valera zakharov: hello, welcometo our green at google and authors at googletalk series. my name is valera zakharov. and today, we have a prettyuncomfortably exciting talk for you today. we have with us, a localsan francisco-based author, ozzie zehner. and the book is called"green illusions-- the dirty secrets of cleanenergy and the future of
environmentalism." and the bookhas been causing shock waves, as "the sunday times"reported recently. and it's been pretty eyeopening actually, and interesting to follow some ofthe debates raging out there on various internet resources. meanwhile, ozzie has beenbusy with his book tour. so he's done a lot ofappearances on environmental segments, some of which wouldhave been featured on cnn, pbs, bbc, and public radio.
when he's not on the road, ozzieis a visiting scholar at the university of california,berkeley, where he researches the social, political, andeconomic conditions influencing energy policy priorities and project outcomes. i'm also proud to say thatozzie a fellow engineer. he has an engineering degreefrom kettering university and a graduate degree in science andtechnology from university of amsterdam.
before we get started, letme do a little poll. how many of you guys ownan electric or a hybrid vehicle here? so that's great, because ozzieis not planning to talk about that part of the book today. but i think it's going tobe a pretty relevant talk to all of us. we at google are committed tobuilding a sustainable future, both as individualsand as a company.
and at the same time, we loveand we believe in technology. so with that in mind, actuallyozzie told me that he's really looking forward to ourperspective and so he's looking forward to yourquestions and feedback at the end of this talk. so without taking any more timeaway from that q&a, i would like to welcome to google,the author of "green illusions," ozzie zehner. ozzie zehner: thank youvery much, valera.
and thank you very much allof you for coming today. i really appreciate it. and thank you for those tuningin online as well. i'm going to speak for about ahalf an hour and then take questions and answers. so i know you're all very busy,so if you want to leave after the talk, that's fine. if it's that bad, you canleave during the talk. this is not going to be alecture about how we must
think or how we must talk. rather, i'm going to considerhow we might think and talk differently about ourenergy challenges. now, you will all be designingthe built and conceptual environment that we live in. and as such, i suspect you willbe answering a lot of the questions that i'mstruggling with. and so the story wewill lay bare today is far from settled.
and it really is my hope thatyou will help complete it. so let's get started. the premise of my book, "greenillusions," is essentially that green technologies arenot what they seem. they might not be whatyou think they are. they might not be the saviorsthat they're made out to be. and i argue that alternativeenergy technologies rely on a way of legacy thinking. but anyway, i'm gettingahead of myself.
so i wanted to start actuallywith a little bit about my history. i wasn't always a green energyquestioner, i guess. it actually was justthe opposite. and i once founded andoperated a vertically integrated wind power operationin michigan, when i was 12 years old. and i was very stylishat that time. and i ran my short-lived windpower operation out of my
parents' house. and behind our house was agarage, and inside that garage was a turbine, thanks to mydad's job at an industrial fan manufacturer. and i found a rusty steel pipeto kind of use as an axle. and i had to build a kindof a wooden frame. my parents had neglected toteach me to weld, so i had to go with wood. and i also had not secured anyfunding for a tower and so i
used a picnic table. and then one windy day, i hauledthe contraption out, onto the picnic table. i lifted it up on there. i weighed it down with bricks,inserted the turbine assembly. and there was very little timeto appreciate my work, because it started spinning, uncomfortably fast, very rapidly. and at that point, it had becomeapparent that i had
neglected to install abraking mechanism. so i grabbed a brick and ishoved it against the axle. and it was like sparkingand hissing. and the steel sails justeffortlessly accumulated greater speed. and in a sense, i had createdan upended lawn mower, that was kind of thumping withan increasing rhythm. and at first, the frame wasvibrating and then the whole picnic table startedvibrating.
and really what happened thereafter can only be deduced. because by that time, myadrenaline-filled legs had already carried me halfwayaround the house. but when i returned,i found an empty picnic table, in flames. so this was the first of manyfailures in my life, actually. there was another one,we don't have to go through all of them.
but what i was 17, i build ahybrid electric car, that also ran on natural gas. and it was not very fast. i'm pretty sure itwas not safe. and it got stranded in the hallsof my high school and so forth, but not before i got aphoto op with the local paper. and after that, i went toengineering school. and i worked in green tech ineurope for several years. and when i moved back to theunited states, i decided to
start a green architectural firmin a historic district of washington, dc. one of my first clients was adiplomat, who wanted to live in a solar house. and of course, i lovedsolar cells, so it seemed like a good fit. and he already hadthe building. it was this 100-year-old housethat had seen better days. and about the same time thehouse was built, someone had
planted two oak trees on thewestern side of the house. by the way, would anyone like toguess why they planted the oak trees there? audience: to blocksolar cells. ozzie zehner: to block solar-- this guy's thinking ahead. audience: privacy. ozzie zehner: privacy. i heard a lot of peoplesay shade.
i think you're absolutelyright, for all of these reasons probably. well, actually i have no idea. i wasn't there 100 yearsago to witness who exactly planted the trees. but i can guess that thatwas probably the reason. but regardless, thesetrees were great. because they blockedthe summer sun. and in the winter, the leaveswould fall off and they will
allow the sun to shine throughthe branches and warm the home's exterior. and this kind of passive solartechnology is eons old. so as a result, the annualutility bills for this house were thousands of dollars lessthan a house that was just down the street thatwas brand new. and these trees had beendoing this every year, for 100 years. and as a green architect,my first job was
to chop them down. and the solar cells demanded it,as this man pointed out. you can't put solar cells onthe roof of a shaded house. and i would soon find out thatthis was first of many demands that the solar cellswould make. and demand number two, wasfor lots of money. and if you read anything aboutsolar cells these days, you'll likely be left with theimpression that solar cell costs are dropping andthe price curve looks
something like this. but over the past decade, theinstalled cost of solar cells actually looked like this. so why is there sucha discrepancy? well, part of the reason hasto do with subsidies. subsidies give the illusion of aprice drop, when really just someone else is paying for it. but there's a little bit moreto the story than that. journalists, for instance,point to the price of
polysilicon and the technicalcomponents of solar cells. and indeed, those costsare dropping. but polysilicon for instance,represents just a fifth of the cost of an installedsolar system. the bulk of a solar system islow tech things like copper, glass, aluminum, framing,transportation, installation. you'd still have to pay forall of those, even if the price of polysilicon wereto drop to zero. and so those things get prettyexpensive, especially when you
start getting into things likethe rare earth metals and heavy metals, which incidentallybrings us to our next demand of solar cells, isthat they require some pretty toxic stuff. now, solar cell manufacturinginvolves the use or release of numerous compounds explosive,compounds and toxic, compounds like the cell here, whichcontains cadmium, like most thin-film technologies, whichthe epa recognize as a toxin. now, what happens with thisat the end of its life?
if we incinerate this, it goesup into the air and eventually into the waterways. and if we bury it, thenit can leak in the groundwater supplies. and not very much of thisis biodegradable. so today, that'snot a big deal. solar cell generation is tiny. in fact, the supplies isless than 1/10 of 1% of america's power.
if this bucket represented usenergy consumption, then this is what the solar cell sharewould look like. now as social productiongrows, then so will the associated side effects. but to my dismay, the demandsof the solar cells did not stop there. the united arab emiratesrecently conducted one of the largest cross-comparison testsof solar technologies to date. and they did so because theywere building this
eco-metropolis calledmasdar city. you might have heard of it. for this test, they gathered awhole lot of solar cells from a lot of differentmanufacturers. and their goal was to find whichmanufacturer had the best solar cell. but once this test begin, itdrew attention to something else, which was thedisadvantages and limitations that all of the solar cellsshared in common.
so a desert might seemlike the best place to put a solar cell. and indeed, it's oneof the best. but there were problems. the first was haze and humidity,which reflect and disperse the sun's rays. the next was dust, whichtechnicians had to scrape off almost daily. and in other parts of the world,you have to deal with
pollution, hail, snow, ice,these sorts of factors. and the third was heat. so right in the middle of theday when the solar cells should have been producing theirhighest output, they got incredibly hot, which hobbledtheir output across the board. now, in additionto all of these effects, solar cells age. and their output fadesby about 1% a year. the newer technologies degradeeven more rapidly than that.
but an even larger surpriseawaits solar cell owners. after about five to 10 years,their solar array will suddenly stop producing power. and that's because a keycomponent of the solar system, the inverter, willeventually fail. now, solar cells can last20 to 30 years, something like that. but inverters don't. the inverters have to bereplaced about two to five
times during the lifeof a solar system. this is by the way, whatone looks like. fortunately, any electriciancan easily swap one of these out. but unfortunately, eachone costs about the same as a furnace. and incidentally, there's onemore reason i'll mention why a solar array can stop working. this is glenda hoffman's roof.
she woke up one morning todiscover that thieves stole 16 panels off her roofas she slept. and in fact, solar thefts areon the rise nationally. and the cost to replace hersystem chimed in at about $95,000, an expense that herinsurance company covered. but nevertheless, sheintends to protect the new panels herself. and this is what you toldthe "new york times." now, a lot of people say thatthese demands are worth it.
if solar power yields less co2than fossil fuel power, then does this offer justificationfor subsidizing solar cells? well, first we haveto consider costs. even some of the most expensiveoptions for dealing with co2 would become costcompetitive long before today's solar technologies,making solar cells perhaps seem like a rather wastefulstrategy. why would we for instancemitigate one ton of co2 using solar, when we could mitigatefive tons or 10 tons elsewhere
for the same cost? secondly, solar cellmanufacturing involves the use or release of other typesof greenhouse gases. and these are used tomake solar cells. and they make ceoseem harmless. these greenhouse gases are10,000 to 25,000 times more potent than co2, accordingto the ipcc. and we are now learning thatone of the fastest growing emitters of these gases isthe solar cell industry.
so i was in the positionof having to explain all this to my client. and i didn't really knowwhere to start. but i had to like listoff these demands. i mean they demanded thatwe retrofit the roof, first of all. they demanded that we purchaselots of insurance. the solar cells demandedregular cleaning. they demanded expensiveinverters
every five to 10 years. they demanded a lot of money. they demanded an expensivefuneral. they demanded to be buried ina specially sealed, toxic waste plot. and of course, they demandedthat those pesky trees would have to be chopped down. now, think for a moment whatwould you have done if you are in my position?
what would you have advisedmy client to do? well, here's what thenumbers looked like. for every $100 he spent on solarpanels, he would produce this much energy. for every $100 that he spenton led lighting, he would save this much. the value of the trees, theadded insulation, and the efficient appliances wouldbe even greater. in the end, i advised himagainst a solar cell
installation. and instead, told him that heshould keep the trees and spend the money on energyefficiency and energy reduction techniques. and the long story shortis that i was fired. and that's because he hadalready made his decision. the solar cells weregoing to stay. and the trees, well-- now, my experiencewas not unique.
for instance, an old grove northof here was chopped down to install solar cells. and the oil company bp, choppeddown 42,000 trees outside brookhaven nationallaboratories for solar. and the oil-- a company, not an oil company,but another company in new jersey, took down about fiveacres of trees to build a solar array that would power afacility to make plastic bags. i kind of think thatputs a new spin on
paper versus plastic. again, we might thinkit's worth it to offset dirty coal use. but it's important to notethat none of these solar projects will offset the co2debt from clear-cutting the forests that they siton, for reasons we will come to shortly. the solar cells also will notreplace the other benefits of the forests, such as thingslike air cleansing, water
filtration, and trails,and other benefits. but the fate of these trees isultimately a casualty of a certain way of thinking, apresumption that the way to solve our energy problems isto produce more energy. the ethical implications of thisremind me of a movie that i just saw last month, a classicfilm, "2001, a space odyssey." has anyone hereseen the movie? oh, wow. let the record show thatalmost every one
raised their hand. so you might remember acomputer named hal. hal was programmed to carryout a certain mission. and he followed that missionwithout consideration of the changes around him orrespect for human life, as it turns out. hal thought if the astronautsare endangering the mission, then turn off theirlife support. if the trees are blockingthe solar cells, then
chop down the trees. this is a kind ofmission-directed ethical trap that we sometimes fall intobecause we're human. and that's typically because wethink we have a good idea, a good sense of ourethical bearings. and our job is to apply themto our daily life. but as you all know, ethics canoften be more than that. you'll recognize thismotto, i'm sure. now as you all know, googleventured into china, for
instance, to expand its missionof bringing more information to more people. but in order to expand itsmission, it was required to censor search results. now, google refused to censorthe search results. and this is a good example ofhow ethical reasoning is more than just applying ourideals to the world. it's more than just a mission. it also involves looking at theworld, seeing what we can
see, and then lettingthose visions inform our ethical thoughts. but there's a lot thatcan get in the way. for instance, when i spoke withmy client, i made the mistake of thinking that thefacts could speak for themselves. i made a mistake of thinkingthat my crude calculations would be enough. but this wasn't aboutthe facts.
this was about something else. now, we've been told thatsolar cells are clean. and we know the energy fromthe sun is limitless. and we've been promised thatthey will be cheap. and we've been seducedby solar cells. and this isn't the first timethat this has happened. for generations, our energybucket has been leaking. and the leaks here representenergy waste. and in the united states,most energy does nothing
productive at all. it just leaks out, according tothe department of energy. but that's not all, the leakybucket is also getting larger. and that's because welove cheap energy. politicians subsidizeenergy production. and when cheap energy isavailable, demand of course goes up, because peoplewant more of it. and so it brings us right backto where we started, with so-called insufficient supply.
and this applies to alternativeenergy, as well. and in fact, there is noevidence that alternative energy offsets fossil fueluse in the united states. i know that doesn't seemto make sense at first. but consider the expansion ofhydropower and nuclear power. they would both presumablydecrease coal use. as recently as 1950 in fact,hydropower filled a third of the nation's electrical grid. that's hard to imagine today.
but they did not quenchincreasing demand. and demand increased. and the united states met thatdemand by building more fossil fuel plants, not fewer. today, hydropower fills just7% of the electrical grid. this is a boomerang effect. the harder we throw energyinto the grid, the harder demand comes around andhit us on the head. so larger solar cells and tallerwind turbines are just
ways of throwing the energyboomerang harder. and in fact, the history ofenergy in this country is very much a story of throwing theenergy boomerang harder. long ago, whale oil wasconsidered to be clean, cheap, and limitless. i mean one whale might containthree tons of oil. who could want more than that? and we poured intothe leaky bucket. and eventually, whaleswere in short supply.
and they were expensive. but explorers had foundsomething better. their fossil fuels were cheap,they were cleaner than whale oil, and as any driller couldtell you, they were limitless. but that was still not enoughfor the leaky bucket. and physicists had foundsomething else. nuclear power was clean, it was cheap, and it was limitless. well, of course thatturned out not to
be the entire story. but the bucket was still growingand really leaking. which brings us to the next. now, there are ways to stopthe boomerang effect. and there are ways to lowerfossil fuel demand and we'll consider those soon. but first i have afew questions for you about this bucket. what amount of solar energywould fill this bucket?
will this much do it? what if we double or triplethe solar cells in the united states? i mean it would be possible. it would cost a lot of money,but it's possible. what if we multiply solar cellsby a 100, which would incidentally bankrupt thefederal government. and then we added in 10,000utility scale wind turbines, would that fill the bucket?
or will it fuel the bucket'sgrowth and make us even more reliant on fossil fuels? now, common knowledge presumesthat we have a choice between fossil fuels and green energy. but alternative energytechnologies rely on fossil fuels through every stageof their life cycle. most importantly, alternativeenergy financing relies ultimately on the kind ofeconomic growth that fossil fuels provide.
alternative energy technologiesrely on fossil fuels for raw materialextraction, for fabrication, for installation andmaintenance, for backup, as well as decommissioningand disposal. and at this point there's evena larger question, where will we get the energy to build thenext generation of wind power and solar cells? wind is renewable, butturbines are not. and although alternative energytechnologies rely on
fossil fuels, theyare in essence a product of fossil fuels. they thrive within economicsystems that are themselves reliant on fossil fuels. now, i'm no fan offossil fuels. fossil fuel are finite. they're dirty. but we use them for fiveprincipal reasons. fossil fuels our dense.
their energy is storable,portable, fungible, which means they can easilytrade it. and they are transformableinto other products, like pesticides, fertilizers,and plastics. now, these qualities cannotbe measured in kilowatts. so what happens when we spendour precious fossil fuels on building alternative energy? well, then we get energy thatis not dense, but diffuse. it's not easily storable.
it's not portable. it's not fungible. and it is nontransformable. now, to increase the quality ofthe energy we then have to spend more fossil fuels tobuild batteries, to build back-up power plants, andother infrastructure. and of course, this isincredibly expensive. and ultimately, that expenserepresents the hidden fossil fuels behind the scene.
now, there's an impression thatclean energy can supply a growing population ofhigh consumers. there's an impression thatalternative energy can displace fossil fuel use. but the evidence doesn'tshow that. now before i move on, i shouldmention at this point in the story, my architecturalfirm is toast. it's gone. but luckily, i'm somewhat geekyand willing to spend a
long time in frontof a computer. i don't think i'm the onlyperson here that fits that description. and when gas prices rose from2003 to 2008, they shot up. you might remember that. then i stayed safelyin a library. and as part of my academicresearch, i studied a data set of 50,000 articles that werewritten over that period of time when the energy priceswere going up.
for every doubling in oilprices, coverage of solar wind and biofuels shot up 400%. but i also looked at energyreduction strategies, things like home insulation, lightrail, led bulbs. we've witnessed the impressivepay0ff of these technologies and so we might expect thecoverage of these technologies to also be relatively high. but this is what the mediacoverage looked like. and this was not justa media phenomenon.
does anyone recognizethis building? it's quite a ways from here. this is a green building inchicago's millennium park. and to be a green building,the architects might have superinsulated the building,but they didn't. they used glass, which allowsthe building to bake in the summer and lose heatin the winter. they might have outfittedthe building with energy efficient lighting.
but they didn't dothat either. they might have incorporatedoverhangs to block the high summer sun, but allow thewinter sun to shine in. or they might have used lightshelves to toss more light into building's interior. but they did none of things. this building is a greenbuilding because it has solar cells. the california academy ofsciences, just up the road
from here, has solar cellsin one of the foggiest microclimates on earth. the chesapeake bay foundationhas solar cells that are partly shaded by thestructure itself. this bp station has solarcells and some don't even face the sun. there are solar cells right herein mountain view, being consecrated in this photo. they also don't face the sun.
in fact, none of these buildingshas solar cells that face the sun. but you see, that doesn'treally matter. because these architects werenot building buildings to be energy efficient. they were not building buildingsto reduce fossil fuel years. they were building temples. they were building temples totechnology, temples to solar
energy, temples to the ideathat the way to solve our energy problems is toproduce more energy. now, consider for a moment thatsolar cells were a puppy. so maybe a [inaudible], maybea furball like this one. if solar cells were a puppy, iimagine that this is kind of what they would look like, notreal big, not real smart, but super cute. and we all like to takesolar for a walk. and academics get grants forwalking solar, industry gets
good pr for walking solar,government enjoys being out with solar as well. and when elections roll around,all the more reason to take solar out for a stroll. and media likes to walk solarand so does the public. well maybe, dependingon their political affiliation these days. but even i'm fascinatedby solar. and i'm not the only personhere that is.
and sometimes being just apuppy, solar gets tired. but there's always someonearound to pick solar up and keep going. even if it's just to walk to thepark and walk in circles. now, let's consider a walkwith energy reduction. now reduction is a huge dog,with a lot of potential as we have seen, although walks withreduction, differ from walks with solar. reduction's walks include manymore stops to pee, which is
made up all that more difficultwithout the trees. so why go for walks withreduction, when the walks with solar are so much more fun? and that's what we needto understand. we need to understand and figureout ways to organize walks with reduction that aremore fun and interest all of the dog walkers. and that's going to bea lot more exciting than you might think.
for instance, how mightwe plug the leaks in that energy bucket? i'd like to consider fora moment, junk mail. the junk mail industry claims100 million trees a year, which producers must grow, cut,haul, process, print, and then ship to homes, where theyare usually immediately thrown away, hauled, processed,and finally dumped. now, one study equates theenergy bill of the cycle to 11 coal-fired power plants runningcontinuously around
the clock, at full tilt. and all of these power plantsgo to power something that most people don't even like. so in germany, thisis what they did. they created this littlesticker that says no thanks to junk mail. and i have one right here. and this sticker in germanyis legally binding. so most germans chooseto put this stick
around their mailbox. in the united states, thesestickers would help to patch a small hole in ourenergy bucket. and you might think that'sno big deal. it's just junk mail. and in fact, it probably isn'treally that big of a deal. but it's important to point outthat these stickers would have a greater energy impactthan all of the nation's solar cells, planned and existingcombined.
we don't have anenergy crisis. we have a consumption crisis. and a lot of that consumptiongoes toward things that don't make us any happieror healthier. let's consider the growthof that bucket. much of this results from unsustainable population growth. but how can we achieve andethically achieve a sustainable population withoutinfringing on the reproductive
rights of individuals? now, we know that women whoare entitled to civil and economic rights, who are incontrol of their own bodies, can enjoy the freedom of bearingchildren at their own rate, at a pace thatis actually perfectly sustainable overall. but consider this chart inthe united states showing pregnancy and abortion rates. oh, so this is the populationchart of pregnancy and
abortion rates in severalcountries. a girl growing up in the unitedstates is four times more likely to becomepregnant than a girl growing up in france. and an american girl is threetimes more likely to have an abortion than a girl growingup in france. and among industrializednations, america's teens are the least likely to use birthcontrol due to stigma, lack of health care, and high costs.
and we are now treading interritory where environmental and social problems converge. and that is a vast unexploredwilderness. lowering teen pregnancy rateswould greatly benefit the nation's girls. there's no doubt about that. the energy and environmentalbenefits could be a welcome side effect. so how do we stop the growthof the bucket?
solar cells, wind turbines,and biofuels can't do it. health care and humanrights can. and as unlikely as it may seem,universal health care would have a greater energyimpact than all of the nation's solar cells, windturbines, biofuels, and geothermal combined. and it would cost less too,a lot less in fact. in fact, none of these proposalscost much money. none of these proposals leads tolower standards of living,
just the opposite actually. and while they are not hightech, they rely on the same foundations of human ingenuityand creativity. the real clean energyis less energy. but this is a shift in the wayof thinking that is not available to many people,because you cannot see energy savings in the same way youcan see and even worship a solar cell. i set out to builda solar house.
but what i did not initiallysee, what i failed to recognize, was that this shabbyhouse with its two oak trees was alreadya solar house. alternative energy fetishes haveso greatly consumed the public imagination, but themost vital, endurable solutions go overlookedand underfunded. but therein lies the opportunityfor you. you may be asked to think ofenvironmental solutions in terms of energy production.
perhaps you already have. and when that happens, you mightbe willing to think, or ask, is that partof the solution or part of the problem? if we are to understand theethics of alternative energy technologies, then we mustfirst see what they do. alternative energy technologies don't clean the air. they don't clean the water.
they don't protect wildlife. they don't supporthuman rights. they don't improveneighborhoods. alternative energytechnologies do not strengthen democracy. they do not regulatethemselves. they do not reduceconsumption. they don't reduce atmosphericcarbon dioxide. they don't stop the leakybucket from growing.
alternative energy technologiesproduce power. and we generally associatemore power with greater prosperity. but in fact, if we look to theworld's 10 happiest countries, they use less energy thanamericans do, 40% less. so these happy countries valuethings like architectural techniques that make buildingsmore efficient and comfortable. they also prioritize walking,biking, and public transit.
and finally, successful regionsvalue human rights and health care. in contrast, alternative energytechnologies yield low quality energy and theyrely on fossil fuels. they also create a host ofnegative side effects. but they don't always only relyon fossil fuels, they are based on fossil fuels, fromtheir financing, to their decommissioning, and eventualreplacement. alternative energy technologiesare essentially
rebranded fossil fuels. now, what will people thinkabout alternative energy 10 years from now? will they think of alternativeenergies as clean or will they see them as the next round ofecological disaster issues. now, don't get me wrong. i don't claim to knowall the answers. i'm just another member of thesearch party, like you. but it certainly seemsthat there are a lot
of unanswered questions. in fact, it actually seemsthat there are a lot of unasked questions. and by asking the hardquestions, you will be better prepared than anyone else toaddress the rocky times ahead. and as energy prices become morevolatile, you will have the conceptual tools tomake a difference. you will find your skillsto be sought after. in fact, they willbecome necessary.
it's not a question of whetheror not we have the technology to create an alternativeenergy society. the real questionis the reverse. do we have a society that iscapable of being powered by alternative energy? and the answer todayis clearly no. the bucket has too many leaksand it's still growing. but we can change that. as the illusions surroundingalternative energy
technologies continue to unravelover the coming years, you will have somechoices to make. will you remain rigid inyour defense of the green legacy empire? will you turn off the lifesupport in order to protect the illusory mission? or perhaps you will adapt yourthinking to the larger challenges that we face. or maybe you will go beyond thatadaptation and anticipate
those challenges and be aninnovator in the next green movement, a green movementthat is not simply a receptacle for energyfirms and car companies to plug into. a green movement that looksbeyond the eco-gadgets on the stage, to consider the socialand environmental injustices behind the curtain. clean energy is less energy. and the future of energy willnot be a story of wind
turbines, solar cells,and biofuels. it will be a story of livablecommunities, improved governance, health care,and human rights. and it is not enough to saythat we would benefit by shifting our focus. our relevance, your relevance,may very well depend on it. thank you very much. audience: hi. first, thanks tremendouslyfor your talk and for
writing this book. google's [inaudible] energyissues have been on the website called the oil drum formany years, where we are commonly referring toalternatives as fossil fuel extenders, not replacements. so thank you very much. i look forward to giving yourbook to other people to help them, educate them. but i would like toask a somewhat
personal energy issue. i'm building a home right now. we're in the rural part ofthe island of hawaii. a grid connect is extremelyexpensive, prohibitively expensive. and even then, the grid is like70% naphtha burning or so i can do obvious things, likeled bulbs and the like. and in fact, the fact that i'mchoosing not to use propane for most of my say hot waterneeds, whatever, is viewed as
insane by the status quo, allthe electricians and plumbers you might be able tohire anywhere. and now, my concept of usingsolar for hot water, which is limiting solar for solarelectric, has just been shot down in flames by yourpresentation. have you got any advice? i'm not alone in this. there tens of thousandsof us off grid in the western united states.
ozzie zehner: sure. i'd be happy to comment on it. obviously, my research is in thelarger social scale and in political context, not inindividual projects. so i can't really make thatmuch of a comment on that. but i can say that it probablydoesn't really matter. because if it's a vacation homeor a home on the hawaiian island and it's far away fromcivilization and is disconnected from the grid,there is probably no way you
can make that green. so i mean that's just anunfortunate kind of reality. i mean unless you were to movethere and sell all your possessions and just eating thefood that falls off the trees in your yard. and of course, this isthe problem that everyone runs into. none of us can really makeour lives totally green. and so that's why i feel thatwe need to concentrate on
those ways of moving forwardthat bring a lot of people and bring a lot of interest in. and actually when we look there,when we start to look and think about solutions inthose terms, we find out that a lot of the solutions don'treally decrease living standards and requiresacrifice. they just require comingback to basics. if you were at buildings, thatmight be the basics of solar insulation and using passivesolar techniques.
and if you're considering thelarger scale, things like health care, like i discussedin the talk, would have massive benefits for theenvironment and for human population. so they are not alwaysagainst one another. the two can work together. and that's where we find thesweetest opportunities. audience: i totally get yourpoint about how handling consumption is much moreimportant than generation or
much more impactful. that said, i wanted to just getyour ideas on a few things in terms of three questionsthat come to mind. one is in terms of the solarpanel for providing energy versus just using direct heat,for example hot water heating and so on. that must be, i'd imagine, a lotless environmentally toxic and fairly efficient. the second one would be, whenyou use these energy efficient
things, such as fluorescentbulbs and led lighting, i've been concerned about the amountof pollution that come from the fluorescent bulbs. and i would assume theled lighting has its own types of things. the leds may last almostforever, but i'm sure all sorts of other things inthose lights break. and then, that's toxicwaste, right? so i was wondering if you'dgive guidance on that, the
solar water heating, the energyefficient lighting. and the third thing is theelectric vehicles. when i look at whether to buya high efficiency combustion engine versus to use somethinglike a hybrid electric vehicle, i see that they havea lot of problems with the recycling of the batteries. some amount of it entersthe environment. there's the production of it. or even if we consider justholding on to your old car for
longer, if it's within emissionspecs, you avoid putting all that energyconsumption into creating a new car. so i've never really beenconvinced that going out and buying a new hybrid electricvehicle is going to be a good thing to do. ozzie zehner: yeah. thank you for those questions. so for your first question,solar hot water.
that's a perfect example of alow-tech option that makes a lot of sense in a lotof locations. it doesn't have a lotof the side effects that solar cells have. it has side effects of its ownof course, but they're minimal compared to the benefitsthat you get. so your second issue was withother types of light bulbs and energy efficiency. and energy efficiency becomeseven an larger issue than what
you're bringing up with thetoxins in the light bulbs because we have rebound effectsthat occur with energy efficiency. as things become more efficient,people use more of them and it can overallincrease consumption. so that's another side of theenergy efficiency story that i didn't have time to talkabout today, that i cover in the book. and then there's the issueof the light bulbs.
and of course, led light bulbsalso contain all kinds of nasty stuff and so do mercury,compact fluorescents. and i use led as kind of acomparison in my research because in many ways they'resimilar to solar cells. they're high tech. they were both developedaround the same period. they were both used inthe space programs. the were both the associatedwith a lot of high-tech industries.
and they both contain heavymetals and toxics and things like that. and so there's no easygreen fix to that. it's just weighing one set ofside effects against another set of side effects, and that'sreally difficult to do. and this also speaks to theelectric car issue that you talked about. because when we look atelectric cars, we see the same thing.
we're used to looking for sideeffects in one location, which is basically out ofthe tailpipe. but the side effectsin an electric car happen somewhere else. and so it's very difficult tosee them or account for them. and so we assume thatthe electric car is clean, of course. but the national academy ofsciences did a study, a life cycle analysis.
this is the broadest lifecycle analysis done on electric cars. and they found that the harmsstemming from electric cars are a little bit larger thanthe harms stemming from a regular internal combustionengine of a car the same size. and in fact, the only way thatwe can really find that electric cars are cleaner, isif we narrow our research to just one metric, like co2. if we just narrow it to that onemetric, then we might be
able to make an argument thatelectric cars are cleaner. it looks like it might dependon where they're charged and it starts to get murkyafter that. but if we look at the whole lifecycle-- if we looked at, like you were saying, what doyou do with the batteries after, or how much energy isused to get those batteries, what are the side effects, whatare the epidemiological impacts of the pollution. and this is what the nationalacademy has looked at.
they actually went county bycounty and did epidemiological studies and figured all thatout and accumulated it all. and they said, you know what,your electric cars, they run on bullshit. audience: so i've been writingabout a lot of these topics and saying many of the samethings that you did in the first half of your talk, for along time, about the megawatts and the bad math thata lot of people do about alternative energy.
but i've not come to the sameconclusions you have. and i'm wondering what you useto back up the idea that it's likely we could conserve ourway through a crisis? is there any examples fromhistory of people doing that, being able to solve problemslike this through conservation and greater efficiency, ratherthan what's usually happened throughout history, which is newtechnologies coming along and changing the equations? it's obviously difficult tosay with any accuracy what
exactly the technology ofthe future will be. but it's always incorrect tosay the technology of the future will be the same as thetechnologies of today. and that makes this predictiondifficult. an example of you making oneof the same mistakes you accuse everyone else of making,i saw on your chart, talking about light rail as anenergy efficient technology, light rail is the least energyefficient per passenger mile of technology we usefor transportation
in the united states. it's worse than an suv interms of the amount of energy it uses. and yet you put up as here's anexample, why aren't people writing about this. we make these mistakesall the time. but back to basically thequestion is, what examples from history can you showof conserving to get through a crisis?
ozzie zehner: ok, thankyou for asking that. well with regard to light rail,the benefits from light rail come in the context of the communities that they enable. so it's not in the light railitself, but it's in the ability for people to livein a dense urban context. dense urban contexts are a lotmore energy efficient, because people with a smaller buildings,are closer together, they're not losingas much energy for heat.
so you have to look at the wholecontext for light rail. audience: [inaudible]. ozzie zehner: oh, yes. audience: this technology,which means people could deliver themselves. they can take peopleto [inaudible]. is it really going to changehow people move in cities [inaudible]. and nobody thinksabout it right
now as we start planning. so it's not exactly[inaudible]. ozzie zehner: so the futurechanges of technology is certainly something that i'maware of and i embrace. i mean the technologywill change. and we have to be preparedfor that, as well. but ultimately, a lot oftechnologies rely on energy. and so energy becomes a roadblock that's very difficult to get through.
i just listened to a talk,actually from bill gates, where he makes this point. and he says, energyis not high tech. it's not moore's law. moore's law does notapply to energy. it's because you have todeal with physics. and unless you can find a wayaround the physics, you're still left with any technology,any growth in society, any growth physical--
from a physical perspective-- is going to have to bepowered in some way. ozzie zehner: yes. and so of course, gate'ssolution is to have the nuclear reactor. exactly. so the problem is you eitherhave to believe that infinite growth is sustainable over thelong term, an infinitely growing population issustainable the long term, or
we can look to what examples arethere of dealing with the whole issue with conservation? and there really are no goodlarge-scale examples of that. i mean we're watching it happenwith japan right now, which is probably theplace to look. and one of the other speakersthat was here at google, james howard kunstler, i was recentlyon a blog cast with him in which he mentionedsomething really curious. and he said, he thinks that--
i says all kinds offascinating things that make me think-- and he said japan is basicallygoing back to a craft society. he uses this kind of a thoughtexperiment to say, look what's happening in japan. their population is rapidlydecreasing and they're changing their societies in waysthat have never been done in advanced industrialsocieties before. and so i think we can maybe lookto countries like that
and see what might be happeningand what might come several decades downthe future. but no, you're right. there's no good for it. audience: thank youfor speaking. i think your points aboutreducing consumption are very interesting. but it was interesting becausealmost every single statement you made in your talk, i wantedto ask a follow-up
question to it, to understandbetter, which was provoking. the one that i think is perhapsthe most important to me to clarify at the moment, yousaid a lot about how green technology and alternativeenergies, like solar panels, require fossil fuels to buildand deploy and recycle. and do they require fossil fuelsper se or do they just require energy? like if we had hydro and solar,you could presumably just take the same electricityand build
the plants with those. they don't logicallyrequire coal. we just don't have enoughexisting infrastructure yet. am i right? or are you saying somethingthat i didn't understand? ozzie zehner: no, that'sa really good point. and this is another big questionthat i can't fully answer because in a way, in manyways, it's unanswerable about what might happenin the future.
we need the energy. yes, you're right. the problem is that certaintypes of industries rely on certain types of energy. so it's difficult to explorefor copper and bring the trucks out there, if they areonly running on electricity. so that's why we use thefossil fuels for that. and so the cost ends up going upsignificantly if you try to replace certain types of energyfor other types of
energy in different contexts. but yeah, ultimatelyit's the energy. but there's also qualitiesto energy that go beyond kilowatts or the amount ofenergy, like i brought up the fungibility and the storabilityand the transport. and so these are all qualitiesthat we have to keep in the back of mind. and it's difficult to reallyput those in a spreadsheet, because how do you measure thoseand how do you compare
them across differentenergy technologies. audience: so let's say you'redeclared the dictator of the united states tomorrow. ozzie zehner: it would be a sadday for the united states. audience: oh, that'sa better goal. or the world, whateveryour prefer. what changes would you make tothe existing system, let's say policy changes or something likethat, to make people move in the right direction?
so for example, like let's sayremoving the subsidies and making technologies reflectwhat they truly cost throughout their life cycle,might be something. but you show that it doesn'twork, because solar panels really aren't as effective asjust reducing your usage. so what kind of changeswould you make, if you were the dictator? ozzie zehner: whew, well-- audience: sorry, loaded.
ozzie zehner: first of all,there would be lucky charms in all of the restaurants. i think probably universalhealth care would be the number one priority. i feel like universal healthcare has so many benefits. and we often hear people say oh,i don't really want to pay for that person's health care. and it's just like that personis going to go to the doctor too much.
well, first of all that kind oflike a remarkable breakdown in civil society. it represents a kind ofremarkable drawback from that perspective. but also, most people don'trecognize that we already have an emergency universalhealth care system when a homeless person goesinto the er with pneumonia because they didn't have healthcare, they end up spending a lot of moneyon bringing that
person back to health. and of course, that systemis incredibly expensive. and that's why we could actuallysave money by going to something like a universalhealth care system, like the ones in europe. and there's nothingabout the health care systems in europe-- they're not perfect, i guessis what i'm trying to say. but you also don't see germansin the streets protesting for
an american style healthcare system. and i think that's something wehave to keep in mind too, in all the rhetoric going backand forth on these issues. the other things that i wouldenable, to make a short list, is a kind of energy efficiencyenabling technology or research-- a department of efficiencyinstead of a department of energy. and also things like removingzoning restrictions that
prevent density in certainurban contexts can end up having a big impact. and so that's probably thedirection i would do. audience: hey, ozzie-- ozzie zehner: yes? audience: --thanks a lot foryour wonderful talk. i really enjoyed most of thetalk, especially the fact that you've taken such a radicalapproach to what the common belief is.
and you're being successful inconveying the point, which is very scientific andwell-grounded. so i really appreciated thepoint that you mentioned the real crisis is a crisis ofconsumption, not the production. however after that, i didn'tquite follow how you link that to the population management. about that, just from what yousaid, i would like to share, like for india as country, thepopulation has been mostly
huge for thousands of years. and i usually read a lot ofsanskrit literature from ancient stories, like ancienthistory of india. it's been a vast populationall the time. and it's been sustaining. all the problems that youmention having to do with electricity and fossil fuels,that all started like in only the last 100 years or so. but prior to that danger,civilization has been running
for years and years and yearswithout any of these problems. so i'd just like to point outthat it's not necessarily the but it's under a dimension thati would like to just kind of hint at here, which youmight be interested in pursuing for further, whichis actually the concept of consciousness, likewho we really are. what bring satisfaction to us asa person, as a individual. so the indian culture is kindof focused on that spiritual dimension, which provides thehigher level of satisfaction
so that you don't dependon gadgets and material technology to fulfill yourdemands constantly. which is what that the vastmajority of the consumption comes from. so without providing anultimate higher way of enjoying your life, you cannotreally take away all the gadgets and say thatbe [inaudible] and solve the energyproblem that way. rather, the indian culture isfocused on the aspect that
you're a spiritual being and youcan be satisfied by other means spiritually, comparedto you using gadgets. that's one of the main reasonsthat civilization has sustained for so many years. so i'd just like to comment onthat and see if you have any thoughts about that? ozzie zehner: well, i shouldmake a clarification that probably our views are notincongruent, in that i'm not for population control.
i should say that rightoff the bat. in fact, i think the idea ofpopulation control within the environmental movement, andthere are some people pushing for population control,and i think that's a misguided effort. and that's because i do think ittramples on the ability for societies and for individualsto have a free life and procreate how they choose to. but we find that actuallycoercion is not
necessary at all. if you look in china, the lowestbirth rate is in a place where the one-childpolicy does not apply, in hong kong. and we find that throughoutthe world. actually shanghai, also. it doesn't apply and shanghaialso has a low birth rate. we find that really by justinstituting human rights and health care, it allows people tohave the number of children
that they want to have. and that number happensto be sustainable over the long term. and so really the trick i thinkis just delivering human rights and health carein the first place. i really see population growthas a symptom of suboptimal social conditions. so the real thing to do is tojust satisfy those social conditions and the populationgrowth will
take care of itself. audience: i have oneother question. i think we're gettinglow on time. but i was curious what youthought of the work of like professor jacobson at stanford,and others, who have come out and said, look, we havethe technology, we have the resources to power all ofthe energy in the world today with existing knowntechnology, for wind, water, and solar.
and how you compare that withyour graphs of showing the tiny drops compared tovery large buckets? do you think his analysis iswrong or do you agree with it and were presenting somethingdifferent? ozzie zehner: i was actuallyjust on a radio show, npr, last week, and hewas on the show. and the issue with this reportwhich you're referring to, for people who don't know, is thatbasically there's these ideas that there's enough solar energyin the mojave desert to
power the entire world. there's enough wind power topower 100 times what we need and these kinds of things. and really, these arejust a failure in the way of thinking. i mean of course if you ask aridiculous question, you can find a ridiculous answer. and i mean the mojavedesert may be the saudi arabia of solar.
but if we were to cover it withsolar cells, and cover the world's deserts with solarcells, it would destroy civilization as we know itwithin a single generation, just because of the toxins, thefossil fuels that would be required, the other climategases that are produced, that are many times worse than co2. if you take that little dot ofsolar energy that we get currently, or wind power thatwe get currently, and then multiply those side effects bysomething like 10,000, that's
what you're looking at. so you just get another set ofside effects with alternative energy technologies. and they all relyon fossil fuels. thermal solar has thesame side effects. when you get back down to it,you end up with the same types of side effects. the high cost of thermal solarreflects the fossil fuels that are behind the stage.
audience: so is it accurate tosay that you think in that report, they didn't do a properlife cycle analysis? ozzie zehner: i don't think theyasked the right question. audience: ok. ozzie zehner: yeah, that'swhat i don't think. i mean maybe their findingsare correct. i could ask the question, howmany threads of linen are in this carpet. and i might be ableto find an answer.
but is that really a meaningful question to be asking? audience: in a google[inaudible]. audience: thank you. ozzie zehner: thank you. audience: hi, there. thank you. great talk. i'm not as well read as someof the other questioners.
but i'm curious why nuclear isnot mentioned anywhere and whether you think that there'sa place for it in the future world? ozzie zehner: thankyou for asking. that's an excellent questionabout nuclear. a nuclear would be a wholeseries of talks, aside from this one. which is why i didn'ttalk about it here. i do talk about itin the book.
so if you're interested in myviews on nuclear power, you can look there. but nuclear is a fascinatingcase because it is something that is actually scalable andthere is a lot of fissionable material on the planet. and that can be looked at asa blessing or a curse. and there's people that lookat it from both directions. the issue with nuclear poweris that we have yet another set of side effects andlimitations and consequences.
some of them, weknow very well. some of them are riskysituations, that are growing and accumulating over time,such as that with waste disposal and accessto proliferating materials like plutonium. and the nuclear armamentsindustry has even tested byproducts from the thoriumcycle in anticipation that there might be a thoriumpush in the future. so we will look at conflict.
we look at potential formaterials getting diverted. we look at long term storageof nuclear waste. we look at the potentialfor explosions or like fukushima disasters. and so, we just get anotherset of side effects with nuclear. but the big issue with nuclearthat shouldn't be underestimated is that thereis a lot of fissionable and we're going to run intodifferent types of barriers
with nuclear than we're encountering with fossil fuels. audience: [inaudible]? ozzie zehner: oh, i'm not theright person to ask about either projects and the fusionreactors and things like that. fusion has been kind of 30 yearsin the future now, for very long time. but we're now kind of findingthat the future isn't what it used to be.
and it's getting more and moredifficult to really see a way forward with thingslike fusion. i mean maybe it willhappen some day. i don't really know.
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