MAXIMILLEON: Welcome! Yes, welcome! It is an auspicious day. I, Maximilleon Tyranery the 4th, am proud to unveil the launch of a marvelous new invention: the world’s first time travel device. Now, of course I myself did not build it. No, I paid other people to build it and I took all the credit. Yes, you see, several generations ago, my great-grandfather discovered a large amount of oil. It made my family fantastically wealthy and I was born into the family fortune, but I assure you that I deserve it with every fiber of my being. Now, while other billionaires indulge themselves in frivolous rocketships and private islands, I decided to use my wealth to do something for the people. Lately, some of our analysts - you know those doomers and naysayers - keep pestering me about rising energy costs, the supposed dwindling of fossil fuels, and green technology struggling to meet ever-growing demand. They claim this would have dire consequences for our company. But ah, don’t worry! These are all problems that will be solved one day. So I said hey, why not skip to the day where they’re already solved? But ah, don’t worry! Any problem you can anticipate will be solved by the Edison, Einstein, or Elon of 100 years from now. And if these are all problems that will surely be solved one day. Then why not skip to the day where they’re already solved? That is why I funded the construction of a machine that transports users 100 years into the future - where I’m confident they’ve unlocked infinite, clean, renewable energy. Then we can bring that technology back, patent it under the company name, and secure abundance for our investors and shareholders. Ah, as well as the people. Yes, the people. It’s mostly for them.That’s right, I say the future is going to be absolutely sparkling.You see, I am an optimist. I always have been an optimist. I remember once my mother told me, you have to eat a healthy diet if you want to grow up big and strong. I told her mom, not if you’re an optimist.I can hardly wait to see the gleaming cities, listen to the glorious hum of endless AI data centers, and behold the marvel of unlimited renewable energy making it all possible. An abundant techno-utopia awaits us my friends. Oh um, one thing, only one person can fit into the machine. It’s… well… a bit cramped. We hit some budgetary constraints. But don’t worry – I will go it alone. But please hang tight. Rest assured knowing that it does get better and that there’s nothing you can’t do if you believe in yourself. And have enormous sums of money. All right, it’s time to make history. One small step for man, one giant leap for-Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey. A podcast exploring the stories we tell ourselves about where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. I’m Alex Leff. When you imagine yourself in the future, what do you see? If you’re a kid, maybe you’re excited to be taller, faster, stronger. If you’re an adult, maybe you’re hoping to be wiser. Well, we all know the future is something that will happen no matter what. But if you have a vision of the future you want to create, how do you get there? Maybe there are parts of yourself you want to spend more time with. Maybe there are some unhealthy patterns you want to work through.Therapy’s certainly helped me grow more into a healthier version of myself. And no, this is not a therapy ad.When I’d tell my therapist about something I wanted to process, she’d ask: well where do you feel that in your body?And for a while I had no idea what she was talking about. My body? My thoughts and feelings aren’t in my body, they’re in my mind. I was, and still am, much more familiar with my mind than my body. Always thinking, thinking, thinking. I think our dominant culture tends to be like that too. We’re always talking about our politics, ideologies, ingenuity. “Where there’s a will there’s a way, if we put our minds to it.” Always up in our now global mind.But we rarely come back down to our global body - the natural systems everything depends on. Regardless of our political opinions, there are physical realities.Economists like to say, well yeah, money is the reality. But money’s made up. It’s just another abstraction. Another way of thinking. No, our physical reality is soil. And sunlight. Forests and grasslands. Oceans and microbiomes. If we’re going to go through some sort of civilizational therapy, to move towards the future we want, we’re going to have to get back in touch with our physical reality and back into the body of the world. And that’s what the guys over at the Crazy Town podcast are good at. Reminding us of our physical reality. Getting us back into our planetary body. Also dad jokes. They do love dad jokes. 
Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller are a research biologist, ecological economist, and Executive Director of the Post Carbon Institute, in about that order. I’ve had them on Human Nature Odyssey before, in our episode “Can We Escape Modern Civilization?” And they were gracious enough to have me on Crazy Town.I’ve learned a lot from listening to Crazy Town. Maybe even recovered a little sanity. 
So I pitched the idea of collaborating on a two part series with Crazy Town  — to help us get a clearer glimpse into the future, not one of our delusions, but one rooted in the physical realities civilization has ignored for so long, only at our own peril. And even though this future might not include the high tech sprawl of our fantasies, it might actually be a world future generations actually like to live in.So today in Part 1, I’ve edited together a compilation of excerpts from Crazy Town episodes, added some thematic music - a podcast mixtape if you will - to give us an honest prognosis of our civilizational situation, and where we might be realistically headed.And then, in Part 2, which will come out later this month, I’ll step into a time machine with Jason, Rob, and Asher to imagine what the world 100 years in the future might actually look like. Okay to get us started on our civilizational therapy and back into our physical reality - we need to ask an important question: how much energy does it take to toast a slice of bread? Jason, Rob, Asher, take it away.CRAZY TOWN:You guys seen that video on YouTube? Robert versus the toaster. It’s this German Olympic athlete, right? Huge guy. Just massive. You look great. So this video had him basically see if he could toast a piece of bread. You know, just pedaling a bike, right? Okay. And he was working his ass off.I think he generated, like, 700W. And he held that for an hour or less. Certainly less than two minutes. Right. Okay. Working his ass off to try to get this little piece of bread toast. I mean, basic and typical human can put out maybe 100W, you know, for like 20 minutes or an hour, instantaneous output. So. And some good exercise.If one of us normal humans can ride for an hour at 100W, then that guy's doing seven times that. Yeah, for a short period. But that's basically the output of of a horse, right? But only for like a couple minutes. And he was spent at the end. I think you said something about how he could taste blood in his mouth, how he was tired and he just ping.And it was toast. Yeah. A little piece of bread that you got to get the butter on really fast if you want it to. Yeah, it was white bread and you could barely see a brown hue to it. Exactly. It wasn't that good. Yeah. And they did that video. I think in order to help people sort of understand how much energy it takes to even, you know, toast a piece of bread.ALEX: So it took one olympic athlete named Robert to toast one piece of bread. And that thing was barely toasted. But our civilization isn’t powered by olympic athletes. Otherwise we would have never gotten off the ground. Alright Jason, over to you.CRAZY TOWN:Part of the thing I think about it, this is like a biologist, and I look at that human evolution.And something that's really weird about humans is that we have the ability to control what's called exo somatic energy. So that's an s.a.t word. That's an essay word. Exactly. So somatic refers to the body. So exo is outside of the body. Endo somatic would be like, you know, bike pedaling energy, the energy you're applying to the pedals that's coming from your own body, you're burning calories.But exo somatic is then we control energy that's not of our own body. So the first one is like fire. So imagine building a campfire and cooking, you know, like mastodon roast over it and it having like a mass add on drumstick or something like that. Okay. A pretty big truck. Is it big? Yeah, it's a big time slot.I would feel pretty. Kick your teeth with the tusks afterwards. Humans using fire to cook has affected potentially our digestive system and our brain development. Yeah, so it's a huge part of the machinery theory. Yeah. The humans. Yeah. The theories are basically. That's what led to the huge advances in our brain development. Right, right. All the things we're able to do now was a result of us being able to cook our food and not having expend as much energy, and in digesting it and all that.Right. And then we talk about the term horsepower refers literally to harnessing a horse and using it. Well, that's literal too. You put a harness on on the whole harness. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's what it is. It's literal. Then we start to figure out windmills, water wheels. And so we would try to extract energy from the environment. But then what you were doing though, when we started tapping fossil fuels is we were taking energy that was contained from previous epics of solar radiation and now burning that for the first time in millions of years.So that's been sort of a transformation of our society through this various stages of sort of expanding our use of exo somatic energy.ALEX:And from fire to fossil fuels, humans have long harnessed exosomatic energy from outside our own bodies to do what no olympic athlete ever could: fully toast a piece of bread. And a lot of other things.CRAZY TOWN:It's almost inconceivable thinking about, like, human labor. You know, we're talking about the average output a person can put out, which is something like 70W in. Extrapolate that over the course of, of a full day. Basically you take a barrel of oil, right? And if you run the numbers, it's the equivalent of 11 years worth of human labor, right?Working full time over 2000 hours a year. Right? Yeah. A little vacation time in there. Nobody thinks about that. How could you possibly imagine that? This thing. Right. Which, by the way, is burning is ruining our chances of actually inhabiting this planet. But putting that aside, how could you possibly imagine this thing is so incredibly valuable in the world right now?Consumes about 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent, right? It's not all in oil, but if you equate it to barrels of oil, then you take a lot somebody's lumps of coal equal a barrel of oil. Exactly. Or even renewable energy. So 100 billion barrels of oil per year is what we're consuming, right? Right. So 100 billion times 11 years, times 11 years, 1.1 trillion years of human labor a year that we're consuming.And I have no clue what that means. It means it's inconceivable right now. The universe isn't that old. No, it's not even close. ALEX:Our global civilization uses the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil worth of energy a year. But here’s the funny thing, it actually takes energy to get energy. I’ll let Rob explain.CRAZY TOWN:There's a concept that I think we all gotta know about nuts energy return on investment.The basic way of thinking about that is how much energy do you have to expend to get the energy resource that you're looking to use. So you take a cheetah. Yeah. You know, that's trying to chase down a gazelle on the African savanna. Right. There's a calculation that's happening there. If that cheetah, for all the energy that it's expending running 70mph to try to chase down this thing fails, too many times it dies, right?It needs to get more energy out. Not just in that one moment where it's chasing after that gazelle and catching it. But you need to get more energy out from that gazelle for every time before that, it's running failed, right? Right. Because they fail most of the time. And the thing that's amazing about fossil fuels has been that the return on that is astronomical.But that's changing, right? You look now, how do we get our fossil fuel? I mean, the U.S. became the largest producer of of oil and natural gas by fracking. Yeah. You know, and we're doing things like putting these drilling rigs in three, 4000ft of water. Yeah. I mean, there's such a clear distinction between the quote unquote good old days where you, you get a gusher, you know, and you can actually go look in and see these old historical photographs of these just towers of oil shooting up in the sky, you know, hundreds of feet.Right? Delicious. All that pressure, you know, just shooting up. And now, right now, what we're dealing with is needing to put billion dollar deep oil rigs in the ocean to go down tens of thousands of feet, you know, to to try to get oil from below the fucking ocean, you know, or going up to the arboreal forests in Canada and scraping up this bitumen, which is basically unfinished oil, you know, that we get a cuckoo insane, I mean, or fracking, which is basically going down, drilling laterally for thousands and thousands of feet, shooting a ton of water and sand and chemicals in there to blast apart these rocks, to get these little tiny pockets ofoil to come out. We picked the low hanging fruit. Yeah. And now we're having to go after stuff that's harder to get and has a lower energy return. You know, where you just described. And this is why it was easy for me to understand this as a biologist. Okay. So in biology there's an in colleges, there's what's called optimal foraging theory.And it's just where you said any organism is going to go find and locate the most energetically profitable resource first. Yeah, you're going to forage optimally. And then when that runs out they're going to switch. So like the cheetah goes after the Impala the Pauls get a little rare. They have a hard time finding them. So they go after the hyrax or whatever.Right. A smaller animal less abundant. But they still good after a while though, if they if they hunt out that, then they're going to something else, like like a little rat. And the next thing you know, they can't get enough rats. And the cheetah population starts crashing. Yeah. As soon as you understand optimal foraging theory, everything you just said of energy return on investment.And you just look at what we're doing as a civilization going after this crap, basically in desperation Moves and we call it we like, oh, we've, we've unlocked this new resource and we just think we're awesome. Yeah. I go, you idiot, you're following the declining quality of resource in an optimal foraging theory situation. That's a sign of desperation. Oh, God. ALEX:So not only is the use of fossil fuels pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, warming the planet, melting polar ice caps, yada yada you know the drill, but fossil fuels are getting harder and harder to come by, requiring more and more energy to extract. But don’t worry guys… civilization has got a solution. CRAZY TOWN:Solar freakin roadways.ALEX:Do you remember this crowdfunding campaign from 10 years ago? CRAZY TOWN:It's technology. The replaces all roadways parking lot, sidewalks, driveways, tarmac, bike paths, and outdoor recreation services with solar panels. And not just lifeless, boring solar panels. Smart micro processing, interlocking hexagonal solar units. No more useless asphalt and concrete, just sitting there baking in the sun, needing to be repaved and filling with potholes that ruin your axle alignment on your sweet ride, bro.So for folks who don't know, there was a viral video that came out. It was being passed around. Certainly in our circles, a lot talking about this cool new invention, which is basically a way of putting solar panels down on a surface under glass that we could drive on. Right? So like instead of driving on asphalt, we'd be driving on solar panels.So they did this Indiegogo campaign, right? Sure. And they set out to like, raise a million bucks. They raised almost $2.5 million, right? People were like throwing, you know, just pulling out loose change and throwing up. Anytime somebody talks fast and says, bro, I give them as much money as I can. Yeah, totally. Bro directly correlates to a solid business plan.Here's they're lying flat on the flat on the ground. Yeah. I mean, on the equator. You want the stuff basically level with the ground. But you know, where I live it's 45 degree angle is the optimum. Oh you're going to start in with geometry stuff. I've just immediately run to issues. Right. So that's the reason I brought it up.Right. So if you just like scratched the surface a tiny little bit, you realize, yeah, you scratch doesn't make any goddamn sense. Think of all the jobs you'll create cleaning the glass as it gets dirty. These guys, you know, with this, the solar roadways, they basically admitted that just the LED lights would consume most of the electricity. So but my point here is not so much making fun of this idea.It's more the fact that we see these kinds of things. Oh, they're dime a dozen. Yeah. ALEX:So here’s the situation we’re in. There are basically two big energy arguments we hear governments and corporations talk about: we either double down with fossil fuels, or swap ‘em for renewables. Those who want to stick with fossil fuels argue that we’ve used oil, gas, and coal to construct our entire global civilization - and nothing is more powerful. Honestly, there’s truth to this. The one little issue with using fossil fuels is DESTROYING THE ENTIRE WORLD. So then the other argument we’re all familiar with is replacing fossil fuels with renewable green energy. It’s the idea behind… the Renewable Energy Transition. So where do the Crazy Town guys land on this whole fossil-fuels-or-renewables debate? Well I think they have a pretty interesting perspective on this — and not one you typically hear.CRAZY TOWN:We're going to have to transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. So yeah it's going to happen one way or one way or the other. So not against that. And in a much better for us to actually manage that transition and try to do it as soon as possible.Absolutely. I mean, the climate crisis is demanding that of us. But what we see a lot within the climate movement is sort of a grasping at plans and proposals that are being put out there. That sound good on paper. Yeah. Wishful thinking. Yeah. But when you actually run the numbers and you actually think about it in, in the real world maybe won't come to fruition the way that they're talking.Yeah. It's like the rah rah optimism around the notion of, hey, the future will be like today, only better. And run on better energy sources, right? Yeah. And I don't want to pick on anybody, but I thought, you know, there's this, but you're going to it's you're going to do, Oh, I mean, so I'm not going to name names here.Go. But here's, here's somebody who is quoted the spokesperson, somebody who works for for one of the the climate organization that's out there. And he basically said, hey, if you're at all technologically optimistic, the message from everyone in the clean energy world is this transition is going to be quicker and cheaper than anyone predicts. The hope is that we're sort of in the 1980s of computer technology when it comes to solar, and that countries, once they get the ball moving in the right direction, will figure out that they can transition even more quickly.Right. And I probably was in that camp at one point. Yeah. I mean, I think we want to believe this, right? Yeah. And, you know, folks like Mark Jacobson at Stanford University, he's, you know, are going to name names. Yes. Well, I will name him because I think Jacobson has been at the forefront of putting out these a set of solutions, these plans on paper that basically say we can transition 100% to renewable energy.In fact, we'll save money. It won't be cost prohibitive to do this. And while I share the vision, I think it needs to be grounded in some sort of of reality. ALEX:Okay. If we want to survive as a species - which I think is a pretty good goal - we’ve got to transition away from fossil fuels. If that transition is gonna be grounded in reality, what are some key things we need to consider?CRAZY TOWN:So the problem is, is that almost everything proposal you see is like, oh, we're going to go 100% renewable like, well let's imagine you say you got 100% renewable electricity, which in and of itself would be amazing. That still leaves 80% of our energy system. Just think about this. So only about 20% of the energy in the US is delivered to us via electricity.The electricity part of the energy puzzle is just really the easiest part to solve. And I think that's part of why gets the most attention right? Low hanging. It's getting, you know, a lot of investment in it, a lot of technological focus in terms of improvement. It's something that people can engage in that in electric vehicles. I mean, you could see why those get a lot of the attention for people.But as you said, I like a lot of our energy consumption comes in forms that's a lot more challenging to transition or just substitute. ALEX:It’s not just electricity that needs to be transitioned — as Jason mentions, only a fraction of U.S. fossil fuel use actually goes into generating electricity. The rest goes into transportation, heating, industrial processes, and even the raw materials our infrastructure is made from.CRAZY TOWN:Our roads are made from bitumen, and the steel that goes into almost everything is use high heat components. You know, they use natural gas to keep things going 24 over seven because they don't want the kilns, they get coal. ALEX:And here’s another thing. Solar panels and wind turbines may use renewable energy, but the panels and turbines themselves are still made from nonrenewable materials, like steel, silicon, and rare earth minerals that need to be mined, extracted, and manufactured.CRAZY TOWN:You're talking about data centers. We can talk about electric vehicles. We could even just talk about what goes into the construction of solar PV panels. There are nonrenewable resources that go into these things that are being harvested right now through the use of nonrenewable energy, and they're not really to last for decades and decades. They're not easy to repair, they're not easy to recycle.ALEX:Well hold on, hold on. Wait one minute. They used to say people would never be able to fly but we figured that out, didn’t we? Sure, solar and wind might not be able to fully replace fossil fuels yet. But we’re always inventing more high tech, efficient solutions. Won’t we eventually figure out a way to fully replace all fossil fuels with renewable energy… and build them with renewable materials? Well, what if we did…CRAZY TOWN: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. Yes. Growing the size of the economy, growing the amount of energy that flows through the economy. So we're always looking at this exponential growth. We've got this colleague, a physicist named Tom Murphy, who's he actually had a blog called Do the Math.Yeah, yeah, it's a fantastic blog and not not lazy about doing some math. But he looked at this exponential growth and so he said, okay, let's say we we grow energy use at 2.3% a year, okay. Which is less than what our historical rates been, more like 2.9%. We said, okay, 2.3% a year, and we're going to do this with all renewable energy.And let's just make a wacky assumption that the solar we're going to hit solar panels and the solar panels are going to be 100% efficient, which is impossible. I mean, no, no loss. We're getting like 20%. You know, that's good performance right now. But let's just let's just go ahead and run with that assumption. You run the numbers and in 400 years time, we'll have to cover every square inch of the planet, including the oceans and solar panels, to generate that amount of electricity.He took it another level further, you know, because people are always going to come in and say, well, what if we discover fusion power or whatever, or invent something that they can put out more? He just ran that on. Okay. If you exponentially grow the amount of energy that we're using on the earth, it only takes you 1400 years until the heat that you're generating is equivalent to the sun.Yeah. So so here on Earth, it's going to be as hot as the sun if you exponentially grow energy use at 2.3% just because of waste heat. Right? Which is true for no matter what form of energy, there's a certain amount of heat that gets that gets in perfect second law of thermodynamics and yeah, turns into heat. Yeah.ALEX:Let’s really think about this. If we keep growing our energy use like we have been, the waste heat – even if it all comes from renewable energy – will make the Earth hotter than the sun. Which obviously wouldn't actually happen because we’d all die hundreds of years before that when the oceans literally boiled over. So this is a serious problem. Not just because it would be too hot to go to the beach, but because that means we can’t keep growing our economy the way we have been. And that’s hard to imagine, since our entire global economic system is based on continuous growth. So any energy transition that doesn’t involve turning the earth into an easy-bake-oven has to also involve creating economic systems that aren’t based on exponential growth.And not only that but energy, after all, is just the fuel for what we do. The question is, what would we do with that energy? CRAZY TOWN:We've got a serious problem, right? Like even if you could magically pull off this energy transition, like let's say we went all solar and wind, got rid of all the the coal and oil, I guess, except for the little bit that we needed to fire up our solar power plant or whatever. Okay, so you're trying to put me in, like, fairy land, America land.Exactly. Okay. Even if we did that, we don't solve humanity's overshoot crisis. That would be the worst thing. Yeah, the biodiversity crisis, for example, you know, that's linked to habitat fragmentation and loss. That's about ag expansion, that's about overhunting, pollution, industrial development. Yeah. You're not solving any of that. ALEX:To me, this is a key point. That energy is just part of the puzzle. It doesn’t just matter where we get that energy, but what we use that energy for. If we discovered unlimited green energy – from renewables, nuclear power, or even unlocked the secrets to nuclear fusion – what would we actually do with all that energy? Wouldn’t we just use it to consume the world’s limited resources? Like pretend the energy transition was actually successful. We now had all the energy we ever wanted. If we’re just going to keep building bigger and bigger cities, clearcut the final remnants of forest for farmland, strip every last scrap of metals and minerals, and turn every square inch of planet earth into one big civilization factory, then that seems less like a transition and more like a slamming on the gas as we speed right off the cliff. Well then jeez, what the heck are we supposed to do then? Rob, Jason, Asher - you got anything? CRAZY TOWN: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.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 are not. So we're not saying that. We're saying unless we downscale our demand by an 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 it, like a small distributed simple repair or simple, repairable, less complex systems, then maybe we're talking I think we're going to be constrained by the laws of physics and 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, and live good lives without needing all this stuff? It's, if you pose to all of us the question of we have these limits, we have these realities, these, these constraints on us or these certain values that we want to apply.And you put that problem to people and you say, how does technology, 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. What's fascinating to me really has to do with the psychology of why people like, why do they fall either into this belief system that is caught up in this idea that this transition is happening right.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, right. You know, and we've got solar panels everywhere. Like what leads people into this kind of just trust that this transition is going to happen. It's just a political promise.We hear this all the time. Yeah. The technology's been solved. There's more sunlight that hits the Earth every so in a second than we could possibly consume in a year, right. This is just a political problem. It's not a technological problem. So what is it about people that leads them to sort of just take that at face value when the stakes are so high?I think there's a lot to it. I mean, I think people are tied to this notion of, oh, you're not going to tell me that I can't have whatever it is I'm accustomed to, that I can't have more than I'm accustomed to, and I totally. And so if you're a say you're a Stanford professor or you're a an activist who's trying to influence a political system, they can't ever go to the political leadership and say, we're going to have less in the future.We're going to we're going to have less energy. People are going to be materially less wealthy. And so that becomes a conversation you can never have. Then the sort of.The sort of calisthenics or gymnastics or contortions you have to go through then to try to make up some absurd story that fits the non-negotiable way of life. It just leads to one crazy absurdity after another. Yeah, I think that we're in. It's totally understandable. Here we are faced with this existential, dire threat of climate change. And for people who are concerned about that issue, to try to mobilize people to address it without being able to promise them a future.Yeah, that doesn't require using energy substantially differently than we currently use it. We're using less of it feels like it's a really hard sell. That's a tough it's a tough platform. You know, we built roads and we built cars and airplanes and all these other things that we've done because we live in this infrastructure that was built on fossil fuels.We get stuck in thinking, well, the way we can get around is going to be car still, right? Just are going to be electric, right? So we're still going to have these roads. We're still going to be flying on airplanes. We're still going to be doing all the things that we're currently doing is just going to be swapping green or clean.You know, at the end of the day, it's unlikely that we're going to be using as much energy as we currently consume. If we're getting 100% off of fossil fuels and going completely to renewable energy sources, and once fossil fuels start declining, renewables won't compensate. Yeah. To me, the big takeaway here is we are undertaking an energy transition.We don't have a choice one way or the other, but this transition is going to be as much about a change in our expectations, as much about a change in how we're using energy and how we live as it is about the sources of that energy, so that we can actually achieve this transition in a way where we can shared equitably and we can live happy and healthy lives and are not trying to perform a magic trick.ALEX:So civilization as we know it — even if we ran it 100% on renewable energy — may be unsustainable, but humanity itself is not. Humans have lived without this high-energy lifestyle for a very long time. We can live without it again. Maybe even with the new knowledge we’ve gained. In the next episode, I’ll be stepping into the Time Machine with Jason, Rob, and Asher to imagine what that future could actually look like. And who knows — instead of doom and gloom, we might just find another kind of world altogether. Thanks for listening.Until next time, I hope you’ll consider the stories we’re told about what the future should look like. And imagine what a positive vision of the future might look like if it doesn’t involve unlimited energy.If you enjoy Human Nature Odyssey please share it with a friend. Leave a friendly review. And come say hi on the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon. There you’ll have access to bonus episodes, additional thoughts and writings, and audiobook readings. Thank you to everyone supporting us on Patreon. It means a lot to hear from you and your support makes this podcast possible. And thank you to Nic, Tom, Charley, Joe, Jessie, Dylan, Brian, Nare,  Rob, and Sheer. for your input and feedback on this episode. This episode was produced in part with support from an Omega Action Research Grant. Thank you so much to the Omega Resilience Awards for supporting Human Nature Odyssey.This series was made in association with the Post Carbon Institute. You can learn more at Resilience.org.If you enjoyed hearing Jason, Rob, and Asher, go check Crazy Town wherever you enjoy your podcasts.And as always, our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes.Talk with you soon.