Energy Blind

- Animated video #1 in The Great Simplification series

Greetings friends

We have been making an animated video series to visually describe The Great Simplification for podcast listeners. Originally I planned to have three 2 minute video animations – natch – that evolved into four 6-8 minute videos 😉.   Today we release the first of these 4 animations: “Energy Blind” a 6 minute video outlining the long history of humans on earth arriving at the current day. The focus – as you might guess – is on the relationship between size and scale of the human enterprise and our energy use. The main point (of this first video) is that our society swims in energy benefits like a fish swims in water, but our economic systems (and thus cultural narratives) largely ignore this - to our future peril.

Energy Blind

The other videos are at various stages of completion and will all be released simultaneously in early March.  I am quite proud of this effort -put together over the last many months with a great team at Energyandourfuture.org (script and visualizations) and Jumbo (art and production).  This was the first time I’ve attempted putting art and music to a science tethered script – it creates a different emotional arc than mere words.  I have long said that future paths should first be bushwhacked by artists, and the engineers and architects should follow. 

I hope you enjoy this (and subsequent) videos as much as we enjoyed putting them together.  More importantly, I hope they change your mind a bit about – energy – and about our future.