Keep Playing The Music
Our trip to Nashville, staying motivated, and why fossil fuels will keep losing.
Staying power is what we all need right now. This year will likely be rough, climate-wise and otherwise, with lots of backsliding, destructiveness, and stupidity.
If you’re wondering how to stay motivated, here’s one idea: just keep playing the music.
We did a trip to Nashville after the election and I’ve been playing lots of guitar ever since. In Nashville they tell you that sad songs are easier to write, but happy songs do better commercially. So here’s a couple of happy song ideas. Feel free to put them to music, hum them, or make up your own better ones.
Just keep playing the music.
Song #1: ‘The fossil fuel investor blues.’
“If you go down to Deep Ellum, to bet on fossil fuels, you’re probably gonna end up gamblin’ away your shoes…”
[Note: not investment advice]
The government can double down on fossil fuels all it wants, but that doesn’t make them a good investment. The deck is stacked against fossil fuels, no matter what executive orders and industry lobbyists say. The fossil ecosystem is increasingly losing ground to more modern, efficient clean-energy technologies.
China’s oil and gas consumption is poised to fall off a cliff in the next couple of years, thanks to its accelerating changeover to solar and wind for grid power, and to EVs for transportation. This will shock global oil and gas markets, tanking prices and slashing profits, as China is the world’s biggest fossil fuel consumer.
And China’s not just switching off fossil fuels themselves, they’re shipping massive quantities of ultra-cheap solar, EVs and battery cells to the rest of the world, enabling further global fossil demand reduction.
Simultaneously, they’re building next-generation military capabilities like battery-powered drones (basically flying EVs). If the U.S. wants to compete with China economically and geopolitically, we need to be investing heavily in batteries, EVs and clean power generation; not going backward and doubling down on 20th century fossil technologies.
Song #2: ‘Fifty kilowatts saved my soul.’
“Turn on that inverter, fire up that transformer, climb aboard that electrification train”
We visited to Nashville in November, and it was great. We saw up-and-coming musicians at the Station Inn, The Bluebird Cafe, and The Listening Room. And we visited the incredible Museum of African American Music, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and historic Ryman Hall.
Nashville’s one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. It’s a global brand, and a destination for tourists, musicians, and corporate money from all over the world.
And it all started with 50 kilowatts. That’s what put Nashville on the map.
In 1925, a Nashville radio station started broadcasting the ‘WSM Barn Dance,’ a showcase of traveling fiddlers, guitarists, mandolin and banjo players. Six years later, WSM got ‘clear channel’ status and began broadcasting from its new 50,000 watt transmitter (50 kilowatts). That’s when the Barn Dance, renamed as ‘The Grand Ole Opry,’ became a nationwide megahit, bringing country musicians like Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and The Carter Family into America’s living rooms.
The rest is history: today, country music and Nashville reign supreme, all because of fifty kilowatts. That’s less juice than a single electric car draws today at a DC fast charging station! A drop in the ocean of electricity, yet enough to put a new idea (religion?) on the map worldwide. That’s how powerful electrification is.
Song #3: ‘Can’t get enough of that rooftop sunshine.’
“One bourbon, one scotch, and one megawatt…”
I don’t drink, but I do search addictively for rooftop solar panels everywhere I go. I didn’t see many in Nashville, though I did see an awesome ‘1000 Turkeys Wanted’ sign, shown above. Tennessee lags the south in solar capacity, and has a near-total statewide ban on wind power (TVA, the state’s biggest utility, is still all in on coal).
So imagine my excitement when I saw this:
Our hotel room looked down on this building, a conference center and amphitheater which spans six city blocks. The gigantic roof has a guitar-body-shaped thing on one side, with solar panels inside it, and a ‘green roof’ on the rest, designed apparently to look like a guitar fretboard from space.
As you can see, the existing solar panels (845 of them, with a 240 kilowatt capacity) take up about a tenth of the roof. But what if that capacity could be 10x-ed (to 2.4 megawatts)? How much more electrification could it enable?
Turns out this building has 1800 parking spaces. But the current solar can only support about twenty cars charging at the same time (plus some other loads like HVAC and lights).
If the roof were completely covered with panels, though, it could support over a hundred cars charging simultaneously. Like this:
Better, right? Maybe this will get me inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Of course, retrofits aren’t easy. And green roofs, which seem to have peaked between 2000 and 2010, have their benefits, like capturing stormwater, providing a natural habitat for plants and pollinators, insulating the building, and lowering surrounding air temperatures (the heat island effect).
But a musician can dream!
Encore: even more music.
That’s all for now, but if you want a little more music to keep you going, try these movies:
I really enjoyed “A Complete Unknown.” The sets, clothes and cars do justice to the early sixties. And Timothee Chalamet and Monica Barbaro really nail early Bob Dylan (his best music imo) and peak Joan Baez. I only wish they’d given Pete Seeger more credit as the legend he was who kept protest music alive from the nineteen thirties to the sixties, despite being blacklisted by McCarthy-ites for a decade or so.
We also recently watched “Mr. Jimmy,” a movie about a Japanese guy who spends his whole life trying to play (and look) exactly like Jimmy Page, and largely succeeds. His obsession with detail and quality, sort of a Zeppelin otaku, may be inspiring to anyone who’s on a mission to do something really well.
Want more? Here’s a few other inspirational music movies: “Summer of Soul,” with incredible footage from the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, “Twenty Feet From Stardom” about backup singer legends, “Stop Making Sense,” the 1983 Talking Heads classic, and “Muscle Shoals,” about the infamous Alabama music studio that spawned so many legendary recordings (Aretha, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rolling Stones).
Have a good day, and keep playing the music!