Category Archives: Geothermal

Geothermal, History, Mauna Kea, Peak Oil, Science

Law of the Splintered Paddle & Today

Richard Ha writes:

Kamehameha's Law of the Splintered Paddle has modern-day application. To those who aspire to be ali’i as they point their fingers in the air and pronounce what we must do to preserve the past: do not forget the rubbah slippah folks. 

You who want to be our ali‘i, our leaders – I don't see you leading us forward, but only back. You want to keep everything the way it used to be, while we are marching into crisis.

The rubbah slippah folks have the right to disagree with the (self-proclaimed) ali’i if those "ali‘i" do not take care of the people.

Read this historical note, from Wikipedia about the "removal of chiefs" due to the mistreatment of common people intolerant of bad government:

It has been noted that Kānāwai Māmalahoe [the Law of the Splintered Paddle] was not an invention of Kamehameha I, but rather an articulation of concepts regarding governmental legitimacy that have been held in Hawaiʻi for many prior generations. Countless stories abound in Hawaiian folklore of the removal of chiefs – generally, but not always, through popular execution – as a result of mistreatment of the common people, who have traditionally been intolerant of bad government. As a shrewd politician and leader as well as a skilled warrior, Kamehameha used these concepts to turn what could have been a point of major popular criticism to his political advantage, while protecting the human rights of his people for future generations.

The price of oil is four times higher than it was ten years ago and the price of everything is through the roof (and still going up). More and people people cannot afford to live here; in fact, more Hawaiians live outside Hawai‘i than on these islands. Isn't that the same as losing our land?

How are you addressing that? How is trying to shut down our geothermal resource (which will substantially reduce our electricity costs), trying to outlaw our biotech options (which will substantially reduce our food costs), and trying to keep out the TMT (which will open up all sorts of new options), helping our people?

The world is changing. There is more and more homelessness. More than half of all Hawaiians no longer live in Hawai‘i. Young folks cannot find jobs. Farmers are getting older and older, because young people are not going into farming.

What will happen to the rubbah slippah folks in the face of finite resources? Those who aspire to be ali‘i, remember this: "You cannot be ali’i if you cannot feed the people."

  • Geothermal is a gift from Pele that will protect us from electricity and other costs that are spiraling out of control. Why would anyone aspiring to be ali’i want to take away this gift in the face of declining resources?
  • The Thirty Meter Telescope brings our young people great opportunity and inspiration, and it brings the island economic gain, jobs, and more than $50 million in cash to a fund for the education of our keiki. Why would anyone aspiring to be ali’i take these opportunities away from our future generations?
  • Biotechnology is a tool that will safely feed our people. Why would anyone aspiring to be ali’i take  this tool away from farmers trying to feed the people? Farmers representing ninety percent of the farm sales on the Big Island favor using biotech tools. Why look to outsiders for advice when Big Island farmers are telling you what you need to know?

If it wasn't used in pre-contact time, it's bad? Is that really your thinking? Would Kamehameha agree?

Geothermal, Lowering Electric Rates

Canada, LNG & What Our Electricity Will Cost in Hawaii

Richard Ha writes:

Hawai‘i’s utilities depend on liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a “bridge fuel,” which will allow it to lower rate payers’ costs. The cost to rate payers, though, depends on the long-term contract HECO can secure.

Canada is probably the best place for Hawaii to acquire LNG. But Canada has some important decisions ahead. Should they build LNG plants, which will require huge upfront investments in the multiple billions? They will have to make some decisions soon.

Click to read a special report on the subject from TD Bank Group (PFD):

Higher prices abroad and an increasingly promising global demand outlook for natural gas have garnered a considerable amount of attention from North American resource producers, who are interested in tapping into foreign markets, via liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports…. 

Japan is the highest priced market for LNG, but Japan has not yet made its final decision about whether it will restart its nuclear plants. And the Russia/China natural gas pipeline could take 10 percent of Asia’s demand off line.

What will Canada do? They are wrestling with this decision right now.

Hawaii rate payers will be interested to see what price contract HECO is able to secure. Whatever it is will determine the electricity rates we pay for the following twenty years.

And we don't want to see what happened in the Aina Koa Pono docket – where the price was kept secret.

The Big Island has geothermal as a low-cost base power. What we don’t want here is for expensive LNG to prohibit the development of our low-cost geothermal.

Big Island, Current Affairs, Food Safety Certification, Food Security, Geothermal, Government, Hydroelectric, Hydrogen, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Science, Sustainability

Preparing for Climate Change, The Overview

Richard Ha writes:

I was asked to talk this morning at the Hawai‘i State Association of Counties 2014 Annual Conference, which was held in Waikiki. I spoke on the panel called Preparing for Climate Change. Here’s what I said.

***

Aloha everyone. Thanks for inviting me.

Food security has to do with farmers farming. If the farmers make money, the farmers will farm!

The Hawaiian side of our family is Kamahele, from lower Puna. All the Kamaheles are related. The Okinawa side of our family is Higa. The Korean side of our family is the Ha name. It’s about all of us in Hawaii. Not just a few of us!

I write an ag and energy blog Hahaha.hamakuasprings.com. It stands for three generations of us.

What is the difference between climate and weather? Neil DeGrasse Tyson, on Cosmos, describes it like the guy strolling down the beach with his dog. The dog running back and forth is the weather. The guy walking along the beach is climate.

Background: 35 years farming, more than 100 million pounds of fruits and vegetables. We farm 600 fee-simple acres which the family and 70 workers farm. Not having any money, we started out by trading chicken manure for banana keiki and went on to become the largest banana farm in the U.S. We were green farmers early. In 1992, we were first banana farm in the world certified Eco-OK by the Rainforest Alliance. In 2008, we were one of six national finalists for the Patrick Madden SARE award. We were one of the first farms in Hawai‘i to be food-safety certified.

When we needed to find a solution for a disease problem, we took a class in tissue culture and tried to culture the plants in our back bedroom. But there was too much contamination, from cat hair maybe. So we made our own tissue culture lab. We have our own hydroelectric plant, which provides all our electricity. Our trucks and tractors operate with fuel from Hawai‘i biodiesel.

My pop told me that, “Get a thousand reasons why no can.” I’m only looking for the one reason why CAN.

As we stroll along the climate change beach, there are two things that we notice.

The first is energy. Without energy, work stops. Petroleum products are finite and costs will rise. Farmers’ costs will rise and farmers’ customers’ costs will rise. How can we dodge the bullet?

I attended five Peak Oil conferences. The world has been using twice and three times as much oil as we have been finding. So the price is going to keep on going up. It will increase farmers’ costs and will increase the farmers’ customers’ costs. We need to do something that will help all of us, not just a few of us. Something that can help future generations cope.

That something is hydrogen. The geothermal plant can be curtailed at 70 MW per day. That’s throwing away 70 MW of electricity every night. The new eucalyptus chip plant Hu Honua can be curtailed by 10 MW for ten hours per night. The key to hydrogen is electricity cost. On the mainland it is made from natural gas. Here it can be made from running electricity through water. We are throwing away lots of electricity at night. We know that oil and gas prices will be steadily going up in the future. Hydrogen from our renewable resources will become more and more attractive as oil and gas prices rise. At some point we will have an advantage to the rest of the world. And as a bonus, hydrogen combined with nitrogen in the air will produce nitrogen fertilizer.

You may be interested to know the inside scoop about the lawsuit that Big Island farmers brought against the County.

Why? Clarity: Farmers are law-abiding citizens and we play by the rules. We thought that the Feds and the State had jurisdiction. We want clarity about the rules of the game.

Equal treatment: Only Big Island farmers are prohibited from using biotech solutions that all our competitors can use. How is that equal? It’s discriminatory against local farmers.

When the law was first proposed, they wanted to ban all GMOs. We asked what are papaya farmers supposed to do? They said, we can help them get new jobs, to transition. We were speechless. It was as if they were just another commodity. So farmers and ranchers got together and ran a convoy around the County building in protest. Then they said they would give the Rainbow papaya farmers a break. I was there when the papaya farmers had a vote to accept the grandfather clause for Rainbow papayas. There were a lot of young, second- and third-generation farmers there in the room.

In the end, the papaya farmers said, We are not going to abandon our friends who supported us when we needed help. That is not who we are. Then they voted unanimously to reject the offer. I was there and being a Vietnam vet, where the unspoken rule was we all come back or no one comes back, I could not have been prouder of the papaya farmers. That explains why the Big Island farmers are tight. Old-fashioned values. The rubbah slippah folks absolutely get all of this.

So who are these farmers? I am one. I don’t grow GMOs. It isn’t about me. I’ll make 70 this year and, like almost all the farmers, have never sued anyone. But there comes a time when you have to stand up for what is right.

The group we formed, Hawaii Farmers and Ranchers United, grows more than 90 percent of the farm value on the Big Island.

This is about food security. The GMO portion of food security is small. This is not about large corporations. It is about local farmers. It is not about organics; we need everybody. But organics only supply 4 percent of the national food supply and maybe 1 percent of Hawai‘i’s. Our organic farmers are not threatened by modern farming. Hawaii organic farmers are threatened by mainland, industrial-scale organic farms. That is why there are hardly any locally grown organics in the retail stores. It’s about cost of production. Also, on the mainland winter kills off the bad bugs and weeds and the organic farmers can outrun the bugs through the early part of summer. Hawai‘i farmers don’t have winter to help us.

Most importantly, this is about pro-science and anti-science. That is why farmers are stepping up. We know that science is self-correcting. It gives us a solid frame of reference. You don’t end up fooling yourself. In all of Hawai‘i’s history, now is no time to be fooling ourselves.

My pop told me that there were a thousand reasons why No Can. He said, look for the one reason why Can! He said to look for two solutions to every problem and one more, just in case.

He would pound the dinner table and dishes would bounce in the air and he would point in the air and say, “Not no can. CAN!”

We can have a better world for future generations. It’s all common sense and attitude.

***

Geothermal

A Geothermal Column in OHA Newspaper

Richard Ha writes:

Do you read the Office of Hawaiian Affairs monthly newspaper Ka Wai Ola? You can download the June 2014 issue here, and if you scroll down to page 28, you’ll see Trustee Robert Lindsey’s column.

He asked Davianna McGregor and me to write about geothermal in his column this month. She writes from the “anti” perspective, and I write from the “pro” one.

It was not a debate. I have no expertise in the cultural area of geothermal, though I am very respectful of the cultural aspect. I’m sharing my mana’o as a 35-year farmer and the only person from Hawaii to have attended five Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) conferences on the mainland. I’ve visited both Iceland and the Philippines to see geothermal operations and I have a good sense of how and why it would work for us here.

Current Affairs, Geothermal, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability

What Monterey Shale Oil?

Richard Ha writes:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) made a dramatic announcement recently: it is revising its estimate of the Monterey Shale Oil supply downward by 96 percent.

Ninety-six percent is a lot.

Especially when you consider that the Monterey Shale Oil supply presented two-thirds of the United States’s oil reserves. It was estimated that we had 100 years of oil reserves left in this country altogether, but now that we know 66 percent of it doesn’t exist, there must be only 34 percent, or 34 years, of oil reserves remaining in the U.S.

However, the cost we would have to pay for oil companies to retrieve it would exceed what it would cost them to do so. In other words, if we consumers were willing to pay $1 million/barrel, all of those 34 years’ worth of oil could probably be recovered. But if we the people can only pay $150/barrel, we might only see ten years’ worth drilled. Hmm.

Those of us who attend Association for the Study of Peak Oil conferences (I’ve attended five now, the only person from the Big Island to do so) have known that the claim that the U.S. has a 100-year supply of oil was way overestimated. We are never going to be Saudi America.

Kurt Cobb writes about this at Resource Insights:

The great imaginary California oil boom: Over before it started

Sunday, May 25, 2014

It turns out that the oil industry has been pulling our collective leg. 

The pending 96 percent reduction in estimated deep shale oil resources in California revealed last week in the Los Angeles Times calls into question the oil industry's premise of a decades-long revival in U.S. oil production and the already implausible predictions of American energy independence. The reduction also appears to bolster the view of long-time skeptics that the U.S. shale oil boom–now centered in North Dakota and Texas–will likely be short-lived, petering out by the end of this decade. (I've been expressing my skepticism in writing about resource claims made for both shale gas and oil since 2008.)

California has been abuzz for the past couple of years about the prospect of vast new oil wealth supposedly ready for the taking in the Monterey Shale thousands of feet below the state. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) had previously estimated that 15.4 billion barrels were technically recoverable, basing the number on a report from a contractor who relied heavily on oil industry presentations rather than independent data.

The California economy was supposed to benefit from 2.8 million new jobs by 2020. The state was also supposed to gain $220 billion in additional income and $24 billion in additional tax revenues in that year alone, according to a study from the University of Southern California that relied heavily on industry funding.

But that was before the revelation by the Times that the EIA will reduce its estimate of technically recoverable oil in California's Monterey Shale by 96 percent–almost a complete wipeout–after taking a close look at actual data for wells drilled there already. The agency now believes that only about 600 million barrels are recoverable using existing technology. The 600 million barrels still sound like a lot, but those barrels would last the United States all of 40 days at the current rate of consumption….

Read the rest

We need to take a step back and reevaluate where we are and what we need to do. As I’ve been saying for years now, we need to get on with geothermal. For the Big Island, the path we need to take is clear.

A byproduct of the oil operations is natural gas, and it would be helpful if natural gas prices rose to help with the costs of development.

It’s kind of like curtailed electricity. If it could be sold at any price, it would help lower the bid price of geothermal and wind operations and would result in lower electricity costs for the rubbah slippah folks.

If curtailed electricity could be bought at a cheap enough price, it could also enable a hydrogen storage option. Then we could get a hydrogen fuel cell option for various motors. And we could look at converting hydrogen to ammonia, so we would have nitrogen fertilizer to help with our food security. 

Big Island, Geothermal, Hydrogen, Renewable Energy Sources, Science, Sustainability

Toyota Shifts Focus to Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles

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Richard Ha writes:

Toyota made a major announcement today: It will stop focusing on pure electric vehicles, and begin focusing its attention on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This is huge.

Do you know that here on the Big Island we throw away (“curtail”) tons of electricity from geothermal and wind every night? We can turn this energy into hydrogen fuel cells, for transportation, and this can help us solve our transportation fuel problem. It can also be used for nitrogen fertilizer.

Solar energy projects do not provide curtailed electricity. We need to think about the big picture and be careful about running like lemmings after solar.

Hydrogen fuel cell for transportation is a very good opportunity for the Big Island to use its curtailed electricity. It’s a free resource that already exists; currently, we are just throwing it away.

From Audioguide.com:

“Toyota will forgo further development in pure electric vehicles in search of what it sees as more promising alternative fuel vehicles.

The automaker will focus on the development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles according to Toyota North America CEO Jim Lentz….”

 Read the rest

Geothermal, Iceland, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources

HECO Needs to Match Output to Customer Needs

Richard Ha writes:

Our electric utility needs to match up its output with customer needs. Renewable sources of electricity such as wind and solar have short- and long-term problems with fluctuation. That’s why the utility needs to have electricity generation units on standby.

We are so fortunate here to have geothermal electricity, which is not only stable but is also cheaper than wind and solar, all things considered.

And we know that geothermal works in Iceland. In spite of that country’s recent economic crash caused by irresponsible bankers, Iceland is one of the highest-rated countries in the world in terms of quality of life issues.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Hawaii confronts ‘green’ energy’s bugaboo: batteries

Hawaii and California utilities are moving to add storage on their grids to accommodate ‘green’ energy and better match production energy production and consumption. But storage is still expensive. 

By Ken Silverstein, Contributor / May 11, 2014

Hawaii Electric Co. – no stranger to solar power – has a problem with the sun.

When it shines, so much energy from utility and home-based solar panels comes surging in that it can overload some circuits in the grid and, potentially, cause a power surge that damages home and office equipment. When the sun goes into hiding, the utility has to generate power from somewhere else. That’s why the utility is casting a net to find vendors that could supply it with the technology to store electricity….

Read the rest

Geothermal, Lowering Electric Rates, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources

‘Behind the Plug & Beyond the Barrel’

Richard Ha writes:

I spoke on behalf of the Big Island Community Coalition (BICC) at the Hawai‘i Island Renewable Energy Solutions Summit 2014 on April 30th, which was titled “Behind the Plug and Beyond the Barrel," and here's what I said: 

BICC mission

Good morning. Thanks for the introduction. I will use just this one slide, and you can read our mission statement on it, which is to lower the cost of electricity. “To make Big Island electricity rates the lowest in the state by emphasizing the use of local resources.”

I would like to spend some time talking about who makes up the BICC.

Dave DeLuz, Jr. – President of Big Island Toyota.

John Dill – Contractors Association, and Chair of the Ethics Commission

Rockne Freitas – Former Chancellor Hawai‘i Community College

Michelle Galimba – Rancher, Board of Agriculture

Richard Ha – Farmer

Wallace Ishibashi – Royal Order of Kamehameha, DHHL Commissioner

Kuulei Kealoha Cooper- Trustee, Jimmy Kealoha and Miulan Kealoha Trust.

Noe Kalipi – Former staffer for Sen Akaka, helped write the Akaka Bill, energy consultant

Kai'u Kimura- Executive Director of ‘Imiloa.

Bobby Lindsey – OHA Trustee

Monty Richards – Kahua Ranch

Marcia Sakai – Vice Chancellor for Administrative Affairs, former Dean of UH Hilo, College of Business

Bill Walter- President of Shipman, Ltd., which is the largest landowner in Puna.

These folks are all operating in their private capacities. I'm chair of the BICC, and the only person from Hawai‘i to have attended five Peak Oil conferences. I've visited Iceland and the Philippines with Mayor Kenoi's exploratory group.

As you can imagine, the BICC has strong support all across political parties and socioeconomic strata. People get it in five minutes.

Oil and gas are finite resources, and prices will rise.  One note about natural gas: the decline rate of the average gas well is very high. Ninety percent of the production comes out in five years. This is worrisome.

Hawai‘i Island relies on oil for sixty percent of its electricity generation; the U.S. mainland only two percent.

As the price of oil rises, our food manufacturers and producers become less competitive, as we all know. Food security involves farmers farming. And if the farmers make money, the farmers will farm.

What can we do?  By driving the cost of electricity down, the Big Island can have a competitive edge to the rest of the world.

Since rising electricity rates act like a giant regressive tax, lowering electricity rates would do just the opposite. And since two-thirds of the economy is made up of consumer spending, this would be like "trickle up" economics. If the rubbah slippah folks had extra money, they would spend and everyone would benefit.

 The lowest-hanging fruit:

1. Geothermal. Allows us to dodge the finite resource bullet. It is the lowest-cost base power. The Big Island will be over the hot spot for 500,000 to a million years.

2. We throw away many lots of MW of electricity every night. Hu Honua will probably throw away 10 MW for ten hours every night. PGV, maybe 7 MW for ten hours.

3. Wind, too.

Maybe HELCO will allow us to move the excess electricity free. They don't make any money on the throwaway power now, anyway. What if we used it for something that won't compete with them? Then people could bid for the excess, throwaway power for hydrogen fueling stations, to make ammonia fertilizer, and to attract data centers. Hawaii could become the renewable energy capital of the world. People would love to come here and look at that. As airline ticket costs rise, the walk around cost in Hawai‘i would not.

The BICC call for lowering electricity costs could leave future generations a better Hawai‘i.  And that is what we all want.

Big Island, Geothermal, Hydrogen, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability

‘Triple Bottom Line’ Approach to Renewable Energy

Richard Ha writes:

We need a “triple bottom line” approach to renewable energy options. They need to be socially sustainable, environmentally sustainable, and economically sustainable.

World-renowned economist, Nobel laureate, and New York Times best-selling author Joseph Stiglitz spoke on this at UH Manoa. His lecture, “Where long-term and short-term goals converge: Using sustainability as an impetus for economic growth,” starts at the 21:30 mark of this video.

Social sustainability has largely been ignored in many approaches to renewable energy solutions. The Big Island has the lowest median family income in the state, and that is not socially sustainable. Hawaiians leaving their ancestral lands in greater and greater numbers in order to look for work is not socially sustainable.

We need to pay more attention to this. Finding solutions that give folks on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder more spending money will benefit all of us, because two-thirds of our economy is made up of consumer spending.

Energy and agriculture are inextricably tied together, and the agricultural industry is vulnerable because of its dependency on energy. Nitrogen fertilizer, plastics, chemicals, etc., are all byproducts of petroleum.

What can we do to dodge the bullet? We can maximize the resources we have available to us here in a sustainable way.

On the energy side, we have geothermal, which will be available to us, according to the scientists, for 500,000 years. On the ag side, we have a year-long growing season. These are both huge advantages. We need to leverage them so we have a competitive advantage over the rest of the world.

Geothermal electricity puts us on the right side of the cost curve. And as natural gas prices rise, we will be able to competitively make hydrogen. We can use that hydrogen for transportation, as well as to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer.

In the ag industry, we should be maximizing technology to help us with disease and insect control, thereby lessening our dependency on natural gas.

Our tourism industry is also at risk as jet fuel rises in cost. But with the same low-cost electricity that helps our farmers and their customers, we would lower the walk-around cost of the average tourist’s budget. This would both support our tourism industry and bring money into our local economy.

From Peak Oil News:

GEOG Researchers Address Economic Dangers of ‘Peak Oil’

Researchers from the University of Maryland and a leading university in Spain demonstrate in a new study which sectors could put the entire U.S. economy at risk when global oil production peaks (“Peak Oil”). This multi-disciplinary team recommends immediate action by government, private and commercial sectors to reduce the vulnerability of these sectors.

Read the rest

In the final analysis, we can no longer think and act in silence. We need a long-range systems approach, based on the three pillars of sustainability – social sustainability, environmental sustainability, and economic sustainability.

If you’d like to know more, sign up at the Big Island Community Coalition and we’ll send you an occasional email letting you know what we’re doing and how you can help.

[The link is not working from this blog, though the BICC website is up. Please go to www.bigislandcommunitycoalition.com.]

Current Affairs, Food Security, Geothermal, History, Iceland, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy Sources, Sustainability

Hawaii: A Microcosm Of The 1914 World

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Richard Ha writes:

Christine Lagarde, director of the International Monetary Fund, just gave a very significant speech about where the world is at right now, and—very interesting—how similar it is to where the world was at exactly one hundred years ago, in 1914.

I was struck by how, right now, right here in Hawai‘i, we are a microcosm of what was happening in the world a hundred years ago.

From Christine Lagarde’s speech:

I invite you to cast your minds back to the early months of 1914, exactly a century ago. Much of the world had enjoyed long years of peace, and giant leaps in scientific and technological innovation had led to path-breaking advances in living standards and communications. There were few barriers to trade, travel, or the movement of capital. The future was full of potential.

Yet, 1914 was the gateway to thirty years of disaster—marked by two world wars and the Great Depression. It was the year when everything started to go wrong. What happened?

What happened was that the birth of the modern industrial society brought about massive dislocation. The world was rife with tension—rivalry between nations, upsetting the traditional balance of power, and inequality between the haves and have-nots, whether in the form of colonialism or the sunken prospects of the uneducated working classes.

By 1914, these imbalances had toppled over into outright conflict. In the years to follow, nationalist and ideological thinking led to an unprecedented denigration of human dignity. Technology, instead of uplifting the human spirit, was deployed for destruction and terror. Early attempts at international cooperation, such as the League of Nations, fell flat. By the end of the Second World War, large parts of the world lay in ruins.

Right now, in 2014, we are heading into difficult times, which in fact have already started. We already see how the skyrocketing price of oil has impacted all our costs. Everything is, noticeably, much more expensive: electricity, plane tickets, gasoline, retail goods that have to be transported here, food that needs fertilizer and has to be cooled enroute here. Everything—and it’s only going up.

The story of 1914 is the story of what’s happening in Hawai‘i right now. We have serious divisions, and people yelling at each other about important issues. I don’t see people trying to come together to solve the many problems we are facing. Are we going to go the same way?

They’re doing it right in Iceland. A few years ago, Iceland had the biggest financial meltdown in history, and they’ve turned it around very successfully. They looked at their resources, and used them very well. It’s working.

We are not doing this. Right now, everyone is running around trying to force solutions that benefit themselves. But individual solutions aren’t going to work. We need a big picture solution. We have to come together to seek answers for all of us.

As in Iceland, what we have going for us here is our geothermal potential. I’ve said this so many times now that it sounds like I have an agenda, but I don’t. I don’t gain anything from our increased use of geothermal energy except for what we all will gain: stable energy costs, stable food costs, stable everything costs. The ability to better afford living in Hawai‘i. The pleasure of knowing our kids and grandkids will be able to afford to stay and establish their career and family here, instead of taking off for a cheaper location on the mainland.

An increased use of our geothermal resource will make a big difference in the quality of our lifestyle.

Some people say solar energy is the answer, but that’s not it. Hawai‘i had the highest number of solar installations ever last year. Twenty years from now, when those people have to put on a new roof and redo the solar panels, what will the economy look like then? If oil spikes, they might not have the financing to pay for it. Will they be able to afford it?

The geothermal plant I toured in Iceland could last 60 years. My hydroelectric pipe will last 100 years. Solar is a temporary answer, and maybe it’s a bridge, but it’s not the solution.

Back to Lagarde: What happened to end those 30 years of war and economic disaster was that in 1944, leading economists from around the world came together in New Hampshire.

In her speech, Christine Lagarde said:

The 44 nations gathering at Bretton Woods were determined to set a new course—based on mutual trust and cooperation, on the principle that peace and prosperity flow from the font of cooperation, on the belief that the broad global interest trumps narrow self-interest.

This was the original multilateral moment—70 years ago. It gave birth to the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF—the institution that I am proud to lead.

The world we inherited was forged by these visionary gentlemen—Lord Keynes and his generation. They raised the phoenix of peace and prosperity from the ashes of anguish and antagonism. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude.

Because of their work, we have seen unprecedented economic and financial stability over the past seven decades. We have seen diseases eradicated, conflict diminished, child mortality reduced, life expectancy increased, and hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty.

Now, in 2014, which direction are we going to take? The path they went down in 1914, which led to crisis and disaster? Or the 1944 coming together, which changed the disastrous path they/we were on, and from which we are still benefitting?

Let’s not go through 30 or more years of crisis and disaster. Let’s learn from the past, and from what others are doing around us. Let’s all pull together and think on a bigger scale.

Lagarde’s speech was titled, “A New Multilateralism for the 21st Century: the Richard Dimbleby Lecture.” You can read it here. Or watch the video here.