i kind of wanted to touch on because i know
i've seen the kind of renewable energy maps of you know we're talking about self-sovereign
individuals but when we're thinking on a level of country to country some countries are going to be
able to power themselves you know given you know supply chain constraints could conceivably power
themselves on existing renewable technologies so other countries in a post-globalized world
even you know if they were able to get all the solar panels they wanted or you know
even activate all the geothermal resources they wanted really their only option is nuclear and
some of them aren't even necessarily sophisticated enough to operate the complex nuclear you know
infrastructure that they need so i guess that that might be a bigger list that you're thinking on
nuclear it is 1950s technology we should improve it obviously but i i think that nuclear is going
to be a bigger part of the future than a lot of people think because believe it or not its supply
chain is simpler even with non-proliferation concerns it's simpler than it is for solar panels
so then it leads to the question do you think that each country has a renewable
energy future with energy independence i don't think so no with today's technology
you know it might change in time well it will change in time uh with dave's technology we're
talking australia the united states mexico britain denmark assuming they can get their head out of
their asses argentina and chile those are the only countries in the world that have a good enough
green tech solar and wind profile to theoretically get more than half of their electricity from
a really robust build out unless you and that i'm not counting the cheating that places like
denmark are currently doing where they have a lot of wind towers but they still source the majority
of their power from the european grid i'm talking about if you're doing a standalone national system
those are the only ones it doesn't mean that it can't help with the margins for other places but
our intensity energy intensity and our the energy density problems of solar and wind just haven't
been surmounted yet in other locations where the it's uh less favorable so baby boomers are
leaving the market that takes a lot of blue collar that takes a lot of trucking and agriculture away
gen xers are a small generation with low labor participation rate so that means labor inflation
is locked in for at least the next decade the millennials lost three to five years of expertise
either because they meet the negative stereotypes or because they entered the workforce just in
time for the financial crisis and all got fired at the same time either way they're
the least skilled generation we've ever had and that's where you're feeling the pressure
in terms of software because they're just not skilled enough for their age but the next
generation down the zoomers they're anti-social they were raised by gen x they were told that you
had to be better than everyone else if you wanted to survive their dream job is to live in a closet
coding it's the only job they want so like at least i have some good news for you guys
your your labor concerns in that specific spot are going to go away this reminds me
of a lot of things i remember hearing um well not personally hearing i'm not that old but
among the really hard left in san francisco in the 1970s all we need is global peace and
for the police and the military to go away and then we can all do whatever we
want shift whatever we want we're not in that world and we're definitely not moving to it
you