Don't fall for the shale boom hype

So, yes, I am very optimistic about technologies and processes and understandings that already exist. The mystery to me is why they are not being deployed. They make complete sense from economic, political, national security, ecological and social justice standpoints yet we don't use them at scale. That's not a technology problem, that's a narrative problem. Another way of saying that is I am very optimistic about technology but decidedly less optimistic that we will use it intelligently and rationally.

James Stafford: Should the US export natural gas?

Chris Martenson: Fossil fuels. They're a one-time gift. You get to extract them and burn them exactly once. That is, whatever you choose to do with them is what gets done. They perform work for us. So we really should be focused on what sort of work we want those fossil fuels to do for us.

There are, right now, about a dozen proposals to liquefy and export US natural gas, and a study just came out this past week, commissioned by the EIA, saying that that's a good idea. Wrong, it's a terrible idea. Fully 25% or more of the energy contained within the natural gas is expended just in the process of liquefying it. That's what you get to do with 25% of the units of work. You get to turn the gas into a liquid, and nothing else.

We should be using every possible unit of work that we extract from the ground contained within that natural gas to do something actually useful. If it were mine to say, we'd be using that energy to rebuild our nation's crumbling infrastructure; we'd have a 30-year plan for exactly what we want our country to look like and how we were going to use our natural gas to get there. So when the natural gas runs out, and it will someday, we'll at least have a resilient, well-built country that can run on alternative energy sources.

James Stafford: What are the big future opportunities for investors?

Chris Martenson: The big trends are very clear. Food, fuel, water, those are the big, obvious trends that a burgeoning population are going to place increasing demands on. But the things that excite me the most are those technologies, those things that we can do that are going to save us the most energy.

Anything that has a visible, obvious improvement in energy use, or new and improved ways of really growing food of higher quality with less embodied energy, those are the sorts of places where I think the most extraordinary opportunities exist.

And they'll make economic sense right now, because they make energy sense right now, and in the future.

James Stafford: Chris – thank you for taking the time to speak with us.

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