coe095_bakke.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, everyone, it's Dominic and Simone.

Speaker2: [00:00:28] Hi, Dominic.

Speaker1: [00:00:29] Hi, Simone,

Speaker2: [00:00:30] How are you doing over

Speaker1: [00:00:31] There? I'm doing all right. How are

Speaker2: [00:00:32] You? How you like it on the other side of the studio?

Speaker1: [00:00:34] I'm on the other side of the studio for one, so I'm mixing it up, keeping things fresh and original.

Speaker2: [00:00:39] I was just the first one in the door, so now I get to be over on this

Speaker1: [00:00:42] Side of the aisle. Note that I'm on the left side of things. You are on the right,

Speaker2: [00:00:46] But you're usually over here on the right. Well, if I turn around, then that changes everything.

Speaker1: [00:00:51] Hey, everyone, we have a rare bit of mailbag news. This week we had an exciting we had a great response to Semenya's rant about Smith and Wesson last week. Do you want to tell us about that?

Speaker2: [00:01:00] Yes. Well, so yesterday we had yesterday, well, last week we had a very stimulating

Speaker1: [00:01:07] Scandals ago, three or four

Speaker2: [00:01:09] Days. That's the thing. It's like Las Vegas now feels like ancient history now that we're hearing all about Mr. Weinstein's exploits. Oh, but this was a really nice piece of mail from our mailbag, and we're happy to receive mailbag. You know, whenever you got something cool to say and informative. So anyhow, so I was saying, why aren't people suing Smith and fucking Wesson showing that I'm probably out of date because I don't even know if Smith and Wesson is like the big paintball and gun manufacturer anymore, but apparently a group of families who were affected by Sandy Hook. I suppose parents and family are bringing a suit against Bushmaster, which was the maker of the weapon. I'm sure it was manufactured the a AR 15 rifle that was used. And then there was a really good piece in The New Yorker on the 1st of January 2015 about that. So the preparation for the trial is still underway, and probably it's going to go in front of the Supreme Court of Connecticut this fall. So in fact, people are getting out there and

Speaker1: [00:02:12] But there are some problems. There are some limitations.

Speaker2: [00:02:14] So, OK, so this case and others like it struggles because of the broad legislative immunity granted to gun manufacturers only by this thing called Plaka Protection for lawful commerce and arms. It was passed in two thousand five. It was sought by the NRA. After some cases, cases against gun companies appeared likely to succeed. So then they pass this placating. So the politics of Plaka are very complicated. Bernie Sanders, who was then a House member in 2005, voted for it, and in 2016 he defended the NRA position in favor of immunity, even though he changed his position later in the campaign. So that's another piece of it. So there's a there's a feeling that a Democratic Congress might in fact repeal or weaken this Plaka. And then you get to see more cases of action. So in other words, there's reduced their immunity.

Speaker1: [00:03:12] There's yeah, there's a kind of a legislative roadblock against the type of lawsuits you were

Speaker2: [00:03:17] Recommending for now. But the Newtown, the Newtown case now proceeds under quote negligent and trust meant like, that's I guess, the legal category negligent and trust meant. But Plaka makes that very hard to proceed with.

Speaker1: [00:03:32] So anyway, yeah. Any help? You had a good idea. But also other people had that idea and well, Congress maneuvered to limit the capability of people.

Speaker2: [00:03:41] So that's where we're at. Well, right, because it's the same with, you know, it's the same with a car manufacturer and safety standards and cigarettes and and other things that need to be reined in in different ways.

Speaker1: [00:03:51] But folks who wrote that,

Speaker2: [00:03:53] I'm not sure we're allowed to share that.

Speaker1: [00:03:55] Let's give that person a pseudonym.

Speaker2: [00:03:57] Ok, let's see. Let us call that person, Alison now frog.

Speaker1: [00:04:04] Alison now frog. Yes. Wow, that's a very specific pseudonym. Thank you, Alison. Thank you so much for writing in to the podcast and other people. We will endeavour to give you less bizarre to be right or if you want to use your own name, that's cool, too. So on the podcast,

Speaker2: [00:04:21] Alison will understand what I'm talking about, and that's all that matters is that they get it

Speaker1: [00:04:26] Ok on the podcast. Today, we are talking with Gretchen Barky, who's an anthropologist who wrote an amazing and very highly celebrated. I mean, this is a book that I saw in in-flight magazines being profiled. You should go read this book called The Grid, which she took a very nerdy topic and turned it into something that a lot of people are reading. So congratulations, Gretchen.

Speaker2: [00:04:47] Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a wonderful read and really, really informative.

Speaker1: [00:04:50] Yeah. And you wrote a review of that, and

Speaker2: [00:04:53] I got I got a fancy advance copy. Yeah. And yeah, got to write a review for science, which was cool boy. But they're tight on their word limit, man. Let me tell you, I was like, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. I had all kinds of good things to say, and they're like, Nope, you'll get this many words.

Speaker1: [00:05:06] But anyhow, yeah, so we were really thrilled to get a chance to to talk with Gretchen, who's been a friend for some time, came out to one of the cultures of energy events a few years ago, and it's a really terrific book. I learned a lot. I mean, I've been looking at electricity for a while, as have you, Simone. I think we both learned. A lot from this book, and it's really well and it explains like how electricity works, right in terms almost anyone can understand, a

Speaker2: [00:05:28] Singles bar metaphor

Speaker1: [00:05:29] Is super valuable. Yes, we go into that at some length.

Speaker2: [00:05:32] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, yes, it's a great piece, great for teaching and just great for learning with. And it's actually a book that you could get for family members who aren't, you know, necessarily hardcore academic types, right? You know, it's not all full of jargon and all that extra sludge.

Speaker1: [00:05:49] So I was going to say on our rant corner this week that would be us recapping. Having just completed and again, the Culture of Energy podcast is where you come for hot takes on things that you watch three months ago and are probably forgotten about. We just made it through The Handmaid's Tale. And can I get a couple of minutes to talk about The Handmaid's Tale and you could get a couple of minutes to talk about it? I'm going to say that, first of all, there's a lot of great things about this series, including the acting, which I really liked, and I appreciate that this was done probably on a threadbare budget. I'm looking forward to next season when they probably will have a much bigger budget because they won all sorts of awards. And it's obviously going to be a project that Hulu is going to carry forward. Couple of things, though, disturbed me about the series.

Speaker2: [00:06:35] Besides the soundtrack,

Speaker1: [00:06:37] The soundtrack is actually one of the biggest things I really think. The soundtrack made some very strange choices in terms of trying to capture the mood. And yeah, it was just so jarring

Speaker2: [00:06:48] That Jefferson Airplane bit when she goes into

Speaker1: [00:06:51] Jezebel. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:06:52] One pill makes you smile all and one makes you at all. I mean, I love that song, but it was a little too predictable and yet bizarro.

Speaker1: [00:07:03] At the same time, it was kind of like borderline satiric, I thought, which was not capturing the vibe of the rest of the rest of the series, right?

Speaker2: [00:07:11] Because it's not full of levity, let's just say.

Speaker1: [00:07:13] But OK. And again, I also don't. I think that this series may well have been written, you know, before Trump's victory, although it obviously picks up on some of those themes. Basically, my feeling is I do worry legitimately that we're in a kind of Weimar era in the United States in which because of, in this case, self-imposed rather than externally imposed economic crisis and devastation. You've got a hollowing out of the political center, a radicalization of both the left and the right, which leads to a period basically in which there is a kind of radicalization of of alt alt right, you know, white supremacists on the one hand. And then you know what I think is a gentler, less violent radicalization on the left. But in both cases, there's a sense in which there is no longer a kind of functional political apparatus that everyone participates in. Right. And again, people on both sides will say, that's a good thing. We should overthrow the system and we should should challenge things. But one of the lessons of the Weimar era is that the right tends to win these things because they're more violent because they're willing to go to greater lengths to brutalize people than the left is typically. And so that is worrisome. All this is to say is that there's something very resonant and disturbing about The Handmaid's Tale, and that's good. But I worry a little bit that the way in which is depicted in the series still feels like a little bit like it's it's kind of like a liberal fantasy of what authoritarianism looks like in the sense that, you know, we have this kind of these images of a kind of blissful time before Gilead comes, and it's kind of multicultural happiness and everyone is kind of, you know, somehow ignoring the fact that no one's able to have children anymore.

Speaker1: [00:08:50] And that's one of the things that's, you know, if that were to happen, that seems to me that would be all that people are talking about. But somehow this is kind of like a minor thing and people don't realize that radicalization is happening around them. And then suddenly we're in this authoritarian system that it just it just seems to me, I don't know how to express this exactly, but it's like to perfectly seamless that have been said. And you know, like all the guards are not allowed to speak because they can't pay them to speak. But they, you know, they remind me so much of like the characters in James Bond movies like the guys in the background and their black turtlenecks and their little hats on and they were carrying their weapons. And again, it's like this kind of it's it's a Hollywood kind of authoritarianism in a way that I think and I guess this is my issue is I think it undermines a little bit our capacity to recognize that all of the elements of that type of violence are already present in our liberal society today. Right. We don't need a Gilliard to see that. Does that make sense? Anyway, that's credit where credit's due. There's a lot of wonderful things about the series, but there's something about its portrait that still rings a little false and hollow to me.

Speaker2: [00:09:57] Well, OK, maybe a maybe this is given it too much dispensation, but let's try and read it through the lens of when the book was actually written and what it was intended to be. Right. Right.

Speaker1: [00:10:08] Because before it was

Speaker2: [00:10:09] Published, I was going to say 85, but OK, it was published in 84 and it's a feminist dystopian novel. And so it is in that kind of sci fi genre, right? So there's a bit of the surreal that always goes into a sci fi production, right, there's. And the way that The Handmaid's Tale is shot is certainly focused on the aesthetics, like it's very beautiful and they're very into these stark contrast between the robes and the white snow and the black vehicles and et cetera. So I wonder if part of it isn't a kind of a nod to the genre of of the original story to try and create that what you're calling your reality or the unreal ness of Gilead, like it's sort of too prim and too neat, and it happened too fast and it's it's too clean and there's not enough overt reaction. There's no garbage in the streets anywhere like it feels.

Speaker1: [00:11:03] It feels dreamlike. It's dreamlike, dreamlike. It's like a nightmare from which we just snap back out. And that's true.

Speaker2: [00:11:10] But I wonder if that's I mean, I'm not sure what the political orientation of the of the producers was if they were meaning to draw attention to this kind of potential authoritarianism. Certainly, that's what Margaret Atwood was writing about the many decades ago that she wrote the story. Right. So it's coming out now, but I just I wonder, I don't know if we give them the benefit of the doubt that they recognize that what they were creating was this kind of a slightly fantastical world that almost has like a dismal Disney feel to it that it's part of the aesthetic that they're trying to convey, not just the beautiful aesthetic, but the kind of surreal aesthetic of of the sci fi world, which always has to have a little eerie reality in it. No, I don't know. I think throwing that out there?

Speaker1: [00:11:55] No, no. I think I mean, it does work. Obviously, if it gets you worked up, it's working. And that means it's a good piece. And I think you're right, like Atwood's book is was prescient as fuck you know it, it is. It is a book that reads really well today because we can imagine that type of institutionalized violence against women at a societal scale very easily because it does exist. I mean, this is the thing. It's already there. It's already there. It doesn't. It doesn't take a nuclear war to trigger it. No.

Speaker2: [00:12:24] And but OK, yeah, I'll let you finish. But the other thing is, I mean, one of the details that's bothered me more about the reproductive narrative is that we already in the present as we're sitting here watching the TV show, we already have so much reproductive technology that would basically run an end game around, you know, needing to use these these women as vessels, right? As as egg, as egg bearing vessels. Now the premise of Gilead, of course, is that it's this fundamentalist Christian state, I suppose, although they haven't quite called it Christian, but it's certainly fundamentalist. And their punishments, for example, are right up there with, like the Taliban, right? Or, you know, Belgian colonialists, right? Cutting off people's arms for their sins right there, their forearms. But you know, the kind of reproductive technology that we have now would certainly make it that if there were any viable eggs out there, if there are any viable sperm out there, you could start producing babies through technology. And so this whole ritual of them like having a ritual once a month and, you know, having actual heterosexual intercourse is kind of quaint in the present, right? Because like, if you really want to make babies like, there's other ways to do it. And of course, it kind of more realistic setting. They would probably be kidnapping and raping women from, you know, Bangladesh or something, right? They wouldn't necessarily be enslaving their own women, right?

Speaker1: [00:13:53] And it doesn't really address the contemporary concerns about having too many people on the planet not having too few. So that's another kind of dreamlike quality to it. But I guess the last thing I want to say is, and this is very minor, but I think it's telling in the ways that I mean, I think it's been very true to the book as I understand it. But one of the ways in which has been updated the storyline is to include these weird little moments where they're talking about, you know, the need to reduce their carbon footprint. So it's very eco in that way, right? And that bothers me a because, you know, of one of the things that the right argues against climate action is that it is a kind of slippery slope to authoritarianism. So there's a weird kind of way in which they're saying that I know that that's not probably what's meant. I think it's meant to show the cynicism of these people and the duplicity which they show in other ways, like the Jezebel and the brothels and everything like that. But, you know, still, the idea that this is kind of one of the ways they've updated it is to kind of involve a climate change story.

Speaker2: [00:14:47] Yeah, there's a little

Speaker1: [00:14:48] There's a I wish they had done that better. I wish

Speaker2: [00:14:50] They had. There is a little there's a tiny, tiny thread of that. I think it only gets mentioned a couple of times

Speaker1: [00:14:55] Just in passing

Speaker2: [00:14:56] And very much in passing. But I will say in the last, was it the last episode? Yeah, it was the last episode when she's when all the handmaids are supposed to stone the one eyed handmaid to death? Right? Yes. And they refuse. And then they all get sent home. And there's also a really inappropriate song playing over them, walking home her as she's walking, as Elisabeth Moss is walking.

Speaker1: [00:15:19] And I just wanted to say, like I. Just imagining in my head, as you were saying that that as they're walking down the street, that they're playing the rocky theme that's about that's about how appropriate it was like Dum Dum Dum Dum. Yeah, I had that. I mean, that's the level

Speaker2: [00:15:34] Of choice of gloves. It could be boxing gloves.

Speaker1: [00:15:37] Anyway, I'm going to cease mansplaining, please.

Speaker2: [00:15:39] Ok, so anyway, before I was so, so rudely interrupted, she was walking down the street and you see her on this. You know, you see the Black Street underneath in the beautiful white snow and she's in a red robe. And then about the only other spot of color on the entire screen are these little recycling rates.

Speaker1: [00:15:57] No, they recycle.

Speaker2: [00:15:58] They're like bright. There's like bright green, you know, garbage sized bin. And then there's the little blue boxes and they're all out on the sidewalk. Those are the only. It's black and everything's black and white. Everything the houses, the street, the snow, except for her in red. And then these little, you know, little pointillist moments of recycling. So now that was a choice.

Speaker1: [00:16:17] I just don't think it was a good choice.

Speaker2: [00:16:19] You're kind of like, why are you indexing recycling here? I'm not sure because. And it's not doing any favors for us recyclers.

Speaker1: [00:16:26] No, exactly. It's just as much part of the background nightmare background like we're going to have to recycle. We're going to have to

Speaker3: [00:16:32] Reduce our carbon. They're going to be better on the streets with guns.

Speaker1: [00:16:36] Ok, we better stop. We've been going on and on. But folks, if you want to write to us and dispute or affirm our read of Handmaid's Tale, please do. Until then, shall we say, of Dominic?

Speaker2: [00:16:48] Yes. Of Simone.

Speaker1: [00:16:49] Oh, Snap, did you see? Did you see how she did that?

Speaker2: [00:16:54] Brilliant, huh?

Speaker1: [00:16:55] That's feminism. You're so nice. I like it.

Speaker2: [00:16:58] All right. Go, Gretchen. Go, Gretchen. Hey, there are welcome back cultures of energy listeners, we have a Gretchen back in the house with us. Hi, Gretchen, good to have you here.

Speaker3: [00:17:27] Hello.

Speaker1: [00:17:27] Hi, Gretchen. Well, OK, I'm going to start because I am the least celebrated person in this conversation.

Speaker2: [00:17:34] This is my husband. He's the intrepid co-host today.

Speaker1: [00:17:37] I have not written a book that has been a celebrated crossover hit like the Grid Gretchen's 20 16 book, and I also haven't written a review of that book in science. As my co-host has.

Speaker2: [00:17:49] I'm taking a small bow right now. You should take a bow to Gretchen. You take a big cowgirl.

Speaker3: [00:17:54] Thank you. I was very excited about the review in science. I have to say, OK.

Speaker1: [00:17:57] You too have brought it. I am just going to be the, you know, the person who kind of drags this conversation intellectual level down a little bit. So I'm going to start with current affairs, and I'm going to say that this book reads maybe slightly differently in the Trump era than it did in the Obama era, but not so much, because it's still dealing with longer term challenges that are going to exist for probably many administrations to come. We were just struck by the fact that less than 24 hours ago, we had the Scott Pruitt, our ever transparent and intrepid EPA director, declaring that the war on coal was over. We are getting out of the Clean Power Plan and that this is part of a broader campaign which is being led by the administration and many and the fossil fuel industry in defense of base load. The idea being that it is our increasing sacrifice of our baseload capacities and our fruity experiments with renewable energy forms with all their intermittency and so forth that is causing, you know, power disruption and is causing a lack of energy security and especially electricity security in the country. Right.

Speaker2: [00:19:05] But wait, isn't baseload part of the Second Amendment. I thought it

Speaker1: [00:19:08] Was, yeah, everyone has a right to baseload energy. I just want to check that a minute. Yeah. I want to get

Speaker2: [00:19:14] That

Speaker1: [00:19:14] Straight. You can have as much baseload energy in your house as possible. You just store it up there anyway. But your book, Gretchen, is all about the vulnerability of the grid. But I, you know, I don't remember whether you mentioned baseload in there. If so, it wasn't a big part of your story. So I just wanted to maybe start off by asking you to respond to this idea that we are imperiled by our decreasing reliance on coal and baseload generation.

Speaker3: [00:19:38] Well, I have to say that in defense of baseload is a great phrase. I don't talk about it a lot. I do talk about the fact that there is a worry about how to go from electricity that is completely controlled on the generation side to electricity, which is not completely controlled on the generation side. And that so much of the kind of good thinking I would say that's happening around grid reform right now has to do with precisely that problem. But even even Perry's report, the leaked version of it and even the published version of it essentially said that we can kind of let go of baseload as an idea. We don't. We can't necessarily let go. Is it of it as a sort of as a cultural motivator? Which is to say, I don't think it Trump or his guys care so much about coal miners, but they really care a lot about people who care about coal miners. Mm hmm. And so there's the political side of it is very clear. And I think most people know that. But even in the even in talking to people in the industry, which I was actually doing this morning and in hearing, you know, good news reports about this sort of backing away from the Clean Power Plan, it's not going to change much because an infrastructure investment is something that you do. You're looking 20 years into the future, 30 years into the future, 50 years into the future, putting pretty big money down into systems redesign at this point, and that this administration is not predicted to last more than three more years and certainly not expected, and it will impossibly last eight more years at this point.

Speaker3: [00:21:17] Right. So in terms of thinking about how one reforms and infrastructure in a way, it doesn't matter that much, and most people inside the industry know that. But politically, it's quite it's quite easy to celebrate. I'm not going to say it's efficacious, but it's easy to celebrate. The one thing I do say about baseload in the book, I don't put it this way, but there was this point at which I realized that essentially 12 percent of our electricity is being produced by nuclear in the U.S. and of course, it varies by where where you live, but on average, 12 percent and our refrigeration and air conditioning on average come to about 18 percent of the electricity that we use in the country. And so there's this strange sort of way in which we're we're we're just making nuclear power to keep things in our houses cold. And I think that thinking about it that way, it's kind of like, OK, so what can we do with a refrigerator and an air conditioning unit? In fact, a lot as the Internet of Things sort. Actually is sneaking into our everyday lives, but as it's just even basic efficiency measures are changed, we can do a lot with those things in order to reduce just a base load is just electric power that's made at the same rate night and day. That's all that means. It just means there's a power plant that no one has to turn up or down. And the fact that this needs to be like a talking point of an administration is fascinating. Yeah, yeah. Fascinating.

Speaker2: [00:22:44] Yeah, no. That's absolutely true. Well, it's it's interesting because Dominic's really into baseload, as you could tell. But if you think about it like it, really, it really is about the source of that baseload because natural gas can provide baseload just as well as coal can. And that's of course, what's making coal, whether in the industry, whether it's because it's so much less expensive to extract and and transport and use. So you can still have baseload if you have different forms of of generation.

Speaker1: [00:23:17] I am not a fan of baseload. I'm interested in it as a fantasy construct. I think it's an absolute fantasy.

Speaker2: [00:23:23] Well, it's a real thing. Yeah, but I'm telling you it's part. It's part of the inclination of the American consumer to always have electricity at their disposal.

Speaker1: [00:23:32] Oh yeah, yeah, I get, I get it. But that's what that's what interests me anyway. Let's move on. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:23:36] No. But I don't want to move out. All right. Let's stick here. I think that I think that the I think that the sticking point between anthropologists, right? I think that the stinking sticking point is as soon as you get rid of this idea of baseload, you start to intervene on the consumer side of things. You start to ask people to pay some sort of attention to how much electricity they're using and when they're using it. And as people start to make solar power, which is happening more and more again in various pockets of the country. But as they're making their own solar power, you have to ask, you have to ask them to be attentive to how much electricity they're making and all of that. That seems to be where that seems to be. The stoppage point is you can't just have as much as you want all the time for very cheap, right? You can if we have quote unquote baseload, but there's absolutely no reason not to match the variability of renewable forms of generation, not even by using more natural gas, but by creating a kind of flexibility on the market side. And that's what's beginning to happen. It is in fact beginning to happen, but it's it's feels really weird because it's changing a century's worth of relationships between us as consumers, people and the electric power industry.

Speaker2: [00:24:53] Yeah, right. That consumption side of being able to access electricity when and you know, when you need it and how you need it, I think that's really important. So I think that this is actually a nice segue into a point that you make in the book and the grid, which is that electricity electricity is is not a banana. These are not bananas for sale. And I think it's a spectacular metaphor because it really does capture so much of the expectation that we have around market goods being transportable and available at certain times. And yet there's a magic to electricity as a commodity that's quite distinct. So can you tell us a little bit more about why electricity is not a banana?

Speaker3: [00:25:36] Well, I think that I mean, the easiest answer to that and where I'll start, but also what I'll come back to is that it's not a thing. It's not an object. It's not. It's not storable. Even though we talk about batteries or other forms of storage, it's not actually storable. All all we do, if we're using a battery is use electricity to create a process that when you turn it around, creates electricity. It's not there's no electricity inside of anything. And I think that that part of the great love of the battery right now is just like, Oh, we can think about electricity as a thing. We can we can imagine it like a banana and we can have little bananas, i.e. little batteries or big bananas or big batteries. Yeah, it allows. It's sort of like this, this very easy slot for the imagination to go into

Speaker1: [00:26:27] Grid scale banana. So I'm just I'm just throwing it out there.

Speaker3: [00:26:30] Exactly. Vehicle to banana. Ok. So the but the thing about a commodity that we're used to is it's not just the object ness of it, but it's the notion of choice. And so much of America is based on choice and the, you know, we get to choose the things that then define us as consumers, but also as individuals and as citizens. And you don't get a choice with electricity. You don't get to go to the grocery store and say, like, I want, I want an organic banana, right? But that's what people are asking for when they say, I want to have green power, I want 100 percent wind energy that's made in my state, right? That's essentially what you're saying is I want an organic or an organically grown local banana. Right. And so the so that the fact that choice is kind of sucked out of electricity by its nature, by its non object ness and then also removed from the way in which we interact with it by the fact that it's the utilities have been monopolies for most of the 20th century were monopolies, and so most people don't have any choice about who they even buy their electricity from. And then the best metaphor I saw ever in all of the research I was doing was that it's essentially like the since we don't know how much any of our things use or how much it really costs because the price is changing all the time without us really understanding why or in relationship to what it's like shopping at the same store all year for an entire month, buying whatever you want with no prices attached to anything and then getting a bill at the end.

Speaker3: [00:28:03] Right? And then people say, Well, you should conserve and you're like, I don't even know if it was the bananas that were costing me all this money or if it was the dog food that was costing me all of this money. Right, right. You have no absolutely no idea. And then it's somehow on the consumer to be a quote unquote good person and do some sort of like turning your stereo off at night and checking all of your power strips and, you know, doing all of these things that that don't ever really seem to have any effect on that bill that comes at the end of the month anyway because of the way that the tariffs are sort of mysteriously organized.

Speaker1: [00:28:39] And I think you do an amazing job in the book, and I'm sure this is one of the reasons why you know, it's it's been so popular. You do a great job of actually explaining how electricity works, which is, you know, you would think that's not such an important thing to do, but actually americans' energy literacy is really low, and maybe their electricity literacy is is still lower. So I wanted to ask you to maybe talk a bit about that aspect of the book. I mean, how how deeply did you need to go into the weeds or into your own poetic imagination to to come up with the ways to describe electricity that would make sense to people?

Speaker3: [00:29:12] Well, I started the book not knowing anything about electricity, so it was pretty easy for me to try to write from myself. So even even the three, I mean, I think it was about three years of research before I started to write anything. And throughout that whole process, I would have these moments of like, Wait, how does it actually work? Right? I don't know how it actually works. And then I would sit down and I would get like the best thing I could find, like boys guide to Electrical Projects 19 18. You know, like, OK, so how this is where these things get laid out. But then they would say things like they would start with things like nobody really knows how electricity works, and then I would have to go back. And what I discovered is that the explanations, even the clearest ones, they always used basic engineering. Yeah, sort of speak, engineering, speak. And so at that point, I had to say either I'm going to go that way and just explain all the terminology to people, but that's just a snooze fest.

Speaker1: [00:30:11] Yeah, it really is.

Speaker3: [00:30:12] It really is. And I tried it and I tried it. I would say not even even after I got past the point at which I think two or three different times, I explain how electricity is working very much in layman's terms when I get to got to having to explain the battery, which I was totally going to skip over. But my editor was just like, You have to explain how a battery works. Like, I swear to God, it took me three weeks. It's like four paragraphs in the book, but every time I sat down to do it, I was like, There is no way to make a battery interesting. Right? Not be done. It cannot be done. Whereas the just talking about sort of atomic forces of attraction, we have a lot of metaphors available to us. And you know, the one that I chose is the singles bar.

Speaker1: [00:30:55] I like that one a lot.

Speaker3: [00:30:57] Yeah. But there's, you know, there's just as soon as I gave up on trying to do anything technical it, you know, the world opened up to to many, many possible

Speaker1: [00:31:07] Metaphors, although it's like a little bit more like a co-dependent relationship because that people keep breaking up and then coming back together again and again, it seems like it's potentially a slightly unhealthy cycle than

Speaker2: [00:31:16] Electricity, some stalking going on every once in a while.

Speaker3: [00:31:19] Yeah, but you also it also really makes you understand how much energy it takes to blow apart an atom. You know, not just to just to like push electrons off of an atom is like all of that coal. It's just about separating electrons from atoms. And that it's that's a phenomenal project. And I think if you don't think about or let me put it in the positive, I think if you think about what it takes to break up with somebody that you're attached to and to actually move your body away until you attach to somebody else with the same degree of attentiveness, like that's something that takes human beings years, it could take a decade to do that. And it and it hurts in all kinds of ways. And in that sense, I think you feel the force. You can feel an atomic force when you think of it with that kind of intimacy. Even though this is happening, this sort of like bumping of one separating of one electron from an atom, gluing it to the next, which then bumps. An electron off from that, you have to imagine that everybody's married to four or five people at the same time anyway. But you know, you get a feel, you get a kind of a kind of visceral, I guess the modern word would be effective feel for what it is. The difficulty of making electricity and kind of the miracle of it.

Speaker2: [00:32:35] Yeah, yeah. I like this. I like this idea of the electro polyamory.

Speaker1: [00:32:39] Yeah, I like that.

Speaker2: [00:32:42] But so, so Gretchen. Was it a breakup that got you inspired to write the grid? Tell me.

Speaker3: [00:32:46] Not totally. Not good.

Speaker2: [00:32:49] Good. So what did do it?

Speaker3: [00:32:52] I think two things the the first is that I, you know, I wrote this great dissertation. Yeah, I always love to quote Donald Trump, right? Like, it was great. I was it was a really great.

Speaker1: [00:33:04] It was really the biggest and the best one I think it ever was produced.

Speaker2: [00:33:08] It made anthropology great again.

Speaker1: [00:33:09] What I don't understand is why the Democrats don't give you that acknowledgment and also why the Puerto Ricans don't give you that credit.

Speaker3: [00:33:17] Exactly so. But nobody cared. And that is that is fine. Like it's I think a lot of doing scholarly work is about finding the ways in which really small things matter to big worlds. But I wanted after that project was done, I really wanted to think about the ways that big things matter to big worlds. And so, so much of this project comes out of that. It comes out of just this, this desire to find something or to think about something that matters to everybody. And then to write it in such a way that everybody can read it. And that meant learning, in many ways, a new profession. I learned that writing for a public, for a wider public or a popular audience. My daily life looks exactly the same as when I was a scholar, but the entire project is completely different. The way that the writing is done, the community in which the writing is done, the way that it's read, the sorts of things that one focuses on, they're all quite quite different. So that was kind of a shock, and it took a long time to figure out how to do. People are always coming to me and saying, Hey, I want to write for for the public, can you tell me how? And it's like, OK, get ready.

Speaker3: [00:34:21] Yeah. It is not just a matter of like changing your language around a little bit, making shorter sentences. So but the the motivation effect was I was looking at something that's, you know, very similar to what you guys are doing, which is the the massive wind installations in the Columbia River Gorge and how even when I began this in 2007, sort of how those were a sticking point for the grid, how those were causing trouble for the grid. And I was very interested at that point just in the connection between wind and grid. And sort of simultaneous to that I there was a significant storm in 2007 that really decimated this very rural area of the Pacific Northwest coast. Now we're used to big storms, but then there was there was sort of no press on that storm. It was. It was rough and it didn't didn't percolate out into the world at all. And what I saw in the wake of that storm were towns, folks, my family among them very mild mannered, non radical people like schoolteachers and nurses kind of deciding that they would take the they would take grid provided electricity when it was available, and they would do what needed to be done to keep themselves warm and safe and comfortable when that electricity was not provided.

Speaker3: [00:35:43] So I think that the I think those two things came together for me at the right time and then I started investigating both of them. And and as I said, I was three or four years into the project before the grid, in fact, began to change. So before what has you know, now we're in the middle of, in fact, revolution, I would say, an infrastructure or revolution, but that was not evident at the beginning. So in some ways I grew up, I knew just enough about the grid when all of everything started to change to to be able to bring a lot of that change into the book. And realistically, the I now know things. I now know how the book should have ended. So in the year after I finished writing it, I feel like we've kind of settled on. There's kind of a form that the future is kind of settled on and is moving towards now in a way that even a year ago was not particularly clear.

Speaker1: [00:36:33] Well, maybe you could talk to us a little bit about that, but I just wanted to to highlight again a line I really liked from the book where you say power production isn't an industry, it's an ecology, which I think is a great way of reconceptualize what power is and how it works. And you do a wonderful job in the book of tracing the evolution of this ecology in the United States over time. And you know, just as you say, it feels like where we are now is on the cusp of a revolution, as you put it, of a variable and distributed energy revolution. What do you think is coalesced in the past year that that makes the future paths seem a little bit clearer?

Speaker3: [00:37:09] I think just the decision to go with distributed energy resources, which is to say not thinking anymore in terms of. Only big power plants far away from city centres, but thinking about how networks and intelligent networks, but networks of renewables across regions often. So you have solar power in Arizona and you have solar power in Utah. But they might be producing at different times. So how you might balance across regions and then how you might balance renewables with other renewables. So small, small rooftop solar with big hydro or small rooftop solar with wind, which is what's happening in Texas right now with and then also adding in distributed battery storage so that storage is smaller, that renewables are seen as something which can be put into play with one another. And that big power plants can be in fact used or phased out. They can be variable. I want to say big power plant. I mean, like a field of wind turbines. I mean, a big solar plant. I mean, a fairly small natural gas combustion plant. All of these things can be set into motion. And nevertheless, create a reliable system. And I feel like that's now what people are really interested in is what is the shape of that reliable system? How will that reliable system be made to work? But without this assumption that something like the electricity system we had in the 1970s will be the norm forever, and we're just like deviating from it somehow. And, you know, in some places, especially in densely populated areas, you start to get a lot more microgrids.

Speaker3: [00:38:48] The Brooklyn microgrid has done amazing things in the last year in terms of person to person energy trading, which just means that, you know, I make electricity here and I sell it to you and I send you a little Christmas card. That's nice. Dominique me for buying my solar power right now. In the case of Quebec, my very cheap hydro power, and obviously I wouldn't be doing that because we're too far away from each other. And you still have laws in Texas that say you don't really get to buy electricity from outside of Texas. So laws and regulations are still a big part of the story. But everybody seems to sort of have turned their head in the direction of this fluidity, balancing diversity, smallness that just wasn't and then renewable renewables forming, in many ways the logical backbone of that system so that you have the variability, not the baseline, as what the future sort of good functioning of the grid will need to take into account and we'll need to be able to work with. And then there's case, you know, there's just case studies where people who are making are playing this out. So Hawaii, Vermont, those are the sort of the two big ones right now, New York and a different sort of way. California, if they get rid of the internal combustion engine, there's just a lot more playfulness now that, like the big obstruction has been passed. But it was an intellectual idea ideation, obstruction. And it's nice to kind of let that go.

Speaker1: [00:40:21] Right. And I'll just somebody has got a question, but I'll just tack on the observation that this is part of why this Scott Pruitt Rick Perry stuff is so maddening is they're really they're really trying to keep a conversation going. That's already over.

Speaker3: [00:40:32] Right? Yeah. But they they build walls, those guys. So, you know, like essentially what's just what's happened in the last five years with the grid is that a dam has come down. There was a giant cement wall that was holding one sort of order in in place, and that cement wall is being effectively dismantled without anybody getting flooded out. And this particular administration, they just they like walls. They believe in them. They think if we put up a wall, we can keep the terrorists out or we can keep the Mexicans out, or we can keep, you know, the coal in or all of these things. That's always the same vision, just sort of repeated in different sort of wall shaped entities across the policy, sort of the policy scape. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:41:14] Although in Texas, our electricity is mesquite flavor, that's why we don't take your your you're you're flavorless electricity from tequila flavored. Yeah, we got to get some tequila flavored. Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:41:26] But Texas is Texas is fascinating and I'm very into I was just in Iowa and they have they're in exactly the same situation that Texas is in right now, which is that they have a massive amount of wind power and they're just just just beginning to take rooftop solar into the mainstream, which causes a whole new set of problems, right? You have the variability of wind, but then you have sort of the distribution of rooftop solar. So it's another balance. It's another level of balancing that has to happen. But unlike Texas, they have wind kind of all the time. It sort of it's not always at night, whereas in Texas, your wind is it's almost all of us it at night, which means that you can balance that with solar in ways that are unprecedented. And I think going forward, Texas is going to be a very curious proving ground for the way in which renewables can come to balance other renewables. And I have to say one last thing because we never talk about it. But the fact that if you can get people with a home solar system and a battery system to take themselves off the grid automatically on call when there's just too much demand for electricity from the bigger grid and be able to sell that resource, that resource, which is subtraction of a subtraction of demand or subtraction of load that changes an underlying logic that has been in place always and I would say, is even sort of a 20th century way of thinking about things, which is always grow, always more right? And so and this is happening to this, this sort of shift to thinking about what can we subtract? How can we use subtraction as a tool in producing a stable electricity system? And that, to me, is phenomenal. And that had not that was barely on the radar a year ago. And now people are aggregating their subtractive bill, tractability and selling it. So that's going to be a big part of the story going forward, too.

Speaker2: [00:43:13] Hmm. Yeah. This idea of a subtractions, it's very, very interesting. You know, one of the things that the book also does very well, in addition to describing how electricity operates in a kind of physical sense, is that you take us deep into the history of the grid and the production and distribution and sale of electricity in the United States over time. So I learned a lot. You know, just going through the super fascinating history of the grid, the grids, I should say, plural in the United States. And one of the things that surprised me, although maybe it shouldn't have, was how instrumental and how important the U.S. military has been in terms of developing the functionality and the usability of microgrids. So as you point out that, you know, we kind of have this expectation that, you know, the hipsters in Brooklyn or the hippies in Northern California are the kind of people who are going to use microgrids. But you offer a really interesting corrective there where you actually point out that the U.S. military has been kind of invested in this and and experimenting with this for some time and and with a lot of intensity out of necessity, right? Because it's very expensive in terms of resources and also at risk of life to be transporting huge amounts of diesel for generators all over the desert or wherever the next war will be. So it's kind of fascinated by that. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how how you kind of came to that realization or found that bit of information, if you can say more about it? And then also in that same section, you talk about something called nano grids. I'd love to hear more about or our listeners, I guess I should say we should. Maybe you could fill us in more about what constitutes a nano grid.

Speaker3: [00:44:55] Yeah. So a grid, which I haven't defined properly yet. Essentially, it just means a source of generation, a source of transit and a thing that uses it, that uses the electricity. So it's a it's a little system that is working in parallel to us, and the grid is really made the way it's made because we have so many machines. So it needs to work in a reliable way, which is to say with a sort of a constant quality of power because all of our machines need that. And so when we start talking about shrinking the grid down, which is what's happening, we had a very big grid three in the U.S., right a west and east and in Texas. When you talk, talk about shrinking that down, you can shrink it all the way down all the way, all the way down to a little, a little solar panel that rolls up that that flops out on the back of your backpack and a wire that charges the battery. And that's a grid. So a nano grid is that's called a pico grid. That's a matter of fact. And there has been a there has been a significant push again in the U.S. military, though you see similar sorts of things getting played with at MIT, which is to create the military needs. Solar panels which are not shiny, don't really heat, are not black and that are hard to break. Yeah. And ideally that are flexible and what they sew there because they have all of these batteries. And what they were doing during the most recent war and are still doing, though less so if I if I believe less so is they're actually just not only bringing tons of oil or diesel in on tankers, but also flying in airplanes full of disposable batteries, right?

Speaker2: [00:46:43] Right.

Speaker3: [00:46:43] So so that's so that at the at the smallest level, there's this push for the renewable battery and then slightly higher level than that. There's if you can stop using diesel generator, you stop putting a black smoke up into the sky so that everybody knows exactly where you are. So that's a plus, but also the expense, the expense of bringing all of that oil in. And and of course, the fact that tankers are are that's where people die is bringing oil into into bases. And what was quite interesting to me about so I got into. Kerry bases not at home through actually that the fact that the military is turning all of their domestic bases into microgrids. So and that's the to me that's almost the more interesting. They have two different sets of problems at home and abroad. And yet they're solving both of those sets of problems with the same solution, which is to create a microgrid. Microgrids are not, by their nature, all 100 percent renewable, but they require that you have more than one kind of generation. That's part of the definition. And so you usually get some green energy into a microgrid. And the question is how to keep it running all the time while maximizing the lack of fuel, if you will. Because what's great about wind power and solar power is as soon as you've got it up and running, you don't have to put anything into it. You just have to make sure you don't break it. So at home, the domestic bases that that was through Navigant Research, who I'm sure you've run into.

Speaker3: [00:48:11] There's a guy who works for them as an analyst whose name is Peter Asthma's and he lives out in Marin. And I met him when I was in Marin, talking to the guy who brought wind power to California back in the 1970s. Whose name is Tyronne Cashman? And he's great. He's a great guy and he's a great character, and it was really fun to be able to interview him and then get as many stories as possible that he told me into the book. Yeah, but in the in the half, at the halfway point of that conversation, we went to lunch with Peter Rasmus and he's the micro-grid guy for Navigant. So he was the one who was like, Well, you know, the military is doing this because there are so many power outages in the U.S. and the military can't it actually can't stand the it can't stand the unreliability of the American electric grid. And so they're just figuring out ways exactly like the rural folks on the Oregon Washington coast. They're figuring out ways to make sure that they have power when grid provide electricity is not there or not reliable. And the easiest way for them to do it is to essentially be able to island themselves, which just means have a grid that when the big grid is down, which we now are calling the macro grid when it's down, even if it's down for 20 seconds, they can island themselves and create a stable network, which is not trivial when you're talking about electricity. Right? Create a stable network just within the base.

Speaker1: [00:49:34] Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's it's really striking and actually sort of encouraging to see the military taking that kind of role. But then in a way, it reminds you of the case of the internet, too, which is another kind of military project that developed a kind of revolutionary impact infrastructure. Yeah. I wanted to ask you and this I mean, I'm very encouraged to what you were saying before about, you know, the future seeming to be a bit clearer and some of the conversations or some of the differences in worldview being settled. I'm also thinking of the case of Germany, which I know you're familiar with, too. And part of the debate about the energy and the sort of energy revolution there has been, you know, the pacing of it. And if you will, the fallout in terms of what it means for, let's say, utility companies when these processes go very fast because there you have, you know, a massive amount of solar and wind is brought on the grid, and suddenly the utility companies find themselves essentially going out of business. And I think that's part of what drives the fear around baseload here in the United States, too, is that it's in a way it's a conservative principle of like not wanting to change things too quickly. To what extent do you think, Gretchen, that we can rely on utilities to help us to remake our electricity infrastructure in the way that that you're calling for? And to what extent do we have to kind of sidestep them and work around them because they will be in the end, they're too wrapped up with the old system. They are the apparatus of the old system themselves.

Speaker3: [00:51:01] Yeah, it's a good question. What a utility is, and America is already a bunch of different things. Yeah, yeah. And it's different. They're different in each place and there are many utilities and I have a beautiful map of California, its utility landscape on the wall. And it's, you know, they're big for-profit utilities. There are little co-ops, there are municipal utilities, and their utilities are sort of switching into their, you know, people are aggregating and and taking their their towns back or their counties back and deciding they're going to make electricity decisions for themselves, not necessarily make electricity for themselves. So there's kind of a war on and it's quiet, and the people with the most power sort of literal and figurative are trying to win the war by sticking their feet as far into the mud as possible, right? And not all of them are doing that. There are certainly forward looking utilities who you know, they're not all known like. Colorado Springs has an interesting utility who is trying to make who sees this vision very clearly and is trying to make hardware, essentially hardware and software decisions right now that will serve them well in 40 years when the transition is completed.

Speaker1: [00:52:08] Well, so shout out Austin Energy here. Locally, too, is another yeah, we're looking at.

Speaker3: [00:52:12] Absolutely, absolutely. And so the so I think the. There's the question is actually to what degree will the relationship to the regulatory relationship and everybody just starts to yawn when you start talking about regulation, but the utilities are beasts of regulation. They have their form and they're functioning because of a long, a century long relationship with regulators. And some of those regulators are state at the state level and some of them are at the federal level. And regulation usually obliges utilities to do something. It it requires that they act in certain ways. And what this has meant is that the utilities have very little practice thinking on their feet. They're not nimble. They simply wait for the word on high to tell them what to do next. Right. And right now, regulation, as I said before, is really lagging in terms of the kind of quick moving, you know, nipping at the heels of the energy transition that's happening in across sectors. And you get you get these moments like, I don't know if you know this, but Microsoft just decided that they paid a giant amount of money to their utility to essentially create a microgrid for themselves. So they're going to be making all of their own electricity and they use as much as a town of 50000 people. Yeah, right. And so they've done this. They can buy their way out. They have the cash to do that. But they've done this in part because they can't get the utility to do what they want.

Speaker3: [00:53:40] And so that's the those are the battle lines. The battle lines are really between the like quick, the quick and bright and flexible. And you see this even with the the shape of generation, right? It's sort of the quick and bright and flexible versus sort of the lumbering old school. But the lumbering old school are the ones who upkeep the grid. They're the ones who know how to take care of the wires. They're not always doing the best job, but but they know how to deal with the maintenance issues. They have the trained personnel to make this massive system that we can't touch work. And so you also don't want to just kick them to the curb. So that's there's all of these ways in which their revenue streams are being drastically curtailed. And in Germany, that was even more extreme. But it's happening here where it's just like every single way in which money is coming in are just sort of being, you know, imagine that little clamp that they put on an artery, you know, it's just like just sort of like squeezing off all of the lifeblood. And yet it's sort of like in the U.S., which is this is what makes it quite different from Europe. We have a quite quite an unreliable grid, and that unreliable unreliability is pushing a lot of the transition.

Speaker1: [00:54:49] I'm going to blame that on the trees, we have too many trees.

Speaker2: [00:54:52] Oh no, you get these trees. It's not the trees. It's the squirrels. Oh, the

Speaker1: [00:54:55] Squirrels are also a problem, but

Speaker3: [00:54:57] In Europe, they've overbuilt. They've actually overbuilt for reliability, as you can kind of imagine, you know, like so their grid is actually is is not there grid, which there are many like like in the U.S., there are many different grids, but they tend to be made in such a way that there's a lot of replication of duties on the hardware side. And so that causes it. That means that they have different problems than their energy transition than we have in the U.S., where you get where you really get people who are like, this is ridiculous. You know, like all of my electricity is coming from a coal burning power plant. I live in a windy place. I want to have all wind. And not only that, even with that coal burning power plant, my power is going out all the time. So like, let's just do it differently and then people organize and then they do it differently. So there it's a groundswell, and there will be utilities for sure that survive that survived this. But the utility model, I would say, is already, if you think of it as as a vertically integrated, highly regulated monopoly enterprise for making transiting and billing billing for electricity that's already gone.

Speaker2: [00:56:03] Right? Yeah, that precariousness, I think you you. I want to read this quote because I think you say it very well here. You say that the utilities kind of lead us to this conundrum. Utilities do not know how to upgrade existing technology without putting themselves out of business. Likewise, they don't know how to continue with the same system without going out of business. Yeah, no, that's that's that's the paradox, right?

Speaker3: [00:56:27] It's a paradox. But as we get more utilities who are figuring it it out, they perform them a model for the for others like Green Mountain Power is doing really interesting things with

Speaker1: [00:56:38] Our

Speaker3: [00:56:39] Suppliers.

Speaker1: [00:56:40] As we buy, we buy our electricity from them here in Houston Mountain. Yeah, really?

Speaker3: [00:56:44] Yeah, believe it or not. Yeah, interesting.

Speaker2: [00:56:47] Maybe they want to sponsor the pod.

Speaker1: [00:56:49] Yeah, there should be a sponsor. This is free advertising.

Speaker3: [00:56:51] Green Lantern got with it. Yeah. So there you know, there are utilities that are trying to figure it out. And I think as they figure it out on the revenue side as well as just like the technological side, then they will become models for for other utilities that are in similar circumstances.

Speaker2: [00:57:10] So I wanted to I like this and I like I like the idea of the nimble, you know, multiple grids that are nimble and. Taxable and can adjust themselves to renewable forms of power and and everyone can kind of come together and collective and have stable electricity. On the other hand, I also I sometimes wonder about the continuation of this expectation to again, like we began with have electricity at our disposal, at our beck and call. You know, even if it's greener, even if it's more nimble and flexible in the grid form. And one of the things that I got nostalgic about in reading your book was this thing that Jimmy Carter called for back in the 70s, which was the cardigan path, right? His claim was, you know, please turn down your heaters, put on a cardigan sweater and, you know, just kind of deal with the elements in some way like, let's try and conserve. It's that that dirty word conservation, right? Or or going without. And I wonder, are we ever going to? I don't know. Is there ever going to be a form that we can imagine electricity taking or grids taking or power sources taking where it's not always about fulfilling every single human desire to constantly have power at our disposal? Because it seems to me that in a kind of philosophical register, it it it annoys in a way, right? Because it's it keeps on fulfilling that expectation that we humans should be able to sort of control our power and get access to it.

Speaker2: [00:58:42] And we can make it prettier and lighter and greener and happier. But we still need to have it. And damn it, we deserve it. So I don't know if there's a question there, but I just I wonder how you see the operation of an ethos of conservation working through some of these questions of grid and access to power, or or whether these aren't basically solutions for just replacing old dirty power with prettier and cleaner power. And if that's it, that's fine, too. But is there a place for conservation in this to, you know, to use less to, you know, to go without electricity for a little bit longer than we normally might? Or is it really just a practice of replacing the old dirty stuff with the cleaner, lighter stuff?

Speaker3: [00:59:28] So I'm of two minds about this. They're not really my minds, but like just talking, talking to people. There seem to be two and maybe three worlds that it's like a Venn diagram, right? I sort of like bump into each other at overlap. So on the one hand, as one of the things that people are saying very consistently now, and this is another thing that has happened since the book was finished, is that the current system electricity system is fractal, which is to say it's it's exactly the same system all the way into your outlet. So from the giant coal burning power plant all the way into your outlet, it's just dividing down, coming down to lower voltages. But the logic of the system is exactly the same all the way through. And a lot of people are saying right now that what is about to happen is that the insides of houses or of buildings will be with the sort of interoperable connection to the bigger grid will be able to function in vastly diverse ways from one another. And one of the things that will begin to happen at that point in, which is and this was interestingly someone from Duke Energy, which is not the most forward looking utility in the world, but somebody from Duke Duke that was telling me about this is that what you begin to see is that when a building, especially when it's just being constructed and you can just think of like a big box store in a suburban, I don't know, north and west suburban North Carolina somewhere when that building is being imagined, if it's imagined not as a part of the grid, but actually as a kind of machine for making, transmitting and using its own electric power locally, you get a level of conservation which is thought of and unheard of it hasn't. Ok. So the sort of word on the street is that we can reduce by about 40 percent our electricity consumption with no no real difference in lifestyle.

Speaker2: [01:01:23] Wow, that's amazing.

Speaker3: [01:01:25] And but there's no driver for it right now because electricity is so cheap and because the system is always from someone else. Right. So this is an argument for kind of a public private partnership. Those never seem to work. But this argument I find to be an interesting one, which is if you're making it and if you're thinking, if you're not retrofitting your building, but you're thinking you're building from in terms of generation and in terms of consumption, from the moment that you start drawing up the plans for that building, you get a creature of a different type. That's right. So that's that's on the one side. On the other side, the per capita electricity usage that is highest in the world is Iceland.

Speaker1: [01:02:04] Oh, yes. You know,

Speaker3: [01:02:05] And and second highest is Quebec. And the reason for that is that in both of those places, you have essentially 100 percent green energy production and the price is cheap enough that it. It's it's sort of equivalent to giving it away. And so there's no cost, there's no cause for conservation, right? We have I mean, we have fairly in Quebec, which is where I am right now. We have fairly well insulated houses because it gets very cold, very, very, very cold. But the you know, we all have electric heating, baseboard heating, which is absolutely ridiculous. You know, like and there's no it's not really set up for, you know, for any kind of efficiency other than the fact that, you know, the the windows are generally speaking, pretty good because you can't even with good heating inside a house, if it's too leaky, you're just too cold. You can't really overcome it with with electric heaters. But that's, you know, we just use and use and use, and nobody really cares. So there is an argument and I think it's I think it's always sort of a surprising one for if you do have green energy source that is functional and is reliable and is balanced in one way or another. If you're talking about the variable renewables with some other kind of green energy source, there's absolutely no reason to to do efficiency, right?

Speaker1: [01:03:22] Huh? Right? I mean, in the Icelanders case, I just want to say in small defense, I mean, that per capita figure is also because of the number of aluminum smelters that they built specifically. But that's that's part of the story, too, which is the kind of corporate greenwashing of heavy electricity used to. They located the smelters in Iceland so that they can

Speaker2: [01:03:42] Because of angry

Speaker1: [01:03:44] Power there in geothermal.

Speaker3: [01:03:45] So right. But then you ask, then you say the next question, of course, which is, you know, if you can smelt, if you can smell without fossil fuels, why not smelt?

Speaker2: [01:03:55] Yeah, right.

Speaker3: [01:03:56] Well, that's you know, that's that becomes a that becomes, I think, an interesting question for the future. The last thing that I think is worth saying on the Venn diagram of conservation is that and you maybe we're going to ask about this, but the the transition thus far is driven by profit. So and we've seen this story over and over again, which is like, we can deal with global warming by making a profit. You know, like we can find a way. And with the electricity transition we can talk about houses is a little package of of sort of different logics and qualities and capacities, but that still sort of preserves the kind of person who lives in that house. And the only way that we got universal electrification in the United States was because the government decided we should have it. And the only way they got universal electrification in Europe was because the government decided that it should be given that electricity needed to be made available to everyone, even people who couldn't pay for it, and even people where it was too expensive to run poles and wires out to their houses, out to their farms. Even for people who were too poor to actually pay a reasonable portion of their electric bill, it's all it's always provided as a and it's part of the national good. And it's

Speaker2: [01:05:08] Crazy. I know. And how will they do next?

Speaker3: [01:05:11] No one here, too. And the here too. And the the logic behind that, at least in the U.S., is that electricity is part of equal opportunity. So the big question for me is and thinking about conservation is who will be asked to conserve and how will that arm be twisted? And it seems like kind of like creepy, suspicious to say it that way. But as soon as you see this, you know, payments for lowering air conditioner usage in order to keep a grid from crashing in the summer. It's the prisons, right? It's the prisons that step up to that. It's the municipal high schools that step up to that. And we're like, we, you know, like we're happy to give you like we're happy to turn off our air conditioning in exchange for cash. Yeah. So it's when it becomes just about money, money for particular kinds of services. You see the poor in the U.S., at least as being the ones who are set up to suffer from that. And as you see a move away from the maintenance of a macro grid towards sort of what we say is downstream from the substation, so towards a highly maintained, very active distribution grid, you see poor people who are not homeowners or who are not living in houses, which have in some way been integrated into that system, being the ones who rely on the least stable system. And that isn't something that we want for America, and that is going to be something that is is it's going to have to be a policy case because you can't I don't think you can do it with philanthropy and I don't think you can do it with private business

Speaker1: [01:06:42] Here, here. I mean, so well, put Gretchen and I would happily keep talking to you about this book for some more hours and and we hopefully will continue that conversation offline. But in wrapping up here, because you've been so generous with your time. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're working on now?

Speaker3: [01:07:00] Yeah, actually, I have to go teach pretty soon. So I, well, I would happily talk forever about this stuff. But there would be people, sad people in a room. The so the thing I'm doing next and we'll see where it goes. It's really just that. It's it's sort of it's sort of baby steps beginning is to. Ask people as I go around the country, if you know, talking to people for various reasons. If they can do the things that they do without fossil fuels and the drive behind this really is this feeling that I have now with the shift away from the internal combustion engine. You know, in France, it will be illegal, what, 30, 2035 in England, 2040? Maybe those are reversed. I never remember China talking about it. California is now talking about it, and they're

Speaker1: [01:07:47] All hovering between like twenty thirty twenty thirty five right now.

Speaker3: [01:07:49] Most likely. Exactly. And with California, then go thirteen other states in the District of Columbia. So this seems to me to be the sort of the first moment of of where we can truly say that decarbonization is what is happening as opposed to just like a transition in the energy system. Right? And if we think about it that way, we can see that the electric grid is actually two decades into this process. It's sort of far and away the furthest along. And it's just as you were talking about Germany, like we've seen, we've seen stumbles many of them along the way, even though it's still sort of moving apace. We see the hardship of that transition. So I kind of want to sort of say, OK, I looked at the grid. I've seen how that's working. Let's look at all these other industries and see what they can and cannot do or what they think they can and cannot do, or what the what's standing in their way from decarbonising, you know, their livelihood. And again, this sort of comes again to to what Simone was saying before, which is do we need to think about a world which is exactly like the world we have now, but without fossil fuels? Or do we need to think about a world in which certain things can't be done? And I I feel like that's an open question. And in some ways, that's what I'm that's what I'm interested in now. Like Can are there? Can the bar pilots cross the Columbia River bar without using fossil fuels? Like, can you have an engine that's battery powered that's strong enough that you can submerge in saltwater and it's still going to work right?

Speaker1: [01:09:19] You know what? I'm sorry to break. I just saw the prototype. The Santa Antonia river boats are going to be electric from now on because I was just at a firm yesterday here in Houston that's designing them. So again, I don't think, no, it's not saltwater true. But I mean, this idea that we're going to have electric powered river barges, it's a thing it's happening.

Speaker3: [01:09:38] So there you go. There you go. So it's all happening. So I'm, you know, I'm interested in the I'm interested in lithium mining. Can we in mined lithium without fossil fuels? You know, I don't know how is that going to work? So that's what that's where I'm at, and I really I really want to focus on because this will probably also be a book for sort of the general public. I really want to focus on not the gloom and doom story, but kind of what are the things that are beloved to us about the world we live in? And can we continue to sort of make and do those things without fossil fuels? And what are the sticking points if the answer is no to that? So that's where it's going.

Speaker1: [01:10:16] It's amazing.

Speaker2: [01:10:16] Yeah, it's a great, great project, but we're going to look forward to seeing that unfold and flower

Speaker3: [01:10:21] In ten years. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Like the slowest rider in the world, everybody's like, Wow, that book that's, you know, like also I'm like, Uh-Huh. Yeah, well, I started it in 2007.

Speaker2: [01:10:34] I was realizing today, books are sort of like children. They're just they're not as loud and they don't have diapers, but God, they take a lot of effort and investment. Where's the diapers at the end notes or something?

Speaker3: [01:10:49] It's just the when they all when they fall to pieces on the floor. Oh God, yes, OK. I guess that you might say,

Speaker2: [01:10:57] Well, we'll try and keep it together until then. But Gretchen, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us, and hopefully you have some voice left for your class. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:11:07] We're reading learning to die in the Anthropocene today.

Speaker1: [01:11:09] Oh, nice. Good friend of the pod Roy Scranton.

Speaker3: [01:11:12] Yeah, yes, exactly. Exactly. And and very depressing. Yes, even my levity is is having a having a struggle with it. Yeah.

Speaker2: [01:11:23] Well, have them listen to the Roy Scranton pod that we did right after a

Speaker1: [01:11:27] Couple episodes ago. He actually he takes a turn. He takes a turn towards the positive.

Speaker2: [01:11:32] Yeah, I think it does. Yeah.

Speaker3: [01:11:34] Well, I will assign it. Cool.