The World's Coming Energy Catastrophe - Nate Hagens - #508

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Nate Hagens. He's the Director of the Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future. Energy drives our world. It keeps our GDPs growing, our cars moving and our hospitals working. If there was a shortage of energy, life would change very dramatically. Nate has spent 20 years researching the state of our current energy reliance and creating an assessment and philosophy for the future. I expect to learn how energy is intrinsically linked to our economy, why solar and wind are not a solution, why the things that humans value need to change if we want to continue flourishing, what would happen if the price of energy went up by even a small margin, the real reason that the USA has tons of bases in the Middle East and much more. This conversation is quite scary. Nate is unbelievably well researched and everything that he puts across seems to make quite a bit of sense to me and he isn't the sort of person with the kind of personality or agenda to overblow things and that makes me even more concerned. I really, really hope that this opens your eyes as much as it did for me and I can definitely see Nate's ideas and his platform growing ridiculously over the next few years. This seems like something that pretty much everybody needs to know about. So yeah, get ready for this one. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Nate Hagens.
Nate Hagens, welcome to the show.

**Nate Hagens** (1:57)
Good to see you, Chris.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
Good to see you as well. So what I find particularly interesting about your work is that you're looking at energy, you're also looking at human flourishing, you're also looking at economics, you're looking at the past, the present, the future. Given the fact that many of the people listening won't be familiar with your worldview and your work, what is important in the story of how we got here? So what do we need to know about our history before we can assess where we're at at the moment?

**Nate Hagens** (2:27)
It's a big question. I think we live in a culture that focuses on technology and human ingenuity and money as the things that describe our wealth and our future trajectory. And I think culturally, educationally, we misunderstand or fail to recognize the importance of ecology and energy to our lives. And we live as part of a system. So for the last 20 years, I've tried to connect the dots of how the pieces of the human ecosystem fit together. You mentioned economy, which is technology and materials and energy and human ingenuity. There's also the environment and climate change and other species and biodiversity and ecosystem health. There's also anthropology and neuroscience, which I know you spend a lot of time on who we are as evolved animals have arrived here after 300,000 years. But because our brains and our bodies were shaped from the past, and we are biological organisms and energy is the central currency in nature. Animals were the first investors and we just think of investing money. But everything we do requires energy. Every single thing that ends up in a good or service that contributes to GDP or gross domestic product, the size of our economy requires energy to invent, to mine the materials for it, to create, to distribute, to operate, to maintain, to fix and to dispose of. Without energy, all of our technology would just be sculptures. And so without energy, our cities would be museums. And this makes sense, right? Except we assume that we will have the energy we have now indefinitely. And that's where the risk comes in. And I think what's happening in Ukraine and russia right now is causing people to become a little bit more aware of, oh my god, we're really dependent on energy. Well, in this case, Germany and Europe are really recognizing what's happening.
So, long story short, we live as part of a system. And the things that have been supporting the system since you and I have been alive are unlikely to continue for too much longer. And so we're going to have to change how we get our evolutionary neurotransmitters, the emotional states of our ancestors, probably with using less energy and materials than we do today.

**Chris Williamson** (5:31)
Why are things going to have to change in future?

**Nate Hagens** (5:34)
Ah. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about energy properties and energy quality. So there are lots of different forms of energy. And we use predominantly fossil energy, which we are pulling out of the ground 10 million times faster than it was trickle charged by daily photosynthesis of the sun. So the master resource in the global economy now is crude oil. And from that come diesel fuel and gasoline and kerosene and jet fuel and bunker fuel and 6,000 other plastic precursors, oil is the master resource. Oil is found where there were ancient oceans. And it so happens that you and I live in a country where a lot of ancient oceans were. And so America has used more oil in the last 20 years and the last 50 years since the dawn of time than any other country. Let me tell you how powerful oil is.