America at 250: A History of Energy Transitions in the United States, with Liz Moyer

Notable Quotes

• A wealth of natural resources kick-started the US energy story: “One of the things that makes the United States so interesting to study is that we are incredibly abundant in all kinds of energy resources. So, we’re never limited by the resource itself—it’s always present somewhere in the country. The story of our early fossil fuel use is actually a story of midstream infrastructure—the infrastructure needed to get a fuel from its origin to the consumer.” (9:01)
• A modern energy revolution is happening under the radar: “We are currently in the middle of what, by any reasonable definition, counts as a sectoral energy transition to electricity. You don’t notice it. You don’t think about it. And that’s because, to most people, the change in the primary energy source does not affect their everyday lives in a material way. Change is the norm, and we shouldn’t be afraid of change in the future.” (22:30)
• Infrastructure is the sticking point for emissions reduction: “All of the proposals to modify US energy usage to cope with climate change involve electrification. That involves construction of new transmission lines, and that’s something we’re very bad at doing right now.” (25:49)

Top of the Stack

• “US Energy History Visualization” by Robert Suits, Nathan Matteson, and Elisabeth Moyer
• “Energy Transitions in US History, 1800–2019” by Robert Suits, Nathan Matteson, and Elisabeth Moyer
• “Charting the evolution of U.S. energy since 1800—from horsepower to renewables” by Rob Mitchum
• Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes

The Full Transcript

Kristin Hayes: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future (RFF). I’m your host, Kristin Hayes.

So, today’s episode is an homage, if you will, to the 250th birthday of the United States of America. I had a desire to put together a 250th birthday episode and was thinking about how we here on Resources Radio might contribute, in our own small way, to the celebration. I’ve been hoping to talk with someone about the history of energy in this country since its founding, and I had the very good fortune to come across some relevant work led by Elisabeth Moyer, who’s an associate professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.

So, Liz and I are going to talk about the work that she and several colleagues have done, charting the evolution of US energy use since 1800—not quite as far back as 1776, but very much close enough. Liz and her multidisciplinary set of collaborators have created what I think is a really great graphical representation of how energy use has changed over that time period. And in doing so, they’ve also given us tools to think about the future. So stay with us.

Hi, Liz. Welcome to the show. It’s really nice to talk with you.

Liz Moyer: Hi, Kristin. It’s wonderful to be here.

Kristin Hayes: Great. Well, we do like to start with some introduction to our guests before we dive into the content. I wanted to ask you specifically about your research and what you do in a Department of Geophysical Sciences—that might be a new discipline here on Resources Radio. Tell me a little bit more about that and what drew you to that field.

Liz Moyer: So, I’m a little bit of an unusual faculty member. My primary research is actually in experimental atmospheric science from a high-altitude aircraft. But I’ve always been interested in history. In fact, I have a degree in archeology, along with a degree in physics. As an undergrad, I could never choose what I wanted to do.

I’ve always been interested in energy policy. There’s nothing like looking at climate change and feeling like you’re just staring at a train wreck and not doing anything about it.

So, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to work on interdisciplinary studies of climate and energy policy since arriving at the University of Chicago, and then this history project kind of fell in my lap, and we took it from there.

Kristin Hayes: That is very cool. I do enjoy a good interdisciplinary study, myself.

So, I’m going to point our listeners to the graphic animation. I think we’re going to be able to link to that in the show notes. What was your original vision and intention behind the work that you all did to graphically represent the evolution of US energy use over multiple centuries?

Liz Moyer: So, I was teaching a class on energy technology that ended up morphing into a class on energy history, because I discovered you can’t teach how a modern engine works without going back to the origins of that technology. And so, as my class became more and more historical, I wanted to start displaying how US energy use has changed over time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has produced this wonderful set of Sankey diagrams every year, but they aren’t the same format. So, I could never mash them together into a movie. Finally, I started saying, “Well, maybe I can just remake all the Lawrence Livermore data into a movie.”

And then, when I got that ambitious and found a collaborator to be working on the actual software behind making a Sankey movie—which is not trivial, especially when things are changing fast—I got ambitious enough to say, “Well, I wonder if we could extend this into the past.”

I found a wonderful history PhD student, whose father was a physics professor, who is very quantitative, very interested in energy. COVID-19 hit. He couldn’t do his archival research. And so, he said, “You know what? I’m confident we can take it all the way back to 1800.” And so, we did, in about a year. He’s now a professor at University College London, continuing in quantitative energy history.

So, yeah. The frustration over needing a tool led us to create a new tool.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah, that’s very cool. And I hate to direct listeners away from the podcast, but hit pause on our conversation and give the movie a watch. It’s short. It’s only about a minute and a half, 90 seconds maybe. And then come back.

I’m recommending that because, first and foremost, it’s just really cool, but it’ll also give you some really good context for the rest of our discussion.

So yeah, let’s start at the beginning. I’m watching things progress here, and from 1800 to the 1840s or so, energy use is very much dominated by biomass. Although intriguingly, to me at least, even in the beginning there’s a little bit of wind and hydropower in there.

So, let me just start there and ask you about those early energy days in the United States for a minute.

Liz Moyer: What people sometimes don’t realize when we think of ourselves as an industrial superpower is that the colonial United States was basically a subsistence agriculture country. Our economy was dominated by agriculture. We didn’t make a lot of export products. We were a colony, right? So, if we’re selling anything, it’s raw materials. We basically didn’t have much industry at all.

We were accepting imported products from Britain, which, of course, led to things like the Boston Tea Party, the rejection of tariffs on imports. So, our early energy use that you see when you see the wind power, that’s mostly sailing ships for transportation.

And the water power you see, some of it is gristmills for grinding grain, and some of it is very early—depending on what year you are at—the very early stages of manufacturing. US industry really got kicked off in Lowell, Massachusetts, with textile industries that were set up along the rivers using water power. We had very few steam engines in the United States. We would have had to import them from Europe. So, the beginnings of US industry were either using local wood for heat or using local water power for mechanical work.

Kristin Hayes: Okay. Yeah. I remember two friends coming over from England—I’m going to take an aside for just a second, here—but two of my friends from the United Kingdom came over to visit me in the United States, and they were absolutely stunned, even in this day and age, at just how much wood we actually have in this country.

I’m sure back then it was a very bountiful resource, as well. So, something that people could access with little challenge. That was obviously a nice, economical option for folks in those early days.

Liz Moyer: What you see when you look at those early days is this tremendous amount of biomass being used, and some of that is the feed for animals, right? People were using animals for work on their farm. So, there’s a little line there that goes into the agricultural sector, and that is just feeding your cows, oxen, and horses that are pulling your plow.

But, the dominant use of biomass was wood for residential heating, which is something that doesn’t even show up in the economy, because it wasn’t marketed. People were just cutting their own wood. And then, of course, the residential sector doesn’t produce income that economists count in GDP. So, we have this incredible energy use that is not part of the formal economy.

The thing to realize is that the United States was a cold country. It was populated mostly by people coming from warmer countries who didn’t have experience being cold, dealing with the cold winters we have in New England and the Midwest. And we also had this incredible abundance of wood, because the country had been depopulated by disease. The Native population had gone down by a factor of 10 or so.

And so, if you read the stories from European travelers to the early-1800s United States, they were astonished at the amount of wood that Americans burned in their houses, and they spoke … Some of them would say, “Americans are so wealthy. They live like kings. They have these enormous fireplaces. They’re burning wood like you wouldn’t see outside of a palace.” In Europe, wood was a luxury product, and it was sold. And Britain had already moved to coal by this point.

But then, the European travelers also commented on how terrible American houses are built: “They’re so cold, and I slept in the bedroom and the water in my washbasin froze.”

So, we were extremely wasteful, and that actually is exactly as economists would predict: when you have an abundant free resource, you tend to waste it. We were profligate with energy use in a way that’s almost unprecedented among countries in those days.

Kristin Hayes: So fascinating. Well, you mentioned coal, and looking back, I’d say it’s—from my best guess of looking at the charts—it’s around the 1840s, 1850s, that the percentage of coal use in this country really starts to creep up, and it continues to grow pretty rapidly in the late 1800s. And then right around 1880, I think, natural gas enters the mix for the first time.

So, feel free to correct any of those dates if I’ve interpreted any of that incorrectly, but let’s talk about those early fossil fuel uses. What’s happening in the US economy during that window? And you mentioned how profligate we were with our use of biomass. Were we quite energy intensive with those new resources, as well, in that stage of our evolution?

Liz Moyer: So, one of the things that makes the United States so interesting to study is that we are incredibly abundant in all kinds of energy resources. We had wood, we had coal, we have natural gas, we have oil. So, when you look at how people use those resources, you’re never limited by the resource itself—it’s always present somewhere in the country. And so, the story of our early fossil fuel use is actually a story of what we call the “choke point” of midstream infrastructure—the infrastructure needed to get a fuel from its origin to the consumer.

We started using coal right away. There were incredible coal resources in Pennsylvania, but getting that out of Pennsylvania is hard. So, industry built up to use that coal anywhere near the coal fields, or where it could be brought by water, but it was almost impossible to use that coal for widespread residential heating, because there’s just no way to move it around.

So, we don’t see coal really taking off until after the Civil War, when we built our railroad network out. And then you have this trifecta. It sets up this boom where you can have more railroads, so that you can move coal around for more uses. The coal also allows you to make steel, which makes you build more railroads. So, the coal-steel-railroad trifecta takes off, and suddenly we get this revolution where the US economy becomes dominated by coal.

And natural gas is the same thing. It comes in with the first gas discoveries, but we can’t move it anywhere. We don’t have a pipeline network. Building a natural gas pipeline is really hard. And so, that early natural gas tended to be used only close to its location, where we could get it out of the ground.

And so, we build up this weird, specialized industry. There were glass factories that moved to Ohio because there was gas there, and gas is a great fuel for glassmaking. Industrial factories would just move to the energy source.

So, natural gas kind of replicates the pattern of coal use, where you have early use close to the site of production, but then you wait for decades and decades before you develop the infrastructure to move it away.

Kristin Hayes: And of course, there’s another fossil fuel looming out there, and that’s petroleum, made of oil, and we really start to see that ramp up … It’s in the economy, it’s in the movie, before the 1910s and 1920s, but that’s when it really starts to ramp up. I’m assuming this is as the adoption of automobiles also really takes off.

I looked up some statistics, to see if the timing would match. And for context, the first Ford Model T—which was often considered the first automobile that was affordable to a large swath of the population—was introduced in 1909. So, it makes sense that as that became more widely adopted, or as widespread consumer automobile adoption took off, petroleum use went alongside that.

And then, one other thing I’ll note about this period of time that I found fascinating. This is the first time where I was looking at this per capita energy use, which you also have in the movie, which I think is another fascinating aspect here. There’s this really steady growth in per capita energy use until about the Great Depression (obviously there was a dip then), and then there’s a huge ramp-up in per capita energy growth from World War II until the 1970s.

Sorry, that was a lot of info. I hope people had a chance to watch the movie.

But from the 1910s all the way through the 1970s, there’s a lot of change. I know it’s a big period of time to cover, but talk us through that evolution over those decades.

Liz Moyer: So, I’ll go through the 1910s first, which actually is a super fascinating era. It’s an era that’s sort of fallen out of favor with historians; they don’t think it’s as exciting as the formation of the Constitution or the Cold War. But there’s incredible change happening then in the energy sector, and also, that’s when the labor movement really got going. So, it’s a really turbulent and interesting time period.

Automobiles were definitely coming in. I want to remind you, again, that the first oil well was drilled in 1859. So, by 1909, we’re 50 years after the first oil was produced. We see this often in American history. And again, we’re a great laboratory for understanding energy use, because we had so many sources. So, it took 50 years to find this particular use that now dominates our oil usage, which is personal transportation, internal combustion engines.

During the early parts of oil production, it was being used predominantly for lighting. So, once we get the automobile in, it’s helping kick off a transition, but it’s not the only thing.

There was actually a movement pushed by the government to switch all of our Navy ships off of coal and onto oil, for security reasons. It was considered a national security imperative; as they looked at Europe arming for World War I, they’re like, “We have to get ships that will fuel up faster. So, we should use this new fuel called oil.” They weren’t doing anything different with it. They were still running steam engines in their ships, but they were like, “We’ve got to get off coal and onto oil.” So, it was a government-initiated attempt at creating an energy transition in transportation. And then, when the gas-powered automobile comes in, and Henry Ford has this great production line, we just kind of amplify all that.

So, transportation is really driven by these two parallel efforts of coal-fired transportation—locomotives and ships—deciding to go to oil, which is easier to load and easier to move around, and then also the gasoline-powered engine.

And then, we have the weird case of industry. Their transition is amplified by the automobile demand, because if you need to make gasoline, you have to refine crude oil. You’re going to get something left over, something sludgy—heavy fuel oil that comes out of the bottom of your distillation column. What are you going to do with that? You sell it to industry for cheap. And so, the gasoline demand also helped prompt industry to switch, as well. So, we get both of those transitions happening just a few years apart.

If I want to go on to the wastefulness and the growth, the background key fact is that energy use and economy go very closely together. The United States was an abnormal country, but for most countries with normal economies, they’re very tightly correlated. If you tell me a country’s energy use, I can tell you, within a factor of three, what its GDP per capita is. It’s just because the stuff we value requires doing something, and doing something requires energy. And so, energy use and wealth—whatever we call wealth—are super correlated. And the United States, of course, was weird, because we had all this cheap energy in the beginning.

As we go forward with World War II, we’re getting two things that are happening, that are going in parallel. First, our manufacturing booms after World War II. So, for that couple of decades after the second World War, America was the leader in global manufacturing, and because anything that you do takes energy, our energy use also goes up.

But it’s also paired with … We’re starting to come off this early wasteful era. So our income is going up, actually, faster than our energy use does. It’s just that our manufacturing exploded so much that you see this rise in use.

Kristin Hayes: Of course, the other big, seminal event in between the 1910s and World War II was the Great Depression. I am curious: sometimes crises of that magnitude can really depress overall energy use, period. Sometimes they can shift energy use, depending on the nature of the crisis and stuff like that.

So, I’m curious whether the Great Depression was an overall decline in energy use overall. Did it actually change the way the country uses energy, that then continued as that big ramp-up starting in World War II happened?

Liz Moyer: So, one of the things that we find in this study is that revolutions or shocks to the economy that don’t involve the energy sector, specifically—don’t tend to produce a revolution in the energy sector.

So, the Great Depression, where we have massive amounts of the country out of work, we have breadlines, our economy is crashing, factories are closing. We see US energy use decline during that period. But when we start to build up the economy again—especially getting into World War II, we ramped up manufacturing and got us out of that whole depression—we didn’t actually change the mix at all. There was no revolution, and in some ways it even retarded it, because we needed to ramp up so fast for military production that we’re holding on to coal plants for coal-fired production for longer than we would have otherwise.

So, we didn’t see that tremendous economic shock do anything to the energy sector other than reduce demand, bring demand back, and then maybe retard a revolution that was already happening. The economic shocks that produce changes in the energy sector are only the ones that directly affect the energy sector. So, big changes from the OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] oil crisis, the Iranian revolution that followed that cut off oil supply, that had a big effect, but because that’s directly on the energy sector itself.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah, of course. I’m enjoying this so much. I’m learning so much.

Okay, that’s a great pivot, then. So, let’s talk about the oil crisis. Let’s talk about the 1970s. Suddenly, you see energy use per capita really, I would say, starting to plateau, more or less. Again, feel free to correct me if you’d interpret it differently. But this is a crisis that actually does change how we consume energy in this country, and I think it’s fair to say that it led to a new emphasis on energy efficiency, as well. So, that’s where that plateauing of overall energy use per capita seems to come from.

So, those are some questions for you, too. If that’s, in fact, an accurate interpretation of what’s going on here, in what sectors was that energy efficiency realized the most? Did we see a peak in terms of energy use per capita? Put the 1970s in context for us.

Liz Moyer: So, the 1970s were in the middle of our gradual transition to becoming more efficient. If you just look at what we call the “energy intensity” of the economy, which is the amount of wealth produced per energy input, the 1970s do stand out as a pivot point, where we’re getting more efficient afterward. But there was also … We were part of this trend already, but then there is a break in slope. So, we are acting so differently after the ’70s that our US per capita energy has peaked in 1979.

So, even though we’re much wealthier than in the 1970s, you use less primary energy per capita than you did back then. Of course, that was kicked off largely by the oil shock, which drove oil prices high and led to, not really a policy-driven … I mean, there were policies from the government, but also just business responding to higher energy prices to use less, which again, is exactly what economists would say would happen. Often you’re like, “I’ve got to admit, they kind of, more or less, sometimes … ”

Kristin Hayes: Get it right.

Liz Moyer: “ ... have it right.” Yeah.

And so, our per capita energies have been flat for many, many decades, which makes it really easy for me to talk to my class, because I don’t have to adjust the numbers every year.

A good rule of thumb is, if you go through the numbers and you say, “What’s my basal metabolism? If I didn’t do anything—if I was just a hunter-gatherer and all I’m doing is eating food—if I just take my caloric input per day, that’s my only energy use, what is my total energy?” It comes out to about a hundred watts. So, you are functioning like a hundred-watt lightbulb. That’s your energy input that you get from food, and you put it out as work and heat.

Our US total per capita energy use, from all sources, is about 10,000 watts. So, I like to say it’s like having a hundred servants. And that 10,000 watts has really been very steady for decades, like you said. We haven’t changed much, because even though we’ve been increasing the economy, growing wealthier, we have been reducing the energy intensity of the economy, so we’re doing more with less. And so, we’ve been able to hold our energy use flat, even while our economy has grown.

There’s real questions about how long we’ll be able to keep doing that going forward, but it’s been something that we’ve managed for several decades now, and it’s been a good thing.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah. Well, I definitely want to talk about moving forward. I do feel like we’re at a moment where there are certainly lots of predictions around increasing electricity consumption in the future. Let’s pivot toward the future, then.

There are just some great lessons learned. We’ve talked around a few of them, but I’d love to give you a chance to really drill in, no pun intended, on some of the lessons for the future that you’ve developed from looking at this history.

So, I’m going to kind of leave that open, but talk me through the key lessons learned that you guys pulled up.

Liz Moyer: I would say one of our fundamental lessons is that we’ve been through many energy transitions before. The natural state of the US energy economy has changed, because we’ve had so many resources, because we’ve developed different technologies. We’ve gone through radical changes, and you don’t read about them, you don’t get told about them in your high school history class, because they were so inconsequential for people’s everyday lives.

So, we have been through—let me just count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven—eight completed transitions and one ongoing transition. We are currently in the middle of what, by any reasonable definition, counts as a sectoral energy transition in electricity. And you don’t notice it. You don’t think about it. It doesn’t affect you, you don’t wake up saying, “Oh my gosh, there’s something going on with electricity.” And that’s because, to most people, the change in the primary energy source does not affect their everyday lives in a material way. And so, change is the norm, and we shouldn’t be afraid of change in the future.

But then the other lesson is that change is slow. None of these energy transitions happen overnight. You can’t snap your fingers. A huge amount of infrastructure is built up. We currently have about $10 trillion in long-lived infrastructure set up to support our current energy system. You can’t change that overnight.

So, we see timescales; in our paper that accompanies this work, we’ve quantified, by our definition, the timescales for each of these sectoral energy transitions in industry, in residential energy consumption. And all of them take decades. It’s just the norm. You can’t plan for anything faster than that, but on the other hand, they do happen, given enough time.

There’s a key lesson about the role of, like what I said before, midstream infrastructure. We see lots of cases where an energy source is used at a very low level for a long time, like natural gas used for glass manufacturing. People could not get it to cities. They wanted to use gas for lighting, but they couldn’t move it from the source to the consumer. So, most gas lighting in the 1800s was manufactured gas that they made out of coal, because they could move coal around. So, we don’t get the natural gas booming in the United States until we have some sort of distribution/transportation infrastructure, and that’s going to be the case with electricity going forward, too.

So, our ability to navigate an energy transition, to kick off an energy transition, is really a chicken-and-egg problem, with somebody starting to build more midstream infrastructure, use picks up, there’s more demand, there’s more midstream infrastructure, and then suddenly you get a couple of decades where the whole energy economy turns over.

And it’s a real open question: What kicks that off? What sets it? Sometimes you can see a real impetus that starts it. Sometimes you can’t. So, going forward, it’s pretty clear. There’s a trend, and a trend since the rise of electricity, to electrify the US economy. Right now, about a third of our primary energy goes through the electrical sector. So, it’s converted to electricity before it’s sent down for use by the consumer.

And that’s because electricity is easy to transport. That’s the main reason why we electrify everything. I mean, some things like electric lights have to use electricity, but one of the biggest uses of electricity is electric motors in factories. And why do we do that? Because we don’t want to have a steam plant in every manufacturing plant, right? You just want to have one power plant convert your fossil fuel, or whatever your primary energy source is, to electricity, send that to individual factories, and they use it.

So, there has been this steady electrification of the US economy, and any projection to mitigate our CO2 usage, almost all of those projections involve increasing the electrification of the economy. Even separate from this data center build-out and increased electrical demand—all of the proposals to modify the US energy usage to cope with climate change involve electrification. And that involves construction of new transmission lines, and that’s something we’re very bad at doing right now.

So, we’re looking at history, we’re like, “Oh, we can see that’s been done before. When you don’t have enough infrastructure to get an energy source from source to customer, you get delay.” And that may be something that we have to confront in the future.

Kristin Hayes: Right. And that’s the midstream-infrastructure piece that you’re talking about that’s been so critical. When we’re talking about that for electrification, it really is those transmission lines, large-scale build-out … Not just of individual plant-level electricity use, but also this large-scale infrastructure piece.

Liz Moyer: Absolutely. We have been very bad about building transmission in the United States for lots of complicated reasons, including that to build a new transmission line in the United States, you need permits from every jurisdiction that that line covers. And a lot of people don’t want new transmission lines in their backyard, totally understandably.

So, we have seen one case recently that is, maybe, a model for getting this done in the future: a new transmission line that’s been built bringing wind from New Mexico down to another power line that will bring it into LA [Los Angeles]. And that is really revolutionary. It has a huge effect on the California electricity market—just that single power line suddenly allows access. So, we built the United States’ biggest wind farm, and now we’re feeding that power directly into LA.

We have seen, in recent years, a real cost revolution in renewables, but it doesn’t help us unless we can get that energy to the consumer. And so, one of the key issues going forward is going to be transmission lines.

My students ask, “How can I save the world? What can I do?” And they want to, like …

Kristin Hayes: Permitting reform.

Liz Moyer: Exactly. I’m like, “You know what you got to do? You got to go to get some master’s [degree] in, like, zoning and permitting. And you got to go work on really boring municipal stuff, because we’ve just got to learn how to build things again.”

And that’s maybe not as glamorous as they want, but you save the world by doing little bits at a time, lots of little incremental actions, and we’ve done this in the past, plenty of times. It’s not going to be some economy-shaking thing to further electrify—it just requires building stuff.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah. So interesting. I find I have about nine more questions I want to ask you, but I know we’re getting close to the end of our recording time.

I just want to encourage folks, again: definitely take a look at the chart, the movie. It’s very cool, and it’s just a really great snapshot.

Liz, you’ve provided us with so much more rich context about what’s going on there, and then, of course, the paper that accompanies it contributes to that, as well. So, I just really appreciate it. This has been a great way to talk about the history and also the future, what the US might actually look like on its 300th birthday. So, I really appreciate it.

And I’ll close with our regular feature, Top of the Stack. I would love your recommendations on good content, either on this subject, or just whatever’s on your mind that you might want to recommend to our listeners.

Liz Moyer: So, if people are interested in the energy sector, I really recommend a book by Brian Hayes. He was a Scientific American writer, and he wrote a book called Infrastructure that was his response to his little kids looking out the car window on drives and saying, “What’s that, what’s that, what’s that, what’s that?”

And it’s a little old by now, but it is really valuable for making people realize what’s all around them. So, in my class, I have the students go out and just look—draw pictures of their local power pole, identify everything on it, identify the transformer.

We don’t really notice our energy infrastructure anymore. So, energy seems really theoretical to us, and can be big and terrifying and feel strange. It’s really helpful to just see, to understand the system that supports us, that supports our economy. And I love that book so much. I assign chapters of it to my class.

So, I really recommend. It has no equations. Just read through it. It’s a wonderful read, just for the diversity of things that we’ve built. In 250 years of American history, we have built a great country, a great economy, and we power it with energy. And it’s worth celebrating what we’ve done, and also accepting that what we’ve built is changeable, and has changed in the past and will change in the future, and we shouldn’t be afraid of that.

So anyway, I recommend that book. I recommend paying attention to the energy infrastructure all around you, and I recommend not being scared of change.

Kristin Hayes: Yeah, that’s great. Thank you so much. And happy birthday, America. Onward. Here we go.

Liz, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Liz Moyer: Thank you very much.

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