[0:00] You know I'm really puzzled by something.
[0:02] It's 2026, believe it or not,
[0:05] and even though we live in this modern digital world
[0:08] where we can ask our smart assistants to close the blinds for us,
[0:12] we're still excited about finding oil.
[0:16] That feels weird to me.
[0:18] Petroleum is a 19th century technology, and here in the 21st century,
[0:23] very few of the things we use are powered by petroleum products.
[0:27] So why are we still so obsessed with finding more oil?
[0:32] Well, there's a very simple reason.
[0:34] It just has to do with how oil as a technology works.
[0:39] Once we find new crude oil deposits and take some out of the ground,
[0:43] we then refine that oil into many useful products and things.
[0:47] However, by far the greatest portion of it is used to produce gasoline and diesel fuel,
[0:52] which power some of the machines we rely on.
[0:55] Now, those machines are great and have unlocked plenty of wonderful new possibilities for us,
[1:00] even whole new kinds of economies.
[1:03] While they've also come with some downsides that concern me
and I think deserve more weight in our public conversations,
[1:10] you're not going to hear me tell you to stop using your machines.
[1:13] That is not at all what this video is about.
[1:16] But petroleum has an unavoidable issue, which is easy to ignore
[1:20] but I don't think you should.
[1:23] It's disposable energy.
[1:26] In order for our machines to do things for us
like take us to work or get the kids to school,
[1:31] they burn the fuels which power them.
[1:34] That makes those fuels single use:
[1:37] one and done.
[1:39] So to keep using those machines, which most of us would like to do,
[1:43] we have no choice but to keep finding more oil to make more fuel.
[1:49] Many of us have come to the conclusion that this is a serious problem for a long list of reasons.
[1:55] For one thing, it makes our standard of living dependent 
on an extremely intensive resource extraction process which,
[2:02] since what that process yields will be burned
shortly after it's created,
[2:06] appears to have no end in sight.
[2:09] Additionally, because oil deposits inevitably run dry,
[2:13] we often rely on extraction efforts happening in other countries,
[2:16] which may or may not be friendly.
[2:19] And while oil is relatively easy to store,
[2:22] meaning we can build reserves of oil,
[2:24] we use it a lot faster than you may realize.
[2:27] Our 714 million barrel strategic oil reserve sounds huge,
[2:32] but it only holds enough to sustain slightly more than a month of our current use.
[2:38] That's not a very long time.
[2:40] And even when we know we have a healthy and secure supply of oil,
[2:45] that oil costs a lot of money to find, extract and refine into the fuels we buy to power our machines.
[2:52] That results in those fuels being fairly expensive to purchase as a consumer,
[2:57] And that results in a high and ongoing operating cost for any machines which use them.
[3:02] And that cost can change quite dramatically based on supply and demand.
[3:07] What's worse, since nearly every step in our economy
[3:10] currently involves something going on a truck which burns diesel fuel,
[3:14] spikes in oil prices make their way into virtually everything we buy.
[3:20] For those struggling to make ends meet,
[3:22] that can be the difference between well-fed and not, even if they don't drive a car.
[3:27] I truly believe that an honest assessment of the 
basic realities of using petroleum as a source of energy
[3:34] suggests that our situation is actually quite precarious.
[3:39] And if nothing else, it can really hurt the wallet sometimes.
[3:42] But on that note, there's good news.
[3:45] We've developed an enormous variety of electric machines which don't use fuels to function at all.
[3:52] For instance, the screen you're looking at right now, 
and in fact nearly everything in your home.
[3:58] While today we still burn fuels to generate electricity,
[4:02] the even better news is that we don't have to do that anymore.
[4:06] We know how to build devices which generate electricity from nothing but sunlight,
[4:11] and though it has escaped the notice of many politicians,
[4:15] we also know how to build cost effective, rechargeable, 
and recyclable batteries which can be charged from the sun
[4:22] to store that energy for use whenever you'd like.
[4:26] Even at night when the sun isn't shining.
[4:29] The bad news?
[4:31] There are a whole lot of people spending money and time trying to confuse everyone
[4:36] and convince us that everything I just said is a pie in the sky idea, which can never, ever work.
[4:42] But I have never believed those people.
[4:45] Why?
[4:46] Simple.
[4:47] I'm a midwesterner.
[4:49] Most of us that were born and raised here
[4:52] grew up learning the virtue of long term thinking -
[4:55] something that seems to be less and less popular these days.
[4:59] My upbringing taught me to value things like durability and resilience,
[5:03] and to consider those factors when making important life decisions.
[5:07] Midwesterners are also big believers in getting the 
most value out of what we spend our money and time on.
[5:14] And we have learned that in many cases,
[5:16] the best value comes from spending more money 
upfront on things which let you spend less money later.
[5:24] That old fashioned Midwestern wisdom of frugality
[5:27] is what makes me so confident that we should be installing much more renewable energy capacity and quickly.
[5:34] I didn't need scientific studies or lectures on climate change to form that opinion:
[5:39] I just know a good deal when I see one!
[5:42] The energy we capture from renewable sources 
like solar and wind power doesn't cost anything.
[5:48] And while the batteries we will use to support those sources are expensive to purchase,
[5:54] batteries can be used many, many more times than a gallon of gasoline can.
[5:59] Today's battery chemistries are pushing 
5,000 charge cycles before they wear out,
[6:05] meaning they'll last well over a decade before they need to be recycled.
[6:09] And the future of batteries looks even brighter than that,
[6:12] with different chemistries extending lifespans, lowering costs,
and reducing the use of harmful or hard to find materials
[6:19] in the construction of battery cells.
[6:22] These factors combined tell a clear story to me
[6:25] which says renewable energy paired with long lasting 
and reusable energy storage is the best deal out there,
[6:32] and we'd be foolish to pass it up!
[6:35] I would even go so far as to say that at this point,
[6:38] anyone who says otherwise is either lying to you to protect their own interests,
[6:44] or simply hasn't been paying attention to what things look like today.
[6:48] In 2026, the levelized cost of solar and storage, 
which includes the costs of purchasing both the panels and the batteries,
[6:57] is now lower than any other kind of energy production we know of.
[7:02] That seemed like the inevitable outcome to me for years because the sun is free.
[7:07] But for a long time, solar panels were very expensive.
[7:11] Today, solar panels and batteries are now cheap enough to make that outcome real.
[7:16] Now!
[7:17] And solar power is just one source of renewable energy.
[7:21] I believe that a renewable energy future should excite you
[7:24] because it allows us to harvest energy, not extract it.
[7:29] And once you really interrogate that difference, 
the noise goes away and the puzzle solves itself.
[7:35] Before I really get started —
[7:37] and yes, this video was quite long, isn't it?
[7:39] — I have to make a few things clear.
[7:41] First, this video has two very distinct audiences in mind,
[7:45] and which one of those two I'm speaking to may not be entirely clear at any given moment.
[7:50] I'm telling you this because if you think you know 
where I'm going with something, you might be surprised.
[7:57] For example, this video is not trying to sell you 
anything like solar panels or home energy storage.
[8:04] Whenever I'm talking about renewable energy, people seem to think that's where I'm leading.
[8:09] But as a matter of fact, I do not have solar panels on my roof.
[8:13] And for various reasons, I personally don't even want to add them.
[8:18] I don't think any of us should have to put more thought into how we use electricity than we do right now.
[8:23] But I do think we should be moving as much of our energy demand to the electric grid as we can,
[8:29] and we should be doing that more and faster.
[8:32] I hope by the end you'll understand why I feel that way.
[8:35] And again, it might not be what you think.
[8:38] Second, there are going to be lots of comments down below
[8:41] which say things like “but what about the batteries?”
[8:44] and a lot of them will be coming from a place of good faith.
[8:48] But lots of people ask that question in bad faith.
[8:52] And I would like you to know that anyone leaving those sorts of comments here
[8:56] probably didn't watch this video.
[8:59] “What about the batteries?”  is one of the central questions I intend to address.
[9:03] There's a lot of people being told to worry about things, which I, for one,
[9:08] don't think you should be worrying much about,
[9:10] and I promise that I'll explain why I feel that way when we get there.
[9:14] And thirdly, I'm going to be talking a lot about cars
[9:18] since many people have a deep connection to them and they are the biggest reason we use so much oil.
[9:23] And well, since electric cars now exist in large numbers,
[9:28] we can easily compare what a battery powered world 
looks like to a petroleum powered one, both in functionality and cost.
[9:35] Cars are just kind of the perfect tool to understand this at this moment, at least in my view.
[9:42] But the logic of this video can,
[9:44] and I think should be applied to literally anything which burns any kind of fossil fuel.
[9:50] For instance, I still heat my home with natural gas,
[9:53] and natural gas has the exact same problems as oil.
[9:57] Since my furnace sets it on fire,
[9:59] It's a disposable, costly single use fuel we have to keep 
digging out of the ground if I want to keep using the furnace.
[10:07] It just happens to be delivered to my home through a metered pipe
[10:10] rather than sold at fueling stations in a pay-as-you go scheme.
[10:14] But with those things out of the way, let's get back to oil.
[10:18] We use crude oil for lots of things,
[10:20] but the most significant thing we use it for in the US 
is for producing refined gasoline for motor cars.
[10:26] So let's talk about the pinnacle of motor cars,
[10:29] This 2010 Nissan Cube.
[10:32] - Hey isn’t that the car you bought to make videos on engine management technology?
[10:36] - Yes.
[10:38] - When is that happening?
[10:40] We’re getting there.
[10:41] - Oh, carry on then.
[10:45] Now if you were paying close attention to the intro, this section might feel a bit repetitive.
[10:49] And I apologize if it does.
[10:51] But there are two core facts about using this car
which I'd really like you to think deeply about and confront.
[10:58] The first fact is that as this car does its job of providing transportation,
[11:03] it burns the gasoline that's inside its fuel tank.
[11:06] This means you constantly have to replace that fuel if you want to keep driving the car.
[11:12] That's easy enough to do.
[11:13] But the second core fact about using this car is that it 
costs you money every time you replace that fuel.
[11:20] I know you already know both of those facts,
[11:23] but the reason I said I'd like you to confront them
[11:25] is because that's just a normal reality to lots of people.
[11:29] And it's so normal that we do a really bad job
[11:33] keeping those ongoing costs in mind when we make comparisons to new technologies.
[11:38] For example, have you ever thought about
[11:40] just how much gasoline a car like this will burn over its life?
[11:45] This little fella has traveled nearly 188,000 miles since it was built.
[11:49] Nissan Cubes with a manual transmission like this one
[11:52] have an EPA fuel economy rating that comes in at 25 city, 30 highway.
[11:57] And if we assume that all of those miles were highway miles,
[12:01] which I'm sure isn't true, but we'll give this fella all the benefits of doubt we can,
[12:05] then this car burned through a gallon of gas every 30 miles it went down the road.
[12:10] And so, 188,000 miles divided by 30 miles per gallon tells us that so far,
[12:16] this car has burned through about 6,250 gallons of gasoline.
[12:22] Here's a fun fact that's more than half of one of these.
[12:26] Yeah, those big trucks that actually deliver gasoline to fueling stations?
[12:30] The largest ones hold 11,600 gallons.
[12:33] So this one little car, assuming all highway miles, I remind you,
[12:38] has burned through about 54% of what the biggest tanker trucks can hold.
[12:44] And if you're thinking “buying half a tanker truck of gas sounds expensive,” you'd be right.
[12:50] Let's say those 6,250 gallons were burned evenly over the past 15 years spanning 2011 and 2025.
[12:58] Using the average historical monthly prices in the U.S. during that time
[13:02] tells us that it costs something like $19,500 
to purchase all the gasoline this car has used.
[13:10] That's more than the car cost when it was new!
[13:13] Spending nearly 20 grand on gasoline certainly hurts the wallet,
[13:17] but the reason drivers of this car had to spend that much 
comes back to one of those really core facts I've been asking you to confront:
[13:25] You can only use a gallon of gasoline once.
[13:30] Every 30 miles you go in this car means you have to buy another gallon of gas,
[13:36] and this will never, ever change.
[13:39] That fact is one of the reasons we started to look into the viability of electric cars.
[13:45] Now, I won't bother you with a history lesson here,
[13:48] so we'll just jump ahead to 2022, which is when I bought this one.
[13:52] This is a Hyundai Ioniq 5,
[13:54] and I've had a... mostly fantastic time with the car.
[13:59] Hyundai still doesn't seem to know what exactly is going on with the whole ICCU failure thing, which is very reassuring.
[14:05] And oh boy, they really need to release a software update
[14:08] which gives us a button to turn on battery preconditioning manually
[14:11] because until they do doing long distance drives in the winter
[14:15] will get increasingly annoying with its terrible navigation system.
[14:19] I'm not salty, it is.
[14:21] But aside from the ICCU and my bugbears,
[14:25] I've had four trouble free years with this car.
[14:28] In the time I've had it, it's gone nearly 50,000 miles
[14:31] and it hasn't burned a single drop of gasoline.
[14:35] It can't - ain’t got an engine.
[14:37] “Ahhaaa!” the comments erupt,
[14:40] “but you had to plug it into the power grid 
to charge it, and the power grid still burns stuff.”
[14:46] Now, folks, that's what we call a gotcha.
[14:49] People say that in conversation to undermine the point of 
electric cars and make their buyers feel foolish.
[14:55] However, something that's pretty nifty about electric cars
[14:59] is that they can be charged from any source of energy that generates electricity.
[15:04] That could be nuclear power,
[15:05] it could be hydroelectric power,
[15:07] or it could be all that natural gas we have here in the US.
[15:12] Hydraulic fracturing has freed up so much gas that we are now a net exporter.
[15:17] And with abundant cheap gas, some 40% of our 
electricity generation these days comes from gas fired power plants.
[15:25] This car, since it's electric, can make use of that abundant and cheap resource.
[15:31] If nothing else, it's using fuel we already have and control,
[15:35] which has national security benefits.
[15:37] But what excites me the most is that this car can also be charged with these.
[15:44] This is a photovoltaic solar panel.
[15:46] You simply point it at the sun and then electricity 
comes out of these two wires for the low, low cost of free.
[15:54] Now many people quite understandably feel as if that's simply too good to be true
[15:59] and there's gotta be a catch.
[16:01] Of course, the biggest catch is that the sun doesn't shine at night.
[16:04] But you know, this electric car has headlights and taillights
[16:08] because, through the power of batteries, you can drive it at night.
[16:12] So I'm reasonably sure that's something we can figure out.
[16:16] But we'll be talking about batteries and the materials they're made from later on in this video.
[16:21] Ah materials.
[16:23] In many ways,
[16:23] that's what this video is really trying to get you to think about.
[16:27] And they're responsible for the second catch of solar energy.
[16:30] But no, not what those materials are.
[16:34] We'll get there.
[16:35] Instead, I mean simply that I can't really say this 
panel generates electricity for the low, low price of free
[16:42] because the panel itself wasn't free.
[16:44] It's made of raw materials, which cost the manufacturer money to obtain.
[16:48] And of course, the manufacturer wanted to be paid for their work
[16:51] turning those materials into a functional product.
[16:54] And so did everyone else at every step of the
[16:56] “turn raw materials into a product and get it to 
Harbor Freight so some weird YouTuber guy can buy it”
[17:01] process.
[17:02] That meant this solar panel cost a whole lot more than a gallon of gas.
[17:07] But unlike a gallon of gas,
[17:09] using this thing doesn't require destroying it.
[17:13] The useful life of gasoline is exactly once,
[17:17] but the useful life of a solar panel is on the order of decades.
[17:21] That is how solar energy became the least expensive form of electricity.
[17:26] Sure, the panels may be expensive to purchase,
[17:29] but we are using materials to build a durable thing.
[17:33] An object with no moving parts,
[17:35] and that which harvests energy from the sun - which is free! -
[17:39] and will do so for decades.
[17:42] When you average the cost of purchasing solar panels
[17:44] over the many thousands of days
they will produce a free energy harvest,
[17:49] the apparently high upfront cost becomes pennies a day per panel.
[17:54] Now, as I've already said, I don't have any interest in putting these things on my rooftop.
[18:00] Our electricity here in Illinois is already pretty cheap,
[18:03] and I'm not looking to cut the cost of charging my car.
[18:07] With a bit of optimization,
[18:09] which really means by charging my car exclusively at night when the grid is quiet,
[18:14] today already it only costs about one third as much to drive my car
[18:19] as it does to buy gas for a car like the Cube.
[18:22] But thought experiments are pretty fun.
[18:24] So let's say for the moment, I was interested in installing a photovoltaic array on my roof
[18:29] to make my own energy for my own car.
[18:32] What would those costs look like?
[18:35] Well, in case you haven't noticed,
[18:37] the cost of manufacturing solar panels has been dropping like a rock.
[18:41] How do you think Harbor Freight gets their hands on them?
[18:44] It's pretty wild.
[18:46] Have you ever thought about how weirdly cheap big TVs are these days?
[18:50] A very similar thing has been happening in the land of photovoltaics,
[18:54] and new solar panels are miraculously cheap.
[18:58] Let's say that instead of spending $19,500 on gasoline for this weird little car,
[19:05] I spent that amount of money on solar panels.
[19:08] How many could I buy these days?
[19:10] Well, if I Google “solar panel wholesale”
[19:13] and click on various solar panel wholesaler websites,
[19:17] it's looking like I can buy a few pallets of ‘em!
[19:20] This website sells pallets with 32 of these 500 watt panels for $5,600.
[19:26] That's $175 per panel, and they have a 25 year warranty.
[19:31] That price means the $19,500 in this car's total fuel cost
[19:36] could today buy 111 of those panels:
[19:40] way more than I could possibly fit on my rooftop,
[19:43] and enough to generate a theoretical 55,000W of power.
[19:47] That many solar panels, incidentally, represents about 6 or 7 complete
[19:52] rooftop solar installations for an average single family home.
[19:56] Think about that.
[19:57] The same $19,500 in capital which got spent on gasoline,
[20:02] which this one small car burned through and will never be seen again
[20:06] could today purchase all the solar panels necessary to completely power a half dozen homes for decades.
[20:16] I don't know, the math doesn't seem to be mathing very well for gasoline!
[20:19] But let's compare apples to apples here.
[20:22] How many of those 500 watt panels would someone like me, who lives in Chicagoland
[20:26] and drives about 13,000 miles each year, need on their rooftop (in Chicagoland)
[20:31] to charge a Hyundai Ioniq 5 in the middle of December?
[20:36] Twelve.
[20:38] I'll need 12 of those panels.
[20:41] Which means if I spend some $2,100 on solar panels today,
[20:45] then I will have completely taken care of my car's lifetime energy costs!
[20:50] That right there, folks, is why I'm so confident renewable energy is the future.
[20:57] If I were to spend just a little bit more than I did on my last TV upgrade,
[21:02] I will have pre-purchased all of the fuel this car will ever need.
[21:08] Yes, of course, I'm skipping a whole bunch of details,
[21:11] like the labor to install those panels
[21:13] and the racking and the wires and stuff, but I'm also skipping
[21:17] the fact that once we're out of the winter months,
[21:20] those 12 panels will produce way more electricity than my car
[21:23] needs, and in fact, could power my entire home on most days.
[21:28] The essential and core fact to confront here,
[21:31] and this is a fact that often gets overlooked in debates,
[21:34] is that renewable energy capacity is not disposable!
[21:39] It is, in fact durable.
[21:41] And that makes it functionally a one time investment.
[21:45] You only have to buy and install these things once,
[21:48] and then they simply sit there generating free electricity for years to come.
[21:52] All they might need after installation is a bit of cleaning every once in a while.
[21:58] That stands in stark contrast to fossil fuels, which you have to keep buying forever.
[22:04] So going back to the example of the Cube and my Hyundai,
[22:08] the choice becomes do you spend $1,300 on fuel every single year,
[22:13] or do you spend an extra 800 bucks this year 
to eliminate your fuel costs for a quarter of a century?
[22:21] Choice seems pretty clear to me!
[22:23] So now you might be wondering why I said I don't want solar panels on my own personal roof.
[22:29] Well, the quickest way to answer that is to go on a field trip.
[22:33] Behind me is a 27 megawatt solar farm
[22:36] that was built here in the town of DePue, Illinois.
[22:40] Now, there's a couple notable things about that.
[22:42] First, Illinois is not exactly the solar power capital of the country.
[22:47] It's cloudy as I'm filming this, and we're kind of high up in the latitudes.
[22:51] And yet...
[22:53] there's a 27 megawatt solar farm that got built in DePue, Illinois!
[22:58] Why did that happen?
[23:00] Well, because people who like to make money
[23:03] understand the difference between CapEx and OpEx.
[23:07] And so do you, even if you don't know what those terms mean.
[23:10] I'll explain them shortly.
[23:11] But first, do you know anyone with a backup generator?
[23:16] That question might sound out of left field,
[23:18] but I promise you it's a perfect way to understand this.
[23:21] Some people live where the electricity grid
[23:23] isn't as reliable as they'd like it to be.
[23:26] Everyone hates power outages because electricity is extremely important to our lives at this point.
[23:31] And if grid reliability is poor enough where someone lives,
[23:35] they might elect to install a large backup generator powered by natural gas,
[23:40] which will automatically kick on and generate electricity during a power outage.
[23:45] When someone decides to spend their money that way,
[23:47] that's CapEx or capital expenditure.
[23:51] They are using their capital to buy a durable thing which will last them many years,
[23:56] and it becomes an investment in the future.
[23:59] Some folks install generators which are large enough to power their entire home,
[24:03] meaning power outages are nothing but an inconvenient blip.
[24:08] And that leads to what I think is an interesting and revealing question to ponder.
[24:14] If those people own a machine which can power everything in their home by itself,
[24:20] why don't they get their money's worth out of it and just use that machine all the time?
[24:24] Why stay connected to the power grid at all?
[24:27] Well, that's because that machine needs fuel to generate electricity.
[24:32] And that fuel costs money, which makes it part of OpEx,
[24:36] which is short for operating expenditure.
[24:39] The gas company will charge you for the gas that generator uses.
[24:42] And those fuel costs mean that using a backup generator
[24:46] is much more expensive than pulling energy directly from the power grid.
[24:51] Everyone with a backup generator knows this,
[24:54] and that's why it's a backup
and not their primary source of electricity.
[24:58] It is simply too expensive to use that machine all the time.
[25:03] The great big machines on the power grid,
[25:06] even when they're burning the same natural gas as a backup generator,
[25:10] can capture much more of the energy contained in the fuel they burn and turn it into electricity
[25:16] than the small engine inside a Generac can.
[25:20] That efficiency of scale is what makes generating electricity cheaper for grid scale power stations.
[25:26] And the fact that the wires which connect your house to the grid 
are already there and were paid for perhaps decades ago
[25:34] explains why distributing that energy through the power grid is very efficient,
[25:39] both economically and from an energy perspective.
[25:42] And what's really important to remember is that grid power is cheaper
[25:47] despite the fact that the people who operate natural gas plants are making a healthy profit.
[25:53] They're not just running a power plant for the fun of it,
[25:55] they're in business!
[25:57] But the smarter business critters out there know that even with the benefits of scale,
[26:02] a natural gas plant still has a very high OpEx.
[26:07] Each unit of electricity a gas plant generates 
requires burning expensive fuel, which eats into profits.
[26:15] So for those who have an eye on making money,
[26:18] when solar farms pop up and demonstrate that 
we can produce electricity with no input costs at all,
[26:26] well, gas doesn't look so great anymore.
[26:29] See, all a solar farm operator needs to do is sell their electricity for slightly less 
than it costs a competing natural gas plant to make it.
[26:37] And that's what they'll do.
[26:40] That's good for consumers because that makes electricity cheaper to use.
[26:43] But because the solar farm has next to zero OpEx,
[26:48] it still generates a healthy profit, even though it's cheaper.
[26:52] And savvy business people who think long term will use those profits to build more solar farms.
[26:59] The basic realities of economics mean that 
photovoltaics are, at this point, frankly, unstoppable.
[27:07] The sun doesn't cost any money to use, which means 
all of the energy a solar panel produces is free.
[27:14] And that means whatever price you can sell that energy for on the power grid energy market
[27:19] is almost purely profit once the panels have been paid off.
[27:23] Best of all, grid scale energy storage in the form of 
electrochemical batteries has gotten cheap enough
[27:29] that it is now possible — today — to build a solar farm 
with batteries that can produce energy 24/7,
[27:36] and all the while doing that for a lower cost than any other source of electricity.
[27:41] And since both photovoltaic panels and batteries are manufactured in factories
[27:46] which can leverage economies of scale, 
they're just going to keep getting cheaper to manufacture.
[27:52] The economics are already in favor of solar and storage,
[27:56] but they're going to keep looking better and better every year.
[28:00] Solar energy has put us on the cusp of a positive feedback loop,
[28:04] yet relatively few people seem to have realized this.
[28:07] And that's despite the fact that -
[28:09] there's another one not even five miles up the road here in Spring Valley, Illinois.
[28:15] Solar farms are starting to pop up everywhere, even in states like Illinois,
[28:19] because the business case simply makes so much sense.
[28:23] It's farming a crop, just like we do with land today.
[28:26] But that crop gets harvested every single day rather than once a year,
[28:31] and virtually no work is involved in harvesting that crop.
[28:35] Plus, the crop doesn't need inputs in the form of water or fertilizer or pesticide or seed.
[28:41] You just plop some panels on some land,
[28:44] angle them to get the most energy out of the sun as you can,
[28:46] and let the money roll in.
[28:49] This is a capitalist’s wet dream!
[28:52] People are always talking about passive income, as if that's a panacea.
[28:56] Well, there it is!
[28:57] You can become a farmer, and all you'll have to do
[29:00] is mow the grass between the panels a few times a year.
[29:03] The fact that there's this amazing business opportunity out there is why solar farms are happening in the first place.
[29:10] And they're leveraging the power grid we already have
which can move energy from one place to another.
[29:17] And that's why I'm not that interested in putting panels on my roof.
[29:21] Yes, there are good arguments for distributing energy resources,
[29:25] and we have a real problem right now with getting new transmission lines permitted.
[29:30] There are a ton of solar power projects which are already funded,
[29:35] but aren't happening because FERC can't get their act together
[29:38] and they're stuck in permitting hell.
[29:41] NIMBYs aren't helping either.
[29:43] Pushing individuals to install solar on their rooftop is one way to bypass some of these issues,
[29:49] and it does have some advantages,
[29:51] but many people don't have the agency to install solar on their roof,
[29:56] even if they wanted to and could afford it.
[29:58] Renters can't do that even if they're renting a house.
[30:02] And what's worse, apartment buildings don't have enough roof space to be self-sufficient.
[30:07] Cities will always be relying on solar farms.
[30:11] There are many more reasons I'm not a big fan of pushing people 
towards buying their own panels and batteries
[30:15] which I'll spare you for time.
[30:17] Bottom line, I will gladly pay these small businesses 
which are daring to build the future through my power bills,
[30:24] and think that's a far more efficient use of my money.
[30:27] But speaking of efficient uses of things,
[30:29] let's address some of the concerns I know many of you out there have about solar energy.
[30:34] Like land use.
[30:36] Solar farms do indeed require a lot of space.
[30:40] That 27 megawatt solar farm in DePue is on something like a 120 acre site.
[30:47] I used an online tool and drew a circle around the access road to come up with that figure,
[30:51] so I can't guarantee it's accurate,
but that's what I'm going to roll with.
[30:56] Now, 27 MW is a tremendous amount of power,
[31:00] but in the context of the power grid, it's pretty piddly.
[31:04] This is the three phase line that connects the solar farm to the substation in DePue,
[31:09] And it's, uh...
[31:11] well it ain't exactly a big transmission line now, is it?
[31:14] So, yeah, solar energy will use lots of land.
[31:18] However, since I'm from Illinois, I think I'm qualified to explain why
[31:23] you probably don't need to worry too much about land use.
[31:27] That is a corn field.
[31:30] It doesn't look like much right now because it's the middle of January.
[31:33] But corn used to be growing there and it was harvested in the fall.
[31:37] Now there's three very notable things about this reality:
[31:41] First of all, this land should not look like this.
[31:44] This is Illinois, where the Prairie State,
[31:46] the natural environment, is prairie.
[31:48] And now there's virtually none of that left because it has all been turned into farms.
[31:54] Secondly, we only get one harvest per year out of this land.
[31:59] We spend all the summer growing the corn.
[32:02] And then in the fall, it's harvested just once.
[32:05] If this was a solar farm, it could have a harvest every single day.
[32:09] And third, if you're thinking, “well, what if we stop growing corn there?
[32:13] We can't eat anymore!’
[32:15] Well, this corn is not the corn that you eat.
[32:18] Some of it does end up in lots of different food products,
[32:21] but a large portion of this corn gets used...
[32:24] for that.
[32:26] Yeah, those messages on gas pumps which say, may contain up to 10% ethanol?
[32:31] That came from corn.
[32:33] We have been using an astonishing amount of our rich agricultural land
[32:38] to grow corn to feed to cars.
[32:41] Maybe you remember the days of FlexFuel vehicles and E85 being relevant.
[32:46] Well, back in 2005, President George W Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005,
[32:52] and in 2007, he signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
[32:58] Those acts mandated a specific amount of ethanol in gallons
[33:02] which needs to be produced so it can be mixed with gasoline.
[33:06] The idea, as you might have gleaned from the independence and security part,
[33:10] was to start making our own energy for cars
[33:13] so that we'd be less dependent on foreign oil,
[33:16] a policy I wholeheartedly support!
[33:20] The only trouble is that doing it with corn ethanol is tremendously stupid.
[33:25] First of all, it's important to acknowledge that we only get one corn harvest per year.
[33:30] Now, an acre of corn field might be able to produce 
550 gallons of corn ethanol when all is said and done.
[33:37] I'd like to note that it takes an awful lot of chemistry and energy to turn corn into ethanol,
[33:43] but we'll just ignore that and pretend it's easy and free.
[33:46] So let's go back to that solar farm.
[33:49] If this were a 120 acre corn field,
[33:52] then at the end of the year we can get maybe 66,000 gallons of ethanol out of it.
[33:58] That's about five tanker trucks worth.
[34:01] Now, if you didn't already know, this ethanol is less energy dense than gasoline.
[34:05] So E85 vehicles which run on E85 have a really poor fuel economy 
in miles per gallon: it's about a 40% penalty.
[34:15] But I'll be generous.
[34:16] Let's say those 66,000 gallons of corn ethanol all make it into cars
[34:21] that can go 30 miles on a gallon of E85.
[34:24] How far can they drive?
[34:26] Well, 66,000 gallons times 30
[34:29] tells us that they can go just shy of 2 million miles.
[34:33] That might seem like a lot,
[34:35] but now let's consider how many miles electric cars
[34:38] that are being charged from the 27MW of solar panels 
on a 120 acre plot of land can drive every year.
[34:45] The operator of that solar farm's website claims it generates 
about 37,000 megawatt hours of energy every year.
[34:53] Well, the website says “in year one,” so it's possible
[34:56] it wasn't yet complete when they came to that figure.
[34:58] But I'm just going to roll with it.
[35:01] Electric cars generally get something like 3 or 4 miles per kilowatt hour.
[35:06] But let's go ahead and make the picture worse for them and say they can only manage two,
[35:11] which is what my car can get down to in extreme cold.
[35:14] Well, 37,000 megawatt hours is 37,000,000 kilowatt hours.
[35:20] So every year these panels can push electric cars at least 74 million miles.
[35:28] That's 2 million miles of driving each year from corn, 
versus 74 million miles of driving from solar panels.
[35:38] So do you really think we should still be growing corn to feed to cars?
[35:44] Here's the best part, though.
[35:46] Let's say you decided the answer is no
[35:48] and we stopped growing corn to feed to cars.
[35:52] How many acres of cornfields would that free up?
[35:55] Well, this website I found says we've got 96 million acres of land growing corn in this country.
[36:02] And depending on how you count, between 25 and 40% of all that acreage is devoted to ethanol.
[36:11] So let's just say we took a slightly fudged quarter of that land, 25 million acres,
[36:17] and covered it all in solar panels.
[36:19] How much energy would that harvest?
[36:22] Well, that's going to depend on where the panels are.
[36:25] And since we're going to do a thought experiment here where we put the panels in the corn belt,
[36:29] let's just keep using the numbers from the solar farm in DePue.
[36:33] Up here in Illinois, we can get 37,000 megawatt hours per year out of 120 acres.
[36:40] So let's see 25 million divided by 120 and then multiply by 37,000....
[36:47] That is 7,708,333,000 megawatt hours of energy.
[36:55] And why is that the best part?
[36:58] Because that's more energy than the entire U.S. electricity grid produces right now.
[37:03] And by a lot.
[37:05] In 2023, it all added up to 4.178 billion megawatt hours.
[37:11] So if all we did was decide to stop growing corn to turn into ethanol,
[37:17] and we used only that land for generating only solar power,
[37:21] we'd be able to generate 84% more electricity on an annual basis
[37:26] than we do today from all of our energy sources.
[37:30] I hope that helps you understand why I'm not that worried 
about the land solar panels will take up.
[37:37] We've got a whole lot of it,
[37:39] and we're not exactly using it responsibly at the moment, anyway.
[37:43] And by the way, I used real world numbers
[37:45] from a real world solar installation to perform this thought experiment
[37:49] in the hopes that that would be more convincing.
[37:51] But just in case you doubt my numbers, which I understand
[37:54] because I used the numbers from the company's website,
[37:57] there have been plenty of studies which demonstrate this,
[38:00] and I'll link them below.
[38:02] What's most notable is that up here in the Corn Belt,
[38:05] we actually have a pretty bad capacity factor.
[38:09] Solar panels would be much more productive
[38:11] if they were somewhere farther south and sunnier.
[38:14] But even with our mediocre latitude and weather patterns,
[38:18] all the land we need to generate electricity
[38:21] with solar power alone can be freed up
[38:24] if we just stop growing corn to feed to cars.
[38:29] So far in this video I've been talking a lot about solar energy.
[38:32] But you know I also like those things.
[38:35] Yeah.
Let's talk about wind turbines for a second.
[38:38] Something interesting you can do with these is put them in fields alongside crops
[38:42] and farm the wind and some corn at the same time.
[38:46] You can actually also do that with solar panels,
[38:48] it's called agrivoltaics and it's a really exciting area of research.
[38:53] But we'll set that aside.
[38:54] This video is already quite long.
[38:56] Now some people look at a wind turbine
[38:59] and see a pointless boondoggle which clutters the landscape.
[39:02] But I, on the other hand, see a magnificent machine
[39:05] which turns wind into gasoline.
[39:09] Here's a fun thought experiment:
[39:10] Each one of these wind turbines can generate two megawatts of power.
[39:15] And on a windy day, like today,
that's probably what they're putting out.
[39:19] If this car could actually handle that much power,
[39:22] how long do you think it would take one of those wind turbines —
[39:25] just one! — to charge this car's battery?
[39:28] The answer is two and a half minutes.
[39:31] Seriously, not even 2.5 minutes.
[39:33] And if we consider that this car has a driving range of about 240 miles,
[39:38] and then equate that to a gasoline powered car that gets 40 miles per gallon,
[39:42] then you can very much imagine these machines as wind powered oil derricks
[39:47] that generate about three gallons of refined gasoline every single minute.
[39:53] If you're having a hard time imagining what that looks like,
[39:56] most showerheads run at something like two gallons per minute.
[40:00] So imagine you had a shower running all the time 
that was spitting out gasoline which you could bottle and sell.
[40:07] And that's what just one of those wind turbines does.
[40:11] And how much does the wind cost?
[40:14] Slightly more than the sun.
[40:15] But it's still free.
[40:17] Wind power is obviously quite useful.
[40:20] For one thing, these work
just fine on cloudy days and even work at night.
[40:25] But these are gigantic machines with moving parts 
which need much more maintenance than a solar panel does.
[40:32] In fact, while I was out at this wind farm,
[40:35] this one in the background was stopped because there was a crew performing maintenance.
[40:39] That's OpEx.
[40:41] So while a wind farm still has a very, very low OpEx 
compared to a power plant which burns a costly fuel,
[40:48] wind turbines are not quite as cost competitive as solar panels.
[40:52] Photovoltaics are very much a kind of solid state energy generation.
[40:57] And a big machine like that is very much not.
[41:01] But let's pretend wind power doesn't exist.
[41:04] This is a silly thing to pretend because it does.
[41:07] But I want us to return to the purely solar powered thought experiment.
[41:11] Because in the room where that thought experiment takes place,
[41:15] there is an elephant.
[41:17] Covering 25 million acres in solar panels is going to require building many millions of solar panels.
[41:25] Billions, in fact.
[41:27] And that's going to require a whole heckuvalot of raw materials.
[41:31] Now, I do think it's worth pointing out that the fruit 
of extracting those raw materials will function for decades.
[41:39] We use an even heckier heckuvalot of raw materials right now when we extract and refine oil
[41:45] and all the fruits of that process function exactly once.
[41:50] You don't notice all the mass you're burning through right now,
[41:52] because it mostly exists in your mind as nothing but numbers on a gas pump.
[41:57] Unless you're filling a jerry can, you don't even see it.
[42:00] But there's a reason those tanker trucks are constantly showing up and delivering more fuel to each and every gas station.
[42:07] Cars burn that fuel and it's constantly disappearing.
[42:12] I, for one, think we should spend our efforts extracting resources
[42:15] which will hang around for a while.
[42:18] Just seems a little wiser.
[42:20] Regardless, solar panels are large, fairly heavy things
and each one is made from a substantial amount of material.
[42:26] So it's worth talking about what the raw materials inside these things actually are.
[42:33] And that's why I bought this one.
[42:36] And that one.
[42:37] But we'll get back to that.
[42:39] So these slender black things with all the lines on them
[42:43] are the actual solar cells.
[42:45] These are what convert the photons from the sun that land on them into electrons
[42:50] which can be sent down a wire and harnessed as energy.
[42:53] Those cells are extremely thin.
[42:56] We're talking about as thin as a human hair.
[42:59] And that means the vast, vast majority of this panel's mass is simply...
[43:06] panel!
[43:07] Almost all of what makes up this thing is either aluminum, glass, or adhesives.
[43:13] 72 silicon cells were arranged and wired together and then glued to this sheet of glass.
[43:19] Once that was done, the backside of the glass gets coated in some kind of thermoplastic
[43:24] to seal it all up and make it watertight.
[43:27] A hole in that coating was left for lead wires
[43:29] to connect the solar cells to this junction box,
[43:32] and then the box was attached to the backside of the glass with sealant.
[43:36] Oh, and if you're wondering what's inside that junction box,
[43:39] sometimes it's a circuit board with a micro inverter to allow the panel 
to spit out the same AC power that the grid runs on.
[43:46] But in this case, this is a DC solar panel,
[43:49] so all that's in there are a couple of beefy diodes.
[43:52] And well, the last major thing in here is aluminum.
[43:56] The aluminum frame gives some structure to the glass and provides an easy way to mount it.
[44:01] But that's really all it's there for.
[44:03] I'm not that well versed on all the ways these things are constructed,
[44:07] so I don't want to falsely assert that most of them are made like this one is.
[44:11] And a lot of panels now have solar cells on both sides:
[44:14] those are known as bifacial panels. But no matter how they're made,
[44:19] it's mostly just glass and aluminum.
[44:23] I think that's notable because those are both 
materials which are so cheap and easy to get that we use them...
[44:30] for food containers.
[44:34] And it's also notable because these food containers,
[44:37] mainly glass bottles and jars and aluminum cans,
[44:40] are something we already actively recycle.
[44:43] It would be better if we reused glass containers
[44:46] rather than ground them up and melted them,
[44:48] but that's an issue for another time.
[44:50] The important thing is we already know how to do that,
[44:53] and we already have industrial processes
[44:56] which turn used ground up glass into new glass,
[44:59] and which melt scrap aluminum into new aluminum.
[45:04] So at the end of this panel's useful life,
[45:07] which won't be for 25 years!
[45:10] ...almost all of its raw material mass can easily be recovered
[45:14] and turned into another panel, which is important.
[45:18] When it comes to the actual silicon cells,
[45:21] Well, you've probably heard (or heard someone say) that these things are full of toxic materials.
[45:28] That's misinformation.
[45:30] And let me explain why.
[45:32] There are some kinds of solar cell
[45:34] that we've been experimenting with, like thin film solar cells or perovskite cells,
[45:39] which require some less than great elements in their construction.
[45:42] But those represent only about 5% of panels made today.
[45:47] The vast majority are using monocrystalline silicon at this point,
[45:51] which is a material we derive from quartz.
[45:54] You know, rocks.
[45:57] There are some trace elements of phosphorous, boron and silver in here.
[46:02] But based on what I've researched,
the only potentially harmful substance
[46:06] people might worry about in this is lead in the solder which makes electrical connections.
[46:13] You can see some of it right here.
[46:15] But I'm not actually sure that lead is even in this panel!
[46:19] We've had lead free solder for quite some time, though...
[46:22] as any electronics enthusiast will tell you,
[46:24] it can be annoying to work with because it 
doesn't flow as well as when there's a little lead in the mix.
[46:29] I say that because it's possible
these will always have to use lead solder
[46:34] to get a good bond with the silicon cells.
[46:37] But even if that's true,
[46:40] we know how to deal with lead.
[46:42] Did you know that new lead acid batteries are almost entirely made from old lead acid batteries?
[46:49] Every time you buy a car battery from a store,
[46:52] you're going to have to pay what's called a core charge,
[46:55] which you don't get refunded until you bring your old battery back to the store.
[46:59] And that's to encourage recycling.
[47:02] This system works so well that we capture about 99% of the material in dead car batteries.
[47:08] We have a nearly closed loop recycling stream already established for them.
[47:13] That's some foreshadowing for the “what about the batteries?” section,
[47:17] but I'm really saying it here to let you know we can 
absolutely figure out how to capture the lead in these safely and reuse it.
[47:24] We just have to want to.
[47:26] And speaking of recycling, there's absolutely no reason 
we couldn't also recycle the silicon inside of these.
[47:33] The worn out solar cells could be melted down and purified into new silicon
[47:37] to make new wafers, to make new cells at the end of a panels life.
[47:41] But even if for some reason we never figure that out or it's never economically viable,
[47:47] you have to remember two things:
[47:49] First, each panel will last a quarter of a century or longer!
[47:55] And second, those cells are extremely thin,
[47:58] usually less than 200 micrometers,
[48:01] and thus have almost no material in them at all.
[48:04] I wanted to remove the cells from this panel
[48:07] so I could actually weigh them and tell you just how much 
of this panel's mass the silicon cells constitute,
[48:12] but they're so thin and fragile that I could not peel away the coating
[48:16] which seals them to the glass without destroying them.
[48:19] I tried several different solvents, hoping to dissolve 
some of the adhesives in here, but I had no luck at all.
[48:25] The magic of buying two of them has unfortunately failed us.
[48:29] However, I has internet!
[48:32] Assuming a thickness of 200 micrometers,
[48:34] which appears to be on the thicker side these days,
[48:37] then if we stacked up all 72 of these cells, they'd make a stack which is just 1.4cm tall.
[48:44] The total volume would thus be about 94.5cm³,
[48:49] and the density of silicon is about 2.3g/cm³,
[48:53] meaning this solar panel has maybe 215g of silicon in it.
[48:59] That's about 3% of its total mass.
[49:03] Now, this is only a 100 watt panel, and most panels sold today are larger with more cells.
[49:09] But that still means we're looking at about a kilogram of silicon per 500 watt solar panel on the high end.
[49:17] Now, that's not a lot for an individual panel,
[49:19] but if we followed through with the Corn Belt thought experiment, we'd need about 10 billion panels.
[49:24] So, well, those panels are going to need something like 5 or 10 million metric tons of silicon.
[49:31] And that is certainly a lot.
[49:34] But it's probably not as much as you might think.
[49:37] For one thing, right now in the US,
[49:39] we put some 265 million metric tons of stuff in landfills every year.
[49:46] So if we simply landfilled all that silicon, which I will remind you
[49:50] represents the silicon necessary to completely power the entire 
U.S. electricity grid from solar energy and nothing else,
[49:59] we'd only be taking up less than a 10th of our yearly landfill capacity by mass.
[50:03] And we'd only need to do that every quarter of a century.
[50:07] Remember how I said I'd only need 12 of those 
solar panels to provide enough energy to drive my car in the winter?
[50:14] That's what's really important to remember.
[50:16] The amount of silicon, or in fact,
[50:18] whatever material in a solar panel might concern you that 
each person in this country will end up utilizing in this imagined future scenario is very small.
[50:28] And when you remember that each of the solar panels 
is going to last a solid quarter of a human lifetime, if not longer,
[50:35] then the amount of material used per day is irrelevant.
[50:39] Anyone trying to get you to focus on that is fear mongering and deflecting your attention
[50:44] away from the fact that currently we burn through millions of barrels of oil every day.
[50:50] And now here we are.
[50:52] What about the batteries?
[50:54] If we actually live in this imagined future of nothing but solar energy
[50:59] which in case it's not clear, I don't think we will
[51:01] because we have many different sources of energy
available to us as well.
[51:05] But if we actually live in this future,
[51:08] we have to deal with when the sun's not shining
[51:11] and we do that with batteries.
[51:13] We would be building much more solar power capacity 
than we can actually use when the sun is shining
[51:20] and the excess we're not using will charge enormous banks of batteries
[51:24] so that when the sun sets and the panels stop producing any output,
[51:28] we have stored energy to get us through to sunrise.
[51:32] We're also going to have long term storage available to get us through periods of bad weather.
[51:37] But of course, we can also use this high tech idea 
called wires and move energy from sunny deserts to cloudy places.
[51:44] There's a huge variety of ways we could solve this issue,
[51:47] and that's one of the cool things about electricity.
[51:51] But no matter what, we're going to need to build a whole heckuva lot of batteries.
[51:55] And those suckers absolutely do have some nasty chemicals in there.
[52:00] And we're going to need to extract a whole lot of raw
[52:02] material from mines and whatnot to get them.
[52:06] However, if you understand the logic of lifespan, you'll know what I'm about to say.
[52:12] Most people who say “but what about the batteries?” seem 
to always ignore two core facts about batteries:
[52:20] The first fact is that they last many years now.
[52:23] In fact, some of the latest batteries with a daily 
charge cycle should get to 15 years old before they start degrading significantly.
[52:32] That's 15 years of daily use of the same battery pack
[52:36] as opposed to fossil fuels which can all be used, I remind you, once.
[52:42] And the second core fact
[52:43] is that when those batteries have degraded,
[52:46] they're still there!
[52:49] When battery cells degrade, it's not as if the material inside of them is disappearing.
[52:54] What's actually happening is that the physical arrangements of those materials is slowly changing.
[53:00] As the reversible chemical reaction which we call charging and discharging the battery occurs inside,
[53:06] little bits of material in the anodes and cathodes can start
[53:09] breaking off and moving around, creating structures inside
[53:13] that eventually start to block the chemical reaction from happening
[53:17] and reduce the battery cell’s ability to function.
[53:21] But that does not mean any of the materials have transformed into something else.
[53:27] You can't take a lithium atom for example, and turn it into iron.
[53:31] All the lithium that was in there when the battery was made is still there.
[53:37] So when the battery wears out,
[53:39] all of the lithium inside can be recovered.
[53:42] Let's talk about mining for a second.
[53:45] When we find new deposits of some substance we're looking for,
[53:49] it's not as if someone just happens
[53:51] upon a giant lump of pure cobalt, and we start cutting chunks out of it.
[53:56] No, we find a deposit of ore which is rich in that material.
[54:00] Then we'll dig up that ore and do lots of fancy processing
[54:04] to extract the cobalt or whatever from the rest of the rocks and purify it.
[54:09] Why am I telling you this?
[54:11] Because the richest ore for whatever material you need to build a battery...
[54:16] is used batteries!
[54:18] We are already starting up processes
[54:20] where we grind up used lithium ion batteries
[54:23] and turn them into a mineral rich paste,
[54:25] which, just like the raw ore we get out of the ground,
[54:28] can be processed into the raw material inputs that built that battery in the first place.
[54:34] Jerry Rig Everything has a two year old video about this process, 
and I'll link to it in the description if you'd like to see it.
[54:40] Unlike fossil fuels where we toil away
extracting and purifying resources
[54:45] just so that we can sell them, put them in our gas tanks and set them on fire, when we're building a battery...
[54:52] we are *building* something!
[54:54] We're extracting and purifying resources to make a durable good,
[54:58] which will last many, many years.
[55:01] And because that durable good doesn't disappear once we've used it like fossil fuels do,
[55:07] everything inside that durable good can be recovered.
[55:11] That's kind of the whole point of renewable energy.
[55:14] It's called renewable because it's not disposable.
[55:17] It's a resource we can use again and again and again
[55:20] without worrying about running out.
[55:23] Now, a lot of people like to point out
[55:25] that we don't have a huge industry recycling lithium ion batteries yet,
[55:30] but that's mostly because we don't have a huge supply of dead lithium ion batteries yet.
[55:37] The biggest supply comes from electric cars with worn out battery packs.
[55:41] But again, modern battery chemistries in thermally controlled battery packs last decades.
[55:47] So aside from first gen Nissan Leafs,
[55:50] which had a uniquely terrible battery pack design,
[55:53] most electric cars that were built in the last 15 years still have their original battery packs.
[55:59] The biggest reason we end up with used packs is cars getting into collisions and becoming totaled.
[56:05] That happens way more often than a battery pack failure.
[56:09] So it's not like a recycling industry isn't going to happen,
[56:13] in fact, it's already happening!
[56:15] But it doesn't seem to be at a very large scale yet because most EV batteries are still in service
[56:21] and a lot of folks are buying used EV battery packs from totaled cars 
and the like to repurpose them for stationary energy storage,
[56:29] meaning they are still in use.
[56:31] They're just not in a car.
[56:33] But there's another rather enormous reason I think 
“but what about the batteries” is a misplaced concern.
[56:40] That reason?
[56:42] We’re still learning.
[56:44] We are constantly learning how to build better batteries.
[56:48] Name any material of concern inside a battery pack,
[56:51] and I can guarantee you there are engineers out there trying to eliminate it.
[56:56] Lithium iron phosphate cells, for example,
[56:59] don't contain nickel, manganese, or cobalt.
[57:02] And in addition to eliminating the need for conflict minerals,
[57:05] LFP battery chemistry is also much more stable,
[57:08] meaning the risks of battery fires have been reduced dramatically.
[57:13] And we're on the cusp of commercializing sodium ion batteries which don't use lithium at all.
[57:19] They use sodium.
[57:20] You know the stuff in ramen noodles?
[57:22] Table salt.
[57:23] The stuff we can get simply by filling a pot with seawater and waiting a while.
[57:28] Sodium ion batteries are not as energy dense,
[57:31] so they'll probably not be a great fit for electric cars,
[57:34] but they'll be a fantastic fit for the large grid scale energy storage facilities
[57:40] which are already being built all the time.
[57:43] And if you've read about battery fires at those facilities,
[57:46] that's a huge reason we're looking into sodium ion.
[57:49] That chemistry is far more stable
[57:51] and seems nearly immune from thermal runaway risks from what I understand.
[57:56] We are constantly learning new things as we try to crack this nut.
[58:01] I remind you,
[58:02] the energy we get from solar panels is free,
[58:06] so there is a huge incentive for us to figure out 
how to use this free energy when the sun isn't shining.
[58:11] We are and have always been working on building better, cheaper, longer lasting, less dangerous batteries
[58:18] which use materials we can find in our own backyard.
[58:22] So whatever you've heard that might make you concerned
[58:25] is not guaranteed to be relevant in the next few years or even tomorrow.
[58:30] And because every single battery we build will 
still be there when it wears out (barring accidents, of course),
[58:37] we have the ability to reprocess those batteries 
into fresh new batteries without extracting more virgin materials.
[58:45] That's the end game.
[58:47] I've seen a lot of people say things like,
[58:49] “well, lithium is just going to become the new oil!”
[58:51] but that completely misunderstands the realities here.
[58:55] We cannot stop extracting oil because we burn it as we use it.
[59:01] Yes, renewable energy technology will require lots of extraction to build,
[59:06] but we don't destroy what we extracted.
[59:10] That is what we do with fossil fuels.
[59:12] We burn them as we use them.
[59:14] And that's the problem.
[59:16] There's scarcity built into fossil fuels because it disappears.
[59:20] Each and every gallon of gasoline you've ever purchased,
[59:23] except for what's sitting in your gas tank right this moment, is gone.
[59:28] But the battery pack I purchased alongside my car is still with us.
[59:33] It's right there.
[59:34] All of the raw materials it's made from are still inside of it,
[59:38] and we are able to get to them.
[59:40] And so when it's no longer doing its job
[59:42] as I need it to, it will live another life.
[59:45] Just as the steel which makes up the rest of the car will be crushed
[59:48] and turned into new cars,
[59:50] The minerals inside that battery pack will be 
processed into their pure form and used to build new batteries.
[59:57] And even if we never figure out how to make better batteries and we're stuck 
with lithium ion from now until the end of time for some reason,
[60:04] eventually we'll have built enough of them to do everything we need to do.
[60:09] I'm not buying a new battery pack for my car because it's already got one! And it's still working.
[60:14] And once we've built enough batteries for grid scale energy storage,
[60:18] well, we'll have built enough batteries.
[60:21] There does come a day when we have built enough,
[60:24] because we only use energy when we choose to do things
[60:27] like cook food or drive a car.
[60:29] And there's only so many humans on this planet choosing to do stuff.
[60:33] And when they start wearing out then, yeah,
[60:34] those batteries will need replacement but that 
doesn't mean we'll have to keep mining for more lithium forever.
[60:41] We'll have to find some new lithium to make up
[60:44] for whatever is lost in the recovery process.
[60:46] But if we can follow the example of lead acid battery recycling
[60:50] and all but completely closed the loop,
[60:52] then in a theoretical 50 years down the road scenario,
[60:55] perhaps 1 in 100 lithium mines will remain operational.
[60:59] The rest of them will have closed down
[61:01] because when we need to build new batteries, we'll get lithium from old batteries.
[61:07] But the best part is something I mentioned way back at the start.
[61:12] We're already here.
[61:14] Solar and storage is now the cheapest form of electricity generation we know of.
[61:20] For years, the barrier to making solar energy happen at scale was simply cost.
[61:25] We had functional solar panels decades ago,
[61:28] but they were ludicrously expensive to manufacture.
[61:31] And that's why the only places you tended to find them were on,
[61:34] like the International Space Station and satellites and junk.
[61:38] But now we are way under $1 per watt.
[61:41] Random websites will sell me, a random schmuck,
[61:45] solar panels which go for just $0.35 a watt, and they'll certainly get cheaper than that.
[61:51] They already are when you have a contract for 27 MW worth.
[61:55] Of course, I care deeply about the materials angle
[61:58] and appreciate the fact that unlike all fossil fuels,
[62:02] nearly everything we extract out of the ground
[62:04] to build solar panels and batteries can be recaptured at the end of their life
[62:09] to make new solar panels and batteries.
[62:12] I like that a lot.
[62:14] But even if you don't care about that,
[62:17] the sun is free!
[62:19] And both solar panels and batteries are now cheap enough
[62:23] to make practical use of that free source of energy.
[62:27] We are here.
[62:29] We made it and the future looks quite bright.
[62:34] ♫ anomalously smooth jazz ♫
[62:40] Oh sorry.
[62:41] Yeah, this isn't the actual end.
[62:43] If you watch until the actual end,
I promise I'll explain why I did that.
[62:47] But for now,
[62:49] I want to ask you something.
[62:51] Did this video make sense to you?
[62:55] A while ago, I put a quick talking to camera thing
[62:57] together on my second channel, where I basically just
[63:01] explained the whole situation here and asked,
[63:03] why does the logic of pay more upfront to save more later
[63:08] break down whenever we're talking about renewable energy?
[63:12] It was a pretty snarky video and very off the cuff.
[63:16] I don't even remember what prompted me to make it.
[63:19] But at last year's Open Sauce,
[63:21] which, by the way, I'll be headed to again this year,
[63:24] I had a wonderful conversation with someone who told me
[63:27] that video changed their mind.
[63:30] I have to apologize because I don't remember your name.
[63:32] But I very much remember that conversation.
[63:35] And it's been stuck in my head ever since.
[63:38] See, the logic of renewable energy
[63:41] seemed self-evident to me.
[63:43] And that's why the video was as snarky as it was.
[63:47] Frankly, and I don't want this to sound like I think I'm full of myself,
[63:51] but it probably comes across that way, so I apologize in advance.
[63:54] But as soon as I was old enough to understand what photovoltaics did
[63:59] and that like almost every technology we've ever dealt with,
[64:03] eventually we'd figure out how to make solar panels cheaply.
[64:07] I immediately thought, oh, cool.
[64:10] So eventually we'll be able to stop burning
[64:12] expensive stuff to generate electricity.
[64:15] And that mental reality has been in my head
[64:19] so long that I never thought to explain it.
[64:22] I kind of assumed everyone already knew what we were trying to do
[64:26] by commercializing solar and storage technologies.
[64:30] So when I discovered it's
[64:32] not as self-evident to everyone as it was to me,
[64:36] well, that's when I started thinking about making this video.
[64:39] And in the process of making this one,
[64:42] I've been reflecting on some of the other videos I've made.
[64:45] For instance, the videos I've done on heat pumps and electrification, etc.
[64:50] I made those videos assuming that everyone who watched
[64:53] them was on the same page as me,
[64:56] and that comments which were perplexed by my desire
[64:58] to stop paying for things we set on fire,
[65:01] were coming from a place of malice.
[65:04] I'm sure some were.
[65:06] But I also know that not everyone is really thinking about resilience
[65:10] and the value of permanent infrastructure in the way that I am.
[65:15] Lots of those comments were probably honest,
[65:17] especially when I made arguments couched in my own internalized reality
[65:21] which understands that natural gas is very cheap today,
[65:25] but it is likely to become more expensive in the future.
[65:28] While electricity is almost certainly going to get cheaper.
[65:34] That is, of course, once we decide to cut it out with this weird aberration
we find ourselves in where computing is getting less energy efficient somehow.
[65:42] But I digress.
[65:44] I am always thinking both through lens of history and opportunity.
[65:49] And that's why when I look at an electrical panel,
[65:52] I don't see a boring piece of infrastructure
everyone has in their house.
[65:56] I see an endless variety of new opportunities.
[66:00] If you've got a natural gas connection,
[66:02] then you probably have at most four appliances
which actually utilize it.
[66:06] Meanwhile, literally everything else you own is powered by the wires that are in your house.
[66:12] Everything we've invented in the last
[66:14] what, century? Is electric.
[66:17] All the innovation we've been doing to make our lives better relies on electricity.
[66:22] And all the innovation which happens in the realm of fossil fuels
[66:25] is how to use them slightly more efficiently.
[66:29] That's it.
[66:29] And we're already damn near perfectly optimized in a lot of cases.
[66:33] There's very little room left to innovate,
[66:36] But we are always innovating with electric technologies.
[66:40] And since your house already has wires in it,
[66:43] you can add new things and new technologies
[66:46] to your home with very little effort.
[66:49] When the personal computer hit the scene,
[66:51] nobody needed to do an engineering study
[66:53] or get permits to get one because you just plug it in.
[66:57] Some things, like installing an electric car charger,
[67:00] are a little more difficult, but they still utilize the feed wires
[67:04] you already have and the power grid which already exists.
[67:08] Electrification seems like the most rational thing we should be doing.
[67:12] We can leverage infrastructure
[67:14] which is already in place to distribute
[67:17] and utilize the free energy we can harvest from the sun, the wind,
[67:21] or maybe even the hot rocks beneath our feet.
[67:24] And we can bulk up that infrastructure if and when we need to support new demand down the road,
[67:30] in many cases, simply by replacing wires and transformers.
[67:34] That's how the grid went from not existing, to
[67:38] existing basically just for electric lights, to everyone has air conditioning now.
[67:43] And that's a perfect segway...
[67:45] Oh, those were also electric.
[67:47] Anyway, that's the perfect segue to addressing the “misled” in the video title.
[67:53] And well,
[67:56] now the snark levels are going to go up a bit.
[67:59] Let's just, uhhh, roll some clips.
[68:01] You know, I also just want to point out I drove my electric car out here.
[68:05] I'm 134 miles from Millennium Park in downtown Chicago which is a pretty rural area.
[68:12] And yet there's a lot of people who think you can't drive electric cars out in the country.
[68:15] I don't know what that's about.
[68:17] Something else I should point out.
[68:19] I didn't spend any time charging the car
[68:21] because I spent the night at a friend's house and her house,
[68:24] believe it or not, has electricity.
[68:26] So I just plugged the car into her house, and then it charged overnight.
[68:29] It's wild.
[68:30] Did you know homes have electricity?
[68:32] You know, I should also point out that I parked my car right next to one of these
[68:36] because I wanted to find out if they really make that RRRER RRRER RRRER
[68:39] noise that some people say they make.
[68:41] And, you know, I can hear some whooshing from the blades every time it goes past,
[68:45] but it's not that loud.
[68:47] Standing right beneath it,
[68:49] and I can hear the blade whooshing by, but, I don't know.
[68:53] Just take a listen for yourself.
[68:55] [faint repeating whoosh sounds with an even fainter 60 Hz hum from the transformer]
[68:59] Are these are these really that loud?
[69:01] Let me just let me just walk around this way.
[69:03] By the way, I'm also taking a look on the ground
[69:05] to see if there's a bunch of dead birds around here.
[69:08] I hear that these things are just murder factories for birds.
[69:12] But I don't know. I'm not.
[69:13] I'm not seeing any.
[69:16] It's a really windy day out.
[69:17] Honestly, just the wind is kind of louder than the whooshing of the blades.
[69:22] Yeah, if it's not clear yet, I'm going there.
[69:26] But before I do, it's important to me that you understand
[69:29] and grasp the difference between small p politics and capital P Partisanship.
[69:36] A lot of people in the United States right now confuse those two,
[69:39] and think any discussion of a political issue
[69:42] must have been bought and paid for by the other team.
[69:46] That's just not how any of this works.
[69:49] If you've been watching my channel for any length of time,
[69:52] then you should already have a pretty clear understanding
[69:55] of what my personal politics are.
[69:58] If you've been under the impression that I've not been political,
[70:01] you simply don't understand what politics means.
[70:05] I have indeed stayed out of partisan politics and electoral politics,
[70:09] but I've been wearing my personal politics on my sleeve this whole time,
[70:14] and they've not been that subtle.
[70:16] Remember that thing I said about getting the most value
[70:18] out of how we spend our money and time?
[70:21] The money part is obvious,
[70:23] but the time part might be less so.
[70:26] I have a tremendous respect
[70:28] for the working people of this country.
[70:31] I certainly have a cushy job these days,
[70:33] but I used to work in the hotel industry,
[70:36] and I have not forgotten what it's like
[70:38] to make ends meet on $14 an hour.
[70:41] Nor have I forgotten the amazing
and underappreciated housekeeping staff,
[70:45] who were the only reason we could even be in business.
[70:49] My connection to those women and their families
[70:53] is absolutely part of my personal politics.
[70:56] And if the foreshadowing of that isn't clear enough, my God,
[71:00] have you not been paying attention.
[71:02] I believe in the value of labor,
[71:04] and I also respect the purpose of labor.
[71:07] Our housekeeping staff was there to do
[71:09] the grunt work of cleaning rooms and doing laundry,
[71:12] a sort of domestic labor we have never truly valued.
[71:17] Front desk me was there to help people
[71:19] with whatever problems they might be having.
[71:22] Did you know businesses used to put their real phone numbers
[71:25] on their websites? When you called my hotel,
[71:28] the front desk phone rang and it was my job to say hello and ask what you needed.
[71:35] It was old fashioned, but it worked and way
[71:37] better than every single customer service chat bot
[71:40] I have been forced to interact with lately.
[71:44] When I think about the laborers who work on, say, oil rigs,
[71:47] I respect what they're doing immensely.
[71:51] Those people toil day in and day out
[71:53] to make our lives possible, which is noble work.
[71:57] But I also think there's a
[71:58] crassness to that work, because if we must toil,
[72:02] why should we toil as Sisyphus on drilling platforms,
[72:05] doing work that brings us fuel to spin our wheels,
[72:08] but which moves us nowhere?
[72:11] We should build with what we extract.
[72:13] We should not just set it on fire.
[72:17] And when we build things which make our lives easier,
[72:20] we improve the human condition.
[72:23] Basically, I just want us to learn stuff and grow our bag of tricks.
[72:28] And that's what I've been preaching from this channel the whole time.
[72:32] Sometimes that's through looking at interesting pieces 
of old technology and making connections between them.
[72:38] There are a lot of lessons we've already learned as a species,
[72:42] but which can easily be forgotten if folks aren't sharing those stories.
[72:47] Other times,
[72:48] that's through teaching things
[72:49] like the difference between power and energy.
[72:52] Basic facts of our world that if you can learn to intuit,
[72:55] are very helpful for understanding your energy bills or indeed
[73:00] just how much opportunity solar panels unlock.
[73:03] Everything I do here is rooted in my belief
[73:07] that all of us should have some basic understanding
[73:10] of how the stuff we use in our lives works,
[73:13] and what the impact of using that stuff is both on ourselves
[73:17] and our fellow humans.
[73:20] It is very empowering and protects
[73:22] you from people who would otherwise leverage your ignorance
[73:25] and scam you into things you don't actually need.
[73:29] And another core piece of my personal politics
[73:32] comes from something we know deep in our hearts,
[73:35] even if we sometimes like to pretend it isn't true.
[73:38] We accomplish more when we work together and collaborate.
[73:42] The power grid is the ultimate example of that.
[73:46] I believe the power grid is the most miraculous machine
[73:49] our species has ever created.
[73:51] Once we figured out how useful this whole electricity business was,
[73:54] we took great efforts to run wires
[73:57] to almost every structure in this country.
[74:00] Even remote farmhouses, which a traditional view of capital would tell
[74:03] you could never recoup that infrastructure investment.
[74:07] If you've never spent time amongst the cornfields,
you might not have seen
[74:11] the poles and wires that run for miles, sometimes to serve just a single house.
[74:17] We decided it was so important that everyone have access to electricity,
[74:22] that our government made that happen.
[74:24] When the private sector certainly would not.
[74:27] But somewhere along the line, we lost the will to do that.
[74:31] If you don't know anyone who lives in a rural area,
[74:34] you might not know how horrible it can be
[74:36] to get reliable internet access out there.
[74:39] Even though it's totally possible to get networking anywhere with wireless technologies,
[74:44] internet service providers are doing the math and realizing,
[74:47] oh, they're just not going to make very much money
[74:49] getting broadband out to the boonies.
[74:51] So they didn't.
[74:53] And somehow the most rational response to this reality
[74:57] is a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit?
[75:01] As impressive as that is technologically,
[75:04] it's kind of crazy making that we're fawning over that solution
[75:08] rather than just like blanketing
[75:10] the country in 4G a little bit better.
[75:14] We've got countless point to point networking options,
[75:17] which don't involve launching rockets into space,
[75:20] but we dragged our feet so long
[75:23] that satellite constellations somehow seem rational.
[75:27] Don't get me wrong.
[75:28] I used to rely on Starlink,
[75:30] and as someone dealing with either a six megabit DSL line
with a whole one
[75:34] megabit upload speed, great for a YouTuber,
[75:37] or a flaky 4G connection
[75:39] that would get overwhelmed to the point of becoming useless
[75:42] if too many people were in the area at the same time.
[75:45] Starlink was a miracle.
[75:47] but if AT&T could just get a better trunk line to that tower
[75:51] and maybe put some extra radio equipment there if needed,
[75:55] well, then I would never have needed Starlink.
[75:57] And what really makes me pull my hair out
[75:59] is that AT&T absolutely knows that tower is getting overwhelmed.
[76:04] Or at least they should if they're running analytics.
[76:06] But they just don't care.
[76:10] It's not a big enough problem for them.
[76:12] Launching satellites into space to make rural broadband
[76:15] happen is an admission of laziness and defeat
[76:19] from both Big Telecom and the government.
[76:22] It's a solution a billionaire could provide and happily monetize.
[76:26] But it's not necessarily the best solution now is it?
[76:30] That's called
looking at something with an eye for nuance and complexity.
[76:33] Not everything is black and white.
[76:35] But the truth is.
[76:39] And here are some true facts I'd like you to know.
[76:42] And now we are getting into partisan politics.
[76:45] Go ahead and click away if you don't want to hear any of this.
[76:48] But did you know that President Jimmy Carter
[76:50] put solar panels on the White House?
[76:52] No, they were not photovoltaic panels, though those did exist at the time.
[76:57] They were instead solar water heating panels.
[76:59] Those are still common today in sunny climates.
[77:01] They're effectively just boxes with black pipes
[77:04] zigging and zagging back and forth and solar radiation
[77:07] heats the water inside the pipes for free
[77:10] and without using any electricity or fuel.
[77:12] Carter did this to promote
[77:14] the idea of alternative sources of energy,
[77:17] something that was very much on our mind
[77:19] during the energy crisis of the 1970s.
[77:22] And then in 1986,
[77:24] President Ronald Reagan took them down.
[77:28] Supposedly, the white House was getting its roof resurfaced,
[77:31] so they were taken off, which is understandable.
[77:34] But what's less understandable
is that he never bothered to put them back.
[77:39] Now, President Carter was a Democrat
[77:41] and President Reagan was a Republican.
[77:44] And in the years since, there has been a repeating pattern
[77:48] where Democratic administrations attempt to usher
[77:50] in new energy technologies to free us from endless extraction.
[77:55] And then Republican administrations swiftly undo that.
[77:59] We just went through this when President Biden
[78:01] signed the Inflation Reduction Act,
[78:03] a weirdly named piece of legislation
[78:04] which included a lot of spending for renewable
[78:07] energy and electrification investment in this country
[78:09] to make panels and batteries here,
[78:13] investments that I hope by now,
[78:14] you understand, were to lower our costs in the future,
[78:17] improve our national security and make our lives better.
[78:21] But then President Trump got into power
[78:23] and told his Republican Congress critters to repeal
[78:26] that law almost immediately.
[78:28] Except, no, that's not actually what happened.
[78:31] President Trump signed some executive orders
[78:33] which froze much of the funding,
[78:35] bypassing the very structure of our Constitution,
[78:38] which explicitly gives Congress the power of the purse.
[78:42] We actually have a whole law, the Congressional Budget
[78:45] and Impoundment Control Act of 1974,
[78:48] which explicitly makes what Trump did illegal.
[78:51] But Republicans currently control
[78:53] both houses of Congress, and they've made it very clear
[78:56] they do not care to provide
[78:57] the checks and balances they're constitutionally obligated to do.
[79:02] They are desecrating our Constitution
[79:04] because they happen to be on the same team
[79:06] as the guy in the white House.
[79:07] And as we all know, the primary objective
[79:10] of this administration is to own the libs.
[79:13] Or is it kidnaping brown people?
[79:15] It's getting kind of hard to tell.
[79:18] I didn't think masked cowards with guns going around
[79:20] demanding papers, please was on the bingo card of my 30s,
[79:23] but apparently it was.
[79:25] And having looked at that card a little more closely,
[79:28] I mean, I've almost got a bingo without even using a free space.
[79:31] I've already crossed off,
[79:32] threatened to invade Greenland and destroy NATO, threaten
[79:35] to annex Canada and papers, please.
[79:37] So all I need now is a few murders of U.S. citizens
which were captured on video from multiple angles.
[79:43] What's that?
[79:45] Cross that off too?
[79:47] Well, surely I'm not going to be able
[79:49] to cross off “government officials telling us our eyes didn't see what we saw.”
[79:55] Oh.
[79:57] Bingo.
[79:59] Folks, you need to wake up and smell the fascism.
[80:03] I don't know what imaginary lines
[80:05] you might have drawn which could be crossed,
[80:07] but if you can't agree we've crossed a very bad one
[80:10] you need to get off Twitter and stop watching Fox News or 
Newsmax or OAN and or whatever those new ones are.
[80:17] Or, I'm so sad to say, CBS news.
[80:22] It's bad.
[80:24] We are clearly living under leaders
[80:25] who have a completely different
[80:26] understanding of reality than the rest of us do,
[80:29] and they are so high on their own supply
[80:32] that their followers will believe abject lies.
[80:36] Renewable energy is only
[80:38] controversial because they made it so.
[80:41] And they don't want you thinking through the reality
[80:43] which is free energy from reusable materials, as I've just explained.
[80:48] They have donors who still make money selling you fossil fuels,
[80:52] and so they do not want you thinking about how much you're spending
[80:55] and how we have the opportunity to stop.
[80:59] Even worse,
[81:01] they'll artificially lower the cost of fossil fuels through subsidies,
[81:04] even though they're supposedly the party against that sort of thing.
[81:08] I am very scared of what
[81:10] the future of this country looks like.
[81:13] The Bill of Rights looks to be effectively dead.
[81:15] Our First Amendment right
[81:16] to protest is being challenged through intimidation,
[81:19] and the press that dares to tell the truth
[81:21] is being declared an enemy of the people.
[81:24] Our Fourth Amendment right to be free of unreasonable
[81:26] searches and seizures
[81:27] is being gleefully violated, and nobody seems to care.
[81:32] Even the Second Amendment might as well be lost.
[81:35] Our government used the fact that Alex Pretti,
[81:38] a legal firearm holder with a concealed carry permit,
[81:41] had a gun on him to justify his murder.
[81:46] So do we have a right to bear arms or not?
[81:49] Sure doesn't seem like it!
[81:52] If you're upset that a tech creator like myself
[81:54] is suddenly being explicit about politics,
[81:57] then you're not paying enough attention and are part of the problem.
[82:02] I should not have to do this.
[82:04] I never thought I'd be making a video where I said,
[82:07] hey guys, remember that whole Constitution thing?
[82:11] I figured our leaders would always uphold it, but they're clearly not.
[82:16] The document does not enforce itself, and so it is up to us.
[82:21] We had a revolution in
[82:22] 1776 to escape the tyranny of British rule.
[82:26] And the Declaration of Independence describes
[82:28] what's going on right now with distressing clarity.
[82:32] Let me quote it for you.
[82:33] “He has kept among us, in times of peace,
[82:36] standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.
[82:39] He has affected to render the military
[82:41] independent of and superior to the civil power.
[82:45] He has combined with others to subject us
[82:47] to a jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution
[82:49] and unacknowledged by our laws.
[82:52] Giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation.
[82:56] For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.
[82:59] For protecting them by a mock trial from punishment for any murders
[83:03] which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.
[83:07] For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world.
[83:11] For imposing taxes on us without our consent.
[83:14] For depriving us in many cases of the benefit of trial by jury.
[83:18] For transporting us beyond seas
[83:21] to be tried for pretended offenses.
[83:25] Those words were written about King George,
[83:27] but they might as well describe Donald Trump.
[83:34] We fought the Revolutionary War to be free of tyrannical kings,
[83:38] but it looks like we're under tyranny again,
[83:40] inflicted on ourselves.
[83:43] You may have been one of those people who likes to stay out of politics,
[83:46] but politics eventually comes for everyone.
[83:49] Here we are,
[83:51] for the love of God.
[83:53] Please learn from this
[83:55] and remember what happens when you stop paying attention
[83:58] and let other people think for you.
[84:01] It doesn't end well.
[84:03] Now, as scared as I am,
[84:05] I am still going to vote in the midterms
[84:07] and I will be voting against Republicans.
[84:11] I think you should too.
[84:13] And yes, because the realities of our terrible
[84:16] two party system don't always sink in to everyone.
[84:19] I am saying I think you should vote for Democrats in November.
[84:23] I am not a huge fan
[84:25] of a lot of what the Democratic Party is up to these days.
[84:28] They seem, unfortunately, to be far more beholden
[84:31] to corporate interests
[84:33] than they're concerned with the lives of their constituents.
[84:35] Universal health care still hasn't happened.
[84:38] And the best reason I can think that's the case
[84:40] is that the for profit health care lobby is very influential.
[84:44] Meanwhile, constituents such as myself
[84:47] haven't even been able to leave a voicemail
[84:49] at any of Senator Durbin's offices
[84:50] because there all all the inboxes are full.
[84:54] They've been very disappointing.
[84:57] But right now, we are heading into a primary season,
[85:00] and you'll have the opportunity to vote in those primaries very soon
[85:04] to tell Democrats how you want them to act.
[85:09] Please make sure you are registered to vote in general
[85:11] and in the Democratic primary if that's required in your state.
[85:15] If you don't know how to do that, call
[85:17] or walk into your local library.
[85:20] The people there have the same mission I do
[85:22] to share knowledge and be helpful, and they'll guide you.
[85:27] Be sure you ask them how the primary process works in your state,
[85:30] and whether you need to declare a party affiliation to vote in it.
[85:33] And by the way, just throwing this out there,
[85:36] the process of registering to vote is
[85:38] how we verify the citizenship of voters.
[85:40] You have to be on the voter rolls before you can cast a vote.
[85:45] But it's a lot easier for Republicans
[85:47] to ignore that fact and lie by omission to make
[85:50] you think massive voter fraud from non-citizens keeps happening.
[85:54] They lie all the time,
[85:56] and people need to stop listening to them.
[85:59] This isn't just normal “politicians always lie” stuff.
[86:01] This is active propaganda designed
[86:04] to make you distrustful of your fellow human beings.
[86:07] It's disgusting and shameful.
[86:10] How did we get to a place where the president can say
[86:13] other countries pay for tariffs and literally nobody cares that he's lying?
[86:18] He's counting on his base not understanding
[86:20] that you can't just charge someone extra money
[86:23] when you buy something from them, because
[86:27] that's just not how trade works.
[86:30] Hell, that's not even how commerce works.
[86:32] I can't walk into Menards and demand
[86:34] they pay me to buy their products,
[86:37] but the only people who are willing to say that plainly
[86:41] were independent journalists and freaking YouTubers.
[86:45] The stalwarts of the press
[86:46] just kept writing headlines as if reality was up for debate.
[86:50] And they still haven't cut that shit out.
[86:53] It is terrifying
[86:54] how nobody is interested in holding anyone accountable
[86:57] for anything these days.
[86:59] But while I am terrified,
[87:02] I am also increasingly hopeful.
[87:04] The people of Minnesota are demonstrating what we have to do.
[87:08] We have to care for each other.
[87:11] Don't wait for someone to lend a helping hand.
[87:13] Be that helping hand.
[87:16] Organizing networks are popping up everywhere
[87:18] because those of us who managed to grow up into adults,
[87:22] who care about people other than ourselves,
[87:25] are not going to stand by
[87:27] and let this illegitimate government run by petulant toddlers,
[87:30] violate the Constitution
and the very principles that make America great.
[87:35] My fellow Midwesterners in Minnesota have made me so proud.
[87:40] Stay strong
[87:42] and keep teaching us how to be brave and resist
[87:44] this horrible chapter of our history with steadfast,
[87:47] nonviolent defiance.
[87:50] Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a lawless group
[87:54] of masked thugs terrorizing our cities and neighbors
[87:57] for daring to look not quite white.
[88:01] Anyone who has any understanding of history
[88:05] will know that it is happening here.
[88:08] And if you believe that to be true, then
[88:10] you should also believe that ICE must be abolished.
[88:15] And if that freaks you out, I'm going to guess
[88:17] you've been told the people who say that want completely open borders.
[88:21] Some people do, but most people simply
[88:24] took the poem on the Statue of Liberty as meaningful
[88:28] and think this country should open its arms
[88:30] wide and provide a legal pathway to immigration.
[88:32] Just as our ancestors did on the storied Ellis Island.
[88:37] It is our decades long
[88:38] inability to have true immigration reform occur
[88:41] which put us in this place and what we're doing today to fix
[88:45] it is clearly wrong.
[88:48] It is a racist ethnic cleansing operation
[88:51] happening on the pretext of childcare fraud,
[88:54] which was already being investigated and dealt
[88:56] with by the state of Minnesota, but which some terminally online weirdos
[89:00] somehow got wind of and spun into this madness.
[89:05] And that madness
[89:06] is being perpetrated by agents of the state
[89:09] and endorsed by Republicans.
[89:12] Republicans could stop this now,
[89:15] but they won't.
[89:17] and the reason I know we absolutely can abolish ICE?
[89:21] I am older than ICE.
[89:23] In fact, I'm older than the entire Department of Homeland Security.
[89:27] That agency was created post 9/11.
[89:29] And in retrospect, the folks who thought “Homeland” Security
[89:33] sounds kind of ominous were apparently correct.
[89:36] We need to throw this system out and start over.
[89:39] And so, yes, I believe ICE must be abolished.
[89:42] There is no reforming that agency of thugs.
[89:45] It has to go.
[89:46] And the lawless criminals hiding behind
[89:49] masks who are violating the Fourth Amendment day
[89:51] in and day out, need to be prosecuted
[89:55] for each and every one of their crimes.
[89:59] I will be voting in the primaries
[90:00] and I sure as well hope my representative, Sean Casten, starts
[90:04] saying that with clarity and conviction.
[90:07] Sean has been one of the people who understand
[90:09] the realities of renewable energy,
[90:11] and has been a long time advocate of it, so we've been pretty aligned,
[90:14] but we're not aligned on everything.
[90:15] And my patience is starting to break.
[90:18] So if you made it here.
[90:21] Thank you for watching.
[90:23] I hope we can bring some sanity back to this country
[90:25] and that we can start calling lies what they are.
[90:29] And you will have to be a part of that.
[90:31] Talk to your neighbors.
[90:33] Talk to your family.
[90:34] And if you don't know where to start the conversation.
[90:37] That's why there's that fake ending.
[90:40] If you think it might get some gears turning,
[90:42] go ahead and watch this video with someone and stop it there.
[90:46] See how it goes.
[90:47] And if you want to send it to someone with a link,
[90:49] there's an unlisted version of this video on my second channel,
[90:52] which actually stops at the fake ending.
[90:56] The link is in the description
[90:57] and a card should be popping up now.
[91:00] I would pin a comment too, but I am not interested
[91:04] in knowing just what sort of replies that will get.
[91:07] I am all but certain it will be depressing.
[91:10] The future has always been in our collective hands,
[91:14] but we need to stop tolerating lies.
[91:17] We need to stop tolerating greed.
[91:19] And we need to stop tolerating politicians
[91:22] who care more about their corporate donors than
[91:25] they do their constituents.
[91:28] We need to care about
[91:29] our future more than we care about the price of eggs,
[91:32] or the price of gas.
[91:34] And most importantly,
[91:36] we need to care for each other.
[91:39] There is a duty of care in everything we do,
[91:43] and that's the simplest way to put my personal politics.
[91:47] Start acting like you take that duty seriously.
[91:50] A free future depends on it.
[91:53] A future with liberty
[91:55] and justice for all.