In this episode, Dr. Andrew Koonan and I discuss his new book, " Merchants of Doubt: How the Facts Don't Matter: The Truth About Climate Change." We talk about his argument that climate change is not caused by humans, but by the manipulation of the climate system by the fossil fuel industry. We also talk about the dangers of replacing fossil fuels with other chemicals, and the benefits of replacing them with other materials. We finish up the episode with a quick Q&A with listeners. Thank you so much for listening and supporting this podcast. It was a pleasure to have Andrew on the show and I hope you enjoy it. If you like the podcast, please consider becoming a patron patron and/or becoming a supporter of future episodes of the podcast. I'll be looking over the best ones in the next few weeks. Thanks again, Andrew. See you next Tuesday! Timestamps: 3:00 - What is climate change? 4:30 - What does climate change mean to you? 5:20 - What are your thoughts on the book? 6:40 - Is climate change a scam? 7:15 - How the facts don t matter? 8:00- What are you going to do? 9:20- What does the science say about climate change and what does it mean? 11:30- What do you think of the science? 12:00 14:50 - How do we can we do about it? 15:40- What would you like to see in the future? 16: Does climate change have a role? 17:50- Why does it matter to me? 18:50 19:00 What are we should we do it better? 21:00 Is there a better way to make climate change more? 22:00 Do you want to know what we can do to make it more effective? 23:00 Can we have a better understanding of climate change in the 21st century? 25:00 | What do we need to do more of this? 26:00 How do you know what s going to be the best thing? ? 27:00 Are you ready for a better than a better solution? 29:00 Does it matter more than that? 30:00 Will there be a better answer? 35:00 Should we get more evidence?
00:01:04.000So for decades, on a number of problems, there have been scientists who show up and say, the consensus is all wrong.
00:01:11.000So it started in the 60s with tobacco.
00:01:13.000So, you know, the evidence was very clear that smoking is bad for you.
00:01:18.000And then the scientists started showing up and saying, no, you know, we don't really understand.
00:01:23.000There's all these problems with the science.
00:01:24.000And what the tobacco companies figured out Very early is that having a scientist advance that message was much better than having a PR person.
00:01:32.000So they would go out and hire scientists to say, hey, we need you to push this message.
00:01:47.000In fact, I was going to say, you know, that's a fantastic book.
00:01:52.000By Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway that really goes over this all the way into climate change about how science is used to try to undermine policy action.
00:02:01.000And so then, you know, fast forward to the 80s and you have fluorocarbons and ozone depletion.
00:02:06.000And in fact, the exact same thing happens.
00:02:09.000The science is really well established, but the scientists are showing up saying the scientists have it all wrong.
00:02:13.000And in fact, the arguments they're advancing Are almost exactly the same as the arguments that Dr. Kuhn is advancing.
00:02:19.000If you take a Word document, you just do global word replace, ozone depletion for climate change, you have exactly the same argument.
00:02:25.000In fact, I have a slide with a quote that I normally don't make people read a paragraph, but I think this is actually really useful.
00:02:31.000If you go to slide 52, this is from 1989, and I think, is it going to show up there?
00:03:23.000$135 billion of equipment used CFCs in the United States alone, and much of this equipment will have to be replaced or modified to work well.
00:03:29.000Eventually, that will involve 100 million home refrigerators, air conditioners in 90 million cars, central air conditioning plants, and 100,000 large buildings.
00:04:18.000No, I was going to say, I think Kunin's take on replacing things is essentially that there's so many people in third world countries in impoverished areas that rely on fossil fuels and that eliminating fossil fuels will be devastating to those environments because these people are going to lose out on massive amounts of income and economically it's going to affect them in a disastrous way.
00:06:17.000So if you want to create a reliable carbon-free grid, you have a grid that's about, on average, produces 75% of its power from wind and solar.
00:06:28.000And then the other 25% is what we call dispatchable firm power.
00:06:32.000So it could be nuclear, could be geothermal, could be hydro.
00:06:36.000It's a power source you can turn on and off to balance the The variability of wind and solar.
00:06:42.000So when the wind stops blowing, you turn up your dispatchable, and when you're getting lots of wind and solar, you turn it off and you let wind and solar run.
00:06:51.000I was under the impression that wind was not very effective, that these windmills don't produce that much power.
00:06:59.000I mean, some days in Texas, it's half our power.
00:07:43.000Wind and solar are very cheap at this point.
00:07:46.000And in fact, the marginal cost of wind and solar energy is zero.
00:07:49.000They produce an extra joule of energy at no cost because they don't have any fuel.
00:07:54.000So if you want to pay the least amount for energy, What you want to do is you want to have a grid that's mainly wind and solar, but then you have to have this firm power that makes up for it when the power, when wind and solar don't produce.
00:08:07.000Because there are going to be times when they don't produce.
00:08:24.000So that's part of why you need to have dispatchable energy.
00:08:27.000You don't really need energy storage on a grid.
00:08:30.000Now, there are some benefits to energy storage, especially storage that lasts a few hours, because you can collect energy at noon when solar is producing lots and shift it into the evening.
00:08:41.000So you can shift the energy a few hours.
00:08:43.000So you might want to use batteries for that, but you don't really need long-term storage To run the grid.
00:08:48.000You just need some sort of dispatchable power to balance the renewable.
00:08:52.000So is, when you have batteries that are attached to solar systems, is that just for individual use, like for off-the-grid homes and things of that like?
00:09:03.000And again, the idea would be to shift power from when you're getting the most solar, which is noon, to when the demand is the highest, which is a few hours later.
00:09:11.000Right, but what I'm saying is, for individual homes, most of them have battery backup systems.
00:09:15.000They have systems that store the solar, correct?
00:09:18.000Like, I used to have a system like that.
00:09:20.000Yeah, you know, I actually don't know the statistics.
00:09:23.000I think most people that have solar panels that are housed don't have batteries.
00:09:26.000I think some people do, but most don't have solar.
00:09:36.000So for most people who have solar panels in their house, they actually have an interlock system that when the grid goes down, their solar panels shut off.
00:09:42.000And the reason to do that is for safety of the power line workers.
00:10:38.000But I think one of the things that people like about the idea of solar power is that you're off the grid, is that you don't have to rely on anything.
00:10:46.000Like if the big freeze happens again and everything shuts off, you'll have a refrigerator, you'll have heat.
00:12:07.000We were taking a drive through the middle of Texas the other day and we saw one and it was so close to the highway and it was facing the highway and I had this irrational fear that the windmill was going to break off and go rolling down the road and crush us.
00:12:39.000Let's talk about the Texas freeze because I think that was really a great example of how the grid is supposed to operate and why it didn't operate.
00:12:47.000And so, you know, Texas, we have a lot of wind and solar.
00:13:37.000So it didn't back up because the gas supply essentially was choked off.
00:13:43.000So especially in West Texas, a lot of the gas that comes out of the ground has a lot of condensates in it, things that condense and freeze.
00:13:51.000So heavier hydrocarbons, water, and at the very cold temperatures, It actually froze the wells, so the gas couldn't get out.
00:14:09.000This was in the middle of the night on February 15th, 2021. The power started to go down.
00:14:14.000And then what happened was, a lot of the natural gas infrastructure is powered by electricity.
00:14:18.000They have these compressors, they have valves, and once the electricity started to go down, all of the rest of the natural gas infrastructure started to fail.
00:14:26.000And so you lost even more natural gas.
00:14:28.000So it was really this cascading problem with the natural gas system are the dispatchable power.
00:14:36.000And, you know, that event cost about $200 billion.
00:14:43.000Between how much we had to pay for gas, plus all the damage, all the pipes that froze and burst.
00:14:48.000I mean, it was an enormously expensive event.
00:14:52.000One of the most expensive events Texas has ever experienced.
00:14:55.000For that $200 million, which is all going to repair pipes, it's going to these really rich natural gas guys, we could essentially build enough nuclear power to replace most of our gas power if we had just done that.
00:15:07.000But instead, we're spending all that money You know, repairing houses that were destroyed because the natural gas system failed.
00:15:13.000I mean, it's crazy to me that we still rely on these systems that, you know, we can talk about fossil fuels, but fossil fuels have many huge disadvantages, not just climate change, but many others.
00:15:25.000And, you know, we could fix this if we wanted to, but we're not.
00:15:28.000And we're just sitting here paying money.
00:15:30.000Year after year for these failures of fossil fuel systems.
00:15:33.000Now, people have a fear of nuclear power based on Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima and the like.
00:15:43.000When you're looking at nuclear technology in 2022, how much safer is it?
00:15:48.000How much more effective and efficient is it?
00:15:50.000And what's the best example of a new, modern nuclear power plant?
00:15:56.000Yeah, so let me just say, right off the top, I'm not an expert on the details of nuclear power.
00:16:02.000Certainly, people are worried about nuclear power, meltdowns, etc.
00:16:07.000The way I look at it is you have to trade off costs and benefits, and you look at climate change.
00:16:14.000I mean, we can go over the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels, and I'd be happy to do that.
00:16:18.000And if you look at all of those and you say nuclear, my view is I'm willing to take some risk With nuclear power to avoid all these other really terrible impacts.
00:16:27.000Now, I do know that there's a lot of work being done on new technologies for nuclear, these small modular reactors, things that hold the promise of better nuclear power.
00:16:38.000But even with kind of existing technology, from what I understand, I'm willing to take the risk.
00:16:43.000My understanding of technology, the nuclear technology, rather, is that in 2022, there's many more failsafe measures than were when they designed, like, say, the Fukushima system, for instance.
00:16:54.000Yeah, I mean, every time you have a disaster, people go into it, and they say, what went wrong?
00:16:58.000And then you learn lessons, and you incorporate those into the new plants.
00:17:02.000I mean, you do that with plane design.
00:17:03.000You do that with any kind of big industrial thing.
00:17:06.000So there's no question in my mind that that's right, that they're safer today than they were in the past.
00:17:13.000But let me say, while I support nuclear, and if Republicans came out and said, we will solve climate change by building nuclear, I'd be 100% gung-ho.
00:17:22.000By no means am I one of these nuclear bros that you might see on Twitter who, you know, fusion is 10 years away.
00:18:08.000But when you're saying like nuclear bros, so is your impression that these are real people that are just enthusiastic about nuclear power or are these trolls or are these people that work for some sort of a lobby and they're enthusiastic about getting nuclear pushed forward because they're a part of the industry?
00:18:29.000You know, I think they're honestly enthusiastic about nuclear power.
00:18:33.000Well, they're young guys who are pros.
00:19:01.000And when you looked at Steve Coonan's assertions about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment and carbon in the environment, and what about human use is responsible for that?
00:19:24.000Do you dispute his positions on those that the amount that humans, like with fossil fuels in particular, have an impact on the earth is smaller or at least less significant than a lot of the alarmists would say?
00:19:43.000No, I think the numbers he gave are pretty accurate.
00:19:45.000And let me just sort of preface this by saying, I think that the facts that Steve Koonin gives are largely accurate.
00:19:52.000I could dispute one or two, but the things he says are right.
00:19:55.000But you have to understand that he's really acting like a defense attorney for carbon dioxide.
00:20:01.000And a defense attorney, they don't lie.
00:20:04.000They get disbarred if they go in front of a court and lie.
00:20:06.000But what they do is they give you this carefully curated Picture of reality.
00:20:10.000Just like, you know, you sit down with the defense attorney and he explains why his client is innocent.
00:20:16.000You're going to walk away thinking, you know, that person's getting railroaded.
00:21:49.000It was the assumptions going into the economic model.
00:21:53.000The Trump administration didn't put very much value on future people and didn't put any value on people outside of the U.S. And so what that means is the difference came down to a value judgment.
00:22:06.000Do we care about damages to the rest of the world?
00:22:09.000Do we care about damages to future generations?
00:23:22.000You're saying that he is not looking at it in terms of like how it affects the world.
00:23:27.000Well, that was an example of the Trump administration, how the assumptions that go into these economic models can make a factor of 10 difference in what you estimate.
00:23:37.000And if the assumptions that an economist makes when he's, the value judgments, the values of the economist when they're doing a calculation can make a factor of 10 difference, you can't look at that as a reliable number.
00:23:57.000So in your opinion, he's looking at it leniently.
00:24:00.000I just Googled that, and yesterday this is a news article from a federal court decision.
00:24:07.000It says federal judge halts Biden administration from using social cost of carbon.
00:24:13.000Can you scroll up so I can read what it says?
00:24:15.000Federal judges barring the Biden administration from using the social cost of carbon put into place on January 20th, 2021. The decision issued Friday affects the interim figure in place now as well as an updated metric expected to be issued later this month.
00:24:38.000If this were the Trump administration, they would put $5 per metric ton on that.
00:24:43.000And again, you know, which value is right?
00:24:45.000And this shows you that there's huge uncertainty in the estimates.
00:24:49.000So it says here, the case brought up by 10 states, including Louisiana and West Virginia, challenged the interim metric, arguing that it was arbitrarily set and would increase the cost of energy production and other activities.
00:25:04.000So how much of an effect does this have on what you're saying?
00:25:09.000I mean this is not – I mean my point is about the reliability of these economic estimates and these reliabilities that we have no – we have no idea what the cost of climate change is going to be.
00:25:20.000So when he's saying – when they're ruling that you can't use that term, the cost – what exactly – put it back up again so I can see it one more time.
00:25:30.000Yeah, I think this is actually a lot less than what you're trying to...
00:25:49.000What they're saying is the Biden administration reversed the Trump administration.
00:25:52.000And when you do that, there are certain rules about how an administration can change an executive order from a different one.
00:26:01.000And what they're saying is they didn't quite follow the right procedures.
00:26:03.000I haven't read this, but that's my interpretation.
00:26:06.000It says here the plaintiffs did not challenge a particular use of the Biden administration's social cost figure, but rather its potential applications.
00:26:15.000So, I guess what they're saying is that they don't want the Biden administration applying this idea of social cost.
00:26:24.000And if you look at it, it's Louisiana and West Virginia.
00:26:27.000Those are fossil fuel producing states.
00:26:29.000And, you know, a social cost of carbon is bad for fossil fuels because it makes them pay for the impacts that they're—or at least it incorporates the cost of the impacts in the decisions.
00:26:42.000But this doesn't challenge sort of—this doesn't have any impact on what I'm saying about these economic estimates Are not reliable.
00:26:49.000And so when Dr. Koonin says it's only 4% of GDP, you know, maybe it's 4%, maybe it's 80%.
00:28:46.000And if you kind of even look at 3 degrees, the estimates differ by a factor of 10. Some people are saying 20% loss of GDP. Others are saying 2% or 3% loss of GDP. And all of these are lower limits.
00:34:18.000Well, it's just even if they are fixing it, how'd the metal get bent like that?
00:34:21.000Look how the rocks and gravels pushed to the side.
00:34:26.000So what Kunin was doing, in your mind, is looking at absolute best case scenario and ignoring all the potential things that could go sideways like these infrastructure things you're pointing out.
00:34:40.000Yeah, I mean, you know, what does a defense lawyer do?
00:34:43.000You know, my client is an upstanding family man.
00:34:54.000He mentioned that during his interview.
00:34:55.000And what he doesn't tell you is, you know, CO2 was found with the victim's blood all over him, and he was holding a knife, and there's videotape of him stabbing the client.
00:35:04.000And I'd be happy to go over why we're so...
00:35:06.000I mean, twice you asked him what fraction of the warming Is due to humans.
00:35:11.000And he basically blew you off several times saying, we have no idea.
00:35:15.000And that's one of the things that's absolutely wrong.
00:35:17.000Okay, so what fraction of the warming is due to humans?
00:35:20.000So the best estimate is that it's 100%.
00:37:51.000So, again, I don't know if you want to read this, but we have massive amounts of evidence that carbon dioxide is responsible for the warming of the last hundred years.
00:38:24.000Geologic record shows correspondence between CO2 and temperature.
00:38:28.000Fingerprints and climate model support.
00:38:30.000Yeah, I could talk a little bit more about this.
00:38:33.000So we've known since the 1800s that if you add a gas, a greenhouse gas, those are gases that absorb infrared radiation, if you add that to the atmosphere, it's going to warm the climate.
00:38:42.000We've known that since Arrhenius in the 1890s.
00:38:45.000We also know that carbon dioxide is going up.
00:39:02.000They said, we can't see it yet because we don't have measurements, but this is going to warm the climate.
00:39:06.000So indeed, when you see the climate going up, you think, okay, that makes sense.
00:39:10.000If you look back at the paleo record, we have reasonable estimates of what the climate was back a billion years.
00:39:18.000Not super good, and you have to infer them.
00:39:20.000There's obviously uncertainty in that.
00:39:22.000But you can see that in periods when the carbon dioxide was low, there was a lot more ice on the planet, because you can tell if there's ice covering regions of the planet.
00:39:30.000And so you can see this correspondence between low CO2 and lots of ice.
00:39:35.000It's not perfect, and if you want to, you can point out a period, well, it's high CO2 here, but it's a pretty good correspondence.
00:39:43.000You put that slide back up so I make sure I don't forget.
00:39:45.000Is there any instances of high CO2 but low temperatures?
00:39:49.000You know, I have, let me, actually, can you go to slide 26?
00:39:57.000So this plot, the bottom plot, shows millions of years, and the left-hand axis, which goes with the orange line, is atmospheric CO2. You can see atmospheric CO2 varied from 2,000 parts per million, which is about five times as much as there is today,
00:40:13.000to 250 parts per million, which is about 60% of what it is today.
00:40:19.000And the blue shows how far down, that goes with the right-hand axis, that shows how far down the ice went.
00:40:27.000And you can see that in periods when the CO2 was low, there was a lot of ice.
00:40:34.000Now, you can also see there's some variability that doesn't necessarily reflect itself with ice.
00:40:39.000So if you go back 400 million years, right before the CO2 line starts, you can see a period that might have high CO2 in ice.
00:40:46.000But there are lots of other things that could be going on.
00:40:48.000A single outlier like that, you don't want to use to contradict the overarching picture of the trend.
00:40:57.000And so going back to that line, the next one is called fingerprint.
00:41:00.000So what a fingerprint is, is it's a way to separate various forcing agents.
00:41:07.000So for example, if the sun were causing climate change, we would expect the entire atmosphere to warm.
00:41:12.000That's a prediction that you can work that out just theoretically.
00:41:16.000If greenhouse gases are causing the warming, the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere cools.
00:42:11.000There's ozone depletion, which also affects the trends in the stratosphere.
00:42:14.000How do we know that the temperature in the upper atmosphere goes down when you add carbon dioxide?
00:42:20.000Okay, that's a good, you know, I often ask that question to graduate students.
00:42:25.000So basically, what's a good way to think about it?
00:42:30.000So when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, I'm trying to think about a way to say you increase the emissivity of the stratosphere.
00:42:42.000So basically, probably the best way to say it is, when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, if you add it to the lower atmosphere, you're basically trapping heat.
00:42:51.000If you add it to the upper atmosphere, you actually increase the ability to radiate to space.
00:42:56.000And so by adding to the upper atmosphere, it's radiating directly to space, and so it actually can cool the atmosphere.
00:43:02.000In the lower atmosphere, it doesn't have the ability to radiate directly to space, and it basically just traps heat.
00:43:08.000Now, I'm going to get angry emails about that, because that's a great simplification of it, but that's basically the way I think of it.
00:43:14.000But the important thing is, this is really firmly established, theoretically.
00:43:18.000And I doubt Dr. Kuhn would argue with that.
00:43:21.000So clearly there's an observable trend that matches the model that high CO2 is causing the warming of the lower atmosphere and the cooling of the upper atmosphere.
00:43:33.000It's important to say this is not a model result.
00:45:52.000Now, when he talks about it and he shows these charts of a period of many hundreds of years and the temperature of the Earth over that time, it does seem to be having this fluctuating effect which mirrors what we're seeing now.
00:47:02.000We know the Earth is warming, and it's warming about as much as our theories suggest.
00:47:06.000So a lot of what this is, is it's just kind of a shiny object to distract you.
00:47:11.000Like, let's talk about Greenland melting in 1930. That's a distraction.
00:47:15.000It doesn't take away from the fact that humans are warming the climate, and that as the climate warms, Greenland's going to melt a lot more.
00:47:22.000So there are these aberrations and you look at long periods of time where it does get unusually warm or it does get unusually cool.
00:47:30.000But what you're saying is, make no mistake about it, what's happening right now is unusual and it's caused by humans.
00:47:55.000What I say is humans are driving this warming.
00:47:57.000And, you know, modern human society with millions of cities of millions of people and trillions of dollars of architecture, of infrastructure, that's maybe 100, 150 years old.
00:48:09.000We've never experienced the kinds of warming that's coming.
00:48:13.000And it could be a terrible, terrible ride.
00:48:51.000I'm speaking, again, that's my personal opinion, not as a scientist, because science doesn't tell you that.
00:48:56.000That's my personal opinion as a citizen.
00:48:58.000What I'm saying about it being unusual, not that it's not unusual in terms of like historically over the time that the Earth has existed, but I mean that there's this moment where it's very clear that human beings are doing it.
00:49:11.000Yeah, if you mean unusual that way, I would agree with that.
00:49:17.000There's no debate in the scientific community about this.
00:49:20.000So what can be done in terms of having an impact on the fossil fuel consumption and what would that do to this overall model of global warming or climate change,
00:50:04.000This plot is the ERCOT. So ERCOT is the Texas grid.
00:50:07.000And this shows the power that's getting connected to the Texas grid by source.
00:50:13.000And the horizontal line shows the different sources and the bars are different years.
00:50:19.000Don't worry about the different years.
00:50:20.000You can see nobody's hooking fossil fuels up to the Texas grid.
00:50:24.000There's a little bit of gas, but it's mainly wind and solar.
00:50:27.000And there's actually a little bit of battery.
00:50:28.000It used to be, if you looked at older years, they had coal as a separate category, but nobody's hooked coal up to the grid in so long that they just lumped it in with other, which is zero.
00:50:38.000I can't believe how big solar's impact is.
00:50:43.000Fossil fuels have already lost, and the reason they've already lost is they're expensive.
00:50:47.000You know, people don't want, you know, if you're building energy, if you're an energy producer, you're going to build the cheapest energy source, right?
00:51:00.000And if you go to the previous slide, So, you know, at this point, it says renewables will account for 95% of the growth in global power generation capacity.
00:51:12.000It says renewable energy has another record year of growth, says IEA, and another record year of renewable energy despite COVID-19, blah, blah, blah.
00:51:21.000290 gigawatts of new renewable energy generation capacity mostly in the form of wind turbines and solar panels has been installed around the world this year, beating the previous record last year.
00:51:32.000On current trends, renewable energy generating capacity will exceed that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026. I would have never guessed that.
00:52:54.000Yeah, so I mean, it's much better than an internal combustion.
00:52:57.000The way it's been explained to me is that there's not enough minerals to support the production of enough vehicles that are made simply with electricity.
00:53:37.000This is what's confusing, because I think I've read something that said that there are not enough rare earth minerals to power electric cars for every person on Earth.
00:53:48.000Physically impossible, that they don't exist in terms of like the ore, whatever the mines that we currently have that are pulling these things out of the ground.
00:53:59.000I mean look, I would be very skeptical of that.
00:54:02.000Remember when they said we were running out of oil?
00:54:04.000Yeah, but that's a different thing, isn't it?
00:54:06.000I mean, we've been extracting oil for a long time.
00:54:08.000We've only been making electric cars for a couple decades.
00:54:10.000Right, but my point's about innovation.
00:54:44.000Well, certainly, if you want to build, if you want to scale up all of these renewable energy sources, you have to be able to build it.
00:54:51.000And I do think that one of the concerns is not so much in the availability Of these rare earth elements, but more in where they're located and how they're mined.
00:55:02.000So a lot of them are, you know, in Africa.
00:55:05.000And I do think you don't want to create problems where the mining is.
00:55:27.000Prices of neodymium oxide more than doubled during a nine-month rally last year and are still up 90%.
00:55:34.000The U.S. Department of Commerce said in June it's considering an investigation into the national security impacts of neodymium magnet imports.
00:55:43.000Yeah, I mean, let's think about, let's say you're a battery manufacturer in the U.S. You realize that if you can figure out how to make a battery without that compound, you're going to be rich.
00:55:54.000And so once electric cars pick up, the innovation is going to be extremely impressive.
00:56:00.000And the reason I say that is not because, you know, pie in the sky, because that's our history.
00:56:04.000The history of environmental regulations It's causing advances in technology.
00:56:12.000Just that plot of the price of solar and wind, that's driven by concern for climate change.
00:56:18.000It wasn't just like it happened to happen then.
00:56:20.000It happened because people see renewable energy as a future, and so there was a lot of work done to produce that energy more cheaply.
00:56:28.000And I think that's what's going to happen with electric cars.
00:56:31.000I know that there are some theories and there's some concepts that they're working on in terms of like making these batteries more efficient and making these batteries quicker to charge and last longer.
00:56:42.000But I didn't know that there's new technology in terms of like different minerals that are more common that could be used as batteries or in batteries.
00:56:52.000Yeah, I mean, there's a huge amount of research.
00:56:53.000I'm not a battery person, so I really can't speak on what the cutting edge of batteries is.
00:56:58.000But something, if it was innovative, would change everything.
00:57:37.000As of right now, you can go buy a Tesla.
00:57:38.000I mean, the question is, can we- Yeah, but they're very expensive.
00:57:41.000Like, if somebody wanted to go and buy an electric car and they were on a very tight budget, there's a lot more financially viable options for internal combustion vehicles.
00:58:17.000Most of the electric cars are aimed at a market for people who are concerned about climate change, people who would otherwise be buying a BMW. So I don't think there's been sort of the effort by the manufacturers to make a middle, sort of a lower price point But I will say,
00:58:38.000you know, the most exciting things for me is Ford and their F-150 truck.
00:58:42.000I mean, yeah, you live in Texas, you know that you pull up to light, every other car is a F-150, it seems.
00:58:47.000And did you see the new commercial they had during the Super Bowl of the Chevy Silverado that's electric?
00:58:52.000I did not see that, but I heard about all the electric car commercials.
00:58:55.000They pissed a lot of people off because they used the Sopranos theme song, and then the kids from the Sopranos were in the ad.
00:59:01.000But the car, the new Chevy Silverado electric, looks amazing.
01:00:29.000I mean, I'm sure it's great, but I've done it a couple times just to show people, like, watch this, doo-doo, and then like, look, it's driving.
01:01:03.000But I used to use it when I'd come home from the comedy store when I lived in L.A. And I used to use it for that reason, because I was tired.
01:01:08.000Because, you know, I'd come home, it's like 12.30 at night, I'd just get on the highway, go doop-doop, and just...
01:01:14.000You know, put my hand on the wheel, but I'm just driving straight, and there's not that many people on the road, and it's a little bit more relaxing.
01:01:21.000Yeah, I think on the highway is where I would probably trust it the most.
01:01:23.000But even then, when you see someone acting weird, sometimes you want to drive defensively.
01:02:30.000I mean, I think that a lot of the stuff that people talk about doing in space is going to turn out to be a lot more—that may turn out to not be economically viable.
01:02:50.000The elimination of coal-powered plants and these other things that are putting CO2 and particulates into the environment, what can be done about those things and how long do you think it would take to implement them and what kind of an impact would that have on the overall effect that human beings are having on the climate?
01:03:11.000So let me begin by saying nobody talks about shutting all this stuff off tomorrow.
01:03:15.000It's like, you know, we're going to shut this off tomorrow.
01:03:17.000There's debates about how fast to decarbonize.
01:03:21.000My personal view is that this is sort of a multi-decadal problem that you probably just, you know, I think it's not unreasonable to shut down all the coal now, but the other stuff you probably want to let run out until it wears out.
01:03:33.000Then you just don't replace it with fossil fuel infrastructure.
01:03:36.000And, you know, that's certainly achievable.
01:04:48.000And there's lots of studies which show that Coal, if you live in very polluted air and you're breathing it in, you'll have heart attacks more frequently, you know, strokes, all these health impacts are associated with that.
01:05:03.000And, you know, it's tens of thousands of Americans every year from coal.
01:05:09.000And, you know, this is something, again, the anti-climate people, they don't talk about it.
01:05:14.000It's just it's not something that supports their case.
01:08:40.000To see one of the country's largest coal-fired power plants head northwest from this Ohio River City on east, Because there's another in the region.
01:08:50.000In fact, nearly every direction you go will take you to a coal plant, seven within 30 miles.
01:08:56.000Collectively, they pump out millions of pounds of toxic air pollution.
01:09:00.000They throw off greenhouse gases on par with Hong Kong.
01:09:05.000Industrial air pollution, bad for people's health, bad for the planet, is strikingly concentrated in America among a small number of facilities like those in southwest Indiana, according to a nine-month Center for Public Integrity Investigation.
01:09:25.000It merged two federal data sets to create an unprecedented picture of air emissions.
01:09:29.000They found that a third of the toxic air releases in 2014 from power plants, factories, and other facilities came from just a hundred complexes out of more than 20,000 reporting to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
01:09:43.000So how does the EPA allow those Plants to stay open.
01:09:47.000I mean, if you're looking at what these people are saying, where they've got a fine dust of mist over their child's play sets and the streets would be black with coal, like, how is that possible?
01:10:04.000We have, a lot of our politicians are essentially wholly owned subsidiaries of ExxonMobil, and they do what's in the best interest of fossil fuel.
01:10:14.000Let me show you a, I have a good slide that shows that.
01:11:02.000Saying that Texas needs to avoid a patchwork of local regulations that threaten oil and gas production.
01:11:08.000Governor Greg Abbott on Monday signed legislation that would preempt local efforts to regulate a wide variety of drilling-related activities.
01:11:17.000So this is different though than the coal-powered plant.
01:11:21.000Drilling is fracking and drilling for oil and also natural gas, right?
01:11:27.000It is different from coal, but the idea of what's happened is these fossil fuel producers, as they become unpopular and uneconomic, they're looking to legislatures to rescue them.
01:11:39.000So the same people who, and these are often Republican legislatures who talk about freedom, they're happy to take away consumers' freedom if it supports the people who give them a lot of money.
01:11:52.000These fossil fuel companies are so powerful now politically that they can get legislatures to pass laws to force consumers to use them, or at least to force them to continue to allow them to be extracted.
01:12:04.000If you go to the other side, there's another Texas law where they said...
01:12:10.000Texas passes law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses.
01:12:15.000So the state of Texas won't work with you if you divest from fossil fuels.
01:12:22.000So they passed a law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses.
01:12:28.000Well, the state won't work with a company.
01:12:32.000So the state won't work with a nuclear company, a company that's making solar?
01:12:38.000Imagine you have a bank, and the bank says, we're going to divest all of our investments from fossil fuels, and they make a statement that.
01:12:45.000Then the state of Texas would not work with them in some capacity.
01:12:50.000It's not like you have to use fossil fuels, but if you make a statement that you're divesting from fossil fuels, you're off the list from Texas.
01:12:59.000And again, in a state that is based on freedom and companies making decisions for their shareholders, these companies that divest, they're making business decisions.
01:13:08.000Right, so Texas won't invest in these companies that divest.
01:14:22.000There are lots of people who—so Obama, during—he had something called the Clean Power Plan, and the Clean Power Plan would have essentially eliminated coal-fired power if it was written in such a way to explicitly cause coal-fired power to basically not—there would be no more building of coal-fired power plants,
01:14:40.000and it would really have caused them to be phased out pretty rapidly.
01:14:59.000And the states are presumably suing because there's some sort of a financial interest by the people that are putting these politicians in place.
01:15:11.000You might be able to find it by Googling.
01:15:13.000There was an article, I think it was North Dakota, was canceling a lot of wind leases in order to prop up their coal.
01:15:20.000So people who had leased space to build windmills, wind turbines, they were going through and they were canceling these leases in order to save the coal industry.
01:15:33.000Is there any sort of technology that can extract the particulate matter that these coal plants eject into the atmosphere?
01:15:46.000How coal holds on in America, in North Dakota coal country, Officials rally to save a coal-fired power plant at renewable energy's expense.
01:16:47.000And essentially what it's done is it's taken away power, especially from, you know, a lot of these coal plants are polluting the poorest neighborhoods.
01:16:55.000If you go to Houston, you look around like the Ship Channel, the most polluted places are the poorest places.
01:17:00.000Those people have no political power at all.
01:17:02.000And, you know, they could go talk to their Sort of like the water in Flint, Michigan.
01:17:10.000Those people have no power and they can't lobby.
01:17:15.000Maybe their representative is pushing it, but there's not this groundswell of support in the rest of the legislature doing something about it.
01:17:22.000So when we're thinking about fossil fuel, we can't just think about the effect that CO2 has in the environment in terms of warming.
01:17:30.000We have to think about the effect of the particulate matter and the pollution and what it's doing to people's health.
01:18:38.000And in fact, we know that a lot of recessions have been caused or they've been started by price swings from fossil fuels.
01:18:46.000So it's really this, you know, if you have no idea what you're going to be paying, it's hard if you're a business owner or a citizen to make a decision.
01:18:54.000You know, it's like gas is $2 a gallon.
01:18:56.000Should I spend money on On tuition, or do I have to put money in the bank because I know gas is going to go up?
01:19:01.000I mean, you don't know what the price is, so it's hard to do it.
01:19:17.000So we did it because of the need to maintain stability in the oil markets, especially the 1993, when, no, 91, invasion of Kuwait and Iraq.
01:19:31.000And the thing I realized is even though we don't import a lot of oil from those places, the price of oil is set by the international market.
01:19:37.000So if you buy a barrel of oil from West Texas, the price of that is set by the entire world.
01:19:42.000And so that gives people like Vladimir Putin, gives people like Saudi Arabia the ability to manipulate the price of oil and hammer our economy.
01:19:51.000So, for example, two years ago in 2020, Saudi Arabia and Russia got into a price war Drove down the price of oil.
01:20:00.000The oil futures actually went negative here for a few days.
01:20:05.000And that actually demolished, obliterated the Texas oil industry.
01:20:11.000I mean, there were layoffs, there were bankruptcies.
01:20:15.000And so, from a national security standpoint, we don't want those countries to be able to hammer our economy by manipulating the price of oil, which they can do.
01:20:24.000And if you look right now, You know, Putin sitting on this big gas supply that goes to Europe.
01:20:31.000And, you know, there are all these implied threats about gas supply being sent to Europe.
01:20:36.000And Europe is, you know, they need the gas.
01:20:38.000And so he's got his, you know, he's got his hand around their necks.
01:20:42.000And, you know, that's not a good situation to be in.
01:20:43.000So this is not a thing that we can look at in terms of a compartmentalized problem.
01:22:27.000And I think the U.S. over time is just, you know, our political system is not responding to the needs of the people.
01:22:33.000It's responding to the needs of people who are very rich.
01:22:35.000So this Build Back Better plan would have had something in there about eliminating these kind of power plants?
01:22:41.000Yeah, so the Build Back Better plan had a lot of climate policy, and I don't think it had anything that specifically said these must be eliminated, but there was a lot of spending in there that would have led to a lot of good climate policy.
01:22:55.000Isn't the problem with these bills, though, that they slip in a bunch of other stuff that people don't want to have attached to something that may be good?
01:23:03.000Like, if you looked at the Build Back Better, there was a politician, I forget who it was, That held up the bill, and it was like thousands of pages.
01:23:12.000And he's like, do you think any of these people that are trying to pass this have read through this?
01:23:50.000It's really hard when you see how these people behave to think that they actually have our best interests in mind.
01:23:55.000And to think that this is all we have.
01:23:57.000All we're offered is like crap and crap and crap.
01:24:01.000It's like the idea of the free market in terms of politics has never really manifested.
01:24:07.000There's never been some better solution to the way we handle things now.
01:24:12.000It's still large corporations that are influencing politicians to do things that aren't in the best interest of their constituents, and that's how they get elected.
01:24:20.000And when they get elected, they bullshit us, and they get into office, they still do the same thing over and over and over again.
01:24:25.000It's like a magic trick that we keep falling for.
01:24:28.000It's like Lucy pulling that ball away from Charlie Brown every time he goes to kick it.
01:24:32.000I mean, every time, it's the same thing.
01:24:35.000Yeah, but I wouldn't blame us as much.
01:24:38.000I mean, there's a lot of things that the politicians do to sort of entrench their power.
01:24:42.000You know, gerrymandering is a classic thing.
01:24:44.000You know, if they gerrymander correctly, your vote doesn't count.
01:24:47.000I mean, they've literally taken your vote away from you.
01:24:51.000You know, you wonder once you get into a situation like that, how do you get out of it?
01:24:56.000Because you can't vote the people out because, you know, they've literally said it so you can't do that.
01:25:00.000And the complex system that they've put in place with, I mean, it's so entrenched and these people are so, their roots go so deep.
01:26:21.000So right now it's free to dump Pollution into the atmosphere, you don't pay for it, even though you're causing harms to all these people, you don't pay for it.
01:26:30.000If you do that and you make people pay the full cost of their actions, that would go a long way towards fixing the problem.
01:26:36.000Well, I would imagine like in Evansville, it'd be non-profitable.
01:26:41.000I mean, it seems like the amount of money that those...
01:26:43.000I mean, there should be some sort of a crazy class action lawsuit.
01:26:46.000Yeah, no, I learned about it today watching it same as you did.
01:26:51.000Yeah, that does seem like a terrible injustice.
01:26:54.000So when you read a book like this that is essentially a non-alarmist perspective, you think...
01:27:01.000I think that what this does is not just delays the inevitable, which is we do need to take a chance, but also puts us in a worse position because people are looking at it like it's not that big a deal.
01:27:13.000And by the time they wake up to it, the amount of issues that we have will have multiplied.
01:27:19.000Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of things are going on.
01:28:14.000And so, you know, by delaying, there's an economic cost to that because when we do switch, which we are going to do it because, again, solar and wind are the cheapest energy.
01:28:22.000We're going to be buying it from, you know, wind turbine manufacturers in Europe and from China, solar panels from China.
01:28:29.000It's kind of like, what if we had not, you know, not let Silicon Valley grow up in the U.S.? You know, it's sort of that level of economic activity that we're giving away by not acting.
01:28:41.000In addition, you're right, emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is effectively irreversible on any time scale that we care about.
01:28:48.000What that means is, once the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere right now, it's at about 415 parts per million, which means out of every million molecules of air, 415 are carbon dioxide.
01:29:02.000Once it goes up to some level, 420, it takes a very long time for that to come down.
01:29:07.000Hundreds of thousands of years before it gets back down to pre-industrial.
01:29:10.000And so we're going to be warming the climate for thousands of years.
01:29:15.000So people in the year 3000, the year 4000, their climate will be determined by the decisions we make.
01:29:21.000Decisions we make will determine the climate for a very long time.
01:29:23.000And so we really don't have time to wait 40 or 50 years.
01:29:28.000And, you know, it sounds like, you know, if I remember your previous guest, he basically said something like, you know, eventually we'll take care of this, but it's not a priority.
01:29:36.000I think future generations beg to differ on that.
01:29:39.000You know, they're going to be affected by this for a very long time.
01:29:43.000And to me, that's one of the most challenging parts of this is the very long timescale of our impact.
01:30:49.000So if you drive a cargo ship full of iron and you just dump it out the back, you could grow a lot of plankton.
01:30:57.000The plankton would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then they would die and they would sink.
01:31:01.000So we could take potentially our iron waste and dump it into the ocean and that would make all this plankton grow and that would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
01:31:56.000And so the problem with planting a lot of trees to pull carbon out of the atmosphere is that you need a lot of land.
01:32:03.000It's not clear where that land would come from.
01:32:05.000And then the biggest problem is a tree is not a good long-term tree.
01:32:09.000Storage for carbon because you have a forest, it grows up, and then the forest burns down.
01:32:14.000All that carbon's back in the atmosphere.
01:32:16.000And so you need to be able to store carbon for a very long time.
01:32:19.000So trees, even though I think we should be playing trees, I love trees, they're not a way to solve this problem.
01:32:25.000One of the things that Steven said when he was on the podcast was that the Earth is far greener now because of the fact that there's excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
01:34:15.000This is sort of a proof of concept, is how I would look at it.
01:34:17.000So people are working on this, but you have to realize that To pull 10 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere in a year, which is probably kind of around the magnitude we'd have to do, that would be just a titanic industrial process.
01:34:34.000It would be equivalent to about all of the infrastructure we have to produce that much.
01:34:38.000So think about all of the wells, all of the power plants, exactly.
01:35:05.000It says, estimated cost of geoengineering technology to fight climate change has plunged since a 2011 analysis.
01:35:12.000Now, is it possible that, like all these other things, like you were talking about solar, how solar was far more expensive and the yield was far lower, you know, 20 years ago, that as time and technology increases, they could get to a point where they could siphon this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere much more efficiently?
01:35:32.000Yeah, just like when I was talking about batteries, there is so much money in this.
01:35:36.000If you could come up with a cheap way, if you could do this for $50 a ton, you would be richer than crisis.
01:35:41.000I mean, you'd be the richest person in the world if you come up with a way to do that.
01:35:53.000What if you pump it in there and fuck that up, too?
01:35:55.000You know, we know that these natural gas reservoirs, where you'd put it, it stays there for a long time, because natural gas has been there for millions of years.
01:36:45.000And, you know, in Europe right now, natural gas is extremely expensive.
01:36:49.000And so remember how I talked about a grid has intermittence and it has to have dispatchable firm power.
01:36:55.000So if you go to the UK, their dispatchable firm power is natural gas.
01:36:59.000And when the wind goes down, which you know it's going to do, you know there are going to be periods where the wind's not generating, they have to turn natural gas.
01:37:05.000Natural gas is incredibly expensive right now.
01:38:05.000So they have to go deep, deep into the ground where it's far hotter, and they take that, and they use it sort of in a similar vein as nuclear power?
01:38:14.000Yeah, or like any kind of conventional power.
01:38:18.000It goes down there, it gets hot, it boils, and you get this really hot steam coming out, and you use that to turn a turbine.
01:38:24.000And people are working on all sorts of different things, using it in places where it doesn't get that hot, sort of lower temperature geothermal, and there's a lot of innovation going on in that space.
01:38:34.000So I think that that's sort of the dark horse candidate.
01:38:38.000Instead of nuclear, maybe we go with geothermal as dispatchable.
01:38:41.000And then you don't have to worry about the fallout.
01:38:43.000Yeah, you don't have to worry about all the known disadvantages of nuclear.
01:38:46.000Now, fracking is used for not just natural gas, but also oil, correct?
01:38:53.000Yeah, so they get both out of these fracked wells.
01:38:56.000And in a lot of cases, they really care about the oil, and they just vent the natural gas to the atmosphere.
01:40:01.000You have some batteries that are very short term, a couple hours, and that helps you shift solar energy from when you get it at noon to the evening.
01:40:11.000And then you have your firm dispatchable power.
01:40:15.000It could be natural gas with carbon capture, although I think that's probably not good, where they capture the carbon dioxide before they vent it to the atmosphere.
01:40:24.000That has not been demonstrated to be something that we can do at scale yet.
01:40:31.000Then there's nuclear, there's geothermal, and then there's hydro.
01:40:34.000If you live in a place where that's available, the geology is available.
01:40:40.000Now, the use of petrochemicals and fossil fuel products has a bunch of different problems, and one of them is just the waste that's caused by plastic, and how plastic is essentially, most of it is put into landfills.
01:40:56.000One of the things we found out doing this podcast is that most of the plastic that you think you're recycling doesn't really get recycled.
01:42:13.000He's a brilliant young man who devised a method to extract plastic from the ocean with these, like, giant machines that sort of scoop plastic together out of the ocean and they use it to create products.
01:42:28.000But, you know, that Pacific garbage patch, which is insane.
01:42:34.000It's as big as the state of Texas, if not bigger, right?
01:42:38.000It's so crazy when you see how big it is, like, on a map.
01:42:42.000And that it's all waste, and it's all within the last 70, 80 years from the advent of petrochemical products.
01:42:50.000Yeah, I mean, one day I worry that we're going to find out we've done something really terrible to sort of the ocean ecosystem and that it's going to affect humans.
01:43:15.000According to World Economic Forum report, in the meantime, plastics will continue to leach into the human body.
01:43:22.000And while scientists debate the certainty of toxicity studies determining that bifenol A, BPA plastics, are carcinogenic, the FDA will continue to review BPA safety,
01:43:38.000and of course, plastic consumption will increase petroleum consumption, wrecking havoc on the environment and geopolitical stability.
01:43:48.000What about other things that affect our environment?
01:43:53.000You know, one of the things that people always like to point to...
01:44:03.000I think decentralized currency would probably prevent a lot of the issues that we're dealing with, with monopolies and politicians and, you know, the kind of fiat currency problems that we have, don't you think?
01:44:14.000You know, one thing I've noticed about Bitcoin is it seems to mainly be used by Bitcoin bros and by...
01:45:05.000So, what I was getting to is there's a lot of other things that people point to as having a negative effect on the environment, and one of them is a big one that gets into the weeds ideologically is veganism.
01:45:20.000Vegan diets versus animal-based diets and whether or not you can truly have a renewable farm that's a carbon-neutral farm that grows plants and animals and does so in this sort of symbiotic matter where you can feed large-scale populations,
01:45:40.000but it's a carbon-neutral environment.
01:45:43.000Yeah, so you've opened a whole can of worms there.
01:45:45.000So what we've been talking about so far is just emissions from energy.
01:45:50.000And that is a pretty, in my view, and I think in the view of the people that work on this, is a solvable problem over the next few decades.
01:47:06.000But I do think that, you know, that's something that we have to work on, you know, getting our emissions down from agriculture.
01:47:14.000Is there, I mean, have you ever studied this?
01:47:17.000Is there like a long-term solution to a viable carbon-neutral farming system?
01:47:22.000You know, I'm not an expert in this, but I do think that there are methods of not just stopping emissions, but actually sequestering carbon in soils through various farming techniques and things like that.
01:47:35.000You just have to really convince farmers that it's in their interest to do it.
01:47:38.000And so you talk about, well, maybe we could pay farmers to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and things like that.
01:47:44.000Well, the people that have talked to me about this that seem to think that there is a way to do this, they're doing it on a very small scale relatively.
01:47:54.000One of the problems morally and environmentally that we have with farming in this country is factory farming of animals.
01:48:12.000Monocrop agriculture, because it's not normal to grow thousands of acres of one particular kind of plant, and in order to do so, you have to kill everything else, including all the animals, all the different things that could possibly consume your crops,
01:48:39.000And so factory farming is a way to produce the most pounds of hogs, you know, per dollar you're spending.
01:48:47.000And if you want to do something different, people have to recognize that they're going to pay more At the grocery store, but you'll get these other benefits.
01:49:03.000And so I think, as a general rule, we haven't done probably as good a job, and that's because there are people out there that are sort of combating us with misinformation, at really explaining all of the costs of our present Economic system.
01:49:17.000You know, as we talked about with fossil fuels, you know, you're killing millions of people around the world every year from air pollution and, you know, that's a huge cost and all the cost of climate change and things like that.
01:49:27.000And, you know, you just have to realize that people have to realize they might see higher prices for meat in the store, but there are benefits from that.
01:49:35.000I mean, we could make the argument that you're killing millions of people with poor diets as well and that the main contributors to this poor diet economy are probably fast food.
01:50:29.000Yeah, I mean, you got to go to some sort of a sustainable ranch and get some grass-fed, grass-finished beef on a free-range cattle where the manure is being recycled and they're using it and they're composting it and then they're having pigs roam and chickens roam and everything is sort of like feeding into the soil.
01:50:48.000Yeah, so let me sort of talk about agriculture in general.
01:50:52.000I almost never talk about agriculture because I've talked to people who know a lot about it, and the thing I realize is it is incredibly complicated.
01:50:58.000Just, you know, farmers, agricultural systems are one of the most tightly managed by humans.
01:51:05.000Of all the systems we have, that's the one that humans manage.
01:51:07.000And so there's a lot of capacity for adaptation.
01:52:07.000You know, the fossil fuel companies want to make money.
01:52:09.000And, you know, they do whatever they can to make money.
01:52:13.000If that means giving lots of money to politicians and supporting, you know, dark money groups who run ads against their opponents, you know, this is all stuff that, you know, they're looking at their bottom line.
01:52:24.000They look at their job as to make the most money possible.
01:52:27.000And if you believe that's your job, and most corporations, I think, do, Then you're willing to do anything to do that.
01:52:33.000You'll buy politicians because it's legal.
01:52:35.000It's completely legal to buy a politician in this country.
01:52:38.000Now, when you look at the future, when you take into account all these issues, whether it's coal-fired power plants or fracking or agriculture, if you're being realistic, do you think we can turn this around?
01:52:55.000Yeah, so keep it up slide 11. So let me sort of lay out sort of our choices here.
01:54:11.000Okay, so that should scare the crap out of it.
01:54:15.000Half of an ice age in terms of temperature change, an ice age of warming.
01:54:19.000I look at that, and I look at my kids, and I think, holy crap, if this happens, I don't know how bad it's going to be, but half of an ice age of warming could be awful.
01:54:58.000Infinite confidence in humanity that we'll figure out some way to do it.
01:55:01.000And I hate government regulation, so bring on the heat.
01:55:04.000You know, I look at this, and again, I'm speaking as a citizen now, not as a scientist, but as a citizen, I don't have infinite confidence in humanity.
01:55:11.000I look at COVID, I look at the Texas blackout, and I think, we're going to F this up.
01:55:16.000When Kunin was talking about global warming and climate change, one of the things that he said was that what it will do is open up new areas for agriculture and that agriculture will move steadily north and that we'll adapt to that.
01:56:50.000All right, so let's talk a little bit about some other impacts, because, again, agriculture is the one I think is probably the most likely we'll be able to adapt As well as possible.
01:57:00.000Let's talk about something that's unadaptable.
01:57:08.000You know, all of the stuff that was built in the North, they essentially build it on permafrost with the assumption that permafrost will never melt.
01:57:17.000So you build a house on permafrost, you say, okay, that's my foundation.
01:57:19.000And then the permafrost melts and the house splits.
01:57:21.000When you say the North, what are you talking about?
01:57:54.000I read that one of the big issues, they were talking about Siberia, and that as Siberia slowly melts, that it's going to emit an incredible amount of greenhouse gases.
01:58:38.000These are tens of billions of dollars.
01:58:40.000I mean, we're going to get to our, you know, my worry is we're going to get to a situation where we're spending all of our money just trying to stay alive, building stormwater infrastructure to handle more severe rainfall, building seawalls.
01:58:55.000Building, you know, things to keep people alive and the temperature gets really hot.
01:58:59.000Building new infrastructure for agriculture.
01:59:01.000Because remember, as the agriculture moves, the infrastructure has to move.
01:59:04.000All of your grain processing plants that were down here, you've got to rebuild them up here.
01:59:08.000And so we're going to be spending all of our time and all of our money just trying to stay alive.
01:59:12.000You're not going to have money to buy, you know, to buy a new iPhone or to go to college.
01:59:17.000You know, it's all, you know, because that money is all going to be tax money.
01:59:20.000I mean, you know, that's where it's going to come from.
01:59:23.000And let me just add one thing, which I think is really important here.
01:59:27.000You know, a lot of people are concerned about the freedom aspect of this, as I am.
01:59:33.000You know, we saw with COVID that disasters often come with more government intervention in our lives.
01:59:41.000You know, when COVID hits, you've got to wear a mask.
01:59:43.000And in certain situations, you've got to get vaccinated.
01:59:46.000And people don't like that, and I understand that.
01:59:49.000What do you think is going to happen if there's a food shortage?
01:59:52.000What do you think is going to happen if we have to relocate Miami?
01:59:55.000It's going to be massive government intervention.
01:59:57.000If you want to have a world where the government doesn't tell you what to do, we need to solve climate change now because it's going to be a much larger infringement on our rights if society starts to fall apart.
02:00:41.000But to the average person that gets confused and doesn't know whether or not you're correct or Steve Kuhn is correct, a debate would be very beneficial.
02:00:51.000You know, I disagree with that entirely.
02:01:39.000But let me just sort of finish what I was saying.
02:01:41.000That, you know, the scientific system of peer-reviewed papers followed by replication, you know, important results are always replicated by other people.
02:01:51.000That's how science determines What is right?
02:01:54.000And I feel strongly that in the one debate I did do, I thought it was terrible and was a waste of my time, and I said I would never do that again.
02:02:43.000But the point is, like, when someone hears him or when someone hears you, there's people that would hear you and go, well, this guy's not right because Steve Coonan's right.
02:02:55.000And then there's people that hear you and go, well, he's right and Steve Coonan is wrong.
02:03:01.000Because Steve Koonin left out all these different things, and he was incorrect about that, and he was way too lenient on the government when it comes to...
02:03:11.000At least it can be explained in a way that a rational person could have a more informed opinion of what's going on.
02:03:22.000Yeah, you know, I think you overestimate the ability to settle these issues in a debate.
02:03:27.000And I will say, you're absolutely right.
02:03:30.000You know, this is why tobacco companies hired scientists to go out and push them, because they understand the power of a scientist saying, you know, X is true, Y is not true.
02:03:40.000And so, yeah, you're absolutely right.
02:03:42.000And, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's very frustrating to me to hear someone like Dr. Kuhn.
02:03:49.000And what's particularly irritating Is, you know, there's always this little bit of conspiracy in there about like, you know, these people, they know the truth.
02:05:20.000Well, again, so we can talk about how to do it.
02:05:23.000I'd be open to discussions about sort of parameters.
02:05:26.000You know, I think the thing you don't want to do, in fact, he even made this point, which I thought was actually an excellent point, which is he's as worried about it as I was.
02:05:34.000He said, make people write down their views.
02:05:37.000I mean, that's what we do in the peer-reviewed literature.
02:05:39.000He said, I don't want to just have a debate.
02:05:41.000Make them write down their things and give citations and stuff.
02:05:44.000And, you know, that's why you look in the peer-reviewed literature where People write stuff, it goes through peer review, then it gets published, and it's all written down.
02:05:52.000It's much harder to get crackpot ideas out.
02:05:55.000I mean, I can say anything to you about anything and, you know, I could just say it, but if I have to write it down and give you references, it's much harder to do it.
02:06:04.000But I do think public debates about policy are really good, and we need to have people talk about what's the pros and cons of this or this.
02:06:11.000My take on what you're saying is there's certain things that you're saying that are irrefutable.
02:06:15.000First of all, the particulate matter in the air that's caused by power plants that are fueled by coal, and we look at that video from Evansville, that's horrific to me.
02:06:26.000The idea that the only way we can move forward is by continuing to do what we're doing already and fossil fuels and all that jazz, that doesn't make any sense to me.
02:06:38.000And I do hope that there is some innovation when it comes to battery construction methods and efficiency and all that jazz and that we do move away from a lot of the stuff that we're doing right now.
02:06:52.000I just, I wish there was no gray area.
02:06:58.000I wish there was no legitimate intelligent people that thought differently.
02:07:05.000That's where it gets confusing because I feel like, I read his book and it was pretty fascinating.
02:07:11.000I've read several things where you rebutted him and I've read several things where you stated your position, so I was very excited to talk to you about this.
02:07:21.000And like I said, there's many things that you're saying that I don't think anybody can refute, particularly the effect of using these things that's happening, not just in terms of warming, but in terms of pollution.
02:07:33.000Yeah, you have to look at the whole menu of disadvantages.
02:07:36.000And if you do that, you realize we really should be phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible.
02:07:41.000And we really should be taking into account what's happening with these increased levels of pollutants in our atmosphere.
02:08:09.000I've heard people dismiss that and dismiss the impact that it has, but how can you dismiss the fact that some people have water that you can't drink anymore?
02:08:24.000If they're doing something that produces a significant amount of energy but also pollutes water to the point where it can't be digested anymore, You can't just only look at one aspect of that.
02:09:41.000I mean, I do firmly believe, and I think this is a key thing about climate and everything else, that polluters should be accountable for the damage they pay.
02:09:56.000You know, carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
02:09:59.000They should be held accountable for that.
02:10:10.000And so really what you're talking about is what economists call externalities, which are costs imposed on people who are outside of your transaction.