WSJ has an interview with Nathan Myhrvold at the ECO:nomics conference. I read the article this morning and was thinking whether to post or not, but then I ran into Nathan an hour ago and said hi. How can I not take it as a sign to post given I hadn’t seen Nathan for??? I can’t remember how long it has been.

Nathan makes an interesting point in the article that it is hard to argue with.

MR. MURRAY: You've done a lot of work in the energy area. Can you talk about where you're focusing your effort there?

MR. MYHRVOLD: The single biggest problem we have to focus on in this century is how to get every citizen of Earth roughly the same per-capita energy we enjoy in the developed world. China is developing. India is developing. Brazil is developing. They all want the lifestyle we have. The world's energy problem is about how we expand our energy budget by a factor of 10 or more, and short of incredible disaster or war, I don't know how we stop that.

We don't have any viable way to do it. I don't believe that problem can be solved with any combination of existing technologies.

Can you imagine a world where every citizen has roughly the same per-capita energy? That is a tough problem.

MR. MURRAY: Do you have another idea that can reach that kind of scale?

MR. MYHRVOLD: We're trying, but don't just bet on me. The way we're going to solve this problem is the way we've solved all of the great technological problems like this in the past, which is you get a lot of people innovating.

Although the bigger news about Nathan is his new $462 cookbook.

Cook From It? First, Try Lifting It

Ryan Matthew Smith/The Cooking Lab LLC

The long-awaited “Modernist Cuisine” is a visual roller coaster through the current world of food and cooking tools. More Photos »

By MICHAEL RUHLMAN

Published: March 8, 2011

DESCENDING this week on the culinary scene like a meteor,“Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”