[Intro Music] What is energy?

Yeah.

Good question.

It's the thing that powers our lives.

So everything that we do uses energy.

You know, from our smartphones to our computers to the lights to when we heat and cool our house.

All the transportation we use our cars or the trains, planes, and ships that deliver our goods.

Even this TV program, it's all powered by energy.

The problem with energy, energy is taught as something that exists in the physics lab.

To me, energy is about everything.

When I'm washing dishes, I'm thinking about energy.

I'm thinking about energy 24/7.

Hot water cleans better than cold water.

Why?

It's got more energy.

Scrubbing off the food particles, well, that's physical energy.

The soap as an emulsifier is chemical energy, and it certainly exists to run our economy.

Our economy is totally dependent upon energy in ways that people barely recognize.

It's so essential and it's a huge part of our daily lives.

It's the biggest industry in the world.

When you think of oil, natural gas, electricity, all of those combined, it is the biggest industry in the world.

So it kinda touches everything that we do.

During my lifetime, we've increased the energy use in the world by 8 times From 1300 to 1750, half of all economic activity was to get the energy to run the other half of the economy.

And some people, kings and dukes, were rich, but most people weren't dirt poor.

I mean, you invest 1 and get back 2.

Coal came along and you got moved up to 5 to 1.

And then oil came along and you moved up to 20 to 1 and we became rich.

Most people didn't have to do drudge labor to get the energy to run the rest of society.

I mean, a guy sits in an air conditioned tractor listening to his favorite music and being computer guided and makes enough food for 10,000 people.

What a difference oil has made.

We are so rich and so powerful and so bloody arrogant because our muscles are so much bigger with oil.

We live on a planet which has greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are greatful to those greenhouse gases because they keep the temperature of the planet at a level which supports life as we know it.

Extracting, processing, and combusting fossil fuels is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And what this does is simply increase the capacity of our atmosphere to retain heat.

Yes.

So when we look at sustainability in terms of energy, we can see finite resources such as coal, such as oil that we're using up and these resources are depleting.

But it's not just about the fact that they're not gonna be there forever.

It's also that these resources tend to have health and well-being impacts, causing climate change as well as local pollution.

It's gonna have to be a transition to renewable energy, solar power, wind power.

We have tremendous potential in the state and are producing solar, we're producing wind.

About half of our electricity is actually hydro.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen, our geothermal options, and we're looking at offshore wind.

It's far more sustainable and a better choice for all, but we need to change the system so we're working to those systems.

At the moment, we have the infrastructure very much for non renewable energy.

It's about balancing the social, economic, and environmental impacts, whether they're positive or negative, and understanding all those contributions around society, economy, and the environment.

Why are we making these decisions?

Can we learn from decisions we've made in the past where we've caused pollution, where we've had a negative impact on society?

The planet will go on without us, so it's up to us to decide what role we want to have on this planet.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by The Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.

The world is going through a major energy transition.

The state of Oregon finds itself on the cutting edge of the renewable energy paradigm.

Solar, wind, wave, geothermal, and more are a central focus on the Oregonian energy landscape.

This is no longer a story about something futuristic that might happen soon.

It's happening now, and the investment flowing into these industries suggests that it's here to stay.

But the process of transitioning our energy systems to zero emissions technology is not without challenges and pitfalls.

The big hard questions need to be asked.

Can this technology truly solve our environmental problems?

What will it really take to reach a zero emissions future?

Can we keep up with ever increasing energy demands?

The future might be hard.

How optimistic should any of us actually be?

Our team is traveling around Oregon to ask these hard questions.

And find out what lies ahead for energy in the long term future.

I'm also really banking on technology breakthroughs.

We can have politicians passing policies.

We can have state agencies working on those policies, but we're also just gonna need new technologies to help us get to where we need to be.

I'm certainly a proponent of technology innovation because I wrote the tax bill that has launched this major set of reforms in the technology space for clean energy.

It's why when people ask me what made the difference in my ability to write the law that broke 50 years worth of gridlock, I say we used carrots rather than sticks.

You know, we gave people a wide range of opportunities.

If I had come in there and said, nope.

You know, we're just gonna say, you know, end of this and end of that, you know, we wouldn't have been able to get a bill passed.

But when we came in and I said, look.

Nobody knows what are gonna be the big opportunities to reduce carbon emissions 25, 50 years from now.

I'm giving you an option that'll create incentives and markets and opportunities if you wanna choose them.

If you wanna go somewhere else, you can do that.

A better world is possible.

We are unstoppable.

A better world is I don't think it would be possible to make any advances towards a more sustainable or renewable future without technology.

It's a huge part, but it's just about the people.

It's about the implementation.

We have the technology.

It's about using it.

We're not gonna be able to just get ourselves out of this mess with technology.

We've also got to address the roots of the problem, which I think have to do with lifestyle and a lack of humility about how we live on the planet.

It's both technology and behavior.

Without those things together, it's gonna be very difficult to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon.

It's going to require cooperation on a global scale.

The strength of our program is really the networked nature of it.

Wanna go ahead and invite the next panel before lunch.

For all its failures, humanity is pretty impressive sometimes.

We are occasionally able to step up and do impressive things.

The technology is already there.

We could be a hundred percent renewable if we wanted to spend the money, if we wanted to make it happen.

We could do it in 20 years.

It already exists.

Wave energy was around 20 years ago.

The machines worked.

It's just they cost more than other forms of generation.

Technology isn't the problem.

It's will.

It's political will.

So political will is gonna be huge, and and that's gonna depend on who gets elected.

It's gonna depend on how we tell the story about what we're trying to do.

It's gonna depend on individuals and legislators, people, communities seeing benefit into this shift of technology directly.

If we can do that, if we have the political will, we can overcome all of the technology challenges.

So I would say in a country like the US, we like to depend on technology.

In countries where there's more reliance or more trust in central government, they can change behavior.

So they might change the way people consume power and work as a cohesive unit more.

Whereas I'd say in the US, we're very much more technology focused.

If we look at what some of the greatest minds are saying around the world, where are we gonna get climate reductions from?

And they sort of break it up between technology that we have, technology that we need, and what societal change.

By 2040, 2050, we can sort of rely maybe 60 percent on technology we have, maybe 20 percent on technology that's coming, and 20 percent on society changing its ways of consuming power.

Because ultimately, it's our consumption that drives everything else.

I think in the context of Oregon, I think we, for better or for worse, are gonna be pretty technology dependent.

I would love to say we're gonna see significant societal change to reduce that demand, but I just don't see evidence of it to give me a lot of confidence in that.

And I don't see any detriment in following a technology path while believing in the fact that there could be societal change.

Because I think if we believe in one and we don't invest in both, we could end up in an endgame where we go nowhere.

Technology is going to be an asset towards an objective.

But where I place my faith in are the people that begin to see the importance of addressing it.

It is not doing one thing that affects the climate change or not.

Obviously, we as human beings are beginning to consume a lot of resources at a much higher rate, but it is not only creating new sources of energy to offset it.

It is also how do you bring about efficiencies and what you do.

There are lots of pathways for those of us who have homes or businesses to approach energy efficiency, to put in electric heat pumps, make sure that our windows are as efficient as possible.

So a lot of this work we can also do with energy efficiency, which doesn't actually require development of more renewable energy.

We have been doing a really good job of individually reducing our per capita use of energy, and that's because we've been doing a lot of energy efficiency projects.

So we're putting insulation on our walls.

We're putting in new windows.

We're weather stripping our doors.

And so we're doing all those weatherization things, and we're building new buildings that are substantially better energy wise than the ones that were built 1990 and before.

We have to go back and retrofit all those, but the new ones are very efficient.

Making sure that we do all those cost effective energy efficiency measures that we can do, putting in LED lights, energy efficient appliances, all those things really help create a system that works better, achieves our greenhouse goals, and keeps costs as low as possible.

Energy efficiency for the longest time and still is was the least environmentally impactful resource, but also the least cost.

It actually was one of the only things that utilities can do that actually lowered people's cost.

Everything else we do raises people's cost.

Energy efficiency also means that if you're using less energy, you don't have to build as many transmission lines.

You can add capacity by having less energy used.

For a long time, we have operated what utilities call demand side management programs.

And these are mostly various kinds of technologies and programs to help customers use energy more efficiently.

More efficient appliances, particularly in energy intensive operations, air conditioning systems principally, refrigeration, large appliances like washers and dryers.

If those operations are using less energy, that is capacity that we can use somewhere else.

We actually provide cash incentives to help customers purchase those devices.

Another area that we worked on is, efficient irrigation systems.

You know, again, incentives to upgrade to more modern, mostly electric motors for pumping of water, but also we have worked with heavy industry on interruption contracts.

For a break on the power rate that they pay, they agree to certain interruption parameters.

So if we're faced with a problem on our system or a huge spike in demand, we can go to that customer and say, we need to take advantage of your interruption parameters.

So if you'll shut down certain amount of your operation, that's capacity that we can then use elsewhere to deal with the dynamic ebb and flow of customer demand across our system.

PGE has a demand reduction program where they actually pay people to stand by.

And they pay them on a monthly basis, and they pay them to stand by in case they need them to drop load.

And then they've signed up that if PGE says, we need you to drop load, they'll drop, you know, half their load, and they'll shut off all this stuff.

That's way cheaper than building a peaking plant for that particular time or going out onto the market when everybody else is on the market and the price went up.

It's really expensive to do that.

So being able to manage that demand with computers to control the equipment is already valuable, and we do it quite often, and we're gonna do more of it.

And people can opt out if they want to.

He has a high end heat exchanger, and so we don't have a furnace.

We just use this thing, which is pretty efficient at turning electricity into heat in the house.

Yes.

Efficiency is a good thing, but it's a 2 edged sword.

And I'm sure lots of people you've interviewed are gonna talk about efficiency.

William Stanley Jevons is one of my heroes.

He was a polymath, a very smart guy.

Queen Victoria's advisors say, you know, the coal is all around us all the time.

What's happening?

I think we need to understand this.

So they said, who's the smartest guy around?

And they went to Jevons.

And they said, Stanley, here's a grant for 2 years.

Go find out about coal.

So he said, okay.

He wrote this all up in a book called The Coal Question.

All economic activity goes back to coal.

He goes through all kinds of examples, fisheries and farming, and that all went back to coal.

He was amazed at that.

And so England's using a lot of coal.

How much coal are they using?

Well, he plotted it and it seemed to be growing exponentially.

Okay.

England's been here a long time.

How long will the coal last?

And he said, well, no more than 200 years and less if we keep growing exponentially.

We gotta build more efficient engines, use that coal more efficiently.

So he goes to the royal library and looks things up and he found out that there had been 3 previous studies similar to him on the Savery engine, the New Coleman engine, the earlier steam engine before the Watt steam engine, and they all concluded the same thing, we needed to make our engines more efficient.

And they did, and the Watt engine was much more efficient, but it made it cheaper.

And by making it cheaper, people found more uses for it.

And it actually contributed to the increase in the use of coal.

And this Jevons Paradox comes up again and again.

In the 1970s when smaller Japanese cars came into the US, we doubled our fuel efficiency and people drove the cars twice as much.

We make refrigerators more efficient so they're bigger.

We've made lighting more efficient so people use more of it.

I guess that ultimate example is some big billboard in Las Vegas.

Jevons paradox doesn't always happen, but it often or mostly happens.

So it's gonna be more efficient, but you have to cap the use.

You have to talk about the total use first.

One of the things that I would observe, though, in our company's experience is that the advances in lighting efficiency, the move from incandescent lighting to compact fluorescence to LEDs, a huge energy saver because the light output has remained essentially the same.

The amount of electricity consumed is significantly less.

So even though people are using more lighting than they might otherwise have, the overall demand from lighting systems has really gone down.

People could do what's called take back.

When their bill goes down because they got more energy efficient house, they turn it from 68 to 70, and they use more energy.

But the net effect overall is that the energy efficiency saves a lot of energy and we use a lot less energy.

But also the quality of life is an important factor.

Energy is a means to an end.

Right?

So it's what we're using it for.

So quality of life is actually a big important part of what's happening in that paradigm as well.

Technology is one essential component.

It's essential, but it's insufficient.

And it's insufficient for the simple fact that if you look at the historical energy use, every time we bring new ways to convert and use energy, we use more energy.

You know, when we started, as an example, using oil instead of just coal, did we stop using coal?

No.

We just started using oil also.

We just started using natural gas also.

We just started using nuclear also.

So our energy use is continuing to go up.

Our CO2 emissions is continuing to go up.

So imagine a future in 30 years where we've solved 90 percent of the problem with emissions.

That would be a remarkable achievement technologically, infrastructure, 90 percent carbon free.

But we've increased our energy consumption globally by a factor of 5, say.

We still have half the emissions we have today.

That's untenable.

This is one of our biggest vulnerabilities moving forward, honestly.

We know that electricity demand is going to increase because we're gonna have more EVs on the road, and we're gonna have more electric heat pumps in our homes.

But in the past, we've been able to largely use energy efficiency and keep up with increased demand, although, you no, we're gonna have to work at it.

But now we're starting to understand that this is a nationwide issue, the impact of data centers.

Data centers now use 4 percent of the nation's electricity.

The estimates are that it could go up as much as 6 percent.

That two percent means everything.

Their needs are going to be exacerbated by AI and cloud computing.

When we are working really hard to get to non-fossil fuel energy sources and really building up the non fossil fuel energy sources, and you have these huge demand entities come in, there is a real question about how we are going to be able to stretch what we're already doing on the ground well enough to incorporate data centers.

Oregon is currently home to over 100 data centers, many of which were built in just the last few years, with more on the way.

Certain parts of Oregon have become data center hot spots due to local tax policies, which incentivize companies like Amazon and Google to build in their communities.

Hillsborough, The Dalles, and Umatilla County have all seen extensive data center development.

The Umatilla Electric Cooperative is among the smallest utilities in Oregon with only 16,000 customers who were mostly provided for by nearby renewable hydropower.

The utility now has the third largest carbon footprint in the state after PGE and Pacific Corp because the energy demand of data centers exceeds what the consumer owned electric cooperative can provide with renewable energy.

When the data centers are located in consumer owned utilities, those utilities largely get their energy from Bonneville Power Administration, which gives them a contracted amount.

If they use all of their contracted energy that they're getting from BPA, they need to go to the energy market.

In the case of Umatilla, a lot of the energy that's been bought on the market is not clean energy.

And so that's how you really start to see both the exponential use of energy and the exponential use of dirty fuel coming into the state.

I think the good news here is that the companies largely that run these data centers, we know who they are, the Amazon, Google, Apples of the world.

I don't think they wanna be seen as the bad guy who sent the nation back to coal.

So they are working hard to try to develop renewable energy sources independently so that they can say that their data centers hold in renewable energy.

In 2023, we tried to run a bill.

In my committee, it was actually my bill, that would have required data centers that are located in the consumer owned utility parts of the state to meet the state's clean energy goals that is 80 percent clean by 2030 100 percent by 2040.

We got a lot of pushback on that, and we set the bill aside.

Since then, we've really developed I think a very positive working relationship with Amazon in particular that was at the issue in that case.

And we've started to realize that this is not just an issue in consumer owned utility areas, it is an issue of the quantity of energy we are going to have available.

So you've got PGE and PAC scrambling to meet our 2030 goals and all of a sudden you have, you know, if 1 data center uses as much power as 85,000 homes, that's the size of Medford.

Right?

So what are you gonna do then?

You know, the need to replace or replenish that clean energy is is really tremendous.

We have clean energy goals.

They're working hard to develop clean energy, but just the data center demand is going to be very difficult for us to keep up with.

It's a big conundrum.

We're just starting to understand what the implications may be.

Because energy demand is rapidly increasing, there's a risk that the current rate of renewable expansion will not keep pace in a way which addresses our climate issues or the looming depletion of economically accessible fossil fuel resources.

Energy, like any commodity, has its price driven by procurement costs and market forces.

Human economic systems are similar to natural system.

I mean, you know, we're natural.

We're organisms.

We're animals.

And so we had to have a continual influx of energy to maintain ourselves, maintain our cultures.

Early economists, one group, for example, called the Physiocrats, Quesnay and others who are writing in 1750, in France especially, and they thought all value came from the land.

Energy came from the sun and was captured by forests and by agriculture, in fact, the animals and so forth.

So it was all about the land.

More land you had, like in Jane Austen novels, more land you had, the more wealth you had.

Then the classical economists, Adam Smith and up to Karl Marx, thought that value came from labor.

People concentrated in factories at the beginning of the industrial revolution, you know, physically putting things together.

Neoclassical economists today, Solow, for example, in 1950s wrote about this, thought that value came from capital.

We were using oil basically to run the economy and to make things and we did that with machines which are capital.

So each of them are actually talking about the energy sources of their time but they didn't have this synthetic overview to understand they're all about energy.

Here's a dollar.

A dollar is worth a whole lot less than when I was doing a paper route as a kid.

Money used to be backed by gold, and it's thought that gold is some kind of standard of value.

But when the Spaniards brought back the gold from the new world to the old world, they doubled, almost tripled the amount of gold in the old world, but they halved its value.

The energy at that time that was running the economy, solar energy that was running agriculture and forestry that was growing the fuel and the energy of the people to chop the food and the draft animals to plow the land, whatever.

All of that energy had not changed.

That's true today.

This should say on it, pay to the bearer 5 megajoules of energy, which is, you know, half a coffee cup's worth of oil.

That's about 5 megajoules there, more or less.

If you buy a bagel, how does that bagel get there?

Well, here's what happens.

Fertilizer is put in a bag and barged up the Mississippi River using diesel and then taken to farmers with diesel trucks and spread on the ground with diesel tractors.

Then wheat is harvested using diesel and then using oil or electricity ground up, put in a bag, put on a train, shipped across from Nebraska, I suppose to Oregon or New York City as a bag of flour, and then mixed using energy in a baker's shop and put into an oven fired with natural gas.

In other words, just all these energy steps.

No energy, no bagel.

No energy, no economy.

And that applies everywhere you look.

So for every dollar you spend, that's 5 megajoules or half a coffee cup worth of oil.

And if you buy a new car, well, you think about it.

Quite a lot of energy that goes in there.

We have to use the oil that we use wisely.

Next 50 years is gonna be really, really difficult because we're gonna have to replace the cheap and abundant oil and gas with something else, which will be very energy intensive to do.

As you mine more and more of either oil, or coal, or copper, or a hundred other materials that we use, we always use the best stuff first.

That's Ricardo's principle from economics.

Always use the best stuff first.

So that means over time, we have to use poorer and poorer grade resources.

That means it's taking more and more energy to get your next ton of copper.

If we go to a renewable world, we're gonna have to use more and more materials, common ones like copper and exotic ones like indium and who knows, cobalt and what else.

And so we have to wind up ten times more stuff than we did in 1920.

This is happening to everything that we're dealing with is the energy cost of depletion.

Oil is gonna cost more in the future because you have to use more energy to get it.

Everything we have in our economy is based on oil.

If the future of oil is how I think it will be, you know, we're up the stream in our canoe without a paddle, and the waterfall is below us.

We gotta do something.

So I think shifting to renewables is the only option, and I don't know if we can do it.

I don't know if we have the materials.

I don't know if we have the oil to make and move around the machines.

If, as I think, oil becomes more expensive, there's gonna be less and less energy available for the rest of society, and people are gonna demand, demand, that they maintain their salaries, their retirement benefits, their health care.

You gotta squeeze all of that out of a smaller and smaller energy resource.

Every time a politician says that he's gonna make your life better by having more of this or more of that, think each time, well, how much energy is that?

How much energy is that?

And that to me makes the question of distribution, ie: rich vs. poor E. Rich versus poor, much more important.

How much energy are we gonna have in the future and who gets it?

And what it means politically, as we see in the United States today, is that it makes the country harder and harder to govern.

You know, politicians may not help, but the left thinks it's the right and the right thinks it's to the left.

It's nothing to do with that.

It has to do with resources.

People get used to this.

They get used to the increase.

Used to say in America, you're gonna be richer than your parents.

Remember that?

Not true anymore.

It's possible that economic downturns centered on energy lie in our future even with the adoption of renewables we see today.

Decreased access to cheap fossil fuels early in this transitional period may also, ironically, impact our ability to address the symptoms of climate change.

The ocean is rising.

Things are getting warmer.

Well, they're trying to fix that sea rise with what?

What do you think they use to try to fix it?

Oil to make barriers, to make levees, to keep the levees working.

My God, every time I see a war and and all this infrastructure destroyed by idiots with with howitzers and I'm thinking my God how much precious embodied energy are we destroying?

If we're going to make some transition to a brave new world of renewable energy because we're gonna run out of the high grade fossil fuels, then how are we gonna do that?

Hard to imagine how much energy is harnessed in there.

Imagination is not necessary.

The scale is readily quantifiable.

We are presently generating 12.75 billion gigawatts of In science fiction, we're often presented with high energy depictions of the future.

Energize.

Teleporters, replicators, phasers, and warp drive facilitate space faring adventures through a populous galaxy full of new life and new civilizations.

To boldly go where no one has gone before.

This is a hopeful, exciting vision for our future.

But there's a problem.

If it were possible to achieve these aspirations, wouldn't there be others in the universe who already advanced past energy scarcity into long lived and prosperous civilizations that spread throughout the cosmos?

Live long and prosper.

Despite the size and age of the universe, we see no conclusive evidence of this, a problem known as the Fermi Paradox.

I got a great graph, and it shows from 10,000 years in the past to 10,000 in the future.

And here you've got a guy, a caveman walking along, and then you have this big spike.

And up here, there's a guy in a space suit.

And then it comes down the other side.

This is the history of our fossil fuels.

And there you have a same caveman, more or less, walking along, except he's got a bow and arrow.

Yeah.

You might have only this window of a hundred years that you would be able to send out spacecraft with signals or send out radio waves that somebody might be able to, intercept somewhere else.

Who knows?

I think it's a helpful reminder that humanity has only been around in a sort of modern form for around 2,000 years, And in that time, we spent, you know, 70, 80 percent of that basically doing about the same thing.

And then the last 200, 300 years, we're an entirely new world.

You know, even my own parents, right?

Dad was born '27.

Everything about modern world is just different than what he experienced growing up, and that's gonna be exactly the same thing for the next generation.

So if you think of humanity and sort of the beginning of civilization down here, and here we are today, and there are nine billion of us on the planet, there's a sense that we're at we're at the end of something.

And it's possible.

But if we aren't and we make good decisions, then we're actually at the beginning of a history that will include innumerable people whom our decisions today will affect.

There may never be nine billion people ever again alive at one time, but the total number of people over the next 100, 200, 500,000 years is enormous.

We're just the beginning of humanity.

If we leave them a planet that is depleted of resources, that the environment is uninhabitable, the climate has gotten to the point where it's not conducive to human flourishing, what what have we left?

What will we do in the short term to shorten or minimize what those impacts will be?

And so there's two schools of thought when it comes to how do we deal with climate change.

A completely engineered solution or stop doing what we're doing and perhaps Mother Nature will fix it on her own.

There is this idea that you can completely engineer a climate change solution along the lines of like terraforming.

And I'm not saying it's impossible.

It just you have to violate the rules that we already have, create your own rules.

And at that point, you're gonna be making your own rules and creating an engineered solution in a cascade effect.

It would be simpler, cheaper, and easier if we just backed off our CO2 emissions and see how that works.

And then potentially look at other more radical engineered solutions.

Part of the issue too is the value system of the society.

Right?

Consumerism.

If the goal is to make money by selling as much as possible, then you have to continually make or create need.

And you create need, and then you generate more production, which is more extractive and has more consequences on the disposal end.

So there are these treadmills, right, of production and consumption that speed up.

And you've got companies that are competing with each other to sell more faster and to create more and more needs.

So that whole way of thinking, that whole economic mindset, I think, has to be rethought and altered.

How do we solve this problem?

Well, with less.

Fewer humans, less economics, less everything, and work on quality of life.

I mean, families and friends and nature.

Take a walk in nature, and don't think you have to have a better car than your neighbor and show off your wealth.

All of that stuff, it's just stupid.

So you're talking about kind of, a scaling back of human civilization over time?

I think that's the only way we're gonna make it, certainly not by growth.

There's a degrowth society that's out there and all kinds of similar organizations.

But, a lot of people understand this, if not exactly the way I do.

I certainly have no magic answer that will allow us to continue to grow.

That's for sure.

And I don't even know if I have an answer that will allow us to continue at the level where we're at.

And we have to look into constraints on our own behavior as being probably the most important knowledge that we need for the future.

What other option have you got?

All these people you've interviewed, do they have any option to replace oil?

Have you looked at the numbers?

Do they give you the numbers?

Conversely, do you ever think about or hear about, degrowth as a concept?

I think yes.

And it's not very popular.

I don't talk about degrowth.

You know, there are absolutely people who are looking at where we are and what the planet needs and very much affirm the idea that we have to take a big step back.

I don't think that is a pathway that's gonna get you the public will that you're gonna need to move forward.

You can't stop growth and have a quality of life.

I don't understand that philosophy.

I don't, you know, most of people in the building and the farming and the ranching and the fishing, you know, 95 percent of them, they just wanna be productive, they wanna pay their bills, they obey the law, they wanna leave something good for their kids.

That brings a better quality of life.

Does it need to be managed well?

Does government have a role there?

Absolutely.

But the role is not to shut everybody down and make everybody's life strictly on government dependency because it cannot be sustained.

I'll give you an example.

You know, I, will be over the course of the next few days, talking to battery facilities.

You know, we've got, you know, tremendous growth in the battery space, and, you know, that's an opportunity for a really good clean energy job.

I do think it's a trap to think that we can just scale back our standard of living.

I just don't believe that that is a productive discussion because I don't think we'll have that kind of consensus that I alluded to before for that transformational change.

If we start saying, well, you need to change your standard of living, I don't think that ultimately would be successful.

So I'm not an advocate for that.

I can see the temptation to do that because the loads are skyrocketing.

I mean, they are getting much larger and they're shifting in time and it's kinda like hitting a curve ball that's speeding up.

So this is a big issue.

So I see this as a fundamental change the way we think about economic growth.

We essentially need a economic growth model, a way for people to make money.

Let's be honest, a way for people to get rich, you know, that fits our model that doesn't rely on continually increasing both emissions and population and energy use.

So this is a hard challenge, a social challenge.

There are extremists.

One people would say, we don't have to do anything.

It's all BS.

And then there's other people that say, we have to shut down everything and and go back to the Renaissance.

And so there's the extreme polarizing viewpoints.

In some cases, people adopt those to kinda like pull people towards their areas, but it's that area in the middle that is really where I think most of the action really happens and where actually most of the progress happens.

So it's the people that say, yeah, but and then they figure it out.

We've been doing that for decades and decades, centuries actually, where we've been dealing with the extremes and saying, that's nice, but we need to actually solve this and be practical about it.

So I'm a pragmatist.

I think shutting down everything and going back to the Renaissance or just sticking our head in the ground and just saying it doesn't even exist are not really viable solutions at all.

Look at the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act.

In the 60s, this clean water and clean air were a disaster.

I mean, you could light the Potomac on fire.

And now there is lots of clean water and and lots of clean air and we've actually changed the way we do things.

We instituted better technology.

We changed the way we formulated our fuels, and we changed the way that we do exhausts.

A lot of that has to do with regulation and smart regulation that actually gets us there.

What I think is important to emphasize is that effectively addressing climate change does not mean that we will not have a robust economy.

It does not mean that you're gonna have to sit at home because you can't get in your car and go any place.

I mean, what we've really demonstrated in the last decade is that we can move much more to renewable energy and still have robust economies and still have, you know, people who live rich lives.

There's no reason to think that this should undermine or significantly depress the way we wanna live our lives.

The Oregon Department of Energy, along with the Oregon Climate Action Agency, OCAC, recently developed a project called the TIGR project, transformational integrated greenhouse gas emission reduction project, TIGR.

And the TIGR project assessed, if we have all these numerous programs and regulations that we have in the state, can we meet our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals?

And what we found was, yes, the the programs and regulations we already have in place have established the policy framework to get us to our goals.

But that only happens if they're fully implemented as planned and fully funded, and so that has to play out.

So we can meet our goals, we have the policy framework to get there, and we know how to do it.

Another thing we looked at in the TIGR project was, what if we accelerated our goals?

Can we do that?

And what we found was, yes, we can do that.

That's very possible, very doable.

And not only that, it's cost effective to do that.

Over a 25 year period to 2050, if we do accelerate from 2035 to 2030, was a total of 47 billion dollars to Oregonians.

And then if you add in the net benefit of the increased health benefits that we get from that new system, it's another 73 billion dollars for a total of about a 120 billion dollars cumulated by 2050 if we just accelerate our goals.

That's pretty significant.

The extremes people are not gonna help us get there, I don't think.

Go back to the renaissance?

I mean, you know, my cameraman here is a diabetic and that that's not gonna work for you.

Yeah.

I don't like that.

Yeah.

Right A friend of mine is too.

He's on a little pump.

It'll be bad.

Technology saves his life every day.

Gonna need some electricity and some plastic to, kinda keep that going.

You know, it's a combination of all these things, being conscious about our choices, adopting new technologies, investing where we can, and being very cognizant all the time of how much work we have to do.

The larger society is brilliant in many ways.

You know, we can go to the moon, split atoms, do all kinds of of things that, other cultures and societies haven't been able to do, but not always with a lot of forward thinking.

So now we've gotten ourselves into a very large mess.

I think it would help if they would listen to tribes.

You know, I think tribes have a really good understanding of our homelands and how the ecosystems function, but also have the humility to try to think ahead, right, and to not move too quickly because it's monetarily rewarding or because it's expedient in terms of, you know, the solving of a problem that's plaguing us right now.

I'm not a scientist, as I said before.

However, I suppose that technology could be part of that solution, but not the sole component.

I mean, we have to figure out a way to work together, you know, and tribes have a lot of indigenous knowledge.

You know, we've lived in these areas for thousands of years.

You know, we are stewards of this land and, whether it's on true tribal land, it's all, it's all, ancestral territory, something like 6 million acres.

Right?

So we feel we are still stewards of all of that land, and we wanna try to protect that land.

We wanna work together, combine our indigenous knowledge and along with our professional staff to make that happen.

Cultures before settlement were incredibly dependent on the land.

Those that were closest and understood how these systems work had a bounty.

So I can never discount the knowledge that is passed on and is known as something we call traditional knowledge.

And if you really wanna talk about climate change, you have to understand baseline conditions before climate change.

Incorporating traditional knowledge into traditional Western science, I think is imperative to understand exactly how things have changed or the magnitude of change we've seen over time.

I'd like to think I'd like to work within the rules that the planet has set forth as opposed to don't know, taking a more radical science fiction completely engineered solution.

Everything's concrete and we have oxygen scrubbers.

I like plants.

Short answer.

We need both and a lot of hope.

Years ago, I went through an experience which kind of woke me up in terms of probabilities of ongoing existence, and that was, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

Absent treatment, I was given 2 months to live.

But he said, if we can give you an aggressive round of chemotherapy and get you into remission, your chance of being alive in 2 years is 20 percent.

If we can get you through 2, 3, and 4 rounds of chemotherapy plus total body irradiation and a bone marrow transplant, your chance of being alive in 2 years is 50 percent.

Now when somebody says to you, your chance of being alive in 2 years is 50 percent, most people will say, well, jeez.

That sucks.

But when the choice is dead in 2 months, it looks pretty good.

And so, not surprisingly, I opted to take the treatment.

So I liken that to our situation with climate change.

I don't know what our chances of diverting that trajectory to one that with which we can live.

I don't know what the probability is, but I am pretty confident if we do nothing, the outcome will be disastrous.

I liken it, if you like, to existential assertivism.

If we do nothing, we know what the outcome is.

So let's assert we have a chance of diverting that trajectory, and let's do the best we can.

Do you believe that this is a problem that we can solve?

Do you think that one day we'll be looking back at this period of history and seeing it as that was a challenge among all the other challenges of history that humans suffered through and ultimately prevailed over.

When I first started this business, I came in thinking about the environmental impacts of energy and I value energy because it's impacts everything we do on a daily basis.

But I thought we could do it better and more effectively and more efficiently and less polluting.

I was the president of the Solar Energy Association of Oregon, and I started the Renewable Northwest Project to help get these things going.

And when when I was doing that 30 years ago, they were like nowhere.

This wasn't happening.

And slowly but surely, it has increased.

And then in the last like 5, 7 years, it has taken off.

Nature has been here.

You you know, people worry about nature.

I don't worry about nature.

Nature is gonna continue.

Mother Nature bats last.

If we understand her rules, we have a chance of making this transition.

We will be living with the effects of climate change.

There's no doubt about that.

The science tells us that.

Right?

We we already are in a different world than I grew up in.

And I think about my kids and what world they're gonna have in their kids.

So I think we will eventually arrest what's going on.

What would happen in my lifetime?

I'm not sure.

As long as we are good to each other and we focus on what technology can do and what it can't do, we are cognizant of what it cannot do, which is it cannot make an agreement with your neighbor.

You know, it cannot really build up communities.

Right?

If there's one thing that gives me concern, it's it's that in this year of 2024, can we talk to our neighbors?

Can we talk to our fellow citizens?

Don't shoot from the hip.

Don't be overreactive.

Don't tell you if you don't believe exactly what I believe you're an idiot.

I am optimistic, I have to be, you know.

This is a time when you pull everybody together and you stop talking about unifying and you say okay, here's my philosophical and political views, here's why I believe this.

If they'll listen and then you likewise listen, there can be a great joy in actually solving problems.

Our country has always had to overcome big problems, big issues.

Stay tuned, I think we'll be okay Keegan.

I'm a glass half full guy.

I think about my own kind of lifetime.

My parents fled the Nazis in the 30s.

Not all got out.

We lost family at Kristallnacht and Theresienstadt.

I almost didn't make this interview, you know, here with you and I'm not talking about getting a flat on.

I-5 or something, you know.

I almost wasn't born, you know.

I had a chance to be raised by a Jewish family that, you know, valued public service and I wanted to play in the NBA.

That wasn't gonna work out and I started working with the elderly.

So I'm I'm not a big believer in setting limits.

I think we can achieve what we set out to do if we're committed to it.

Of course, we're gonna solve this.

It's just what that is gonna look like getting there and how much damage that is irreversible on sort of human generational time scale are we gonna do, you know, the forest will recover, but it will take thousands of years.

So, you know, I'd I'd like to see us have not as much damage on my kids and grandkids generations.

I have granddaughters.

You know, we're taught to to look ahead 7 generations and think about how we're acting right now, what that's gonna mean for people coming behind us.

We constantly think about all of the things that, the generations before, that 7 generations before up on the wall, where I said I had my 3 times great grandfather's signature is up there or his mark.

You know, they were thinking about us just like we're trying to think about future generations.

So, you know, we're gonna give it our all, and I hope we do.

It's not necessarily about optimism, it's about responsibility.

We need to make the right decisions for our, you know, 7 generations in the future.

Responsible choices and decisions are the only way that's gonna happen.

It will play out easily over a hundred years.

By the time we're done rebuilding our energy system, we will have a renewable energy system that is perpetual in some sense.

No fuels, no pollution.

I see how every corner of the world is invested in it.

And when the younger people get, I always remind them when they get engaged, you are the future of the world.

And we are going to do our best to leave a better world for you, and I have great faith they are gonna make a better world.

We always have to have hope.

I mean, that's, I think, part of the human condition.

Once we've lost hope, we have a tendency to give up.

And so we gotta keep hope and I have it.

I subscribe to the school of thought that says we can do it and I say that because the alternative is not acceptable.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by The Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.