Last week, while seeing a favorite band, I couldn’t help but notice the sea of undulating phones around me. With my view partially obstructed by shoulders, I found my eyes constantly settling onto the glowing screen of the guy in front of me, who was recording each and every song. The screen allowed me to see clearly, and yet it seemed a strange mediation of a moment that is all about the present. Yes, by recording the full show, you get to watch it later. But what did you really experience in the first place?

Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattooMeanwhile, the group standing beside me at this concert had faces flushed from a little too much alcohol. They had their phones out too, the flashes going off periodically as they snapped shot after shot — arms excitedly slinging around each other. As soon as a photo was taken, they’d lean into the capturing phone and laugh as its owner typed out a message and posted it on Facebook. Was the liquor-soaked moment really one they wanted to share with everyone, co-workers included?

Both today’s talk, “Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo,” and today’s new TED Book from Damon Brown, Our Virtual Shadow: Why We Are Obsessed with Documenting Our Lives Online, take reflective looks at the nuances of what it means to have an online record of life. In his talk, Enriquez classifies social media fragments as “digital tattoos,” while Brown characterizes this mediated life as our “virtual shadow.”

Which concept meshes more with your view of our digital lives? Here, a deeper look at the two concepts.

What are they?

Digital tattoos:

“Tattoos really do shout,” says Enriquez in his talk. “What if Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, FourSquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor — all these things you deal with every day — turn out to be electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would?”

Virtual shadow:

As Brown writes in his book, “More than ever, we’re now focused on documenting and building the history of our lives, not on living the life unfolding right in front of us. It’s all about the check-in, the status update, the captured moment, rather than being fully present day to day. We’re each focused on what I call our virtual shadow: a collected narrative that, like a physical shadow, is symbolic of where our real selves have been, albeit a few steps behind.”

Is this a brand-new problem? Nope:

Digital tattoos:

“The Greeks thought about what happens when Gods, humans and immortality mix for a long time,” Enriquez says in the talk. “Lesson #1: Sisyphus. He did a horrible thing and was condemned for all time to roll this rock up — and it would roll back down. It’s a little like your reputation. Once you get that electronic tattoo, you’re going to be rolling up and down for a long time.”

Virtual shadow:

“Socrates had as much trouble with then-new technologies as we do with modern tech. Words were meant to be spoken, Socrates believed, rather than written down,” Brown tells the TED Blog. In his book, he adds, “[It's] the same conflict humans have had throughout time: how do we successfully capture a potentially significant moment? It is the prehistoric caveman making images on the wall, the elementary-school class creating a time capsule, every man in an army platoon getting the same tattoo right before a battle.”

What’s the most disconcerting new technology out there?

Digital tattoos:

Says Enriquez, “Facial recognition is getting really good … Companies like Face.com now have about 18 billion faces online.”

Virtual shadow:

Writes Brown, “Google Glass can take pictures and video, check your email, text your friends, and surf the web — in short, it can record your whole life … Google claimed that they weren’t built for everyday use, but I doubt Apple planned on people texting while walking, either.”

How do we escape the grip our online lives have over us?

Digital tattoos:

Enriquez tells us, “Be cautious when faced with the choice of doing something boneheaded on Twitter or Facebook. Give it 12 hours.”

Virtual Shadow:

Brown writes, “The best way to separate mundane short-term memories from important long-term memories is to simply be as present as possible … The more aware you are of your surroundings, the more your brain can create a cohesive, solid memory. A rich memory — for instance, making love for the first time — isn’t created by an isolated sensation, like a gentle touch or the smell of a cologne, but from the collecting and connecting of all those inputs into one unforgettable multisensory experience. The brain doesn’t need better tools; it just needs us to be as present as possible when things are actually happening.”

How do photos and video play into this?

Digital tattoos:

“People don’t understand how quickly this has changed,” Enriquez tells the TED Blog. “There weren’t a lot of videos of September 11, because it was a pain in the rear to take video on 9/11. You needed a large camera and battery pack – you had to set up the camera. Now every one of us carries HD in our pockets … HD video is so simple, cheap and easy to use that it can affect a presidential campaign, like what happened with Romney.” He adds, “This 24-second news cycle, where a presidential candidate says something stupid on air and, ‘Gotcha!,’ is now beginning to apply to other people’s lives.”

Virtual shadow:

Brown writes in the book, “My favorite uncle shared some good news: He had pictures — hundreds of pictures — from our wedding day. He’d gotten some gorgeous shots, he said, and he couldn’t wait to send them to us. He also told me that he couldn’t wait to get the official video, since he’d been distracted and missed a lot. He was excited to watch a recap of what had happened while he was busy trying to capture the beautiful moments as they were actually happening.”

Is there potential for good with social media?

Digital tattoos:

“The really neat thing is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that allows a group like TED to be so successful and spread ideas,” Enriquez tells us. “And that allows Twitter to spread ideas in a very powerful way — to take on governments, take on bad officials, expose corruption, start movements, do Kickstarter. I’m not arguing [social media] shouldn’t exist. I’m saying that precisely because this stuff is so powerful, we should be careful.”

Virtual shadow:

“There is definitely much good that comes from social media. I’m a huge Twitter fan …. I think we just need to ask the same question we do with other activities: Is this affecting my quality of life?” he says to the TED Blog. “Saying technology is making us less attentive is a copout. Technology has always been an issue for us, whether it was a child in the ’50s watching too much TV or a caveman playing with a new discovery called fire. Like our ancestors, what we really need to do is find a smart way to integrate our newfound technology into our lives.”

So where do you stand, do you feel like the bits and pieces of you online are your digital tattoos, or that they comprise your virtual shadow? Or perhaps a little bit of both?

Watch Juan Enriquez’s TED Talk on digital tattoos »

Read Damon Brown’s TED Book about virtual shadows »

Photo: Ryan Lash

“I’m not arguing that this stuff shouldn’t exist,” says Juan Enriquez. “I’m saying that precisely because this stuff is so powerful, we should be careful and think about what we’re doing, instead of treating it like a lark, thinking if we post something at 2am that no one will care.”

The Boston-based entrepreneur and many-time TED speaker is mulling the impact of social media and new technology in an interview with the TED Blog yesterday. As he asks in this short talk from TED2013, what if the “digital tattoos” we create by using programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are in fact as enduring as any embellishment on our physical selves? Shouldn’t we at least try to avoid being branded with the digital equivalent of an embarrassing tramp stamp?

Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo It’s a new metaphor for an old topic, one that’s busied writers and thinkers of every generation. As Enriquez himself points out, the ancient Greeks were terribly taken with ideas of immortality and how they might be remembered. Yet he believes that in modern life we’re not at all savvy about the long-term consequences of impulsive decisions. He points to Andrea Benitez, the young Mexican woman who recently ran afoul of social media when she proudly and publicly wrote about getting her father to shut down a restaurant she considered didn’t treat her with enough deference. “Now she’s ‘Lady Profeco,’ essentially Lady Macbeth,” says Enriquez of the girl, who’s been roundly trashed within social media, even the subject of an article in The New York Times.

Enriquez is not arguing that Ms. Benitez should have been free to exploit her father’s status. Neither is he saying that the solution is to swear off social media for good. Rather, he’s advocating a path of conscious tolerance. “We’re demanding that young people be responsible for stuff that lasts for a long time,” he says. “Folks should pay attention.”

But isn’t Enriquez just being old school, I ask? Sure, he and I might be horrified by the idea of every last thoughtless jape of our younger selves being captured and broadcast to a virtual audience of millions. But, well, it wasn’t. Why does he think those growing up in a new status quo won’t simply figure out the best way to manage the deluge? Might not society mores shift, so that what he sees as a permanent stain might in fact be as fleeting as a temporary tattoo? “I do wonder,” he allows. “If all our lives become transparent, if you actually get a full picture of the good and the bad of someone sitting next to you in church, how would our societal norms change?”

“I don’t know that there’s one answer,” he adds. “I’d like to think we’d be more tolerant, but often when things are exposed we clamp down and deem something unacceptable.”

In other words, it’s the grey areas we should watch for, and we should foster open conversation about the impact of our media on our actions and behavior. The solution isn’t to deny digital, though heaven knows there are plenty of such ideas in the works. (Enriquez mentions these glasses designed to impede facial identification software.) Instead, we must be thoughtful, smart, and conscious of the decisions we’re making, the tradeoffs we’re making, and the potential consequences of our actions. To apply (whisper it) common sense. That’s a concept that’s as old as the ancient Greeks … and one that’ll never go out of style.

Writing on Darwin’s 200th birthday last week, Lise Buyer offered this commentary about today’s TEDTalk, Juan Enriquez’ “How Mind-Boggling Science Will Outlast the Crisis.” From the story:

… In his talk at TED, Enriquez said the fact that we are the only living species of humans is an anomaly — or at least out of synch with history. Millions of years ago, there were as many as five different species of humans co-existing on the planet.

Well, hooray! Perhaps modern humans are the end result of all evolution. Perhaps we have reached the very pinnacle of natural selection and genetic drift. On the other hand, Enriquez suggested, perhaps those are slightly arrogant conclusions.

Read the ABC News commentary >>
Watch Juan Enriquez’ latest TEDTalk >>
Find more jaw-dropping big ideas from Juan Enriquez on TED.com >>

Photo: TED / Asa Mathat

Watch Juan Enriquez’s talk from TED2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 370+ TEDTalks — including many more bold predictions.

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WITHIN THE billions of sentences about the financial bailout there is one word notably absent, austerity. All talk is of payments, supports, subsidies, incurring more debt, stimulus packages. The thesis seems to be: If only we spend more, the party can go on. True, only if the financial meltdown is a temporary mismatch and dislocation in housing and credit markets. But suppose there is something fundamentally wrong with the US economy. Then spending more will not fix it. Getting the diagnosis right means getting the treatment right. It may save us a trillion or two.

Read the full op-ed below or on the Boston Globe‘s site (registration may be required)

Photo: Robert Leslie

From the Boston Globe, October 1, 2008:

What about austerity?
By Juan Enriquez and Jorge Dominguez

WITHIN THE billions of sentences about the financial bailout there is one word notably absent, austerity. All talk is of payments, supports, subsidies, incurring more debt, stimulus packages. The thesis seems to be: If only we spend more the party can go on. True, only if the financial meltdown is a temporary mismatch and dislocation in housing and credit markets. But suppose there is something fundamentally wrong with the US economy. Then spending more will not fix it. Getting the diagnosis right means getting the treatment right. It may save us a trillion or two.

The subprime collapse is one symptom of years of little regulation, under-taxing, overspending, and massive debt. One way to understand what is happening in the United States is to look at what occurred time and again in Latin America and Asia, hotbeds of financial and banking crises. What we are living through happened time and again in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, as well as Korea and Thailand.

If there is too much debt, people lose confidence in the banks, then credit markets, currency, and government.

For more than a decade, the international financial cop, the International Monetary Fund, forecast a hurricane was heading toward US shores. As did many heads of the treasury and the Fed. It is, to paraphrase a great writer, a chronicle of an agony foretold. There are five basic drivers of these crises, all based on excess: high income concentration, too much debt, too much reliance on foreign money, not enough tax revenue, and reckless government spending. Time after time governments believe they are different. They are bombarded by warnings but ignore, postpone, spend even more, and crash.

Over past decades, most US wages have fared poorly. Despite stagnant wages, consumer spending and debt increased, fueled by cheap credit. Companies also went on a debt binge. Careless deregulation allowed financial cowboys to run the system. Responsible CEOs who kept some cash, maintained moderate debt, invested for the long term, got pink slips. Financial chop shops did leveraged buyouts using a company’s own cash and credit. To survive, companies piled on debt.

Many politicians decided reelection depended on cutting taxes and offering more benefits. Increase Medicare, postpone Social Security reform, hire more bureaucrats, and pay for a two-front war. Debt grew to pay for this party. These were not true tax cuts, just postponed debt; now we owe more and the bill has come due with interest.

Complicating this crisis is US economic hegemony. There were few places to park a lot of money. Despite the euro, European policies on debts and deficits are not much to brag about. So foreigners have gorged on US debt. The United States continues importing more than it exports. Middle Easterners and Asians who save and invest bought dollars for decades, but some of this money is now fleeing. The dollar has dropped sharply. Gold and oil have skyrocketed. In financial crises, huge pools of capital cross borders very quickly; a few can make a great deal of money shorting the country’s currency.

The United States requires a massive restructuring to address its debt, cutting back on its borrowing, spending, and wars. The bailout package is essential to keep the credit markets open. But absent sentences that include the word austerity all the bailout will accomplish is a temporary postponement. Bailout and stimulus are a stopgap.

A solution requires the country to begin to spend what it earns, reduce its mountainous debt, and address massive liabilities, restructure Social Security, pension deficits, military, and Medicare. No wonder politicians would rather spend more of your money now rather than address these problems. Because we have been spending 5 to 7 percent more each year than we earn, a forced restructuring, triggered by a currency collapse, would have the same effect on wages and purchasing power that the housing collapse had on housing prices. So let’s learn from our Latin and Asian friends and act before it is too late.

Juan Enriquez, managing director of Excel Medical Ventures, is author of “The Untied States of America: Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future.” Jorge Dominguez is vice provost for international affairs and a professor of Mexican and Latin American Politics and Economics at Harvard University.

To my mind, genetic information is a new sort of personal information that the state and even the physician community are terribly slow and old-fashioned in reckoning with. [...] This is not a dark art, province of the select few, as many physicians would have it. This is data. This is who I am. Frankly, it’s insulting and a curtailment of my rights to put a gatekeeper between me and my DNA.

What does the TED community think? Discuss in the blog comment section on this blog, below, and on the forums on talks by Craig Venter and Juan Enriquez.

Among the more than 160 essays from leading thinkers — scientists, philosophers, artists — look for Wired’s Chris Anderson, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Juan Enriquez, Helen Fisher, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Goleman, Kevin Kelly, Steven Pinker, Carolyn Porco, Martin Rees, Michael Shermer and Craig Venter. Block out some time to sample these — it’s an addictive read.

Watch Juan Enriquez’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Juan Enriquez on TED.com.

NEW: Read the transcript >>

What is bioenergy? Bioenergy is not ethanol. Bioenergy isn’t global warming. Bioenergy is something which seems counterintuitive. Bioenergy is oil. It’s gas. It’s coal. And part of building that bridge to the future, to the point where we can actually seed the oceans in a rational way, or put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or do microwaves or stuff, is going to depend on how we understand bioenergy and manage it. And to do that you really have to look first at agriculture.

(photo of rock wall with petroglyphs-”Rock 39 Uluru, Lyndi and Jayson Flickr)

So we’ve been planting stuff for 11,000 years. And in the measure that we plant stuff, what we learn from agriculture is you’ve got to deal with pests, you’ve got to deal with all types of awful things-

(close up of insect heiroglyph-”Dr. Pat Hieroglyph Detail Flickr”)

you’ve got to cultivate stuff. In the measure that you learn how to use water to cultivate, then you’re going to be able to spread beyond the Nile. You’re gonna be able to power stuff, so irrigation makes a difference-

(close up of engraving of irrigation system- “Peerless Vineyard, CA, David Ramsey Collection / T Thompson 1892″)

irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant stuff where you want it, as opposed to where the rivers flood. You start getting this organic agriculture, you start putting machinery onto this stuff-

(photo of tractor in a field- “Tractor in Howth Cullon on Flickr”)

machinery, with a whole bunch of water, leads to very large scale agriculture.

You put together machines and water, and you get landscapes that look like this.

(ariel photo of circular irrigated patches in prairie- “Djof Kansas Agriculture Flickr”)

(photo of tractor dealership lot)

And then you get sales that look like this. It’s brute force. So what you’ve been doing in agriculture is you start out with something that’s a reasonably natural system, you start taming that natural system, you put a lot of force behind that natural system, you put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides-

(photo of billboard-”You think YOUR job involves a lot of bullshit? North American Fertilizer Association”)

(laughter) -behind that natural system, and you end up with systems that look like this.

(photo of silos)

And it’s all brute force. And that’s the way we’ve been approaching energy.

So the lesson in agriculture is that you can actually change the system that’s based on brute force as you start merging that system and learning that system and actually applying biology. And you move from a discipline of engineering, you move from a discipline of chemistry, into a discipline of biology. And probably one of the most important human beings on the planet is this guy behind me.

(photo of Norman M Borlaug)

This is a guy called Norman M. Borlaug, he won the Nobel Prize, he’s got the Congressional Medal of Honor- he deserves all of this stuff. And he deserves this stuff because he probably has fed more people than any other human being alive, because he researched how to put biology behind seeds. He did this in Mexico. The reason why India and China no longer have these massive famines is because Norman Borlaug taught them how to grow grains in a more efficient way and launched the Green Revolution. That is something that a lot of people have criticized, but of course those are people who don’t realize that China and India, instead of having huge amounts of starving people, are exporting grains.

And the irony of this particular system is the place where he did the research, which was Mexico, didn’t adopt this technology, ignored this technology, talked about why this technology should be thought about but not really applied, and Mexico remains one of the largest grain importers on the planet, because it doesn’t apply technology that was discovered in Mexico, and in fact hasn’t recognized this man, to the point where there aren’t statues of this man all over Mexico. There are in China and India. And the institute that this guy ran has now moved to India. That is the difference between adopting technologies and discussing technologies.

Now it’s not just that this guy fed a huge amount of people in the world. It’s that this is the net effect in terms of what technology does, if you understand biology.

(chart- “A Century of Corn Yields”, plotting on a timeline rising numbers of bushels/ acre, noting changes in methods- “Recognizable to BC Farmer”-”Mechanical”-”Biological”)

What happened in agriculture? Well, if you take agriculture over a century, agriculture in about 1900 would have been recognizable to somebody planting 1,000 years earlier. Yeah, the plows look different. The machines were tractors or stuff instead of mules, but the farmer would have understood, this is what the guy’s doing, this is why he’s doing it, this is where he’s going. What really started to change in agriculture is when you started moving from this brute force engineering and chemistry into biology. And that’s where you get your productivity increases. And as you do that stuff, here’s what happens to productivity.

(timeline-
“9000 BC- Ag starts
1830 250 hours= 100 bushels wheat
1890 40 hrs.
1930 15 hrs.
1960 5 hrs.
1990s IT plus biotech

1950-2000 Ag labor productivity ^7x
-Non farm ^ 2.5x”)

Basically you go from 250 hours to produce 100 bushels, to 40, to 15, to 5. Agricultural labor productivity increased seven times, 1950 to 2000, whereas the rest of the economy increased about 2.5 times. This is an absolutely massive increase in how much is produced per person.

The effect of this, of course, is it’s not just amber waves of grain,

(photo- big pile of grain- “Mountains of Grain, BugMan50 Flickr”)

it is mountains of stuff. And 50 % of the EU budget is going to subsidize agriculture from mountains of stuff that people have overproduced.

This would be a good outcome for energy. And of course, by now, you’re probably saying to yourself- “self, I thought I came to a talk about energy- and here’s this guy talking about biology.” So where’s the link between these two things?

(photo- “Oil Spill YourLocalDave Flickr”- picture of oil spill by a highway)

One of the ironies of this whole system is we’re discussing what to do about a system we don’t understand. We don’t even know what oil is. We don’t know where oil comes from. I mean, literally, it’s still a source of debate- what this black river of stuff is, and where it comes from. The best assumption, and one of the best guesses in this stuff, is that this stuff (points to oil photo) comes out of this stuff. (cut to picture of trees) That these things absorb sunlight, rot under pressure for millions of years, and you get these black rivers. (cut back to oil spill photo)

Now the interesting thing about that thesis, if that thesis turns out to be true, is that oil, and all hydrocarbons, turned out to be concentrated sunlight. And if you think of bioenergy, bioenergy isn’t ethanol, bioenergy is taking the sun-

(photo of sun in the sky)

-concentrating it in amoebas, concentrating it in plants, and maybe that’s why you get these rainbows.

(photo of oil droplets refracting light in rainbow colors- cut to slide saying, in big letters, “Hydrocarbons Are Concentrated Sunlight”)

And as you’re looking at this system, if hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight, then bioenergy works in a different way. And we’ve got to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as part of these solar panels.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons why that if you fly over West Texas,

(ariel photo of TX oilfields- “West Texas Oil Fields, Odessa Tx, Telethon”)

the types of wells that you’re beginning to see don’t look unlike those pictures of Kansas, and those irrigated plots.

(cut back to aerial view of Kansas irrigation, then back to oilfields)

This is how you farm oil. And as you think of farming oil, and how oil has evolved, we started with this brute force approach. And then what did we learn? Then we learned we had to go bigger.

(photo of oil derrick being constructed in open water)

And then what’d we learn? Then we have to go even bigger.

(photo of tar sand mine in Alberta, Canada)

And we are getting really destructive as we’re going out and farming this bioenergy. These are the Athabasca tar sands, and there’s an enormous amount- first of mining, the largest trucks in the world are working here- and then you’ve got to pull out this black sludge which is basically oil that doesn’t flow, it’s tied to the sand- and then you’ve got to use a lot of steam to separate it, which only works at today’s oil prices.

(photo of coal seam in rock)

Coal. Coal turns out to be virtually the same stuff. It is probably plants, except that these have been burned and crushed under pressure.

(photo of stream running through a forest)

So you take something like this, you burn it, you put it under pressure, and likely as not, you get this, (cut back to coal photo) although again, I stress we don’t know. Which is curious as we debate all this stuff. But as you think of coal,

(photo of burned wheat kernels)

this is what burned wheat kernels look like. Not entirely unlike coal.

(photo of entry to coal mine)

And of course, coal mines are very dangerous places, because in some of these coal mines, you get gas. When that gas blows up, people die. So you’re producing a biogas out of coal, in some mines, but not in others.

Any place you see a differential, there’re some interesting questions. There’s some questions as to what you should be doing with this stuff. But again, coal. Maybe the same stuff, maybe the same system, maybe bioenergy, and you’re applying exactly the same technology.

Here’s your brute force approach. (photo of coal mine in background) Once you get through your brute force approach, then you just rip off whole mountaintops-

(photo of strip mine followed by photo of power plant)

And you end up with the single largest source of carbon emissions, which are coal-fired gas plants. That is probably not the best use of bioenergy.

As you think of what are the alternatives to this system,

(map of US w/ certain areas in the midwest and east of the rockies highlighted- “Coal Reserves in the United States”, showing where various types of reserves are found)

it’s important to find alternatives, because it turns out that the US is dwindling in its petroleum reserves, but it is not dwindling in its coal reserves. Nor is China. There are huge coal reserves that are sitting out there, and we’ve got to start thinking of them as biological energy, because if we keep treating them as chemical energy, or engineering energy, we’re gonna be in deep doo-doo.

Gas is a similar issue. Gas is also a biological product. And as you think of gas, well, you’re familiar with gas. (cover of kids’ book- “What Stinks?”) And here’s a different way of mining coal.

(photo of coal mining setup)

This is called coal bed methane. Why is this picture interesting? Because if coal turns out to be concentrated plant life, the reason why you may get a differential in gas output between one mine and another- the reason why one mine may blow up and another one may not blow up- may be because there’s stuff eating that stuff, and producing gas.

This is a well-known phenomenon. (photo of a can of baked beans) (laughter) You eat certain things, you produce a lot of gas. It may turn out that biological processes in coal mines have the same process. If that is true, then one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal may not be to rip whole mountaintops off, and it may not be to burn coal- it may be to have stuff process that coal in a biological fashion as you did in agriculture.

That is what bioenergy is. It is not ethanol, it is not subsidies to a few companies, it is not importing corn into Iowa because you’ve built so many of these ethanol plants, it is beginning to understand the transition that occurred in agriculture from brute force into biological force. And in the measure that you can do that, you can clean some stuff, and you can clean it pretty quickly.

(slide-

“Kern River Field (1899) 10 k bbl day > Steam > 85 k
Duri, Indo. (1945) 65 k bbl day > Steam > 200 k
Means, Tx Will inject CO 2

Bottom line? 3.3 Tr bbl conventional > 4.8 Tr (CERA)

Bio Materials?
Jad Mouawad NYT March 5, 2007
Oil Innovations Pump New Life Into Old Wells”)

We already have some indicators of productivity on this stuff. OK, if you put steam into coal fields, or petroleum fields, that have been running for decades, you can get a really substantial increase like an eight-fold increase in your output. This is just the beginning stages of this stuff.

And as you think of biomaterials, this guy, who did part of the sequencing of the human genome,

(photo of Craig Venter)

who just doubled the databases of genes and proteins known on earth by sailing around the world, has been thinking about how you structure this. And there’s a series of smart people thinking about this. And they’ve been putting together companies like Synthetic Genomics, like Ambria, like Codon, and what those companies are trying to do is to think of how do you apply biological principles to avoid brute force?

(“The Cell is the Hardware- Genes are the Software”
drawing of DNA)

Think of it in the following terms. Think of it as beginning to program stuff for specific purposes. Think of the cell as a hardware, think of the genes as a software. And in the measure that you begin to think of life as code that is interchangeable, that can become energy, that can become food, that can become fiber, that can become human beings, that can become a whole series of things- Then you’ve got to shift your approach as to how you’re going to structure and deal and think about energy in a very different way.

What are the first principles of this stuff and where are we heading? This is one of the gentle giants on the planet.

(photo of Hamilton Smith)

He’s one of the nicest human beings you’ve ever met. His name’s Hamilton Smith. He won the Nobel for figuring out how to cut genes- something called restriction enzymes. He was at Hopkins when he did this, and he’s such a modest guy that the day he won his mother called him- and said “I didn’t realize there was another Ham Smith at Hopkins, do you know he just won the Nobel?!” (laughter) I mean, that was mom. But anyway. This guy is just a class act. You find him at the bench every single day, working on a pipette, and building stuff. And one of the things this guy just built are these things.

(photo of two microscopic structures)

What is this? This is the first transplant of naked DNA, where you take an entire DNA operating system out of one cell, insert it into a different cell, and have that cell boot up as a separate species. That’s one month old. You will see stuff in the next month that will be just as important as this stuff.

And as you think about this stuff and what the implications of this are, we’re going to start not just converting ethanol from corn with very high subsidies. We’re going to start thinking about biology entering energy. It is very expensive to process this stuff, both in economic terms, and in energy terms.

(photo of giant yellow blocks)

This is what accumulates in the tar sands of Alberta. These are sulfur blocks. ‘Cause as you separate that petroleum from the sand, and use an enormous amount of energy inside that vapor- steam to separate this stuff- you also have to separate the sulfur. The difference between light crude and heavy crude- well, it’s about 14 bucks a barrel. That’s why you’re building these pyramids of sulfur blocks. And by the way, the scale on these things is pretty large.

(photo of semi truck parked on a vast pile of sulfur blocks)

Now if you can take part of the energy content out of doing this, you reduce the system, and you really do start applying biological principles to energy. This has to be a bridge to the point where you can get to wind-

(photo of wind farm)

to the point where you can get to solar-

(photo of solar panels)

to the point where you can get to nuclear-

(photo of nuclear plant)

-and hopefully you won’t build the next nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an earthquake fault. (laughter) Just a thought.

But in the meantime, for the next decade at least, the name of the game is hydrocarbons. And be that oil, be that gas, be that coal, this is what we’re dealing with. And before I make this talk too long, here’s what’s happening in the current energy system.

(chart-”Efficiency… 86% current energy game” shows mix of current energy, “Conservation,” “Alternative”)

86% of the energy we consume are hydrocarbons. That means 86% of the stuff we’re consuming are probably processed plants and amoebas and the rest of the stuff. And there’s a role in here for conservation, there’s a role in here for alternative stuff, but we’ve also got to get that other portion right.

How we deal with that other portion is our bridge to the future. And as we think of this bridge to the future, one of the things you should ponder is we are leaving about 2/3 of the oil today inside those wells. So we’re spending an enormous amount of money and leaving most of the energy down there. Which of course requires more energy, to go out and get energy, the ratios become idiotic by the time you get to ethanol- it may even be a one to one ratio on the energy input and the energy output. That is a stupid way of managing this system.

Last point, last graph. One of the things that we’ve got to do is to stabilize oil prices. This is what oil prices look like. OK?

(graph of crude oil prices in 2006 dollars showing crazy fluctuations, with markers showing market influencing events)

This is a very bad system, because what happens is your hurdle rate gets set very low. People come up with really smart ideas for solar panels, or for wind, or for something else, and then guess what, the oil price goes through the floor, that company goes out of business, and then you can bring the oil price back up.

So if I had one closing and modest suggestion, let’s set a stable oil price in Europe and the United States. How do you do that? Well, let’s put a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax, and it basically says for the next twenty years, the price of oil will be- whatever you want, 35 bucks, 40 bucks. If the OPEC price falls below that, we tax it. If the OPEC price goes above that, the tax goes away. What does that do for entrepreneurs? What does it do for companies? It tells people if you can produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel, or less than 40 bucks a barrel, or less than 50 bucks a barrel, let’s debate it- you will have a business. But let’s not put people through this cycle where it doesn’t pay to research because your company will go out of business as OPEC drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from happening. Thank you.

Thus, peak oil–the theory that we’re about to get into declining numbers on conventional oil–is probably real. However, Paul said, “I don’t think it has to be the catastrophe that other people have predicted, because there are other ways to make fuel.”

Watch TED.com in the coming weeks for more on alternative fuels, including Juan Enriquez‘s recent talk at TED’s fall Salon, on new ways to grow energy — related to his exciting work with Craig Venter at Synthetic Genomics.

Or take the point of view of TEDTalks favorite James Howard Kunstler. Near the end of Kunstler’s talk on modern suburbia, he describes a post-peak-oil future that actually doesn’t sound that bad: We’ll work and eat locally. We’ll rely on our neighbors. We’ll … walk.

David Keith (pictured, left) showed a New York Times editorial on the coming climate change — from May 24, 1953:

How Industry May Change Climate
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air will double by the year 2080 and raise the temperature an average of at least 4 per cent. The burning of about two billion tons of coal and oil a year keeps the average ground temperature somewhat higher than it would otherwise be. …

Within the NYTimes archive, we found a related story from 1953:

The Weather Is Really Changing
Studies confirm that feeling you’ve had that summers are getting warmer. So are our winters. But atmosphere, not atoms, is to blame.

A few other historical sources Keith referred to:
+ Changing Climate, by the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee, U.S. National Research Council, 1983
+ Restoring the Quality of Our Environment, Report of the Environmental Pollution Panel, President’s Science Advisory Committee, The White House, December 1965

Martin Hoffert discussed the Kardashev scale — a ranking of civilizations based on the kinds of energy they use. Earth is still at the bottom of this scale — we’re just using whatever we find lying around on the planet. More advanced civilizations in the universe, Kardashev theorizes, will begin to harvest and grow power using all the resources of their star system and of the universe. Hoffert shows us one step toward star power: solar energy via satellite.

Juan Enriquez talked about two scientists whose work could point the way to a new future of energy. As an inspiration, he points to Norman Borlaug, called “the Father of the Green Revolution.” Borlaug developed optimized strains of wheat that, quite literally, now feed the world. He brought a biological, a scientific approach to agriculture that allowed it to leap beyond the boundaries of traditional “brute force” farming — to become efficient, dependable and more productive by orders of magnitude. Enriquez’ next scientist-hero is Hamilton Smith, who shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work in manipulating DNA. Is Smith, or someone like him, the person who will help energy make the great leap forward that farming has?

Photo of David Keith by Myrna Suarez, Condé Nast Portfolio