Epoch 1 and 2 is The Borg, the ultimate consumer. We must drop the idea of dominion. Not every resource we see is for us to exhaust. Chi's logic is the very foundation of Blackstone type tokenization/ financialization of the natural world. Thanks for having this guy on. His approach is difficult to square because it is all about profit. He is a wolf in sheep's clothing with a logic holding a few nice eco points.

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

He's an obvious snake oil salesman. He brought nothing to backup the validity of any of his claims about his snake oil.

@audiojake27

25 күн бұрын

I think it's a pretty realistic approach to use the profit motive in order to reduce overall pollution and increase efficiency, if that's what you're really honestly doing. I think long term ecological projects need to start where we are currently, which is the whole point of his multi era approach. He's not putting the cart before the horse. Maybe it's not enough, and maybe it doesn't meet your standards of being drastic or radical enough, but I've seen few people with coherent, realistic solutions that can use the economy in a favorable way. We aren't going to shut it all down tomorrow. It's just not going to happen. Causing a culture shift by essentially tricking people into responsible practices by bringing in the idea of accounting for externalities is honestly pretty smart.

Tom Chi echoes with the sounds of salesmen... But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

Way more than Echoes. As someone who's worked in sales, he's beyond a snake oil salesman to my trained ears.

@cabrilloastro6262

Ай бұрын

@@j85grim4 I'd like to think he's sincere and trying to help.... but the Profit Motive and the Power/Wealth Relation, combined with Jevons' and Civilization Thermodynamics, says to me these ideas will only kick the can a bit further before Growth Uber Alles takes us to a "Final Solution".

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

@@cabrilloastro6262 That's correct. Were humans to ever find an equal substitute of energy to fossil fuels, we would continue to mine the earth until it became a barren, dead wasteland like our brother planet (that also won't save us) Mars has always been. Is that really what someone who claims to be an environmentalist wants? Just so they can smugly keep driving their Tesla around San Francisco 😂

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

@cabrilloastro6262 If you care more about saving human civilization than the actual biosphere, then you are a humanist. Not an environmentalist. And that's what all these tech bro's always advocate for. Even the so called environmentaly conscious ones still lead extremely energy and material high lifestyles.

@jeffreyburdges1293

Ай бұрын

I've given up around 1 hour because of his salesmen qualities. It's likely specific tech really helps fix specific problems humans created for nature, and we do sometimes get lucky that good solutions wind up being more profitable, ala CFC v ozone layer, but we've enough problems from enough angles that overall collapse looks assured.

His sand discussion overlooks a lot of other resouces that need to be used to make a semiconductor he sees as so much more valuable than sand used in construction where it is fill. There is also a life span of the finial product issue as well. The avg cell phone has a lifespan measured in months where a building foundation lasts for a century or more.

@audiojake27

25 күн бұрын

Pretty sure it's meant to be an oversimplified analogy to demonstrate a point. He's clearly talking about short term economic value during that part of the conversation.

Well ... I must say I was very suspicious during the first half of the interview, and I still thinks he underestimates the threat of debilitating unravellings that can and most likely will occur, but I winded up appreciating: #1. That his long term view recognizes a certain ark will impose itself if only because of the physics... #2. That he seems to somewhat share my perception(and that of many others) that all our previous 'ideologies-in-a-neatly-packaged-can' are essentially dead and are now to be understood as harmfully simplistic over-extrapolations. #3. Despite his hopes for certain technological means to enable a metamorphosis of the human endeavour, he seems to also somewhat share my intuition that a great part, if not the greater part of the work that needs to occur is in the organization of society itself. The system already had a inherent, built-in, algorithmic, perpetually running sub-routine that maintains a gigantic steady stream of dumb, uncalled for but really harmful waste; and the underlying reason is all too often to finance livelihoods: in short, industrial civilization has a very obvious Make Work Project component to it. So I personally infer from it that there is no way the political economy can persist as it is. My intuition is that if we are to maintain "mandatory" level of complexity on our way down, or alternatively, down the road of his idealized metamorphosis of the human experiment, we will have to emulate what the electronics engineers do when they face that constraint : they d o w n c l o c k the chip. That's the low hanging fruit. After that, fuck knows ... -------------------------------- After much pondering, I have come to nail the thing that bother me the most when you have guests that understand enough from a birds eye view of the physics of our predicament and even, as in this case, have a reasonably good grasp of economics issues: the things that jumps at me that I would like have confirmed is what is their understanding of the most informed projections on oil supplies. Specifically, when you had J-M Jancovici on a few months ago revealing that for the world's top 16 suppliers of oil to Europe, by 2050 their production would be cut in half CONSIDERING NOTHING BUT GEOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS, I can't understand why it is not understood to NOT mean that Europe's oil supply would be merely cut in half (which would be fuckin' cataclysmic enough even if it remained at that level !) kzread.info/dash/bejne/X3l8pcmuetOflbQ.html So Nate, basically, I think we have reached a point that you'll now have a second set of mandatory questions that you'll need to ask the guests that fall into the categories mentioned above in a addition to your ritual "If you had a magic wand..." ; especially when they exhibit a certain cornucopian tendencies, and those questions are as follows: #1. What is their current knowledge or assumptions about the Master Resource's [informed] projected availability. #2. If they understand the depletion reality but have not quite the latest news (and relevant orders of magnitude in mind) , you should want to invite them into the nitty gritty and inform them of these Rystad's revelations to Jancovici's organization and then ask: "If I told you that this is the projected numbers for Europe..." "...what impact does it have on your current assumptions about the political economy, resource allocation and the information the citizens everywhere are being fed ?"

The Great Problem, with all these schemes... is that they ignore the tragic fact that we have taken truly sequestered Long-Cycle carbon, out of the slow carbon cycle circulation for 10's to 100's of millions of years - and putting it into the Fast Carbon Cycle, where it alternates between the atmosphere and the topsoil, plants, surface ocean. I've yet to hear ANYONE point this out with the force it deserves, and the flaw of trying to stuff as much carbon into what was once a stable, full, Fast Carbon Cycle, (funded by the

This conversation is still resonating with me days after I listened...if Tom is a master salesman, as some have suggested, I want what he's selling -- a way for us to participate in creating/inventing/imagining possibilities for a future for humans among all the species (especially the keystones) on earth.

Fascinating to see the split in the comments between optimists and realists. It would be great to pick some of the guest's claims and subject them to some expert scrutiny. The Silicon Valley approach has always been we know better, trust us. But in reality the vast majority if what it has produced for humanity has been solutions for problems we didn't have.

This is a compelling interview and discussion on so many critical levels. One of the very best yet! Thank you, Nate!

Nate, I had the same initial response to Tom's ideas as your own, and then somewhere in the middle all the lights went on. It happened when I realized that Tom's use of the term "verb" is a brilliantly simple way to conceptualize economic value as relational, rather than objectified. Except try to talk to your average capitalist CEO about profit in psychosocial and linguistic terms. For the last few years I've felt in my heart that we are most likely hopelessly stymied, unable to positively transform our species' relationship to the life web. Unable on account of a majority of us being unable to break free psychologically from survival instincts which bind us to a competitive, dominating outlook based on narrow self-concern and greed. At least, unable to do so in the amount of time now left to us before serious irretrievable ecological collapse. It's also been my thought that every economic system we've devised so far is likely doomed to fail, on account of the very same human tendencies that have led late stage capitalism to become such a disaster. This is the first time I've heard anyone put forward a step by step long term plan, suggesting ideas that could actually seduce the capitalist concept of profit above all, and transform it rather than oppose it -- turn it inside out. And in a way that might actually work to better nurture the whole. I'm amazed by the simplicity of the conceptual shift. This is the first idea of its kind, working within a capitalist system, that I can envision as possibly working. I'm left currently with two immediate concerns. One is that given how long it can take to achieve a major shift in economic paradigms like "value," is there really enough time to let these ideas work to a substantial turning point given the state of our ecosystems, and the rate at which we are currently destroying habitat? (On the other hand, has anyone a better idea, that doesn't also involve the probability of collapse and social violence as a prerequisite?) The other concern has to do with the tendency of capitalism to generate growing wealth gaps, and along with that increasing social injustice. I've yet to encounter an approach to capitalism that would eliminate that tendency.

To date, this has been the most informative and relevant conversation that you have EVER hosted. My gratitude for your efforts is beyond words. Your conversations are the dialogues that anemic humanity needs in the same manner that Tom Chi once needed a transfusion! Thank you, thank you.

@SamuelOrjiM

Ай бұрын

Won me over in the first few seconds, the westerners that come here are so blind sometimes I worry about if they do more harm than good

@anthonytroia1

Ай бұрын

WORD!

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

You must've been asleep during the other ones. This guy did nothing but promote his laws of physics defying snake oil.

Yesterday, I watched Art Berman present "Getting Honest About the Human Predicament | 2024 Teacher Workshop" on KZread (kzread.info/dash/bejne/hIWhlNmtZ5DRgLg.htmlsi=VypCozbodoHBLdLV). I would like to hear Tom Chi attempt to debunk Berman's inconvenient truths. My dark sense of humor imagines Chi waving his hands explaining theoretical physics to the starving, dying climate change victims in the global south to ease their worried minds.

More and more, the human enterprise experiment seems like a science-based collective art project, with the material world as our medium.

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

Don't worry, that type of civilization will be long gone soon.

@NancyBruning

Ай бұрын

@@j85grim4 what interests me is variation will we replace it with?

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

@NancyBruning All the evidence based on previous forms of human civilization leads me to believe we are headed into another dark age and or possibly all out nuclear war. I don't agree with all the hippies on here with their potato farms: they will become a target for people to raid and loot.

14:18 Jevons paradox, cheaper means increased market reach just more air conditioners. Puerile

Listened to about a quarter of this so far and my science based alarm bells are ringing very loudly. Chi comes across as an extremely good salesman for the greenwashing of extractive industries with a good, sound scientific basis for many of his claims, but where is the published peer reviewed research that quantifies the massive positive feedbacks that he claims for his chosen methods and technologies? The methods he described like regenerating envirnoments through planting species in correct succession order is many decades old, and I am not sure Chi is old enough to have actually managed long term projects to the level of completeness that could confirm the levels of regeneration he is claiming. The world is full of ecological desserts that were the result of novel scientific approaches to making the world a better place.

@trenomas1

Ай бұрын

Give him a chance. He's quite correct when it comes to carrying capacity and potential. He's in a place where he has the power and responsibility to snatch the low hanging fruits Internet in the system.

The drastic diminution of the topsoil depth (and the bison species) on the Great Plains is a PERFECT example of our naive human-centric view of "Life" on Earth. I often think of an enclosed, self-sustaining terrarium. Interfere with that internally-functioning mini bio-system and it dies. Homos sapiens' god-like presumptions would be laughable if they weren't so demonstrably tragic.

24:08 "Resources are there not because of nouns but because of verbs" 🎯

@bumblebee9337

Ай бұрын

In a process, there is a product. For example, precipitation is defined as the product of the water cycle. Humans are a product.

@skeetorkiftwon

Ай бұрын

The supply is irrelevant without the demand. The constraints cease to exist without the want or need to employ them. There is a soft floor of supply constraints that can be satisfied by reducing consumption of wants. The hard floor of needs will be much less forgiving. It's stunning to me that so many "smart" people can't observe phenomenon like the overthrow of the Sri Lankan palace after their attempt to force on the people organic farming practices. These climate pipe dreams will suffer the same fate. The general population will not suffer reduced consumption so long as an example of greater opulence can be observed. Especially not for claims they cannot prove themselves.

There is just one problem with the view proposed: energy. We are going out of its aboundance in the near future and there is no viable alternative. Nuclear Fusion? Please be serious. To invent and produce new technology it needs energy. More precisely, the technosphere constantly requires energy inputs to power its operation. This is a direct consequence of the "memetic mutations" that our cultural memory allows, having begun from the first hominids, starting from cut stone through the conquest of fire to the Neolithic revolution, then other developments in technoculture leading to the cumulative use of all the primary energy sources available on our planet. All industrial revolutions from the steam engine to 5G rely on the abundance of energy to support them. So how do we consider maintaining a complex technosphere in a world devoid of energy? It is the know-how that allows the development of complex tools. However, it is based on knowledge and science, which develops powerful tools to explore and use matter and energy. It takes a society with complex technical infrastructures to extract, refine, develop and build the research centers of our civilization equipped with the most sophisticated instruments. To think for a moment that this race for know-how will stop by itself, without external events blocking the road, is to imagine that we will one day suddenly be devoid of creativity, and therefore of inventiveness. Our inventiveness generates the complexity of our societies and the machines they know how to manufacture, producing more and more entropy outside their circle.

I'd have liked to have heard a bit of discussion about where he thinks the energy required to run all the yet to exist farm robots is going to come from.

@johnbanach3875

Ай бұрын

I was thinking the same.

I am relieved that I'm not the only one with a mixed or negative impression of Dr. Chi. Some relatively beneficial products. Some true observations. But also profiteering off the human predicament, while missing some key truths. With his educational background I would have expected better systems literacy. Life is not nouns or verbs or even relationships. Life is a complex adaptive system of complex adaptive systems. Dr. Chi seems to think that the goal of life is efficient optimization of each photon. I think the goal of any complex adaptive system is its own self perpetuation, which involves a dynamic interplay between efficiency and resilience, where the two are sometimes, though not always, at odds. I won't call him epithets like "snake oil salesman". He strikes me as a mix of self-serving pragmatist and genuinely concerned citizen of the planet, same as most or all of us. However, he cherry-picks his observations of how life works to serve his pecuniary ends, perhaps unconsciously. Based on my elementary (so far) study of complex adaptive systems, it seems to me that the humanosphere / superorganism is in a late conservation (K) phase of the adaptive cycle, in a gridlock of super-resilience in an undesirable basin of attraction. Dr. Chi seems smart enough that, if he looked at it that way, he might be able to find some key feedbacks that could be broken, strengthened, or added, or some key thresholds that could be adjusted to LOWER the resilience of the superorganism while nudging it toward a threshold separating it from a more desirable basin of attraction. Dr. Chi correctly observes that the powerful among us fail to empathize with the more than human world, fail to recognize it as an extension of our own selves, and that that is crucial to our net effect on the world. Yet he acknowledges that many of us do not want to be farmers, so justifying his autonomous electric tractor. In the so-called developed world, with our tertiary job economy, farming is rewarded with neither prosperity nor status. OF COURSE under that system, nobody wants to be a farmer. On the other hand, without immersion in the world of diverse species, there is no chance of falling in love with any other species, nevermind love for the diversity thereof. Farming is no guarantee of that love. European folklore is full of fear of the forest, of predators, of losing one's way. Why Europe developed that way while Ioway organized their society around stewardship of keystone species is a great question for cultural anthropologists. But certainly, the Ioway had to experience Bison and Wolves in order to embrace them and learn to steward them.

@roo3515

Ай бұрын

I agree with your balanced appraisal of Tom. Look As far as a venture capitalist goes at least he has some interest in ecology. I just feel like he is missing (or conveniently ignoring) how severe and how quickly both climate change and biosphere collapse seem to be moving. If there was no climate change I could maybe (maybe) see this gradual centuries long epoch transition working, but if we are as some are signalling on a runaway trajectory a few beavers aren't going to cut it. I want to believe. I hope he influences his tech bros....fast.

"This is my cat."

@ppetal1

Ай бұрын

Spoken like a cat.

@greenenigma

Ай бұрын

The Cat is very privacy-oriented and did not give permission to Tom Chi for its name to be on the interwebs.

@JayFortran

Ай бұрын

Just the facts

@bumblebee9337

Ай бұрын

Property of cat.

@michaelmckinley3975

Ай бұрын

This is not a hat.

Indeed, I support the suggestion that we should develop principles that can guide innovation and capital to make them more ecologicaly aligned in the future; there is excellent reasoning behind the ideas and concepts expressed in this interview. Thank you very much for the making this discussion available!

Talk to john kempf about natures answer to neo nicotinoids. Is advertising a noun or verb ?

This guy is such VC ego maniac Nate you should rewatch the episode and notice how he has a simple answer for everything. These are the exact people promising the brighter future while continuing on our same path that you warned us about.

Is he just talking about basic ecology as a cover for manufacturing air conditioners and robots, whilst looking for opportunities to financially enclose regenerative processes?

@hhwippedcream

Ай бұрын

💯

such a beautiful and inspiring conversation. Tom is truly laying out the bridging grounds between Earth and economy, between wilderness and technology. Absolutely loved this cast. Thank you Tom and Nate.

Forgive me, but I cannot help but compare Tom Chi's intelligence and visionary capacity, and even his entrepreneurial spirit to our self-serving dunderheads on Capitol Hill. In some ways that dichotomy is as laughably absurd as any Monty Python sketch. In other ways, it is as terrifying as Hiroshima, Dachau and Gaza.

@stephenboyington630

Ай бұрын

The people in Congress are very good representations of us. We literally choose them to advocate for what we want. They will not change until we change.

@treefrog3349

Ай бұрын

@@stephenboyington630 Wow! you have imbibed heavily of the "koolaid", have you not? Representative democracy is a beautiful idea but also a farce.

@hhwippedcream

Ай бұрын

​@@stephenboyington630 Agreed, considering that corporations are considered "people" as well.

1:28 creating financial enclosure. Nate should read, and consider interviewing the author of, “The Code of Capital; How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality,” Katharina Pistor, who is very interested in how to change our legal and economic systems in order to mitigate negative climate outcomes.

This episode was so fascinating on so many levels. Thank you so much for having him on and giving access to all of us to his thinking. He was inspiring and humbling.

Definitely an episode that I learned and enjoyed ! Thanks Nate and thanks Tom Chi.

So information dense I didn’t do my homework before this episode. Will definitely be listening to this in comprehensible chunks.

@lizzieconnor7

Ай бұрын

Absolutely agree. I got enough to think this is something that I really need to think about and share. But I'll need quite a few replays in order to carry it on into the rest of my life. Thank you so much, Nate and Tom. Those four Cs - wow! So simple, and so profound!

Great enlightening talk! You have to have him on again.

The machines can take the trees faster is one point, faster than the trees will regrow is another point, to change the landscape into ag fields is another point, in changing the entire earth living system into something entirely different is another. All will result in ecological systems that humans won't like.

@RickLarsonPermacultureDesigner

Ай бұрын

This guest is going to be a challenge, already I'm having to ponder the economic value of a kilogram of sand.

@RickLarsonPermacultureDesigner

Ай бұрын

I worked in a factory that produced ice cube machines, back in the earlies eighties, when a machine wasn't working right they would just emit the refrigerant right into the atmosphere to work on it. People around here would probably want to do away with me for telling...

@RickLarsonPermacultureDesigner

Ай бұрын

I don't want to make money like I did in the past. But I do live in this civilization so I will soldier on.

@RickLarsonPermacultureDesigner

Ай бұрын

In permaculture terms we would call these tree metabolism ideas a well diversified seven layer food forest. The guest is a closet permaculturist!

@RickLarsonPermacultureDesigner

Ай бұрын

I'm planting trees by hand, so now I can retire from this work and let the machines do it.

Financially Enclosed Beavers is a pretty decent band name

Second only to Schmachtenberger, this is the best episode of TGS to date. Please have this man back.

@WendyNicholls

Ай бұрын

I so agree with you Anthony. Or better yet have them both on together!!

@stephseckold4324

Ай бұрын

@@WendyNicholls oh yes!

Good job Nate. Nice guest. The soil-food-web economy. The soil-carbon-economy. The Gaian-economy. It's all about regenerative vs extractive, 100%.

A really inspiring conversation on such a wide perspective. It's reasonable to have a realistic timetable, but realistic for the actual financial system or reasonable for the future of our children on an inhabitable planet ?

Amazing interview. Going to watch it again in a couple of weeks.

Well, wisdom. Thank you.

Great show! Thank you

I love these podcasts, so many rabbit holes to dive down and learn. Thank you for another great guest

Fascinating bloke. I only missed a little bit of discussion on the key role of energy in the global metabolism, though. His ideas about putting the most of the energy from the sun "in the middle" to use using nature were great, but I would have liked to hear his thoughts regarding the several key things that the burning fossil fuels does for our civilization that nature will never be able to do (not even with a human helping hand). Maybe for the next time you have a conversation, Nate.

Such insightful closing thoughts. The end was epic between you both 🙌👊

NFTs, guy totally gets it! Need a Beaver NFT made to help educate folks about the 3 epochs?

Thanks really, this was a blast!

Right on, Tom. Let's remember that this is all in a capitalist context. So, if we are wise, we will financialize all of it while managing resources. It's nice to hear him framing things in values that are not only about making money. :-) But, you know, it's nice to know venture capitalists have everything figured out. Happy days. Good things are possible if the Capital Code is coded for something other than Capitalist. All of my animals and cats are chatty. If you build trust and communicate with Animals they will reciprocate. All is sacred.

His voice drops when he says, "Where we want to do economic development on".

I farm tea (Camelia sinensis) in NC. We cultivate bamboo as animal fodder (hay) and a wind break for the tea plants. The manure from the animals fertilizes the tea. NO INPUTS.

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

That's amazing. Now go do that for 8 billion people and come back here.

@d.-beck7205

Ай бұрын

​@@j85grim4 You nailed it. 8 billion is way too many.

@anthonytroia1

Ай бұрын

@@j85grim4 No, YOU go do it for 8 billion people, ya sweetie 😍😘☺😚

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

@@anthonytroia1 I was being sarcastic as obviously the biggest problem with all of these non solutions is they cannot scale up to meet our population size. Even you are clearly part of the food chain if you are using products that allow you to watch KZread videos. I'm willing to bet also 90% of your actual food still comes from the grocery store.

@anthonytroia1

Ай бұрын

@@j85grim4 you look like Darth Vader 🤩😘

Tom Chi is merely expressing, in very detailed intellectual terms, the idea that the Earth is not all about humans. The inter-woven dependence of ALL "life" from microbes to homo sapiens is a fundamental fact-of-life that seems to have been forgotten - or ignored - in our quest to sustain an unsustainable human population. Truth is the basis of wisdom. Yet honesty seems to be one of our most endangered "resources".

@j85grim4

Ай бұрын

No he's not actually, he's trying to sell a product with claims he never once backed up with data. Don't be so naive.

@peteunderdown6889

Ай бұрын

This conversation is not worthy of Nate Hagens. I'm not buying any of Tom Chi's Green Mordor Economy

"I think we should realize that the monetary system is a way of tracking value, it is not value itself." THIS is so important.

@RebeccaPurpleRachmany

Ай бұрын

Unfortunately, it's exactly wrong. Name the top 3 things you value and put a price on them. Oh, and don't forget air.

This is one of those conversations where the tech bro sounds really smart but he's just living in a weird blind bubble where everything is logical within that bubble, but it's completely ridiculous if you start to challenge any one of his assumptions about what's valuable. How does he know how valuable it is that the rock gets warmed, even if there's no lizard on it? How does he know that the photons in space aren't doing something for us on Earth? It's the typical over-intellectualized thing of how we as humans can engineer ourselves out of this thing because we are so much wiser than nature and we know exactly what is good and what is bad for the ecosystem as a whole. It's just an extension of the mechanical view of the world that we can just optimize for the right thing and it will all be fixed. Furthermore, he is justifying his big money-making investments by creating these Epochs and assuming that none of it could happen sooner than he assumes it could happen. It is hard to avoid the feeling that Tom is actually on the edge of evil with lots of good theoretical explanations. It's unfortunate. Nate did a great job grilling him, but fundamentally, I have to say, listening to this guy is counterproductive.

Nate, please….you think this guy gets it????

JFC 2:16 "I was thinking to myself, this guy doesn't get it..." Nate, your first observation was correct.

"Financially enclose"... I wonder how the marketing people feel about that one? It does indeed summon "The Borg" analogy. Profit = higher entropy imposed on the Environment than the countering lower entropy you created by civilizing the "uncivilized". You can't fix what you did by doing more of what you did. I think the only real answer is to do less. Now, how to make a profit out of THAT. That's the great Catch 22.

I wa so excited to see he’s talking about beavers. Dunno if anyone here has found Dr Holley Muraco’s page, she’s a beaver rescue and rehabber and her beaver kids are just…it’s tew much. Words fail. 🥺😍

@bumblebee9337

Ай бұрын

There are more than 100,000 beavers in Chile who need a new home.

@Corrie-fd9ww

Ай бұрын

I think Dr Muraco just gave talks in Peru, maybe you can send her an email about that.

The keystone species that takes care of keystone species. 😊

@bumblebee9337

Ай бұрын

The American Burying Beetle.

9:58 that's not merely a kilogram of sand sent one way or another. Those sands aren't even generally sourced for the same properties as concrete calls specifically for rough surfaces for bonds and silicon wants purity and arguably benefits more from uniformity in radius. That's also a kilogram of sand...and exponentially more fuel spent changing its properties to metallic silicon, of which a great deal of which is rejected for inclusions. It's very frustrating that there isn't a large multi day debate held between these people holding a different part of the elephant explaining how to solve the "problem."

Nate, I’d love to hear an episode on the implications of MMT on the global biosphere. I believe Michael Every alluded to this approach in your episode with him recently, as he spoke on the importance of on-shoring production capacity in the coming years in order to sustain the American economy. The monetary and (thus) biophysical implications seem to sprawl, would love your take on this.

What a great conversation! Many thanks, Nate and Tom. Yay beavers!

Follow along transcript stops at 1:04:37. I'm looking for discussion on what happens to the size of global human population over the coming decades/centuries.

2hr plus. Blimey!

That dude has a Minneapolis "aAleyware" decor...love it!

@stringlarson1247

Ай бұрын

I shop at their affiliate Chicago AlleyWare..

Hothouse Earth certainly had more biomass than the Earth of today, with its ice covered regions. Are there reasons to believe Hothouse Earth was less diverse or more diverse?

@JayFortran

Ай бұрын

They mentioned that the animals were much smaller, in general

One more try -- Follow along transcript stops at 1:04:37 -- Is there anyone monitoring the comments who can add the missing dialog to the very end of the podcast?

Nate should have on Alan Booker

Is civilization or our current form of ( industrial ) civilization the problem? Many other civilizations have collapsed and yet here we are. This interview presents a potential pathway to the next iteration of civilization. No one is claiming it will be the ultimate form lasting forever. We just need to get through this and hopefully come out better than we find it now. Evolution is an ongoing process.

In Aust CFCs in AC were phased out years ago.

@sarahheys2770

Ай бұрын

to slow ozone layer depletion

Polluters pay: their money or our lives

Smart guy. Everything comes out of the ground first. But he just doesn't seem to account for too many humans on the planet.

Tom Chi is the ecological technophile tinkerer equivalent of rocket man Elon Musk, especially with his flowery techno spiel, even caught you out a few times Nate. He also came across as a technophile wolf in an ecological sheep’s clothing. I’m concerned over what the future holds for my great grandchildren, I’m now even more concerned. Tom Chi would monetise everything presumably right down to the Earth worms and the soils microorganisms, and I’d guess Chi wants to robotise those, given half the chance, as after all they’re only made up of photon particles. The idea of autonomous agricultural robots working with soil and crops in the fields, wet and boggy, or bone dry rock hard is a fantasy. Autonomous robots around the farm working around livestock and humans crazy, doesn’t he know farming is one of most accident prone industries there is. If this Chi has worked on a farm it’s probably a so called model farm, and not a very large one. For robots to work effectively there’d need to work with monoculture in large open plan field system, that means taking out all those hedgerows recently restored for birds and other wildlife to habitate, and small woods and copses would also have to go too. He seems to have a fetish with air conditioners and robots, where does he think all these products come from out of CO2 or does he ignore mining, I mean that’s a real energy consuming, ecological and sustainable industry. Then we were treated to the I nearly died sympathy card, oh come on Nate you could have edited that out. By the way if you want the salmon working for us (ecosystem) those wonderful hydro electricity generating Dams need to go. And where were the questions on The Great Simplification’s - Energy Blindness and Peak Oil or should we assume these robots also discovered a clean unlimited constant energy source. Oh and Maybe Nate you should introduction him to William Rees🤔

@olivergilpin

Ай бұрын

Maybe this guy is living closer to the existing system, and is more transitionary? There is wisdom in shifting power from where it already is.

Learning not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs

Vaccinating bees seems like part of "The Great Complication" But it would count towards GDP!

I like him, already 1:12

What an encouraging episode - thank you!

He had me going for a little while, and even sounded like he was coming from a good place, but nope, not going to work. A desperate effort to have our cake and eat it too. Money chases the best return, regardless of the impact to the biosphere. The profit engine is a big part of what is driving us off the cliff, but you just can't get much profit if humans begin taking our fair share of ecological energy flows. And energy underwrites the complex system we have. As energy declines, supply chains for electric tractors and autonomous robots will collapse. One more thing- the number of streams still suitable for beavers to make an impact is quite limited.And how will current landowners feel? A one off trick that will have minimal effect.

@RebeccaPurpleRachmany

Ай бұрын

Yeah. It's one of those ones where he sounds smart as long as you don't question any of his fundamental assumptions, for example, that everything society does must appeal to "typical capitalists" for the foreseeable future.

@EnvironmentalCoffeehouse

Ай бұрын

@@RebeccaPurpleRachmany that was my perception too

People everywhere tend to think I, I, I, me, me, me. They do not think us, us, us, we, we, we. That will not change. "I" want to drive a large, complicated pickup truck to go off-roading for an afternoon. "I" do not care that a solar panel or computer chip could be made to help "us" instead.

Nate! Tom Chi is completely energy blind! Big example a ton of sand vs a ton of semiconductor chips. We're going to invent our way out of energy constraint evidently. He doesn't understand jevins paradox even though you challenged him. I'm sorry but he talks like a salesman.

Solar Punk scenarios spinning out.

1:36:30 There is not a single farmer that wants an electric tractor for the very simple reason that they take forever to repair and are incredibly vulnerable to board failures and lack of supply during especially covid, even in the diesel tractors. When someone says something so fundamentally false that the only possible resolution is that they are completely ignorant of the subject, or they are intentionally lying, all of their other claims must be even more scrutinized. "The gazing populace accepts greedily, without examination, that which soothes superstition and promotes wonder." -Hume

@Sharukurusu

Ай бұрын

You don't get to speak for all farmers, what hubris. Cost of ownership of an EV is lower than ICE even with maintenance costs figured in, and if a farmer has wind or solar on their property that they can charge from they don't get effected by fuel price shocks.

@erkinalp

Ай бұрын

@@Sharukurusu you want your tractor to be working even in case of an EMP strike

@skeetorkiftwon

Ай бұрын

@@Sharukurusu No. All EVs are energetically more expensive than ICE as the batteries themselves consume more energy in production than they store in their useful lifetimes. They are charged at an average 25% loss to heat in their useless lifetimes from the plug to the battery, more with line loss from the fuel powered electric plant, more still converting energy from the turbine to the generator. Solar and wind are petroleum products. Adding steps does not make it not hydrocarbon powered. Where is the solar powered factory that makes solar panels? The wind powered factory that makes turbines? Not one in existence not being backstopped by natgas/coal plants and being delivered by fleets of diesel machines on bitumen roads or concrete made from coal, but you'd pretend the trickle of consumer electronics they power is more than some child's science project. Farmers want to be able to repair their tractors on the fly, not wait months for parts, or pay manufacturers tens of thousands of dollars for proprietary software and parts. KZread search "Louis Rossmann AG leader" or "Louis Rossmann John Deere." Search "Thunderf00t perfect battery" Look up "Spain's Photovoltaic Revolution by Prieto and Hall" and understand why that government run publicly funded scam failed. Look at inverter costs and failures. Look at the CAES systems cost. Look at battery bank costs that are front loaded. Understand that batteries are terrible at generating locomotion under heavy loads. All farmers, yes, ALL farmers, are aware of these shortfalls or they won't be farming much longer and will cease to meet the requirement of being called a farmer. Omgz teh hubris of this guy.

@Sharukurusu

Ай бұрын

@@erkinalp That would knock out modern ICE engines anyway, unless you’re talking about seriously old tractors.

@Sharukurusu

Ай бұрын

@@skeetorkiftwon Wrong on a bunch here, where are you getting such bad information? Lifetime energy use of an EV including manufacturing and transmission losses is lower than ICE, you’re factually wrong here. EROEI for solar is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20:1, meaning every 1 unit of fossil energy input yields 20 over the lifetime of the panel. EROEI for fossil fuels used to recover other fossil fuels is falling while renewables are still seeing gains. Manufacturing can absolutely be done using renewables with storage or better grids, giant arrays have been installed on top of factories for years now. CAES has better economics than batteries for stationary applications, where were you going with that? Farmers would love to be able to do their own repairs, that isn’t where the industry is headed for ICE or EV producers and it sucks but you’re incredibly misinformed if you think that is an EV only issue.

So, did I tell you about when Vervain met me at the door and gave me information I shared with others and lives changed ?

What a wonderful man, and typical of what I call the "Early Birds" - that is people like Nate himself who have noticed that a Collapse is imminent or indeed under way. Some of the Early Birds have already died as they were really early (e.g. John Muir, d.1914). Some have disappeared into "doomsday prepper" bunkers or simply "off grid", and we don't know how many there are or what they are thinking and doing. But many others are staying put, like Horatius at the Bridge - which seems more heroic to me, but it is probably because they enjoy communicating and you can't do much communicating off-grid. Others simply CAN'T disappear to somewhere where you can be self-sufficient - it is not easy, and also it means you have to forgo all the intellectual delights of an advanced civilization as well as the fleshpots. Doing without the fleshpots is not hard, and probably good for you - but doing without arts, sciences, culture - hmmmmm, even if these have become decadent, it is still hard to do without their classical forms at least, and this entails access to vast libraries, museums, recordings, etc. Do without youtube? Eeeeeek - it is a lifeline for anyone trying to hear some meaningful talk and some decent music. It is even a lifeline for Christians now, as their churches plunge down the rabbithole of modern life and its strident posturings. If you stay around in the midst of Collapse, you can communicate actively but also receive passively the benefit of other communicators who look at the bigger picture from a whole raft of specialist angles. Personally I like the ancient historians like Eric Kline who have charted previous meta-Collapses from the written and archaeological record - but I also try to listen to other brilliant specialists who have looked up from the absorbing detail of their field of work and placed it in a wider perspective, or just tried to explain their work and left it to the audience to "pan out" (or not). I do think that it is a minor stumbling block NOT to accept that Collapse is a pre-requisite for complex societies which start to unravel the moment a couple of gaps appear in the web of interlocking supply and demand chains upon which they are constructed. It means that you waste time trying to sound optimistic and positive as if Collapse could be averted, somehow. It seems fairly certain that good things can only happen post-Collapse, if they have not happened by a certain point in the trajectory of complex societies. What was the point in time by which they needed to happen in our global civilization? I don't know exactly, all I know is that we passed that point a long time ago. I see that Simon Michaux and colleagues are using Hawaii as a template for how an entire society could become truly sustainable (though far from that now) - and almost any largish island provides a similar "field of dreams" but also a "field of nightmares", because it is easier to see just how unsustainable our way of life has become if you look at an island. The British Isles or Japan are archipelagos. and they too provide stark reminders of the limits to growth. Smaller examples include Malta, and what my parents always insisted on calling Formosa (Taiwan) - in fact there are hundreds of small examples, and perhaps one of the most frightening is Mayotte, the island in the Comoro Archipelago which still belongs to France. Because it is well-run and benefits from the (unsustainable) wealth of France, the BBC has described it in most un-BBC-like terms which I feel are worth pasting here. "Mayotte is currently prey to a wave of civil disobedience born of local fear of being overwhelmed by outsiders. Lying 70km (43.5 miles) from one of the poorest countries in Africa - the Comoros islands - Mayotte has a "small boat" problem that makes the UK's, over the Channel from France, seem puny by comparison. Hundreds of people arrive every week in boats from the Comoros, in addition to whom there are now increasing numbers of asylum seekers from the Great Lakes region of Central Africa." I should add that Simon Michaux et al have found that Hawaii cannot sustain its current population "sustainably" - it would need a much larger land area to do so. And the same could be said of most Nations, I reckon. They may not all resemble the Gaza Strip or Mayotte - yet. But they are headed that way. I do not know much about Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan - but I have an awful feeling that these shining examples of Growth 'n Progress may at the same time be at the top of all unsustainability leagues (such as the broad brush Global Footprint Network). Yet larger Nations like Canada and Russia should not be complacent. It can happen anywhere - and has, several times, both A.D. and B.C. (mainly B.C., since there is a lot more of that). What we call "indigenous people" now, are often Remnants of vast collapsed civilizations - as indigenous Europeans no doubt will be one day, and trust me, there are loads of indigenous Europeans in Europe, that is what "indigenous" means, to be descended from generations of a particular ethnic group that has occupied the same location - or at least the same continent - for a very long time. [From Old Latin indu "in, within" + gignere (genui) "to beget, produce", from PIE root gene- "give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to procreation and familial and tribal groups.]

1980'2.1990's interventions...hmmm.

About the best responce to Tom Chi comes from anthropologists like Giorgos Kallis, Jared Diamond, and Joseph Tainter. We need some cultural push to abandon extractivism, while still having technology, but our examples like shogunate Japan or the dominican republic looks like dictatorships, which likely makes them unstable against pressue for economic activity, ala the maximum power principle. It's likely other paths do exist, but they're really unclear: All nations could sabatoge one anothers' economies: refineries, coal plants, and cows could all be considered acts of war. An eco-religion could be only partially anti-tech maybe, ala anti-oil butlerian jihad lite. Ask the above anthropologists if they could dream up more answers, but I doubt the good answers look like productivist ideologies, ala capitalism, communism, etc.

Ironic that in some areas there is a shortage of sand due to demand for concrete. The price is not at $10000/kg but people have been murdered over it, and ecosystems are being destroyed.

Epoch 3 is a More-Than-Vegan world.

If you are to view yourself as an individual, you eventually realize that you are dependent on many things.

Awesome?

he seems really smart.......too bad we dont have 200 years of time to start his ideas...even if the worlds greedy mega companies would allow his ideas to be implemented as they gave up their stranglehold of power.

I started off not liking this talk because it took awhile for me to understand Tom Chi's point of view. If you stick with it, this talk really starts to get good then keeps getting better all the way to the end.

Isnt GDP a completely invalid, practically fraudulent measure of economic health?

@stringlarson1247

Ай бұрын

Yep. Much the same with the reported unemployment rate.

Beavers will actually "truck" themselves over to the next location as they move away from home.

Those beavers are not going to save us.

4:30 the abc book of climate change fixing instructions for pepul hu don’t reef well read well or kant control auto correct and glasses/lasik hasn’t helped. My mother is blind literally in so many ways.

It is the goal of some transhumanists to modify other species so they become sapient.

So many valuable perspectives, every kid should be exposed to these for a positive future on earth.

Thou shalt fail 10 of the 11 commandments.

Nothing really new here if you have read a book on ecological economics ....

These ideas are 40 years too late.

@TonydeSouza-cm6qs

Ай бұрын

Oh dear. 10 X financial returns on nature based services. I have to stop listening now.

@PeterTodd

Ай бұрын

@@TonydeSouza-cm6qs Yup, pretty sickening, I won't give this conversation any time.

This guy is such an obvious snake oil salesman. Apparently, he stumbled on to products that defy the laws of physics.

@10.10. The ton of sand going to construction industry and the ton of sand going to silicone valley are different. Chi needs to do a little bit of Material Science before he use this as an example of production for higher value. And also, he is also implied that the value of having a built environment is lower than the virtual infrastructure. At this point, I stop listening. Sorry Nate.

😇 After 14 min, not impressed. I was told about the difference between CO2 and CO2-eq. 😮 Wow! What’s the big deal? It’s all a question of forcing - and of *instantaneous* forcing when you’re at the edge of positive feedback tipping. Can we get serious, Mr Look-Cool-But? Can you present Nate with a complete burger? Like “Where’s the beef?” (1984) - kzread.info/dash/bejne/Y3qOsLuRe6vdfto.htmlsi=CyREt7HJv7XgHTPq (I hope I’ll change my mind at t=30m.) t=29m - Nate is very… generous… when he says “This is the first time I’ve heard this.” Not impressed. Bye bye!

@anthonytroia1

Ай бұрын

OK, we'll see ya later sweetie 😘