everybody Peter Z here coming to you from San Francisco Bay where I'm cooling my heels waiting for my flight uh I've been here for the last several days and as you might guess I get a few more environmentally themed questions in California than I do other places uh the one that I got that I found most interesting however came from a series of economists in Europe who were talking about how uh the solution to the climate crisis ultimately May well be that we just need to use less the idea is if we're using X number
amount of energy and that's too much and solar and wind and the rest are just not ready for prime time then perhaps they didn't stick their reputations on this then perhaps the only way to go is to go down um maybe here's the thing uh there's a direct correlation between economic activity and energy use so while you can make efficiency gains they tend to be incremental and we have made a lot of those uh over the last 30 years things like ovens and dishwashers and refrigerators use about about half the energy that did back in
the 90s uh but that's a relatively small fry uh the real issue has to do with location um if you're living in a place where climate control is required for daily life I mean you're it's really hard to use less so let me kind of give you an example here that puts some numbers behind this if you go back to World War II the populations of Iowa Minnesota and Florida were all between 2 and 3 million but if you fast forward to today uh Florida has over 21 million Minnesota has about six and I was
still below three uh the difference is climate um say what you will about the Midwest it tends to have Summers that are not too oppressively hot and Winters that are not too oppressively cold and so if you're in the middle of it like in Iowa climate control is nice to have but it's not required for Modern Life in the same way that it might be say in hot humid Florida or frigid frigid frigid Minnesota but once the minotas could have heat and once the Floridians could have air conditioning the math changed well that means that
living in these places generates a lot of energy demand in order to get the concentrations of populations and the economic activity we have now so to those economists I could say this you know yes we could all use less but that would mean that we all have to move to Iowa
