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Journalist Markham Hislop interviews leading energy experts from around the world about the energy transition and climate change.
Welcome to episode 370 of the Energy Talks podcast. I'm energy journalist, Marcum Hislop. I first met energy journalist extraordinaire Llewellyn King a few years ago when he asked me to sit on the journalist panel for the U. S. Energy Association media briefing he hosts.
Markham:He also hosts the PBS show White House Chronicles, and he writes a weekly column, and he does so many other things I can't keep track of them. And he's been doing this for 70 years, and it's an extraordinary career that he's had. So when I read a recent email in which he wrote, quote, a new age is at hand, an age dominated by AI and electricity, end quote, I immediately asked him to be a guest on this podcast, and he graciously agreed. So welcome back to Energy Talks, Luella.
Llewellyn:Thank you. It's nice to be with you all.
Markham:We're gonna get into the discussion around electrification and AI, and I know you have some very strong, feelings about that, but let's talk about your career. Can you just, for the audience here who might not know you, know about the work that you've done, could you just give us a brief overview of how you got started and and how you Well,
Llewellyn:let's make it quick so we can get back to the subject. But I was born in Southern Rhodesia, grew up there, went into journalism when I was 16, locked out and became a, became got a job working for a very prominent foreign correspondent. So very early on, I worked for Life and Time when those were very rich publications, the loose empire, and he ran magazines, like, there were movie companies with a lot of money. For example, 1957, the coronation of the Al Qaeda Khan and Dar es Salaam. He said 2 photographers, 2 writers, and me.
Llewellyn:This is ridiculous nowadays. You'd never get that, from any publication or even from television whereas that was the sort of that was the standard procedure for oh, and buy buy one little picture and a caption. That's all that Life Magazine ended up publishing. I went to London, as I turned, 20, and I got work in Fleet Street, which was wildly exciting. I worked on Sunday Mirror.
Llewellyn:I was lucky enough to be made a junior executive there. Fleet Street was a different kind of intoxication, but very potent, exciting, crazy, very much, a world of celebrities and celebrity chasing. I had the interesting job once of following Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton around, not with much success. I never actually spoke to them. But one Sunday, my first wife was there now, but my first wife and I went to a pub near where we lived.
Llewellyn:And sitting at the next table were Burton and Taylor. And she was a very good gentleman. She said, are you gonna call the office, Santoichi? And I said, yeah. They seem so happy.
Llewellyn:Let it be. Then I went back to the chase the next day. Of course, I'm being fired if I let it on that I knew where they were and hadn't called a photographer and got some sort of quote and, you know, quotes in those days were, do you love him? Maybe. Elizabeth Taylor talked last night of her love for actor Richard Burton, you know, there was that kind of thing.
Llewellyn:It was also the kind of story which said, Fast Cause left Scotland Yard last night with a dossier on a mysterious minister act. They were high wild days, but, not by today's tabloids, but I'm a bit too far. And I came to New York to see what it would like, and, and it was very difficult, actually. None of this was as easy as it would sound. New York was difficult.
Llewellyn:I foolishly started to me. Well, it was first when Liberation Magazine, and it it liberated the small amount of money I've raised and didn't liberate any women whatsoever. And in need of work, I came down the line and ended up in Washington where I worked for The Washington Post. And I was an editor there. I was insisted that there were a lot of them.
Llewellyn:It's not as random as it sounds. But I wanted to go back to reporting, and the legendary editor, Ben Bradley, wasn't going to do it. Well, they were pretty good friends. And, I got a job working covering nuclear power, and I found this whole exciting wonderful world of energy. And the thing about energy is that it's good for people.
Llewellyn:You know, plastic oranges, that doesn't matter. I started the energy daily in 1973 but I also started 2 years later, defense week, that energy is good for people, people are better off for energy, they're not sure they're better off for more weapons And, it it's very interesting how these 2 publications have totally different cultures. And to this day, people who worked on Defence Week have done terribly well and really roared through the through the journalists, and well, up the journalists to autobahn, if you will. Great jobs at Time Magazine or Street Journal and Washington Post, but they all left defense the energy people have stayed in energy that's enough
Markham:now you've seen the, you'll be covering energy for 50 plus years And now you're talking about you agree, I guess, the the International Energy Agency came out and said we're entering the age of electricity, and you would agree with that. What makes you convinced that in fact we are entering an age of electricity?
Llewellyn:Well, because we're in an electromagnetic period, all of our rail progress has been fed by electricity from treating housewives of the drudgery of the home with appliances, to making it possible to live in hot style climates like Texas, anywhere in the world that's hot, because we have air conditioning. It's changed the way people can live. We live, all of us, in a cocoon of electricity with lighting, with so it's the vital it is the blood of modern society. Without it being collapsed, if we turn it off, nothing works. I grew up, as I told you, in Africa, and, sometimes we were without electricity for substantial periods of time.
Llewellyn:It's not a nice way to live. It's very difficult indeed. And it it also not only does it have endless value, as you know, because we're all surrounded by its uses, but it also has a great future because it doesn't chew up any natural resource permanently. It has other options, and I've seen those with with, wind, with solar, and to some extent with nuclear, which is very close to perpetual motion. Not quite, but in that direction, it is we can use and reuse so much of the fuel in a reactor.
Markham:Now, you talk to, utility executives and regulators and folks in the, American electricity industry all the time, and I've sat in on some of those interviews. And on the one hand, it seems like everyone's excited. This is a big change in within the you know, a fairly state conservative industry. At the same time, disruption is causing difficulties, and challenges. What's your take over what will happen with the industry, in the United States over the next, let's say, 5 or 10 years?
Llewellyn:You tend to see and have to see enormous innovation. You then have to see, and I think it's in it's coming. We're seeing small modular reactors about to be built and deployed. We also have come a long way with fusion. I've been covering fusion for just over 50 years, and I used to think it was always over the hill.
Llewellyn:It was always a breakthrough to get some more money. 1,000,000,000 of dollars worldwide spent on it. But suddenly, it's at hand. There are 6 American companies, many overseas, commercial, well financed. I particularly have been impressed with the Commonwealth Fusion Systems in Massachusetts, which, believes that it will be able to ship a they don't like the word reactor, but they'll use it now.
Llewellyn:A reactor in the early part of the next decade, a 400 megawatt reactor or device as they would call it. If that is true, that is a massive game changer. Now the the engineering is very demanding. Materials are demanding, and it hasn't happened yet, but it's very close. And right behind them are 5 other commercial companies and 4 including one, I think, is Sporthelion, which is going to be a direct conversion of electricity.
Llewellyn:No no need for, to siphon off heat, to, boil water to turn a turbine. So it's moving very fast. There are several European companies who think they too can take this direct route. I'm not sure I haven't had an opportunity to visit any of those companies, so I don't have firsthand information. But you are seeing across the board a huge technological evolution in which new materials, new ways of using, new thinking, and new demands.
Llewellyn:This makes it maybe the most exciting time in electricity. Back in 1973, things were pretty desperate. I worked on a study in 1974 for president Nixon, and it was bleak. In the US, we had coal, and we had Canada, and we had coal. And that's about what we had.
Llewellyn:And the idea was we'd electrify everything we coat, and we didn't. And, it was very, very worrisome. The Aspen Institute had a, a meeting that I was at where people were talking about the 23% of, decline in the gross national product. This is incredible. This would be a destruction in the American economy and many other economies.
Llewellyn:In 74 alone, about about 20 heads of state lost their jobs because of energy prices and energy. It was a very desperate time. This is not a desperate time. This is a challenging time, and that's a good thing.
Markham:Now, in the email that you sent, you talked about, Donald Trump. And to quote you, by his own statements will destroy economies at home and abroad. What can you expand on that?
Llewellyn:Well, I think that this is not really an energy story, but he has some very strange ideas. Of course, he said a lot of very strange thing. But but the most damaging thing he's likely to do is to establish huge tariffs on everything across the board. We know from Smoot Hawley in the 19 twenties how damaging that can be, Tariffs don't work, and he doesn't seem to understand that a tariff is actually a kind of sales tax, which hurts it doesn't hurt the producer as much as it hurts the purchaser, but it hurts both. Only the government which gets revenue gains.
Llewellyn:But the decline in economic activity would quickly offset any gain in government revenues. It's a very bad situation, a very foolish concept of how you could create fortress America and a very poor way of going about international relations.
Markham:What's your take on Kamala Harris?
Llewellyn:I'm not enthusiastic. I know Biden slightly. I've known him for years. I always thought he was a solid, but not exceptional man. And she's in that condition.
Llewellyn:He selected her. I think she has managerial challenges. She's had difficulty in her small office as vice president, and she's not always a convincing public performer, but she is more likely to maintain, in my view, a steady path for the US than Trump would based on what he has said. And he has said some extraordinary things like dictatorship, using the law and order to punish his enemies, throwing people in prison. It's been a a wild, assortment of, proclamations about what he will do, some of which he cannot do because the constitution doesn't grant the president the ability to do everything he would like to do.
Llewellyn:But it does seem as though it would be a very deleterious thing for the well-being of the country overall. I'm not, of course, in a majority necessarily in that view. I'm probably about 50%. When I write these things, I get strange, emails, some of which accuse me of being a communist. Some call me a fascist, and makes them suggest that my parentage is in doubt.
Markham:I'm sorry for laughing at that, but the idea of your parentage being in doubt, we'll move on. What about the changes that are taking place under the the new Bidenomics, we'll call it, but the, you know, in 2021, the US adopted clean energy industrial policy in a big way. So we had the bipartisan infrastructure act, the chips act, the in inflation reduction act, all of which, depending on how the tax credits play out, could be between a $1,000,000,000,000 and $2,000,000,000,000 injected into the economy over the next, decade. Is it remaking the the US economy, bringing home manufacturing that it used to be you know, had been sent off to China? Is it a or is it a a minor issue or a major issue?
Llewellyn:I think it's about half and half. I think that it's a lot of money. I think it's been inflationary. I'm far from convinced it's all been well spent or will be well spent because it takes a long time for the the checks to arrive. Some utilities that were expecting through the agriculture department or the department, are still waiting for their tracks.
Llewellyn:And some of it suggests social yearning rather than solid, energy, growth budget. On some things, I think, will be very useful, particularly transmission, which is the weakest aspect of the electricity system, and certainly the r and d that has gone into everything, and the new materials, new ways of doing things. I think it will bring some manufacturing back to the US, but that is that's a very dangerous way to go because you're protecting an industry. And we saw in Great Britain where industries were protected, like the start, like the, like the automobile industry, with disastrous results when the protection was over. I remember visiting in India where you could buy a brand new but essentially 35 year old automobile because it was a protected industry and there was no incentive to improve year after.
Llewellyn:You could buy a Morris Oxford car that looked as though it had just come off the production line 35 years earlier. And India suffered tremendously from protectionism, in these early years of independence, really only recently, that, some sort of economic sanity has, upset that belief that protection works. I don't think it does. I think, I think some industries will come back. I mean, awful lot will go to to Mexico, close at hand, and I think Canada might be a beneficiary.
Llewellyn:But I don't, I don't think that you can lure industry by fiat. And when the money runs out, you see what happens. Industry will find, like, water, the lowest cost, the lowest financial denominator to produce its products and services. One of the
Markham:questions I ask American experts all the time, Llewelyn, is the potential for the American, innovation ecosystem, that that amazing system they have of, you know, subsidizing research and development, the basic science, and moving it out into the commercialization process until the private sector, can pick it up. You know, it feels like it's been the new technology has been derisked. And AI is the one that's been getting all of the attention. I know you have a a a special interest in it. So give us your take on artificial intelligence.
Llewellyn:On artificial intelligence. Well, first, I'd like to go back to your your precursor statement. A lot of the innovation is due to a very, to this point in time, creative immigration system. In working on artificial intelligence, you'd be astounded at the number of people, who were not born in the US. I was sitting with some in New York, a month ago.
Llewellyn:2 were born in India, and 1 was born in, Spain. Some of the best thing there's amazing number of people born in Spain in this that have obviously India and China and, Taiwan have made a big event. And if you go, as I did, a week ago up to MIT, you'll be amazed at the number of people who are clearly Asian. They're clearly not traditional Americans. If and one of the great damages that Donald Trump can do to this country is to stop it being a magnet for talent.
Llewellyn:It is a huge magnet for talent, and it's worth looking at why. 1, it's fairly easy to start up. 2, there's a culture where failing isn't regarded as a disaster, and 3 is this huge mobility, up to this point in time, although the high housing shortage may change, mobility of labor, and mobility of endeavor. So if you really fail in your business that you started in Philadelphia and you feel like pain or head of nerve into your collar and start another business, there isn't a sense of stigma that there is in Europe, for example, to failure. I spent a lot of time, on different issues with the think tank in Ireland, and the fear of failure until the Internet revolution, was huge.
Llewellyn:It was discussed openly in public. There's no such thing in America, but our technological boom is fed with immigration as well as these other advantages. And, gradually, we tend to be introducing a more regulated society, and there's a big question over how to manage the immigration. I think it's, I think, overall, the benefits of fairly lax immigration far outweigh the social cost of it. And, we've been the beneficiaries to this point in time.
Llewellyn:But as one of the AI aficionados said, the moment this stops being a police, that it attracts talent, the talent will find somewhere else to go. I'm not sure where that is at the moment, but, at the moment, we're a tremendous beneficiary of some of the best minds in the world in technology. AI, I think, is going to revolutionize everything, and it's not going to be without considerable pain, but with tremendous gains. Productivity will go up. Medical research will change out of sight in which we will have, you know, one researcher who now works for an absolutist.
Llewellyn:And so, not born in this country. He was born in in Jordan and educated in Spain. That is chief, AI officer at the Goddard Space Center. Before that, he was chief in since Kumar Hajime, chief innovation officer in in Houston, and he believes that a child born today will live to be a 120. I'm not sure of that.
Llewellyn:But, certainly, life expectancy, you can expect and some of the big, ghastly diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, and heart, will, if not be cured, they'll be pushed further out, and people will survive them, and they'll be better. Just think about drugs. There are billions of drugs in the world. AI can bring this the disease and the drug together in a way that hasn't happened yet at all.
Markham:Llewellyn, how might artificial intelligence affect the energy system, both on the oil and gas side, the hydrocarbon side, and on the electricity side?
Llewellyn:Well, it'll make almost everything more efficient. On the electricity side, electric utilities are uniquely open to it. This very conservative business and has to be conservative because it's real time. It's like air traffic control. You can't shut down to retool for 2 months.
Llewellyn:There, obviously, we're already it's already being used extensively for wildfire suppression or identification of of wildfire fuel in the forest. We're now inventorying inventorying every, tree in a forest, which is amazing, and put them all in the in the ledger. If you can see the crown from a satellite or from a a drone, you can tell a lot about that tree, and you can identify it. But in customer relations and in the operation of, distributed energy resources and, ultimately, in the day to day running of many aspects, the speed with which virtual power plants can be operated by AI is hugely appealing. And now we're seeing in the AI world the development of agents, which are basically servants of of systems that apply to your interests.
Llewellyn:And there's one currently in New York called Emergence, which is also working on making them more user friendly so that you can speak to them conversationally, so you can actually chat with them about what they're going to do and what they think should be done. This is both scary and exciting. The downside is jobs will be subtracted, and lots of jobs will be subtracted. With automation, we found more jobs were made. People in AI think that will be the pattern.
Llewellyn:I am not sure of that. I think there'll be big social adjustments that I think because AI will make most things cheaper. I'm not sure how it will play except in obvious ways in oil and gas. It will impute improve research, projections, market analysis, and just as with utilities, weather forecasting. For example, if you can have weather forecasting, and build that into your the shape of your load, you're way ahead, it is extraordinary in its only beginning.
Markham:I'll take a moment just to remind everyone that, if you have a question, for Lewellen, please go down to the bottom of your screen and where you see reactions, click on that icon, and, you'll see where it says raise your hand. And so you can raise you can click on that, raise your hand, you'll get into the question queue. And then once Llewellyn and I are finished the interview, then you will I'll ask you to ask her a question of of Llewellyn. So, Llewellyn, one of the because I know you talk to electrical utilities, a lot, and, transmission and distribution comes up quite frequently, whether the system can be adapted to distributed energy, whether we can add enough we'll be adding generation. Can we get it to where it needs to go?
Markham:And it seems to me that AI has the opportunity, the potential to open up that system and make it much more productive than it was before. You know, we're talking about grid enhancing technologies. We're talking about, ways for AI to manage the the grid to its capacity in a way that we haven't been able to do before. So what are the, utility executives telling you about the potential for AI within the electricity system?
Llewellyn:They're cautiously enthusiastic. They're dealing first, and their first sort of response is not to talk about what AI can do for them, but what it's doing to them with the increase in electricity demand with the data centers. But, and there's some pretty frightening calculations that are and then, they're occurring at a huge rate. One utility in Texas, I mean, there are 24 waiting to get into a service there. Well, that's incredible.
Llewellyn:State of Virginia houses more than any other, particularly just west of Washington. Something like 70% of the world's Internet travel travel, I'm told, travels through them. On the other hand, I'm more optimistic. I don't think that it's going to be, a curve that goes up, a line that goes up like that into infinity. First of all, the data center designers themselves are working very hard on reducing the amount of electricity in the use in a data center.
Llewellyn:The first breakthrough will probably using be using water to cool them rather than air which will will reduce the electricity. Then at least, then I heard a very interesting lecture from a young woman who used to work for NVIDIA, but now works for NTT. The Japanese, they're working on a photon chip, which won't use any electricity at all, and there'll be no heaters. Just will be just light. I was talking to a utility in Texas 2 days ago, and they on Saturday, actually.
Llewellyn:And the CEO there said he saw that there would be some reduction in this rate of growth. They don't want to buy that much electricity. You can't innovation is not a confined thing. It's broad and many of these issues, if we look at them only narrowly, seem insuperable. Take transmission, we can increase essentially the supply of electricity with better transmission and that includes, better connectors.
Llewellyn:There's a com there's several companies making, a, a line which has a carbon, composite fiber rather than steel. It's lighter. It doesn't expand, so you don't get any say. We need fewer pylons. It carries an aluminum conductor, and this they say, moves twice the electricity than a copper conductor on a steel rod.
Llewellyn:This is happening across the board. So you've got to look for what I call the collateral development. If you're worrying about one thing, just see if there isn't any collateral development, which would negate some of the problems you're worried about.
Markham:One of the things that I've noticed in in this energy transition that's different from other ones is the tremendous development of technology related technologies. So artificial intelligence and how will that affect the electricity system? How will it affect the the transportation system? Because it'll make electric vehicles more efficient and and smarter. There and materials is another big one.
Markham:Last year at the World Petroleum Congress, I had a chance to talk to, doctor, Ibrahim Abba, who runs is the VP of Technology for Saudi Aramco. And, you know, he was talking about how we're not only in an energy transition, we're in a material trend materials transmission trans transition, and, we'll be able to make materials from hydrocarbons in the next few years that we could never we've never have dreamt of, not not that long ago. And it seems like in every industry, that kind of innovation is is going on. And is I I kind of asked you this question before, but I wanna ask it again. Is the American advantage in innovation enough for it to catch China in terms of advanced technology manufacturing and development, advanced, you know, clean energy manufacturing, that sort of thing?
Llewellyn:I don't know. I think that China's will be held back by its political system, by the top down governance. You can't make all the decisions in a vibrant big economy out of Beijing. But if it were not for that, I would think that, America might be superseded in many things by China. But I think the weakness will be in the Chinese system.
Llewellyn:We don't know how this is going to play out. I don't think it's a very healthy moment when we're running what amounts to a sort of mini coal war with China, which is getting slightly hotter all the time. On the other hand, nobody really has a constructive way of dealing with it or has yet come up with a convincing one. And, that has to play out, and that's one of the bright clouds on our horizon. With with the China.
Llewellyn:Would it be a great military power? Would it be a if it's a great technological power, it doesn't matter. If it's a great military power, this is very threatening.
Markham:Now you're, you're located in in the Washington area, Llewellyn, and you, have, politicians on decision makers, policy makers, on your PBS White House Chronicle show all the time. When you're when you're hanging out over dinner with some of these folks, what kind of energy issues are they talking about? What, what, is top of the priority list these days, on Capitol Hill?
Llewellyn:Well, actually, the means of the changes. I moved to Rhode Island, about 10 years ago, and I go to Washington a lot. I was there this week. I rather I was there last week. But, and also I've changed White House Chronicle from being the geopolitical broadcast to being much more about technology and society and technology and politics.
Llewellyn:Because when I started White House Chronicle 27 years ago, journalists talking about politics were interesting. Now in on American television, there's very little but journalists talking about politics, and it's very tedious. We've got dedicated channels where politics is the only subject. I find the great change that will come to society will be technological and will overwhelm, the political. And just the Internet of things has changed society a lot more than any political declaration.
Llewellyn:I think in the States and probably worldwide, the political class is flagging what is actually happening.
Markham:Well, Lewellen, our audience today is uncharacteristically shy, and we haven't got any questions for you, but we so we're gonna wrap this up. Thank you very much for this. Always a pleasure to talk to you, my friend. And, say hi to, to Linda Forming, and, we will have you on again in the near future.
Llewellyn:Thank you very much, and thank you all for showing up to see this. Someone Bob is pointing a finger at me. I don't know why. Do you want to say something, Bob? You have to, you have to unmute if you do.
Llewellyn:Anybody want to jump in and say I'm full of it or something like that?
Markham:Well, I see James Van Luman had had his hand up briefly. So, James, if you're still there, why don't you jump in with a question?
Speaker 3:I was actually applauding. I I found this very engaging, discussion. And you you bring a perspective, Lavell, on that, is is really quite rare. I mean, you've you've got this enormous wealth of insight and and experience. And, I've I've really tried I'm trying to come up with a good question to to make the most of of your perspective.
Speaker 3:Now I'm actually interested to know what you think we need to know? What what do you think is the most important thing that the world needs to know right now about what's unfolding and what we need to be paying attention to?
Llewellyn:I think that that change is at hand, like the industrial revolution, like the invention of the steam engine or the invention of the airplane, and that it's not just that thing which changes. It's everything related to it. You couldn't have stood at city hall and worried about whether there would be radar, whether there would be high tensile alloys, whether there would be, air traffic control systems. You're worried about making airplanes and all these other things, rifle, collateral, develop simultaneously. We tend to either forget that there will be simultaneous development because there will be market.
Llewellyn:And when you get a market, you get development, you get entrepreneurism, And I think you can forget that. I think there is and is bound to be a battle between the old and the new. The tug of yesteryear is quite powerful. We see it playing out when people say, oh, no. We're still going to need oil.
Llewellyn:We are going to need oil, but maybe in the advanced countries, less of it. We're going to need natural gas because we will not be able to meet the energy requirements for electricity in this country without natural gas. And, Ernie Moniz, a former secretary of energy and a big green fan, did say that he got some coal parts for that to go on producing, and that the need for electricity will be sufficiently, compelling. But you you get that kind of reactionary. It won't work, but it does work.
Llewellyn:Nobody wants electric cars. Worldwide, we're seeing electric cars, and Europe is gonna stop making gasoline cars. I think there's a hesitance at the moment in the market in the US, but it won't last. The future is this electrical world and then something else comes along. And then, gradually, we get adjusted to change.
Llewellyn:I mean, I remember when people bought a cell phone to my office, this is a cell phone, which was a huge heavy thing. It weighed 28 pounds, and he said, that'll never work. That'll never catch on. The moment I tell he has somebody saying it won't work, I think, oops. There there's a natural resistance.
Llewellyn:The other huge change that is coming is some giant companies are moving into the energy space, Google, Amazon. We've never seen this in the US. They are seeking to provide their own electricity. Now they're gonna run into the same problems that any utility has, the same materials, the same regulation, but, they come without without the the baggage of yesteryear. They come with a clean slate, and that might be very, very interesting.
Llewellyn:Google is a leader in it. Amazon is in there. The rate of conversion of industrial transportation to electricity is very high, and these companies are very interested in it. About by the turn of this decade, which is not that long way, about 50% of the intra city transportation in the US will be electric. That's that's the post office, obviously, Amazon, and all these huge, you know, little delivery companies.
Llewellyn:They're all moving to electric vans. It's going to make a difference. It's also going to soften people up to the idea of electricity as being a viable way to move. I think mistakes are made. I think we should have gone to a system of replaceable batteries rather than plugging, but, we'll see the Chinese did.
Llewellyn:There's a lot of fear of China. I'm not sure that it's always justified. I remember when we thought Germany was going to eat our lunch, and then Japan was going to eat our lunch, and, and South Korea, if you keep inventing and you keep some sense in your direction and stop worrying about these external countries, things go well. I think the moment we in the US, Louis, and I am very interested. If somebody would like to jump in and give me a quick crazy on what's happening in Canada, I'd love to hear it.
Markham:Well, I I'd be happy to do that, but it would be very quick because we have a former energy journalist, who wants to ask you a question. So we'll get to Sheila in just a moment. I would say, Lou Ellen, that, the status quo in Canada has not changed significantly. When one of the reasons for that, you've heard me say it on the the media briefings, is that Canada actually already has a, you know, 84% of our electricity is clean. We have robust grids for the most part.
Markham:Alberta may be being a bit of an exception these days. But we being successful in this space has actually lessened the pressure on us to change. And so we've been a little slow off the mark, and we haven't invested that heavily yet into clean energy manufacturing. So we've we've got a lot of work to do, and one of the challenges we have is convincing people that in fact major change is here. And and now a lot of our folks, are from Alberta who are in the audience, and the oil and gas industry has a tremendous influence, and in supporting the incumbents in the status quo.
Markham:So that's kind of a pre c of what's going on in Canada, but now we wanna turn this over to Sheila. She has a question. She's our retired energy journalist. So, Sheila, you have the mic.
Speaker 4:Thank you very much, and I've just really enjoyed the talk, you know, and, and it was especially interesting to hear about the, you know, new big huge companies getting into, electricity. Obviously, it'll be production at some point. I think our incumbent industries here are such a drag on any ability to change. But I was wondering about if I caught your comment correctly when just at the very end there, you said politicians are lagging behind the chain, which I think is true. And and if you could elaborate a bit on that, because what does that mean for governance or or any, ability for public interest to be protected in some of this?
Llewellyn:That's a good question. I think politicians I was once told by a very prominent leader of the senate, and they said they became chief of staff, Howard Baker, the White House, that I had been making a speech saying that the government should do this or that and he said, you know, very kindly because he's a nice man, said you don't understand, but in politics we can't really make changes on issues that were not active during the election or they're very reluctant to. I would say the solution is actually in the permanent civil service, the bureaucracy, much criticized. But the bureaucracy, generally, and I've seen it in the United I I don't know about Canada, but I've seen it in the United Kingdom is ahead of its political masters Right. In realizing national needs.
Llewellyn:I think going back to what you said about Canada, it's what I think of as the curse of plenty. If you have raw materials, you tend to want to use them no matter what, even when they become less valuable, there are no calls in Newcastle anymore except in the brown, you you have to at some point turn your back on it. At the end of the 2nd world war, the general belief was and it was told to every country on earth, if you have raw materials, you're gonna inherit it. Don't worry. You're gonna be great.
Llewellyn:They went to Africa and Asia and said raw and then we saw Japan, which became a power economic powerhouse without any raw material. They didn't have that legacy of we must use it because it's here. Among European among American states, West Virginia, with a huge amount of coal, has been held back by coal. Many governors have talked to me about this. How can we get off coal?
Llewellyn:That, it's what they have, and they feel it must be exploited. And it's a very hard change to make. And I suspect, without any depth of knowledge, that that might be one of the parts of the, Canadian dynamic.
Markham:I would say, Llewellyn, that is a very big part of the Canadian dynamic. And the it would be a the biggest part of the dynamic in Alberta, which is I mean, you know that Canada is the 4th largest oil producer in the world, the 5th largest gas producer in the world, and it's all run out of Alberta. And so the, the you don't turn a supertanker on a dime, unfortunately. And so Canada is, yes, being held back in my opinion. Mike Klein is next up.
Markham:Mike, you've, got the you've got the mic.
Speaker 5:Thanks, Markham. Yes. This is very actually, it's exciting listening to you, Lou Ellen.
Llewellyn:Thank you.
Speaker 5:You got me thinking about something that I often think about, but I'm gonna have trouble putting it into words perhaps. And that is, as we're thinking about innovation and invention and creativity, and we're thinking about all of these things, we get these goals we wanna deliver, and we think about realization processes, we think about modeling those processes to model those activities to yield the results that we're looking for. As we're doing transitions, I think we're constantly having to wonder whether or not we should be spending a lot of time redesigning how we look at, not just the processes themselves, but how we look at modeling processes in a generic kind of sense. AI seems to be perhaps a portal to that, that might be helpful. I don't know.
Speaker 5:I I need I need somebody to clarify my head a little.
Llewellyn:I'm not sure I can do that, but I've tried. I think how you look at things is very important. I think that when we were going through the energy crisis, and I was very involved in it, I founded the Energy Daily. I was running all over the country making speeches, and I spent a lot of time at the American National Labs. There are 17 of them.
Llewellyn:They're run by the Department of Energy. They're very creative. The 3 big ones are Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore, which are all involved in weapons production. And I remember at at Sandia, which is the engineering lab, lab, or primary engineering, they overlap a great deal, in the early days of of wind and solar. We didn't know what shape the windmill should be.
Llewellyn:We thought some people thought it should be like a a windmill in Holland. Some thought it should be an eggbeater, and finally, we found a kind of windmill. And then we found we had to change the the the the, the generator from being in front to being behind because of the cavitation problem, but we didn't know how to make it. And solar power, they built a power tower with mirrors boiling water. This is still used and is still being developed, by the way, in Morocco and a few other places, but indeed, it is less efficient because you've got the old bugaboo of boiling water.
Llewellyn:I think anytime you get any electric creation out of boiling water, you take a a step forward. And, well, of course, now we have solar cells. I also would mention, while technologies are competitive, they're also global. If somebody knows you're doing something which can be done and they want to do it, they will do it, provided its resource. And, again, talent.
Llewellyn:If you have the talent, you can do it. Nuclear proliferation, which is something that the nuclear industry has to worry about. Any country with a lot of money and a lot of engineers can make a nuclear weapon, if they have the talented engineers and, and enough money and enough commitment. So once a path has been beaten, even if it isn't immediately clear, somebody will find their way down that. There are no real industrial secrets anymore except for a few years in the beginning.
Llewellyn:And, you know, that's why I think talent is so important and the freedom. You've got to have a state of freedom in order for the talent to blow them. You can't over you cannot over organize it. Cannot over regulate it. People are saying we need to regulate AI.
Llewellyn:We how could you regulate something which is not defined yet? I mean, this is this is silly. When we get some definition. And it's certainly you know, it has a downside. It's not just jobs.
Llewellyn:It's disinformation. If there's one thing I spend more time talking about and worried about, it's not energy. It's about what is truth in an age of disinformation and misinformation. It is a huge problem. I, was, did a, recording this morning that's talking about with somebody from Poland.
Llewellyn:I'm a member of the Association of European Journalists. And in Europe, the disinformation coming out of Russia is overwhelming, and we don't know what truth is, which is where science comes in because truth is absolute and sound. If I drop this cup on down here, it will go to the top. No doubt. But everything else can be subjective, and you get this you get this hangover where if there's a lot of lying going on, nobody believes anything.
Llewellyn:This is true in this election campaign of the US. Nobody wants to believe anything. And how do you validate things? I think a subset of AI is going to be a cottage industry in validation, in provenance, in watermarking, Because, otherwise, societies worldwide, if they can't agree what's true, we already rewrite history often enough, and we can then produce fake evidence to support our lives. This is the downside of AI.
Llewellyn:I tend to be caught up in the upside of it, but I'm very concerned about the fragility of truth in the world today.
Speaker 5:I I have 2 small observations very quick, Markham. One is it seems to me when we're doing AI to redesign, as I said earlier, redesign processes and modeling of processes, we really need to use the web, which is a a fortunate metaphor, so that we are as holistic as possible. So we're in this contact with as much of the world as we possibly can be. And there's a strength for AI for certain, it seems to me. The second thing is when we're talking about these giant companies going into, energy generation, they do bring one thing that is not a clean slate and that is their way of doing things.
Speaker 5:And, that might we might want to study that really hard to speculate where that might take us. But, anyway,
Llewellyn:thank you. You're you're absolutely right. And there are different ways of doing almost everything. And they don't, they haven't moved as fast in printing, which is now obsolete, but I grew up with pop type, and I loved pop type, and I loved the composing room and a big newspaper, a factory, of many talented people doing many things. But there were different processes in the first one I went into, then there were in England, then there were in New York or Washington.
Llewellyn:And you you have a very valid point. I think where companies coming in fresh, like Google, have an advantage going into electricity is they don't have that legacy. They don't have that burden. They also don't have the burden in the US of of, legal restraint because of court cases long ago. And when Bill Anders was head of owned, the company with the defense contract, he is the astronaut, and he is a friend of mine, and they owned Cessna, Cessna Aircraft.
Llewellyn:And I said, why don't you build us some new airplanes I was flying at the time? We don't want these tired 50 year old airplanes, so we have to pay new prices for. And he said, we daren't do it because we'll be in court with the first accident. We have to go with that which has been trapped. That is a terrible problem in the US.
Llewellyn:I don't think it's a bad a problem anywhere else, but it also shapes thinking. Besides, we are all preachers of our past happenstance. I tend to wear a necktie because I've been wearing a necktie since I was 6 years old. I feel naked without it. Nowadays, people don't wear neckties.
Llewellyn:There's no reason to wear them. They have no value at all except legacy. And you've got to look in engineering or in anything. How much of what am I doing is determined by legacy and how much because it has value in and of itself? And that is a question that scientists need to ask themselves.
Llewellyn:The other challenge I see for science, and that is, too much siloing, too much not sharing information within the same organization, maybe from this desk to that desk. It's terrible in medicine. It's bad in pharmaceuticals, and it isn't great in any part of engineering.
Markham:Well, I was gonna tell a a brief anecdote, Llewelyn, if you will. On Friday, I delivered to a keynote speech at the Red Deer Innovation Fair, and, the emcee, whose name is David Dodge, many people will know him, created a 10 minute, video promotion video for the event, using Google notes and AI. And I have to tell you, listening to 2 AI voices discussing my work, my journalism work, and and and speaking almost as if they would were knowledgeable about it is very disconcerting. And I imagine it's only going to get, more like that and not less so.
Llewellyn:This is part of the truth issue, Malcolm. I for a webinar, a friend of mine who is, I think, a very smart, AI thinker, I'm hoping to do a lot of work with him, But he made a video of me saying things that I have never said, and it's very disconcerting. You could actually because I have something of a British accent, you could if you listened carefully, you could see why it hadn't quite caught in, but it was very convincing to and my wife was able to pick out these small fishes in the but this wasn't serious. This was just a joke. We did it in 10 minutes somewhere.
Llewellyn:It is a whole new world that we're living in. You know, it's sort of like, why are people worrying about pornography in books and dirty books when my bod, the Internet, is is led by pornographic. And, apparently, a lot of the development of the Internet was driven by the pornographers. It's sort of yesterday's problem. Get used to it.
Llewellyn:And sometimes we have to just suck it up and get used to it. We're gonna have to get used to verifying everything we see. It is a huge problem in our business, Malcolm, of energy, of of reporting. What is true? Is it so?
Markham:Does that not now this has occurred to me, Louella, that this, in fact, may lead to a renaissance of journalism, because you need trusted agents, as it were, to gather news, explain news, and verify, news. And even though our industry has been in terminal decline terrible decline for 20 years, might this not the the rise of AI, might it not actually revive journalist?
Llewellyn:I think it might. I think journalism will revive, but I don't know how. I've seen various shattering events to journalism as we knew it. Its great boom came with the development of the Lanham type machine in 18/93 with the mug and bola, can't they, in New York, when they could set type more easily. Although, the initial, boom in journalism came with public well, general public education in the 18 forties.
Llewellyn:It all got much easier in 18/93. This was technology helping journalism, but along came radio, which sucked up a lot of advertising. It was traditionally a misdivid. Then came evening. Then came television, and that was essentially the death of evening newspapers all over the world, in in New York, Washington, all the major American cities, there were often 2 evening newspapers and 1 morning newspaper.
Llewellyn:With television, nobody wanted to go home, pick up the paper. They wanna go home, turn on the box. Now you've got technology having an impact on radio because people are listening to podcasts. They're not listening to radio. And if we get autonomous vehicles, which I think we will, radio's last place of total dominance, the automobile, will not be there.
Llewellyn:So but it has to revile because we need journalism. I noticed, you know, everybody criticizes journalists for this for us, which is liberal, or too conservative, or this, or that, the other thing. But nobody criticizes journalists in Ukraine and and Gaza. When we need information, we need it, and we get it from journalists. We don't get it from government agency.
Llewellyn:And very brave people, many times, the very high death rate among frontline journalists, we need journalism. Maybe an entirely new way of doing it is yet to come. There've been some interesting ways of subsidizing, and the biggest was probably Commonwealth cable rate, which was the British government subsidized Reuters and, incidentally, all the newspaper. But a lot of it was they wanted a national, news agency. So they introduced this subsidized cable rate.
Llewellyn:You can move a lot of words around the world. It was called commonwealth cable rate, but everybody got into it. Even when I worked for a time in life, we filed into Montreal rather than filing into New York. There was a fraction of the costs. So some creative solutions to a clear a problem, which is we need a lot of people turning over the stones to see what's under them.
Markham:Well, I my personal opinion is that, it, journalism, journalist integrity, is going to be the foundation of that revival if there is one. Because if if the question is, who can you trust, then it will be the work of the body of work that you bring to the table, that will, in large part, determine that.
Llewellyn:And not to not to be too too negative at the conclusion of our time together, but if a bot, which looks like you uses your voice, claims it to be their work, what are you going to do about it? We don't know yet.
Speaker 3:That is
Llewellyn:In India in India, they're using, with AI, they're using anchor people who are interviewing journalists to be anchor person. It's a is a bot. It's not a human being at all. That is terrifying. The whole thing.
Llewellyn:But we've got it. It's coming. Let's get on to it and use it constructively. It has the potential for being so increasing productivity on as automation did, and productivity increases lead to a better life for more people. And I'd like to leave you with this thought that because of creativity, because of electricity, and some of these other things we've thought about, no matter how awful Gaza is, now how much how terrible, Ukraine is, more people are living better today than ever have in the history of the world, by any measure.
Llewellyn:Even if you were to collapse, you go back to the the the population of 18/90 relatively, still, it has done so much for us. And if you think that AI is out of control, you can stop it. Unfortunately, you have to turn off the electricity.
Markham:On on that note, Llewelyn, thank you very much for this. It's very gracious of you, and we do appreciate your time. And, thank you. We will have you on again in the near future.
Llewellyn:Thank you very much for having me, and thank you all for staying out late and listening. I appreciate it. Cheers.
Speaker 5:Wonderful. Wonderful.
Speaker 4:Thank you. Thank you.