Yeah.

Welcome to the Aaron Harbor show.

Today we are in Houston, Texas at Ceraweek by S&P global.

Welcome to the Aaron Harber Show.

My guest today, geoscientists Scott Tinker.

Scott, thanks for joining me.

Aaron, it's good to be here with.

You're a TV star.

You're the CEO of Tinker Energy Associates.

There's so much I want to talk about, but but let's start off with what are the threat you see posed by climate change?

It's interesting if you actually go to the IPCC, which I do, because I'm not a climate expert.

But their latest report, a ar6 working group, one which is the least political.

Chapter 12.

And then you have to expand the sections and there's a table 12.12 in there.

And that table summarizes all the impacts of climat change, all the weather impacts, droughts, drought intensity, storms, storm intensity, fire weather, all of it.

And they say with rigor.

So statistical rigor they use in that high confidence.

How much has emerged from what's been going on in the past.

And when it's white it hasn't emerged yet.

Most of it's quite warm.

Yes.

That's emerged CO2 is emerged a couple little other things.

And then they forecast forecast up to 2050 and 2100.

And most of it stays white.

So I look at that and I say with high level of confidence we got more time.

And we're being told in some places.

I worry about it.

I think we ought to work on climate.

I think we have to work on our emissions.

But I also don't think it' a ten year existential threat.

And that's where I am.

What do you think the public should know about climate change?

That it doesn't know that the climate is warming?

Humans are causing quite a bit of that most recent warming.

I think most of the public.

I'm a geologist.

I confess, I don't think most of the public knows about the geologic past much, that it's been much warmer in the past.

CO2 levels have been more than what they are today.

But does it really matter for today in some sense?

Is it does a sense of history.

But in the last 100 years, and what we're doing now is really what we're thinking about.

And so the public understands at least the rich public, the rich world public understands we're forcing it.

And it's scary.

They've been trained and think it's scary by a lot of different people.

And I don't I' not sure they quite understand that we have a little more time than we think.

Probably the other thing that the public.

Let's go to the other 7 billion people on Earth that aren't in the wealthy world.

I've been to 60 countries.

I've been very fortunate to do that.

Every time I go in and say, what's your top five issues?

Climate isn't on the list.

They have other issues, Erin, that they're working with, and I don't think most of our public understands that this is not quite such a high issue to many people in the world.

Well, do you think the energy transition should look like if you were to design?

I give talks, and I've given a Ted talk on what that looks like.

I think it has to includ protection of the environment.

So I'm going to use climate as part of that.

But not all of it.

The land, the air and the water matter too.

I call them the four pillars of the environment.

We got to make sure we're taking care of all of those, and there's some trade offs there.

You can cover a lot of the Earth and solar panels or wind turbines.

That's not so great on the Earth, but it might help with CO2 emissions, etc., protect the environment and provide affordable, reliable energy to all humans on Earth.

Not just the rich world, all of us.

And that's that dual challeng I've talked about for decades, but it's kind of in vogue now.

Is is human flourishing and protect the environment.

And it's not going to be perfect.

You know, there's no perfect solutions here.

There's going to be trade offs, and it's going to vary tremendously around the world depending on where you live, what your resources are, your government system, how educated you are, how much corruption there is, or just a whole lot that goes on infrastructure that's going to have tha transition varying quite a bit.

The other, I think, a really important thing when most people say transition, I think again, in the wealthy world, we think we're transitioning to wind and solar and batteries, and that's not what's happening.

I mean, the data, global data show very clearly.

We just keep adding new forms of energy to meet the demand of this growing society.

Nothing has gone down yet.

I even had you go back to wouldn't call.

Hey.

Hasn't gone down yet.

So we're adding energy and eventually I think we're transitioning to denser forms of energy.

More bang for the buck.

You can measure it and, you know, kill whatever you want to measure in surface power density watts per meter squared or energy per unit weight, dense forms of energy don't impact the environment as much, and it serves more people.

So I think we're eventuall transitioning into those things.

Certainly, oil is a dense form of energy.

Yes it is.

So what other dense form who are you reference naturally through time?

We've gone from dung and hay, which Federer vehicles oxen and horses to wood, to wood, to coal.

And now coal is getting denser.

Nature compressed, intensifie carbon, but it's mostly carbon.

Oil is complex.

Hydrocarbons get more hydrogen in there.

Methane four is actually denser by unit weight than oil by quite a bit.

And then you get into the non carbon based things uranium and thorium for nuclear.

And these are these go off the charts.

There's so much energy in a radioactive element.

And how do you use it.

I mean you basically split that create fission which that makes heat an oversimplifying but makes heat.

So it would boil water, make steam, turn a turbine, run a generator and generate electricity.

That's what nuclear does.

That' what burning coal does as well.

So that's where we're headed and have been.

But there's a lot of perturbations along the way and it varies tremendously by region.

Talk a little bit about switch energy.

It's a not for profit that I started.

Go back ahead of that.

There's a great filmmaker named Harry Lynch and he makes films of all kinds and TV shows, and we met a long time ago, around 2008.

He interviewed me for one of his films he was doing on energy, and he said, after you go, yo know, you're not bad on camera.

He goes, have you ever written a book?

I said, too bloody lazy to write a book.

You want to make a film?

And this was, oh eight.

I said, yeah, what would that take?

And he told me the cost for a great film.

Let's go do that.

And then the oh nine recession hit.

So we're filming during the oh nine recession stalled, but we kept going.

We went to a dozen countrie and made a film called switch, and that was the first film by quite a bit to look at the energy transition.

Went to the best sites in the world for each form of energy, and showed you the pros and cons, not just the pros or just the cons, the pros and cons of each form.

And that's that film got very popular.

We were pleased.

And that led to forming the Switch Energy Alliance many years later and not for profit.

And that film, that second film called Switch On, I got we got back together.

I said, Harry, we left hal the world out of our first film.

The people who don't have any energy are much.

So the second film was about energy poverty.

Different countries Nepal, Kenya, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Colombia.

What does it look like?

How are people living?

What's with some of tha transition going to look like?

So they're not for profit does films.

We do.

We have a four through 12 curriculum nationwide, 10,000 teachers using it in high schools and middle schools.

Now we have a campus case competition international.

4000 students have taken it four years to.

And they have to figure out how to end global energy poverty.

That's the competition for real.

And they pick a country to do that.

Got a PBS show and just a lot of of energy education materials for the broad public.

I assume you get a lot o support from the energy we do.

We do.

Any other particular groups?

Foundations, non energy folks.

Microsoft was on our board and supported us or everybody uses energy.

A lot of individuals from different sectors.

So literally hundreds of supporters for this not for profit, but a lot comes from the energy industry.

And we've gotten support from the solar industry, electric power sector, not just oil and gas.

How do you maintain, the, the nonpartisan ship, the objectivity, of an effort that gets funded, you know, by the energy industry, particularly if you're getting significant resources right from oil and gas, you get criticized for that, first of all.

And response?

Not much.

There's no input or creative control at all.

They they make a gift to nonprofit and we say thank you.

I think they that mostly the broad energy industr trust me to do balance things.

I've they've been branded as sort of this guy on the radical middle who pisses everybody off sometimes.

And that's okay.

I don't mind that.

I don't advocate, I'm not an activist.

We just try to really look at the trade offs and the pros and cons, and most of the industry is good with that.

They just want a fair wrap among things.

So that's fine.

And others who support us are pretty good with it too.

I mean, we're on PBS in a lot of households with a pretty high level two guys talk show, and that's a that's the kind of a left leaning audience, highly educated.

And they're loving it.

They're right in saying, we didn't know that, hadn't heard that, thought it was just simple, you know?

And that's the goal, Aaron, is to really provide a little bit more depth to these very complex issues, which you talk about all the time.

What about energy poverty?

Well, you know, that's something that isn't doesn't seem to be in the, the public sphere in terms of a discussion, certainly on a global basis.

On the other hand, I think you have certainly a new, us Secretary of Energy who, you know, for him, that's been a big emphasis.

Tell me about, you know, what?

What is the state of energy poverty?

What is it?

What needs to be done?

I feel that poverty, economic poverty is the greatest issue facing humans.

That disparity and economic well-being, which just continues to get bigger because there's this group of people anchored in economic poverty, and the rest of us just keep getting richer.

That disparity i the greatest challenge we face.

It turns out energy energy won't end poverty, but you can't end poverty without energy.

And so energy is tightly related access to affordable energy, to economic well-being.

You can make a grap of every country in the world, and you see energy consumptio and GDP, and it's their scatter.

But it's probably got an R-squared of a, you know, pretty good on as you put a line through that.

Okay.

And when you when you realize that you understand that access to affordable, reliable energy is vital to have a chance to bring people out of economic poverty, we in the rich world, it's not our fault, but we we won the lottery.

We were born into wealth.

We take it for granted.

I'd like to say we're kind o entitled again, not a criticism.

We don't know any different.

But you, you start going out.

So how we made a film on this and and I learned more as we did that called switch on.

How bad is it.

It's it's bad.

The worst in the world.

About a billion people have nothing, maybe 1 to 2 megawatt hours a year.

Okay.

In the US we have 70 or 80 megawatt hour a year per person, per capita.

The average of the rich world is 51 to 2 in the poorest billion.

And they have no wealth, $1,000 a year or less per capita.

That's a billion people.

But you start coming up through that, that trend and away from the mud huts and the thatched roofs into these cities, mostly around the world, that are dense, they have some energy, but it comes and goes.

The electricity comes and goes.

The fuels aren't reliable.

They're starved in many ways.

And this is another 6 billion people.

So 4 billion down here i the emerging and low, developing another 3 billion in the upper developing 7 billion total at some level of unreliable energy.

That's energy poverty.

That's a huge challenge.

What's the most efficacious way of addressing that?

It's hard.

You know, you can't pretend like there's one solution.

Not long ago, Toby Rice and I started a nonprofit called the Energy Cor Corp, and Toby said, ect, ect.

But this is not an equity thing.

This is independent of that.

It's a nonprofit energy core, and we have education that's going to be largely switch.

And we have an action arm.

And the action arm has two components to it, partnering with organization that have been working on this for a long time, like Bettering Human Lives, Chris Wright's entity to bring clean fuels into Africa.

There are many, many, many like that out there in the world.

So we want to accelerate, leverage and accelerate them.

How can we help you to do what you're doing more and and these are happening.

It'd be fantastic all over the world.

Two things they have to do.

One, they got to agree to measure and measure what measure?

Human flourishing components.

The sustainable development goals of the UN.

We've got about six of those that are tightly related to energy.

So are you breathing cleaner air?

Are you getting more medicine in a refrigerator?

Are you able to pump water?

You're a great your crops, better food.

There's things like that that change lives.

So we're measuring those wit like instruments and counting.

The other thing they have to do is show a path to commercialization.

We're not dropping aid in here.

The community has to say we're going to use this investment at a low interest rate loan, and here's how we're going to grow it.

We are going to grow it.

Not you, not not you.

Come in and say, here, you really need this, you know, here it is.

And then you leave and it breaks and you're right back to where you were.

So commercialization measurement are the big things, that we're working on.

I think it's a little different approach.

But again, every place in the world has different challenges.

And there are we can talk about those are nontrivial.

So what you just described is really kind of a leveraging approach, which makes it makes, you know, a lot of sense.

What are the most powerful or influential groups you think when it comes to communicating to the public issues like climate change, global warming, energy poverty, all these all these issues?

That's kind of question.

One of the question, too, is, are the American people reall that interested in those issues?

They became front of mind during the last election, the presidential election.

I think climate was in there.

It wasn't necessarily a winning strategy, but it was certainly talked about quite a bit.

And we get really passionate when the price of gasoline goes up or the price of electricity goes up.

And that's starting to happen.

And the reason that matters so much, and it comes back to energy poverty, is, for example, California pays about $0.3 a kilowatt hour for electricity.

Now that's 2 to 3 times Texas.

200 to 300% more.

Germany is paying even more than that.

Businesses can't afford tha in a global competitive world.

So they leave.

They close their door and go someplace where they're the energy that runs their business.

And we all need energy is cheaper.

So this is a this affects real people, real jobs.

The other thing that's I don't think most of us understand the proportion of your income that you spend on energy, because we all pay the same for gasoline.

We all pay the same for electricity.

Wherever we live, the proportion goes up.

The poorer I am.

So I may spend.

I'm rich.

I may spend 2 or 3% of my income on energy, or for not 15 to 20 to 25%.

And that becomes it's kind of a catchy phrase, hea or eat, but it's actually real.

There are people that literally are not heating their homes to the level they could or should, because they can't afford the food.

That's regressive.

This is economically regressive.

And I and I think the public's waking up to this, they're saying, hey, you told us these things were going to be cheaper and more reliable, and my lights go off more and it's more expensive.

What the hell happened?

Yeah.

Okay.

And now.

So that's getting a lot of public attention.

What energy truth should people know that you think is not known?

Why?

You know, widely?

I don't know if you know Marc Mills real smart energy guy.

He's written some good books.

He started something called the National Center for energy Analytics recently in DC.

I'm on his advisory board.

We wrote a little paper, 2025 called 21st Century Energy Guiding Principles.

And we have nine principles in there.

Basic things.

They're in economics, they're in politics, the three in each, and they're in science and technology.

Some guiding principles are dense energy matters.

You can do more with with dense energy than you can with less dense energy.

Dense energ at the end of the day is cheaper again, less resources needed to collect the energy and get them to where it needs to be.

These are some of the economic principles.

When you say dense energy, that's that is again bang for the buck.

Energy per unit weight or energy per unit area, the densest of all bein nuclear, natural gas, oil, coal.

You're progressing down, down to less dense.

Right.

And we started in our lives, in the world as humans, we're the less least dense.

The stuff we could gather fro the forest floor and then on up.

Okay so that drives a lot of things.

At the end of the day, some of the science and technology principles, we need more energy that's cheaper, not less energy that's more expensive.

You know, these are basic things.

These are just principles.

And I don't think people understan that those are actually choices that we're making.

Politics.

Simple summary.

Governments aren't very good at picking winners, and they shouldn't, it's tempting.

And we see a lot of policy that says we like that thing.

You have to buy an electric car.

You can't bu an internal combustion engine.

Well markete that even even in markets loves they hate lack of choices being mandated.

Let the markets have options and decide.

So governments, you can go through all sorts of things.

Governments are done from corn ethanol to, you know, cash for clunkers.

It just the list is endles and they're not very good at it.

Why do we still have corn ethanol farmers?

I mean, that makes no sense at all.

Environmentally.

It doesn't make any sense, right?

It's not energy policy.

It's ag policy.

It's for farmers.

It it they have a crop to grow and a in a market to buy it.

And you're going to go you're going to g takes it away from the farmers.

You know good luck.

Why doesn't that policy make sense?

Well in this country we use the corn kernel.

Corn ethanol.

Ethanol is a fuel that you can bur and we mix it into our gasoline, usually about 15%.

There's E85, which is 85% ethanol.

And you can burn it and it burns.

It's it's not quite as efficient in a miles per gallon sense.

It's not quite as dense.

It's not quite as dense.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And so it's also not great for your engine.

Yes.

Unless your engine is that designed for that.

And they have it.

But here we're using the corn kernel and the rest of the crop is wasted.

So that's not that great.

Plus in this country we have to irrigate, fertilize, manage the soil rotations.

So you're, you're replacing food with fuel.

Every energy source is a resource, okay.

There's good oil in some places and not there's good hydro topography and rainfall.

Not in West Texas.

Okay.

Hydro ain't great out there.

There's good solar and there's good wind.

There's good biofuels.

So you go to Brazil, there's a lot of land, there's great rain.

The soils are there.

They grow these huge sugarcane crops like big, dense mass density because it's tall, and then they convert the whole crop.

All of it is called cellulosic.

So they're using the the roots in the stock and the leaves.

They use it all.

It's not the food.

And then they grind that down and create the gas and convert it into an ethanol fuel.

And it's a good it's not a bad thing.

They're making money down there in Brazil.

But there aren't many Brazils.

That's the point.

It's a resource.

So we've got to we got to get away from the thinking that this thing works great here.

Let's everybody do it.

I'm going to tell you a quick story.

So we were filming in Iceland, which has some of the best geothermal in the world, way back.

And we were meetin with the president of Iceland, which it turns out isn't a big deal.

We drove up to the house, the door open, and we walked in like, where's all the security?

And it was a white House.

So we sat down in his stud and we had a two camera shoot.

I was interviewing him and he was talking to me, and I won't tell you the whole story about crashes, but at one point he goes, Scott, everybody should move to Iceland.

They said, you know, the geothermal here is so wonderful and everybody should do it.

I said, well, we' all love to move to Iceland, but we all don't.

We don't live on the Mid-Atlantic rift, where the heat of the earth is right at the surface, and you poke a 2000ft hole outcome's steam, and the steam flows down the steam pipe to the power plant and turns a turbine.

There's nothing else happening.

It's incredible.

But that's very unique.

It's a great resource.

We can do that actually in a lot more places than we do.

We can that kind of heat and als technology that takes you down 30,000ft where there's a lot of heat of the earth and you crack the rock and up comes very hot water.

But you've got to maintain that thermal gradient for 5 or 6 miles of wellbore.

And when you look at Obama and Trump and Biden and now when certainly with Biden, with the, you know, the era, the infrastructure bill, and you have now, you had an administration that was very focused on climate change and all kinds of projects to address it.

Now you have an administration that is literally putting the brakes o all kinds of things and clearly, clearl doesn't have the same concerns.

What what are your concerns if any, in this this transition?

I'm been around a long time.

You're 65 years old and I've seen this pendulum swing, but not like this.

It seems like physics is being violated.

You know, the pendulum used to swing lik this and it just keeps gaining instead of slowing down, slowing down.

And it's crashing through the walls on either side.

And this creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the public.

So we end up dividing ourselve and picking sides, and instead of compromising and figuring out ways to work together, the votes are completely on Partizan lines.

Now, you go from one administration to the next, and industry is looking for certainty.

The public's looking for certainty.

Regulators are looking for some certainty and there's none there.

So I just worry, Erin, that, we've got to find a wa to become states people again, you know, to to know that you're not always right.

Compromises and bad.

It isn't going to be perfect.

But if you're in the federal government, you got elected to look at all the states, not just your own district or your own state.

You're there for our country.

We have state legislatures.

And so think bigger.

Think a littl about beyond your whatever base brought you there.

And let's start to address some of these problems in a, in a more in a civil way.

And there's some simple dialog, critical thinking.

And that's my biggest concern with both administrations.

You talked about the idea of kind of fundamental change in your own life and professionally.

Can you think of a time where, based on data, information, you got that that it resulted in a fundamental change in a position you too or a perspective that you had?

Oh, yeah.

The idea is that if you change your mind about something, if you change your position in today's political era.

Yeah, that's a bad thing.

Yeah.

You're a flip flopper, right?

But I mean but the whole point of science is that you take a positio based on the, the data you have.

But if you get new data that, that, that says, no, that's wrong.

No.

Yeah.

You learn science is a process.

It's not an answer.

Right.

There was a guy named Thomas Gold, and Thomas Gold thought that that gas came from deep within the earth and wasn't organic.

And we were all brilliant.

I mean, we knew that all natural gas and oil comes from organics locked up in shales, and it's cooked off and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And coming from the deep earth, I mean, how stupid is that?

What antibiotic?

How is that going to happen?

Well, all of a sudden there' been some pretty cool work done and a brilliant man that I'm very, admire a lot.

Jesse Bell started something called a deep carbon observatory.

And guess what?

There's pretty good evidence there's natural ga coming from non-organic sources.

Okay, another one.

I'm in grad school, and th Alvarez's father and son come.

This is the early 80s to talk to us at the University of Michigan to tell us about this meteo that killed all the dinosaurs.

Right?

And we're like, right.

Right.

A meteor that killed all the dinosaurs.

We've had shirts made with dinosaur looking at this incoming meteor and a little bubble going, oh shit, we are so smart.

It turns out Chicxulub impact crater, massive iridium anomaly around the world triggered a bunch of things for several years and decades and caused the end of the Mesozoic, basically, you know, and.

Okay, not that smart.

I grew up not learning about plate tectonics.

We learned about gas mileage, gas inclines and US inclines.

Nothing was moving and then continental drift and then plate tectonic and the whole engine of how the and it's so logical.

Now, this wasn't that long ago.

We're not that smart.

Yeah.

Harry Hess and all right.

We used to call shale accidentally in the all oil and gas was in these conventional reservoirs, so-called, you know, nice permeability, porosity in the shale was something source rock that trapped.

And if you caught that, you get fired.

Now we're producing oil and gas out of shit.

Now.

Now, if you find shale you're a winner.

You're winner.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, look, the list is rock.

If you're not evolving in you thinking, you're not learning.

I think that's one of the mos important things that we can do.

It's just, you know, I think one of the challenges that people I don't think people are taught science in schools are taught how science works.

Yeah.

And so it's it's instead of saying, hey be open to change in your mind.

Right?

All of us, especially in the politica realm, are just we're locked in and it's so difficult, yes, for us to change your mind.

It's funny.

I have a picture.

I showed my dogs.

There's these guys.

They're parked next to a building in a van, and they're putting in posts to keep people from parking next to this building.

But the van is inside the post, and I just laugh when I say they forgot where they.

And I said, those are policy posts.

And you put in these policy posts and we never take them out.

Look, you tried a policy.

It didn't work out.

Try a new policy.

You got to be allowed as a policymaker, freedom to do some things and then change.

You're going to learn as you go, improve it, maybe modify it, but don't be stuck with it forever.

This is crazy.

You think we have all the answers in one point, and we're seeing a lot of policy, implementation and rapid changes in this administration.

So we'll see.

A lot of posts are being yanked out.

Yeah.

We'll see what happens.

Scott, thanks so much.

It's been fun.

All right.

That was geoscientist Scott Tinker.

That was part one of our special two part series.

So make sure you watch part two with Scott.