Transcript: [...] I'm going to talk now about energy and progress. You heard a lot of conversation about energy and things like, you know, people worrying about the electricity bill. I'm going to try and zoom out massively from the worry about this month's electricity price to the question of how energy and human progress are related.
This is a very, very important chart. On this chart, you have lots of countries. On the horizontal axis, you have GDP per capita, which is some approximate measure of wealth. On the vertical axis, you have per capita energy consumption. These are logarithmic axes, which means as you go across, you kind of double, and on the vertical axis, you multiply by 10.
Now, Germany's here near Denmark, a little less wealthy. First of all, it's amazing that you can fit this many countries and get this good a fit. I mean, these are very tightly correlated around this axis, so that's quite unusual to begin with. But there's one extremely important feature of this chart, and that is there is an empty area here. You cannot be a wealthy, low-energy country. It does not exist anywhere in the world.
Okay, so this is very, very important: you cannot be a wealthy, low-energy country. All right, so how come? Why is that so? I want to kind of draw a very large arc about how energy has contributed to human progress and go really, really far back to the first really important human invention of energy. The first really big energy breakthrough is fire.
This is a picture I took myself—no, just kidding. Fire was a huge energy breakthrough. It completely changed how much meat you could consume and how many calories you got out of the meat. What did this make possible? It made possible big brains. Humans, relative to the size of our bodies, have huge brains. Fire let us pull away from lots of other species that didn't figure it out. To this day, we are the only species on this planet that can reliably make fire. No other species can do this. This let us pull away and set us on the path of progress that we are on. It was a huge breakthrough.
What was the second big breakthrough? The second big breakthrough was agriculture. Agriculture is an energy breakthrough. Instead of having to hunt animals and find them out in the woods, you start having them on pastures, breeding them, and keeping many of them in one place for easy access. Instead of having to pick berries, you take a bunch of various plants, grow them right next to each other, irrigate them, and fertilize them. This was a huge energy breakthrough, with roughly 10x the energy density of production.
What did this enable? It enabled big societies. This is a 1490s drawing of my hometown, Nuremberg, Germany. That is a huge society compared to any hunter-gatherer societies. These are thousands of people, and there were tens of thousands of people in these societies during the agrarian age. This was the second huge breakthrough and incredible progress that happened because of an energy unlock.
What was the third big energy breakthrough? Fossil fuels. Early drilling rigs in Baku marked the start of fossil fuels powering the industrial economy. This is a Volkswagen plant that literally has the power plant built into the industrial production plant. This is how crucial fossil fuels were to the industrial age.
So I've given you three big breakthroughs in human history where progress was made because we had a breakthrough in energy. But there's a more fundamental question: why are energy and progress so deeply related?
It has to do with creating order. Here's a picture with coal on one side, iron ore on the other, and a metal product in the middle. Coal and iron ore are very unstructured, but the metal product is highly structured. Progress is about creating order out of more chaotic stuff. By the way, maintaining order also requires energy. It's not just about creating order. For example, this is what happens to your room when you don't pick up after yourself. This is what happens to your car when you don't maintain it. The natural state of the world is not order—it's disorder, and stuff tends towards disorder. Our house certainly tends to disorder. When you supply energy back into the system, you can clean it up and restore order. This is fundamentally why energy and progress are related: you need energy to create order.
Okay, so how are we doing? It turns out we've got problems. You've already heard about some of these problems today. I couldn’t resist putting this in—"Houston, we have a problem." Of course, Houston is one of the oil capitals of the world, and so that's our first problem.
The first problem is that so much of our energy still comes from fossil fuels. That's a problem because when we burn them, we put carbon in the atmosphere. That's greenhouse gases, which are causing global warming and the climate crisis on a massive scale. But there's a second problem in this chart that's maybe less obvious. We've had roughly linear growth in energy.
You might be like, "Well, why is that a problem?" Humanity has been growing somewhat linearly. We've been adding a billion people every once in a while, so shouldn't this be okay? No, it's very much not okay. As we saw earlier, if we want big progress, we need an energy breakthrough. Linear growth is not an energy breakthrough.
Okay, let’s zoom in on this chart that looks like exponential growth. You can see the slope getting steeper and steeper, and then we hit 1973. What happened? The 70s happened! Alright, there were spiffy dresses—and it definitely wasn’t these people's fault; that’s actually a TV show about the 70s.
But what really happened? Well, one thing that happened was the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth. This was a book that basically said, "We're going to run out of this stuff. These fossil fuels are going to go away." The book argued that we cannot afford the level of growth that we have and that we need to scale things back.
The second thing that happened was, a year later, the first oil crisis. OPEC got together, restricted supply, and the price of oil shot up. People panicked and said, "Oh my God, we can't afford this. This is terrible." What did people decide to do? They decided that the solution was going to be energy conservation.
In fact, in the US, we passed the Energy Policy and Conservation Act. The description of the Act does say it aims to increase domestic energy supply, but it specifically states its goal to restrain energy demand. That meant more efficient light bulbs, more efficient dishwashers, etc. And this worked—it worked in the sense that, as you can see on this chart, US per capita energy consumption went up and up and up. Then, around 1975, it just started to go horizontal.
So, in that sense, it worked. But we did this globally, and what was the result? We went from exponential growth, roughly until the 1970s, to linear growth in energy. That’s bad. Really bad. Like, extremely bad. In fact, I think of it as a trap. It’s the low-energy trap.
Alright, I’m a nerd. Some people will get this reference, and many won’t, but it’s a trap. It’s a real trap. Why is it a trap? Because we need more energy—way, way, way more energy than we have today.
What do we need this energy for? Data centers, for one. Data centers are incredible degrees of order. You can see how orderly the cabling is. But what I really mean is that each CPU is an extraordinary marvel of order—a state of bits that represents something in a state of order. These are the most highly ordered systems that we’ve built as humanity, and they take insane amounts of energy.
We want to electrify everything because we want to fight fossil fuels. We want to electrify cars, home heating, and industrial processes. We need way more energy for that. We want to clean up the mess that we’ve made. We want to pull the carbon back out of the atmosphere and have e-fuels instead of regular fuels. Again, way more energy.
We want to do awesome things, like going to space and lifting heavy objects into orbit. I’m a huge fan of this. It does a lot of good things. For example, I sailed across the Atlantic last year, and I had Starlink the entire way. It was fantastic. These are all things we want to do, and they all require energy.
But there’s one more thing: democracy. Democracy also requires energy. This is an absolutely incredible book that was published in 1988, and I urge everyone to read it. It’s a short book. It’s called The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter. He was an anthropologist who studied lots of different civilizations. His key conclusion was that complex societies fail for the same reason: they build up complexity.
Bureaucracy, for example—you heard a lot about bureaucracy earlier. Bureaucracy has a lot of advantages at first, but then it gets more and more expensive to maintain. Eventually, you get to a point where the complexity you’ve built up provides fewer and fewer advantages and more and more disadvantages, and then the society collapses.
Tainter made the observation that industrial societies are subject to the same principles. We may think that we’re smarter than the Romans, but these principles apply to us just as well as they applied to earlier societies. He also writes that, in ancient societies, the solution to declining marginal returns to complexity was to "capture a new energy subsidy." This is very euphemistic—it means slaves. You go and get yourself some slaves or occupy some territory and extract resources from somewhere else. That’s what he meant by "capture a new energy subsidy."
But then he goes on to write, "The capital and technology available must be directed towards some new and more abundant source of energy." This was written in 1988, during the midst of the conservation push, when everyone thought we could get to the future by conserving energy instead of making tons more of it.
I recommend reading the book. But there’s amazing news. We have, in fact, an energy source that’s growing exponentially: solar. Globally, solar deployment is growing exponentially. It’s still small relative to everything else, but when you have exponential growth, you get very far very quickly. This is really fantastic news.
By the way, there was a panel earlier where someone from Commonwealth Fusion Systems spoke. They’re trying to build fusion here on Earth. But we already have fusion—it’s called "remote fusion." The sun provides the fusion and sends photons down here. It sends ordered energy our way, which we get to collect very cheaply.
There’s only one problem: the infamous "Dunkelflaute." This is a chart of energy production in Germany, not that long ago, during calendar week 50 of last year. In the middle of this chart, you can see three days in a row with virtually no yellow, meaning no solar. It’s overcast, and there’s not a lot of solar energy. The light green, which represents wind energy, is also missing.
The top line shows German energy consumption. As you can see, there’s a very large gap between production and consumption. That electricity is purchased from neighboring countries, spiking prices in those countries and making them very unhappy. The amounts of energy here are mind-boggling. This is measured in megawatts. You can see a 20-gigawatt gap. If you form the integral, adding it all up, these are gigawatt-hours. This isn’t one gigawatt-hour; this is like 40 or 70 gigawatt-hours of storage that’s missing.
This is a real problem, and honestly, Germany is in trouble. Remember this chart: there is no wealthy, low-energy country. Yet Germany produces less electricity in 2024 than it did in 1990. It’s that bad.
So what should be done? As we like to say in the US: Build, baby, build. There’s only one way to get out of this—you have to build a lot more stuff. You have to build a lot more storage, a lot more energy infrastructure. You have to build new types of energy, reactivate nuclear, and admit that you’re going to use fossil fuels for much longer than you thought. You have to build carbon capture. You just have to build, build, build.
But here’s the thing: because we have exponential growth in solar energy, if we do it right and complement it with these other technologies and breakthroughs, we can live in this awesome, high-energy future. This is the future we should all want to live in, and it just requires a metric ton more energy across the board.
Thank you, everyone.
