Asher Miller  
I'm Asher Miller.Rob Dietz  
I'm Rob Dietz.Jason Bradford  
And I'm Jason Bradford. Welcome to Crazy Town where the endangered desert tortoises can't find a damn sunny spot with 9 million solar panels shading out their habitat.Asher Miller  
In today's episode, we're exploring the Harry Potteresque dream at the heart of the Green New Deal. Solar panels and other modern energy technologies can be really useful, but the belief that we can technologize our way to bigger and better society powered by clean energy is tragically flawed. Come along with us as we dig into the up and down story of Ivanpah, and as we explore how to make real progress on energy and sustainability.Rob Dietz  
Hey, Jason, hey Asher, good to see you. I would really like to reduce your anxiety today. That's my goal to label with this episode.Jason Bradford  
Got pills? Rob Dietz  
Yeah, okay, I will not drug you, but I'm gonna take you back in time to the year 2018.Asher Miller  
Oh, you're right. I was so less anxious.Rob Dietz  
It was, it was pre pandemic. Yeah, Donald Trump was making some messes in America, but nothing like what's happening today, right?Jason Bradford  
It's true. There's been an exponential function that's occurred since 2018.Rob Dietz  
In 2018 I'm flying through the air on an airplane.Asher Miller  
So you're God?Rob Dietz  
Well, yeah, as a god, sure. The reason was my, at the time, future wife was living in Arizona, and I was living right here in Corvallis with you two clowns, recording this very podcast, and whatever the hell else we do at Post Carbon InstituteAsher Miller  
This episode? I don't recall this. We recorded this very episode?Jason Bradford  
We started our podcast back then. Me too.Rob Dietz  
Yeah, it was right around the start of our podcast. So I'm flying to see her, and the flight is from Eugene, Oregon to Mesa, Arizona. So you got to kind of get out of our little green world and fly across the desert. And I always get a window seat.Asher Miller  
Not me, aisle, baby.Rob Dietz  
I love looking out there.Asher Miller
I always get a middle seat. I prefer the middle seat. I want to be in the middle seat in the row next to the toilets, where you can't lean your seat back.Rob Dietz
Yeah, you're pretty much a psychopath if you request the middle seat.Jason Bradford
I think that seats always available to you. I think it's a masochist. Is what you are, not a psychopath. Rob Dietz
Well, rather than spacing out to a podcast like this, or whatever, I like to look out the window and check out the landscape. And so I'm flying there, and at one point, over the beige, dusty, sandy desert landscape, something just blew my mind. It was this massive bright light, like,  What the hell is that? Asher Miller
UFO?Rob Dietz
Seriously I was like a moth to the flame. I'm staring at this, like, is this going to damage my eyes? What is that? And on the ground around it was this geometric pattern. I was really kind of mystified. Well, I kind of thought, I think that has something to do with solar, but I really don't know. So when I hit the ground, I decided not to visit my wife. I just went, I went to the Google Earth instead.Asher Miller
Yeah, you got it? Got in a rental car.Rob Dietz
I drove all the way back, back. Yeah as you know, I'm a map guy. I love Google Earth. I love looking at things and so I found what it was. And it's a place called the Ivanpah solar generating facility, and it's a concentrated solar panel facility. I m not actually saying that right. It's not a solar panel facility. It's a solar mirror facility. Jason Bradford
Yes, big mirrors.Rob Dietz
So you have this tower, and that's what I was seeing, this gleaming light at the top of the tower, and you have just hundreds of thousands of mirrors.Asher Miller
This was the Eye of Sauron that you were seeing, actually. Jason Bradford
I've seen it. It's spectacular. I had the same experience you had, Rob Dietz
For the listeners, you've got hundreds of thousands of mirrors on these heliostats.Asher Miller
So let's stop for one second. Hundreds of thousands! Not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands.Rob Dietz
Yeah, lots, okay, lots and lots. And, you know, they turn to make the mirror reflect the sun. Straight at this tower. There's a generator up there. You got water in it. You turn it to steam, because it's concentrated heat. Now there's other kinds of solar power plants out there too. You can see photovoltaic cells, like the types we'd have on our roof. They're just sprawled out over the ground, acres and acres of them.Jason Bradford
Yeah, or hectares and hectares, if you're AustraliaRob Dietz
There's really millions of these panels, like 9 million panels. So I've since come back and explored this area on Google Earth. I think it's really interesting. I mean, they have this Ivanpah facility, this solar thermal generating plant. You got those other panels I talked about. But then you got this huge golf course right there.Asher Miller  
Everything you could possibly ask for the desert, a golf course in the desert, yeah,Rob Dietz 
This is the Primm Valley in the Mojave Desert. You also have outlet shopping. You got two high-rise casinos on either side of the highway.Asher Miller  
Wait, so this must be a road that goes to Las Vegas, so we're in Nevada.Rob Dietz  
Well, yeah, it's Nevada, right at the California borderline.Asher Miller  
So this is the road between Los Angeles and Vegas.Rob Dietz  
Yeah, this is interstate 15. Okay, so big, big highway. The best part is the two casinos are on either side of the highway, and a monorail connects them. It's like one of the most Crazy Town places out there.Jason Bradford  
We should go. I wish we had money for road trips. Excuse me, fans of Crazy Town, if you want to sponsor a road trip for the crazy townies, please write a check to Asher.Asher Miller  
We should do a caravan.Rob Dietz  
Think about it. Instead of me just rooting around on Google Earth, we could be on the ground in these places.Jason Bradford  
We could be climbing the tower.Rob Dietz 
We don't even need to ask listeners for funding. We could just go to the casinos. We'll take the monorail.Asher Miller  
Good idea. Well, send us like enough to start, like so we can ante some bucks.Rob Dietz
So I'm gonna take you guys a little farther back in time, okay, even more hopeful era, okay. This is an era of wonder and eco modernist dreams. The date is October 27, 2010. The setting is the same Primm Valley, the vast and hot Mojave Desert of interior Southern California, very close to the Nevada border. A big bunch of people met here, these mucky muck big men, meeting up. You had President Obama's Secretary of the Interior, a guy named Ken Salazar. He had his big white cowboy hat on. You had the vice president of Bright Source Energy. What a great name. Very, very optimistic. Yep, that VP, he unveiled a commemorative plaque to mark the occasion. And then you had the biggest of the big men. You had the California governor and former Hollywood A-lister, Arnold Schwarzenegger.Jason Bradford  
He was the governor for a long time. Interesting.Rob Dietz 
Okay, well, so you had these guys in the desert. You also had a lot of money in the desert. So NRG. Energy, it's the letter N, the letter R, the letter G. Asher Miller  
That's a great name. Wait, that's redundant.Rob Dietz 
It is a little redundant. N-R-G, yes NRG Energy, they were set to invest $300 million. The US Department of Energy supplied a loan guarantee for $1.6 billion so you had all these men and money in the desert to do the groundbreaking on Ivanpah.Jason Bradford  
That sounds like a lot of money, a lot of responsible people, all for a good cause. What could go wrong?Asher Miller  
So wait a second, so there was a golf course there at the time. You think they just came over from the golf course. They just picked a spot in the desert,Rob Dietz 
I m pretty sure the golf course was always there. That's just natural habitat, right?Jason Bradford  
Of course, it's an oasis we just golf on, right?Asher Miller  
Just naturally for springs bubbling up with holes perfectly placed.Rob Dietz 
Now you guys know me. I couldn't not do an Arnold speech here.Asher Miller  
You re only usually sharing this story to do an Arnold impression, so lay it on.Rob Dietz 
He said,  Solar plants like this are making our goals become a reality by 2020. Some people look at the desert and see miles and miles of emptiness. I look at it and see miles and miles of a gold mine. Get to the chopper!  So at the time, Ivanpah was the most ambitious, the highest profile solar project in the entire world. So a little bit about it. It was supposed to power, produce enough electricity to power about 100,000 homes. It was supposed to reduce carbon emissions, and it was really launched with fanfare, celebrated in the media and policy circles to be this like kind of beacon of tech.Asher Miller  
A literal beacon, beacon of light. Jason Bradford  
Yeah, this is what gets me - is this juxtaposition of this supposedly green stuff with obviously an absurd golf course, outlet malls, and casinos, with a freeway running by it, right?Rob Dietz 
The idea, though, was that a California electricity utility was supposed to buy power from Ivanpah through the year 2039, and here's why we're kind of talking about this. It was announced earlier this year that electricity purchases from two of three units at Ivanpah are being terminated. Terminated - get it. You got the whole Terminator. And that means the plant is going to start shutting down next year, which is obviously way ahead of its 2039 due date.Asher Miller  
Sadness, well, can we talk about what went wrong? I mean, Arnold drove all the way out there. Dude's probably pissed, right? He wasted a day doing this or whatever. So 15 years, right? You guys could put in 15 years. So let's talk about what were some of the reasons why this didn't actually pan out, right? There's some environmental issues, obviously. And then there's the economics. So can you guess which one was really the issue?Rob Dietz  
It could have had something to do with money, but we'll get to that.Asher Miller  
Let's talk about some of the environmental stuff, right? So one of the things that is ironic, I guess you could say about Ivanpah: New generations of these concentrated solar power systems, they use other forms of energy storage, right? So one of the appeals of this kind of technology was that you could store this energy over time, when the sun's not shining. This is a major issue with renewable energies. You have to be able to store energy for when demand is not there or the sun's not shining, wind's not blowing, whatever, right? But they decided they were going to use water. But water, we've talked about this. We talked about inertia and entropy and, you know, so there's a lot of loss of heat. And water and temperatures were cool in the desert, cool at night. The water would cool. So in the mornings, they would have to power up the turbines with natural gas to get things going, right? So it's just maybe you could call it an analog, in some ways, for a lot of the renewable energy reality we have right now, which is how much it's still dependent upon fossil fuels.Jason Bradford  
And I think they use molten salt now, is what they use. And I think even these like they need to have a certain temperature. The molten salt needs to be a certain temperature to flow correctly, etc, etc. And they often, even in the molten salt ones, I believe, still have to preheat the salt often, to keep it running at night. So none of these are actually truly off of fossil fuels.Rob Dietz 
It's good when your renewable solar power requires natural gas.Jason Bradford  
And then you're still running a turbine, like, you know, a traditional turbine, which, again, itself requires a whole lot of moving parts and monitoring and connecting to the grid. They make sure it's synchronized with the AC. Like none of this is easy to do.Rob Dietz 
Well, your point, Asher about how we're creating CO2 emissions off a power plant that's supposed to do away with CO2 emissions. That's great. I want to hit another environmental piece, which is the concept that the desert is not a wasteland. It's not emptiness, as Arnold's talking about. It's not miles and miles of a gold mine. We have trouble living in the desert. You know, it's hot, it's dry and not a lot of water. But there are other life forms that are quite well adapted. One of them is the desert tortoise, as an example, does quite well in that habitat. But of course, now it's endangered because of all the habitat degradation that people have caused over the years. And when Ivanpah was getting built, construction on unit two and unit three had to be halted because more tortoises were being killed than was legally allowed. Asher Miller  
And of course, you said to slow down so that they could keep the killing within a certain quota. Rob Dietz 
Yeah, that's it. I mean, despite all the protests from your silly little conservation groups that care about silly little tortoises, the Department of the Interior, which should be the one  the Fish and Wildlife Service is the one that should be working to protect tortoises, and the whole department fast tracked the building of Ivanpah, you know, keep those bulldozers rolling.Jason Bradford  
Well, because it's progress, you know. And these people are building this are pro-environment. Obviously, they've got the golf course, they got the mall, they got the casino, and they've got this plant coming in to run it all and to save human civilization.Rob Dietz 
The top of the tower does not generate anywhere near as much steam as is blowing off of your head right now, every time you mention golf course and outlets.Asher Miller  
Can I be serious for a second? You get the instinct, right? The instinct here is, we're going to approve because the promise here is that they're gonna help reduce carbon emissions.Jason Bradford  
You're gonna break a few eggshells to make your omelet.Asher Miller
Tortoise shells!Jason Bradford
This habitat is really interesting. In fact, I've been to the Mojave Desert a number of times. Mojave Desert also sits kind of at the edge of the Great Basin, which is an incredibly important place for bird migration. And a lot of creatures migrate through the Great Basin. These birds, require these salt lakes. The salt lakes have these shrimp, and they fatten up and they can then move between the subtropics and the temperate zone. So tons of wildlife absolutely rely on this.Asher Miller  
Bird life that's going away, like the Great Salt Lake.Jason Bradford  
You know, the Great Salt Lake is so important, it's just tragic. It's like half the birds that move around in the Great Basin, or something like, rely on the Great Salt Lake. It's such a big lake compared to the others. So there's incredible flight zones through here. And the problem is, you're a bird, and you're looking, you're flying high, and you see this, like, oh, reflective surface looks like a lake, right? But it's not. It's these mirrors. And you swoop down to investigate. And birds would usually, was not uncommon for them to just combust as they fly through the concentrated solar zone. It's crazy. I mean, I was a kid, remember? Yeah, did you ever play with like?Asher Miller  
Are you talking about burning ants? You're going to share stories with us to prove that you're a psychopath because you're burning ants.Jason Bradford  
Yeah, it's a kid with a magnifying glass. Yeah, I did. I did. I mostly did wood and leaves, but you hit an ant once in a while.Rob Dietz 
To tell you how stupid I am, I tried it on my leg. Set my jeans on fire!Jason Bradford  
At least you had jeans. I had imagined bare skin, but yeah, you could burn a hole in your jeans.Rob Dietz 
And so it lit - a white a white hot flame burst off my so that's what's happening to these birds. They're like the white hot flame, smoldering to the ground.Jason Bradford  
They do. They're called streakers. And about six is it? Streakers? Streamers. Streak is what you did in college. And there was about, apparently, around 6000 birds a year die because of this.Asher Miller  
Yeah. Anyway, one thing I will give Donald Trump credit for is he's very concerned about the birds with renewable energy. So constantly talking about the birds dying.Jason Bradford  
Yes the wind turbines and all that.Rob Dietz 
Well, maybe we can get in the cabinet now. Jason can be his head of the department of streaming, right?Asher Miller  
Well, let's get to the real reason why Ivanpah didn't work, right? The economic problem. Yeah, money, yeah. It always comes down to money. And the big driver of this, honestly, was the fact that solar, or photovoltaics, you know, the solar panels that we know and love, the cost of them has come down so precipitously. By 2020 they were delivering electricity at roughly 1/3 the cost per megawatt hour compared to these concentrated solar power facilities. That's incredible, way cheaper, right? And, and you were talking, Rob, about that area, you know, you go on Google Earth, and you look at Ivanpah, and then you zoom out, and you quickly see these enormous fields of these solar panels, you know, like, I think one of them you mentioned was, like 9 million solar panels all put together -- 9 million. So that, I think, really is what did Ivanpah in, was actually not being able to compete with other forms of renewable energy production.Rob Dietz 
Yeah, well, and to get at the expense side of things too: remember when politicians talk about the Green New Deal, they want to talk about the renewable energy, but also the jobs. Yeah, you know all these great jobs that are going to be created, and that didn't really pan out for Ivanpah either. There were about 1,000 temporary construction jobs, like all that technical wizardry you were talking about, Jason. They had to make that. They had to put it all together. So, you know, you had 1,000 people employed for a time, but then after that, there were about 60 people full time that were at the power plant. And remember, we said the total federal loan guarantee for that project was $1.6 billion, so if you do a little simple division, the cost for a permanent job works out to more than $26 million per job, per job! Like, I want that job! Yeah, you pay me $26 million to adjust some heliostats! I mean, how many teachers could you hire?Jason Bradford  
Or podcasters? Yeah, for $26 million! Here's what always gets me: obviously now you have what's called a stranded asset 15 years later, and it's hundreds of thousands of giant mirrors with heliostats and all the copper wires. And these giant towers with these huge turbines. There's concrete, steel. The towers are 400 feet tall, lots of steel, 7,500 tons of steel, 1,200 miles of cabling, 36,000 cubic yards of concrete, wow. What's gonna happen to this? Where's it gonna go? Right?Asher Miller  
Okay, I got two solutions for you. Okay. One is, think about all the jobs that will be created, sending people to go there, unscrewing everything. I mean, this is the vision, I think, of the Trump administration, bringing jobs back to America, right? Just going and unscrewing things, it's taking things apart. And, I mean, the other thing is, when Mad Max happens, all this stuff will be repurposed, you know, for whatever.Jason Bradford  
We Romanian people have had our fair share of crazy autocratic leaders, from Vlad the Impaler to Nikolai Ceausescu. So we see America and think, Oh, God, leaders want many babies and make economy go crash same time. This very bad.Rob Dietz  
I don't think we can do this. Asher Miller  
Keep going. Keep going Asher Miller
Okay, that was a great story, Rob. I love laughing about the absurdity of golf courses in the desert and all that stuff. But why are we even talking about this Ivanpah place? I mean, sure that project sucked donkey balls, but they just bet on...Rob Dietz
It's burro. Burros are what inhabit the Mojave, not donkeys.Asher Miller  
Sorry. But look, they just bet on the wrong technology. I mean, we're saying they got their asses kicked by solar PV. It's growing like mad. Let me be an optimist for a change.Jason Bradford  
Okay,make a few mistakes along the way, but overall, things progress, right? Asher Miller  
It was all part of learning as we go trial and error, as we as we make this energy transition. So I'm going to be an optimist. All right, let me talk about all the positive things are happening with this energy transition. So according to Ember, which is an energy think tank, last year, the world hit a milestone. 40% of global electricity generation came from quote/unquote, clean energy sources. Okay, so that includes hydro, nuclear energy, but there was a 29% increase in solar power production in one year. So solar generation, it's doubled over the last three years, and it's now the largest source of new electricity generation for the third year in a row, okay? And it's expected that this year, probably renewables will surpass coal as the largest source of electricity generation.Jason Bradford  
Well, that was so that was inspirational Asher, and your optimism is going to last about a minute, right? That was your minute, and now I'm going to mess with your brain and destroy the optimism. Because even as this electricity production, like you're saying, is great, renewables, blah, blah, blah, but fossil fuel use, even for electricity production, is also growing. And so forget about this record rise in solar PV that Ember points out. Total electricity demand is also growing at like 4% a year in 2024, and that led to fossil fuel use increasing for electricity production by 1.4%, and global power sector emissions are rising. They rose by 1.6% to set an all-time new high for CO2 emissions from the power sector. And a lot of this, of course, is driven by an increase in air conditioning demand thanks to record-setting temperatures. So fuck your optimism.Asher Miller  
Thanks, man. I appreciate that.Rob Dietz 
That's great. I want to note with your air conditioning that's causing an increase in electricity demand, it reminds me of our old episode number 45 on positive feedback loops.Asher Miller  
We talked about air conditioning, then, because of that feedback loop of higher temperatures leading to more demand in air conditioning, leading to more demand in energy consumption, leading to more use of fossil fuels in this case.Rob Dietz 
Yeah, so check out that episode. That's episode 45. We also did episode 60 on air conditioning itself. Jason Bradford  
Well, I'm gonna throw some even more cold water on your overheating solar panels this year. It's important to keep in mind that electricity production actually only represents 21% of final energy consumption, and this is what drives me crazy. Drives me crazy about the ecomodernism stuff. And so even if all electricity came from renewable sources, that 21% is half of the share of final energy consumption that came from oil products. So we have over 80% of our primary energy consumption in the world still coming from fossil fuels. And even though the percentage might be going down, the total amount is growing, as we talked about, right? And so I'm sorry to beat up on you, but you were representing this way of thinking that drives me bonkers. And so I don't want you to take it personally.Asher Miller  
It's too late, but it's true. I think that's something that few people understand: the electricity part of the energy puzzle just is really the easiest part to solve. And I think that's part of why it gets the most attention, right? Low hanging fruit. It's getting a lot of investment in it, a lot of technological focus in terms of improvement. It's something that people can engage in, that and electric vehicles. I mean, you could see why those get a lot of the attention for people. But as you said, a lot of our energy consumption comes in forms that's a lot more challenging to transition or just substitute, right? I mean, if you think about flying a jumbo jet, 747, across the ocean, right? Trying to do that with Rob Dietz 
it requires one PV panel on the top of the plane, right?Asher Miller  
No, no, it's the wings. They just put them on the wings. Wings made of solar panels. Jason Bradford  
And the problem is that the plane has to keep turning a little bit toward the sun. Yeah, you're flying like, sideways sometimes.Rob Dietz 
yeah, you just add heliostats on top of the plane.Asher Miller  
Our road travel is a little tough. Our roads are made from bitumen. Yeah, the bottom of the barrel, literally. I mean, it's, it's tough. You know, it's a big issue.Jason Bradford  
The steel that goes into almost everything uses high heat components. You know, they use natural gas to keep things going, 24/7, because they don't want the kilns to get cold. I mean, we can go on and on about this, and I'm sure Post Carbon Institute has.Asher Miller  
Yeah, well, we wrote a book about those challenges. God, it's been a while, but it's called  Our Renewable Future.  In that, the assignment that we had  the authors of it are Richard Heinberg, who's our colleague at PCI, and one of our advisors, David Fridley, who works at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. And, you know, they really looked at the energy transition question. They said,  Okay, if our goal is 100% renewable energy, which it should be our goal -- fossil fuels are not only ruinous for climate and have other environmental impacts and health impacts on people, they're finite, and they're depleting, right? So we, at some point, we're gonna have to transition away from them.  So if that's our goal, in that book project, we looked at the demand side of the equation. How are we using energy, and do we need to change how we use energy? Do we need to change how we grow food and those kinds of things?Jason Bradford  
Do we need a more efficient casino lever for the slot machine?Asher Miller  
Exactly, right? Well, AI will do it -- you don't need a lever anymore.Rob Dietz 
Nobody has pulled a lever for a slot machine forever. It's all push button, and pretty soon it's going to be a neuralink.Jason Bradford  
That s the fun part, the only form of exercise a lot of people get. You do curls with your left hand for the gin and tonic, and then your right hand is a pull down. You get your exercise.Rob Dietz 
This is incredibly maddening, right? I mean, you guys are sitting here talking about how hard it's going to be to substitute our current level of consumption of fossil fuels, but we're still growing demand. There literally is no energy transition happening right now. You got all of these fossil fuels, oil, coal and gas. They all grew in 2024. The only time they didn't grow recently was the downturn from the pandemic.Jason Bradford
I know I got excited for a while.Rob Dietz
There's a historian named Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, who he's got a recent book called  More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy.  So aptly titled,  More and More and More.  He talks about how we're not doing the job when it comes to making an actual transition. And to give probably the craziest example, let's talk about wood. Okay, yeah, using wood for energy.Jason Bradford
No one does that anymore.Rob Dietz
Well, so that's the conventional wisdom, right? Is that the Industrial Revolution happened. Coal comes along. We don't need to burn wood and furnaces anymore, of course, not to run anything. But that is not the case at all. Wood still accounts for about 7% of total energy use in the world. Recently, Fressoz was on our buddy Rachel Donald's podcast, Planet: Critical, and they brought up this amazing story about the Drax power station. That's an ominous name, and it probably should be an ominous name. This power station sits in the farmland to the east of Leeds in England, the UK. And it was originally constructed as a coal fired power plant, but they wanted to green it up. So this is the UK's largest power station, provides 5% of the electricity to the UK. And in the year 2000 it was converted to biomass. You guys know what biomass is?Jason Bradford
Wood?Rob Dietz
Yeah, wood. It's wood chips, mostly imported from the US and Canada.Asher Miller  
Were they burning the wood chips in the ships as they're transporting the wood?Rob Dietz 
They burn them to get it started. It's sort of like doing natural gas at Ivanpah. You start burning the chips ahead of time. So, I mean, this power plant is touted as, quote, providing the most renewable power of any single location in the UK, right? And it's also, of course, the single biggest emitter of CO2 in the UK, but they don't count it on the nation's carbon budget, because it's renewable. So, you know, don't worry about that.Jason Bradford  
Got it. Well, okay, now here's also what's been getting to me lately. A lot of things happen, but I've been really reading up on the forecast for AI growth, and it's eye-watering. It's staggering how much electricity is expected. In fact, projected demanded planned for right now, the electricity needed to run advanced, larger energy-hogging data centers. We're talking public plus private investments on the order of the low trillions of dollars are desired. Project out the next three or four years -- I don't even know if this is possible, but they don't seem to care what form it takes, right? It's like, how fast? Because we're in this arms race with AI, apparently, with China, et cetera.Asher Miller  
The other thing I would say about this, I guess: I just want to reiterate this point that you're making Rob, which I think is not well understood, and certainly not part of the discussion within the circles that we inhabit very much, and that is seeing positive signs, for example, with solar PVs, right? We're seeing exponential growth in that, which I would say is, in general terms, a good thing. We are not having a conversation about the fact that demand overall is continuing to grow. So you said there isn't an energy substitution, there is no energy transition happening, right? And I think a lot of people would bristle at that, because they're hearing stories like what I shared, this exponential growth, and solar prices have come way down. You know, we're seeing more EVs on the roads or whatever. People are seeing these as positive signs, and they obviously want hope, you know, for us to be addressing the climate crisis, and for this energy transition to happen, but it's done in this context where we're not looking at the overall system.Jason Bradford  
People don't know the scale. They don't understand it.Rob Dietz 
I think that's a perfect lead-in to some takeaways on the closure of Ivanpah. And what does it mean? What does it portend? And one of them is right in line with what you're saying, Asher, is that there's nuance when it comes to renewable energy. You know, the three of us are not like deniers. You know, we're not sitting here saying,  Don't do any solar projects,  but we're also not putting our hands over our eyes and ears and saying we're boosters either, you know? You have to look at the build-out of a solar power plant in the context of the entire energy picture. And again, what you're saying: what is it used for? Is it used for another AI data center, so that anybody around can ask it to draw whatever stupid picture they want it to draw?Jason Bradford  
Make a better cat video, right?Asher Miller  
Yeah. You know, I find myself, and I think PCI finds itself sometimes (and I'd be curious about our listeners -- where they fall in this). Sometimes people fall into these camps. And I'm not talking about the camp that are deniers, you know, of climate change as an issue, and I'm not talking about the camp of people who are just basically anti-renewables. I mean, we're seeing our US federal government now basically going after every investment in alternative sources of energy. I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about the people who see that there is a problem here with energy picture, and it feels like there's within that group of people, there's a group that is caught up in this idea that this transition is happening. Prices are coming down. This is accelerating. We need to basically support this transition to happen. We can have this sort of bright green future where we're all driving electric cars, and we've got solar panels everywhere, blah, blah, blah. We talked a little bit about this when we were talking about Ezra Klein and the abundance agenda. And then we know, we happen to know people, I think it's a much smaller population of people, but people who are not climate deniers, but they're more, I would say, energy-literate, or energy-aware. And because they see these limitations, they understand the scale of the problem, and that we're just adding renewable energy onto fossil fuels. Or they recognize how many inputs. This is something we haven't really talked very much about. Yeah, you know, it's like all of these things. You're talking about data centers. We could talk about electric vehicles. We could even just talk about what goes into the construction of solar PV panels. There are non-renewable resources that go into these things, and that are being harvested right now through the use of non-renewable energy.Jason Bradford
And they're not built really to last for decades and decades. They're not easy to repair. They're not easy to recycle. It's all Ivanpah-ish to me. At some level it's not, it's set up to be a stranded asset.Asher Miller  
I want to get to that in a second, but I feel like there are those people that because they see what feels to them as energy blindness coming from the pro-renewable space. They sometimes sort of dismiss it out of hand. You know, they become almost anti-renewable,Rob Dietz 
Like we've sat here and said Ivanpah was a disaster. And you can find sort of lefty, greeny types who would then take that and say,  Yeah, never build out something like that. Don't, don't have these solar facilities.  And I think you're saying that's not necessarily the case either.Asher Miller  
There is nuance in this, which is that the future is going to be renewable. The question is, what do we use it for, and how is it done? And that's, that's another piece of Ivanpah that I want to talk about, which is things like that, even if it's improved technology. When we're doing things at these enormous scales, you know, we're locking ourselves into a lot of the mindset and the approach from the current system, or the current way we do modernity that I think, is really unsustainable, right? We're talking about efficiency, right? It's much more efficient of these big plants, but there's so much complexity to these systems and all the specialization that goes into it. And then, of course, there's the profit seeking, right? So it's like miles and miles of gold mines, right? People who are investing in this are looking for return on investment, you know, like lots of capital flowing into this stuff. And what it does is reinforce this idea that we have to do everything at super large scale, right? We've got to use the market, the free market, to incentivize these kinds of investments. It's more efficient. There has to be a profit motive in it. And there's also the psychology thing, which is that we're going to trust other people to solve this problem? And I think that that's a huge part of the challenge here, when we rely on whether it's something like this, or it's another large wind farm out in the Dakotas or in Texas, or these huge solar farms in the desert of Nevada.Jason Bradford  
I think that, unless we downscale our demand by at least an order of magnitude, then none of this is going to make any difference. And as soon as we did that, and we got into more of small, distributed, more simple, repairable, less complex systems, then maybe we're talking. And what bums me out, is that there's all these brilliant minds. I'm sure the people that helped to build and design Ivanha were super geniuses, and they were incredible engineers.Rob Dietz 
I like how you guys can't remember the name of this plant. You call it Ivanhoe. You call it Ivanha. It's Ivanpah.Jason Bradford  
I said Ivanpah, but you didn't understand me because you weren't listening carefully.Asher Miller  
It only lasted 15 years. So why do I have to remember?Rob Dietz 
This guy, Ivan, that we used to know in the desert. He's no longer there.Jason Bradford  
It's another ghost town. Okay, so Ivan the terrible -- that is a great example of a classic failure. But anyway, I think we're going to be constrained by the laws of physics in a lot of these situations, and we have beautiful, wonderful minds out there that are running up against this, like cellulosic ethanol or the hydrogen stuff that I could tell was a boondoggle. And people are getting their PhDs and getting hired by billion dollar engineering firms, and it's a waste of talent. And instead, if we were to say, how do we downscale everything and make it repairable and lasting and live good lives without needing all this stuff.Asher Miller  
If you pose to all of us the question of, we have these limits, we have these realities, these constraints on us, or these certain values that we want to apply. And you put that problem to people, and you say, what role can technology play, or what is the best form of technology that we can apply? How creative can we get? How skilled can we be in problem solving in that context? Right? The problem is, as you were just saying, the incentives are not for that. The incentives of who's hiring people to do this work, who's paying them, who's investing in this stuff? It's people that want the current system to continue.Jason Bradford  
There's no profit in it. It is not profitable to survive, but we should think about survival. Yeah, that's what I think we.Rob Dietz 
If we're talking about continuing to run the current system as is, we've got a serious problem, right, even if you could magically pull off this energy transition. Let's say we went all solar and wind, got rid of all the coal and oil, I guess, except for the little bit that we needed to fire up our solar power plant, or whatever.Jason Bradford  
You're trying to put me in, like, fairy land, Miracle land.Rob Dietz 
Exactly. Okay, even if we did that, we don't solve humanity's overshoot crisis. Yeah, the biodiversity crisis, for example: that's linked to habitat fragmentation and loss. That's about ag expansion. That's about over-hunting, pollution, industrial development.Jason Bradford
Yeah, novel entities in the environment.Rob Dietz
Yeah, you're not solving any of that, not to mention the footprints of these renewable energy systems. I mean, the Brookings Institute did this study, and they reported that solar and wind generation requires 10 times more land per unit of electricity generated than coal or natural gas power plants. 10 times! Yeah, so you know, how are we supposed to be sustainable if we're going to keep growing demand and keep growing these electricity generation facilities?Asher Miller  
I want to talk about something that we haven't talked about yet, but I think is really key in all of this. We mentioned briefly all the resources that have to go into these renewable energy systems or electric vehicles or whatever. That's part of this energy transition. But there's a human and environmental cost that comes from trying to source these, what are now called critical minerals, or transition minerals, right? And it's having a devastating effect. It's a continuation on some level, of this colonial mindset. You were joking about Schwarzenegger talking about a gold mine. You know, it's like this idea that we go off into these places to find these resources, now suddenly cobalt and deuterium or whatever, lithium.Jason Bradford  
Yeah, adamantium.Rob Dietz
Unobtainium.Asher Miller  
These resources, become hugely valuable, and there's a new gold rush looking for them. But it happens to be that a lot of that is on land that is being stewarded by Indigenous peoples in the Global South, and those communities are being devastated by companies seeking to mine all that stuff.Jason Bradford  
I mean, Butte, Montana, right? Yeah, we're making Butte, Montanas, all over the world right now, and that's just terrifying. I've been to places that we're Rob Dietz 
Sorry to all of our Butte listeners. We still really appreciate you listening.Jason Bradford  
Well, if people don't know, there's an incredible toxic legacy there of mine tailings and toxic water.Rob Dietz 
Huge pit that's as big as the entire city right on its border.Jason Bradford. That's from historic mining. But what we're projecting to do now is orders of magnitude more than we've done historically. And it may not be possible. If you listen to Simon Michaux, he says it's just not going to happen. It's obscene what we're thinking about doing.Rob Dietz 
The biggest takeaway for me of this entire story, sordid story of Ivanpah, is that all of these Green New Deal tech solutions -- they can only possibly work within a limits-to-growth framework. You cannot have a continuous build out of any kind of powering of society without recognizing their limits and operating that way.Asher Miller  
Yeah, and I think it's key to recognize that we are not saying no, like we shouldn't do solar and wind and renewable energy, let's do fossil fuels instead. We're not saying that. We're saying this has to be done at the appropriate scale.Rob Dietz 
What we're saying is,  Don't do either solar or fossil fuels. Do magic, fairy dust,  right?Jason Bradford
Great. I love that.Rob Dietz 
All right, let's talk for a bit about what we can do differently, maybe even what listeners can do in their lives to maybe not repeat the mistakes of an Ivanpah. One of the things that I want to discuss is home solar. Jason, we're at the farm in your beautiful farmhouse. We're just sitting under a roof that's just plastered over with solar panels. You got like a nine kilowatt system.Asher Miller  
Are these the Tesla shingles?Rob Dietz 
Elon Musk is actually sitting up there like Fiddler on the Roof right now, creating about nine kilowatts of solar panels. That's pretty big. I have a seven and a quarter kilowatt system at home, panel envy. Yeah, I've got 23 panels on my roof. Just so people know, that produces about eight and a half megawatt hours per year, which covers all the electricity that my family uses at our house. And it was pretty cheap in the end, or will be cheap with all the incentives and Green New Deal kind of stuff.Jason Bradford  
Oh, it's amazing. I mean, I get the cost of these things has plummeted. Obviously, amazing story. It's what everyone hangs their hat on, like we've solved it. We're gonna be okay, right? Okay, we've explained why. It's really not this answer. And also, here's what I want to add. I want to say about this. The way the solar panels are made is still very much rooted in this industrial world that is highly polluting and not really thinking about future. Conservation is still your best bet. I've just started air drying stuff again, because, you know, we're in, we're in the summer weather, the photovoltaic or the, what is it called? Is it the photovoltaic effect?Rob Dietz
Photoelectric effect.Jason Bradford  
Photoelectric effect. It's an amazing thing we've discovered, and it actually could be used, I think, even in a very downscaled way.Rob Dietz 
You're talking about the direct conversion of sunlight to flowing electricity.Jason Bradford  
Yeah, just photons being able to be converted to electricity, and sunlight being the best version we know of. So anyhow, there's an amazing guy, Kris De Decker (talk about a brilliant mind that is thinking about these things), right? He wrote an article reposted on Resilience.org called How to build a low tech solar panel,  and he described an alternative to the highly complex manufacturing we do of silicon-based PV, using something that was discovered in the early 20th century. This is old metallurgy technique using zinc and antimony, and these things could last many decades, and it's also easy to recycle, doesn't have the plastic laminates and all the stuff that makes the current PVs almost impossible to recycle. So that's what I'm thinking about. I could imagine a future downscale that still had some of the advantages we've gained. We could potentially have all of the knowledge, if we didn't waste it.Rob Dietz 
Again, like we said before, it's about conservation first, downscaling, and then power what's actually needed.Asher Miller  
Yes, that whole thing of those three Rs, remember that? That's kind of hokey: reduce, reuse, recycle. And that's not really happening very much with these solar systems. Don t forget: reduce, reuse, recycle.Rob Dietz 
The capitalist would say,  And don't forget, re shut the fuck up. Asher Miller  
So we're talking about home solar, PV. There are other things that you could do in your home, obviously. I mean, we're talking about conservation. We actually just had a home audit done at our house, trying to figure out where we're wasting energy the most. You know, what's the least efficient stuff we're doing? So that would almost be the first place to start, before you even got a solar PV system. Now, there are people who can't do that, right? They rent, they're not a situation to do it. Or they're like me. They live in trees. They can't, but there are other ways you can be engaged in things at the community scale. And one of the things I think that we're talking about, in contrast to Ivanpah or some of these other large renewable energy endeavors, is doing these things at a distributed level, at a smaller scale. And so there are lots of interesting examples of communities doing this. You know, local solar co-op utilities, for example, and there are many different ways that people are doing that. There's a group called Solar United Neighbors. It's a nonprofit org that's aimed at building an energy system with rooftop solar as the cornerstone. They have a program that brings people together into these co-ops. That's where there's, like, 30 to 100 neighbors. They get together, they use their combined buying power to set up a local solar utility. Now, sometimes this is challenging. This is the other thing that people have to grapple with, is that there are barriers to doing this legally. Sometimes, you know, there's, there are issues just in terms of dealing with, like state regulations, but it's a fight worth having. Rob Dietz 
You gotta talk to your neighbor too. Jeez.Asher Miller  
But you know, when you buy together in a collective, you know you're saving money, you get better deals.Rob Dietz
I'll talk to my neighbor if I save money.Asher Miller
There are other things that are happening on this on this level, like a group that we've known for a long time, Co-op Power New England. They actually train people in a lot of low-income communities to be the technicians and installers for systems. They have a co-op where they're not trying to get a bunch of profit coming out of this, but they all collectively benefit as investors in this thing. Here locally, there's an Oregon one where, because we couldn't get solar panels ourselves, my wife and I invested a little bit in a solar co-op that was doing this around the state of Oregon, and we got a very tiny return on investment. But it was something where, for us, the return was not just the money, right? It was about helping deploy some of this stuff.Rob Dietz 
And they find cool places to do it, like on the roofs of schools and churches.Asher Miller  
Right, exactly. And there's a group, Seeds for the Sol, which is local. And they've worked with Habitat for Humanity to try to get solar for lower income families. There's a group called the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. They have a community solar program. A lot of helpful resources on their website. So there's a lot that's actually happening in this space, I think, that people can get involved with, again, if it's done at an appropriate scale -- smaller, local, less complex.Jason Bradford  
Yeah, you know a lot. That's what happens if you're a head of an organization like PCI. So much stuff comes across that you look at and see all the good things going on.Asher Miller  
That's why I never respond to your emails.Jason Bradford  
I get it. 2000 Watt Society is another thing to look into. Helps reduce energy demand in an equitable way. Have sufficiency as their kind of push. The average amount of watts in the US per person is 12,000, and that's about power. That's how much power that you are using, exosomatically, outside of your body, through what our civilization is supplying you. How do we get that down to 2000 per person, eventually 500? That's what the 2000 watt society group is about. So looking at them would be interesting.Asher Miller  
Who's the guy you mentioned in the last podcast? You know, you talked about the solar farm thing?Rob Dietz
Living Energy Farm.Jason Bradford  
Yeah, Living Energy Farm. Those guys were down to 3% in terms of household electricity of the standard US household. And that guy explains the technology and how they go about redesigning things. So, pretty neat.Rob Dietz 
I think that that idea of a 2000 watt society, I mean, we don't operate that way at all. Everybody's operating based on money, right? Like, what can I afford? What can I spend? So if we could somehow get energy to be as important in decision making, that would be incredible. That would really calm things down. I think, on that front, in terms of calming things down and conserving and reducing in your own life, we like to plug our friend's work. The climate scientist Peter Kalmus has been on Crazy Town a few times, and he's got a guide for how to slim your footprint. It's in an award-winning book called  Being the Change: Live well and Spark a Climate Revolution.  And it's a cool book because it's not just a technical how-to; it's also a philosophical book about how do you change your mindset?Asher Miller  
Yeah, and I think the other way that folks can get involved, that I think is helpful, again, is if we're thinking about trying to address the climate crisis, it's not just about substituting where we get our energy or electricity from, but it's looking at other types of solutions or interventions. There's protecting land, biodiversity conservation, but conserving lands that help sequester carbon, for example. And a lot of that land is actually in the hands of Indigenous communities from around the world, something like 80%. Some of the groups that you can support are ones at the frontline, Indigenous communities that have long been doing this work of stewarding these lands. So there are groups like the SIRGE Coalition that's actually focusing on the renewable energy transition itself and how to ensure the rights of Indigenous communities in the push for these critical minerals. But there are other groups like Home Planet Fund that are working directly with Indigenous communities on climate solutions that are much more nature-centric and community-focused, practicing the values of sustainability that are really key.Jason Bradford  
God, I'm learning a lot from you.Asher Miller  
Maybe you'll listen to me for a change. Only time you listen to me is when we do this podcast.Jason Bradford
I think I will, actually.Rob Dietz 
I think that kind of giving is really important. But probably before you can get to any of this, the giving or changing stuff at your house or working in your community, you gotta probably work on yourself. I know for me, this has been a real struggle to actually face reality and understand that there's no magic, techno-solution that's just going to solve all of this overshoot predicament that we're in. So I think the idea is that we've got to figure out how to live as much as we can, the way that people evolved on this planet to live. And that means the energy comes from current solar flows from the sun, and that means, you know, where you can, use your body as the source of energy, and enjoy the ride. So, you know, as Arnold would say, normally, he'd say, like,  Get to the chopper!  But we're gonna change that. It's gonna be,  Get to the bicycle, get to the unicycle, get to the walking shoes! Jason Bradford  
Get to the roller blades!  Was that any good?Asher Miller  
That was pretty bad.Rob Dietz 
We love hearing from listeners who are doing good work out there in the world, and we hope that maybe you'll find some inspiration. In in examples like this one. So Dania Shahid is a bright young woman who got in touch with us here at the Post Carbon Institute and wanted to help, and she provided really high-quality research for this episode. And I've been amazed by talented folks like Dania who have helped us deliver the messages we're trying to get out there. Longtime listeners might also remember how we had research help from Elana Zuber for seasons three through five. I've found that working with Dania and Elana and others to be inspiring. And also, shout outs to Alex Leff and Jenn Leask and Taylor Antal. If you want to follow their lead, then I would hope you could find an organization that resonates with you and lend your talents and skills to help them with their work. And please let us know if you're doing something in service of people and the planet. Leave a comment in your podcast app, or get in touch with us directly by emailing [email protected] That's [email protected]Melody Allison  
That's our show. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard and you want others to consider these issues, then please share Crazy Town with your friends. Hit that share button in your podcast app, or just tell them face to face. Maybe you can start some much-needed conversations and do some things together to get us out of Crazy Town. Thanks again for listening and sharing.Asher Miller  
Crazy Town, duh da duh da duh di duh.