If you’ve followed this blog you are familiar with Tony Seba’s work.
The talk above from October is kind of a rushed summary of his work, and not his most descriptive outing, for that go here. and here.
What’s interesting is that he gave this talk for an audience in Saudi Arabia, essentially describing for them the end of their society’s profit model. Actually, that’s not even his most shocking predictions – the most insane stuff is about land use.
I interviewed Seba and wove his basic arguments into the videos below.
and more below.
And again, below Sam Evans the “Electric Viking” has a thumbnail of the presentation. Seba might be crazy, but he’s made some wild predictions over the last 15 years that turned out to be right. Worth understanding his argument.
Seba is an economist/technologist who knows nothing about sociology and psychology.
Here’s how his thinking works:
Step 1: technology will invent substitutes for animal meat quickly
Step 2: capitalism will drive the price of these substitutes much lower than animal meat quickly
Step 3: everyone will use these substitutes and animal agriculture will largely disappear, quickly
But, besides being wildly optimistic on the pace of technology itself, he doesn’t factor in the human element. Societies and cultures built on certain modes of living don’t react like automatons in a mathematical formula. Humans react poorly to sudden change. One only has to take the briefest of glances at American politics to see this – yet it somehow eludes Seba completely.
He does the same with EVs, predicting that by 2030 almost 100% of cars in the world will be driverless EVs using a subscription model instead of ownership. There are so many assumptions built in there as well as a complete discounting of how people will react to it that it could only be envisioned by a guy in a closed room writing down a formula with limited variables and saying the entire world will behave according to it.
I understand telling OPEC that they’re on the wrong track is itself a good thing, but most of them already know that oil won’t be the going thing for their descendants. Telling them something will happen by 2040 or even 2030 will get mostly shrugs – or even cause them to re-double efforts to themselves slow the pace of change using political levers. The last thing they’ll do is just say, “Oh well, it’s over.”
Seba might be right in the long run, granted, but his timing is indeed crazy.
After 5 years as a vegetarian, for climate reasons, I just started eating meat again – my iron was always low ( I’m a blood donor), I was low on energy, and the lady from the blood service I talked to had also gone back to meat, after 10 years. Chris Keefer’s Decouple podcast has a discussion on meat substitutes – growing huge amounts in vats might be much harder, and more expensive, than suggested.
John O’Neill
Another blood donor here: My hematocrit was always in the “healthy” range, but sometimes below the blood donation threshold. I started supplementing with a store brand multivite+Fe and my hematocrit has been above donation threshold ever since. (Though I do eat a can of smoked oysters or other high-Fe food to help build back my supply for after I donate.)
[End of anecdata]
Cruise driverless cars used to run through our Austin neighborhood every night after midnight for much of this past year. They suspended operations nationwide after feds started an investigation into “incidents with pedestrians” in San Francisco. Even if human drivers had a similar rate of incidents, the familiarity and the liability environment is very different than what an auto-taxi company will want to cover.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/27/cruise-driverless-cars-austin-suspend/
I did note that he—as many other trendwatchers do—talked about 80% EV uptake in terms of new vehicles purchased. There will be well-built ICE vehicles (and PHEVs) on the road for decades to come.
5 years ago he was saying 95% of road miles would be EV by 2030, so maybe he’s hedging that a bit with more recent talks.
https://youtu.be/BuVLlP1cuFg?si=N3POY8_O5bpKHBQS
And yes, I agree, ICE vehicles, especially used ones, will be around for a long time.
So, in Austin, that’s an example of human reaction hampering the place of adoption – his predictions completely ignore anything like that ever happening, when in all likelihood they will be the default. On the pace of technology itself, I’m guessing he’s talking to the marketers of these tech companies rather than the engineers, and hearing only the hype rather than the reality of how difficult certain things are to achieve.
I get that he covers the whole world and not just the US, but in the US long distance drivers will be the last ones giving up their ICE vehicles (or PHEVs).
Rather than distance, he might speak in terms of time. EVs’ biggest win is in urban or traffic jam settings, where plain ICE vehicles use a lot of energy idling. (I think about that a lot while sitting at a stoplight or in a parking space next to a car running its combustion engine.) Getting tailpipes out of crowded polluted cities (Kolkata, Shanghai, Bogotá, etc.) has great value in itself independent of distance traveled.
Besides the technical issues, robotaxis would displace a lot of low-income workers worldwide. Much better is New Delhi subsidizing the transition to electric rickshaws.
A meal of beans and grain* has “complete protein” in terms of the subset of amino acids that humans need. It is also much cheaper than animal meat. I don’t see a lot of meat eaters making decisions now based on cost of equivalent protein or they’d all switch to beans and rice (or succotash, bean burritos, etc.).
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*I eat a lot of rice and bean dishes, if only because the ingredients have long shelf lives and I’m not in the mood to get more refrigerated groceries. For me it also acts as nostalgia type comfort food from my childhood.
I’m sure his audience of carbon footprinted behemoths are aborbing this while they seriously consider how they can sell more oil at higher prices.
At least in Saudi Arabia they appreciate how cheap solar energy will be (even if the high temperatures reduce efficiency much of the time). A lot of these people are thinking of how to invest their personal money into new energy tech as a hedge for their personal fortunes.
Regarding his analysis about S/W/B working “anywhere in the world” and only needing five days of storage, I do wonder if his calculations used old climate data to determine wind and solar availability, since one major change that came with breaking the Arctic and the associated jet stream is that weather systems get stuck (as with the heat dome that lasted many weeks in and around Texas this year).