The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1777 - Andrew Dessler

00:00:11.000 All right, we're up.

00:00:13.000 Well, thank you very much for being here, Andrew.

00:00:15.000 Appreciate it.

00:00:15.000 Why don't you tell everybody, if you would, what you do and what your credentials are.

00:00:20.000 So I'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.

00:00:24.000 I'm the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies.

00:00:27.000 I've been studying climate and the atmosphere for about 30 years.

00:00:32.000 Okay, and thank you for being here, and I brought you on here to counter this book.

00:00:39.000 Steve Coonan, who was my last guest, And I'm trying to do this and balance things out.

00:00:46.000 He has a very different take on what the science says about climate change than you do.

00:00:53.000 So I guess we should start.

00:00:56.000 I know you've read the book.

00:00:58.000 What do you think about his book?

00:01:01.000 Yeah, well, let me start with a little context.

00:01:03.000 I think some historical context.

00:01:04.000 So for decades, on a number of problems, there have been scientists who show up and say, the consensus is all wrong.

00:01:11.000 So it started in the 60s with tobacco.

00:01:13.000 So, you know, the evidence was very clear that smoking is bad for you.

00:01:18.000 And then the scientists started showing up and saying, no, you know, we don't really understand.

00:01:23.000 There's all these problems with the science.

00:01:24.000 And what the tobacco companies figured out Very early is that having a scientist advance that message was much better than having a PR person.

00:01:32.000 So they would go out and hire scientists to say, hey, we need you to push this message.

00:01:37.000 And they went out.

00:01:38.000 It was very effective.

00:01:38.000 They delayed the recognition that smoking is bad for you for decades.

00:01:43.000 Have you seen the documentary Ministers of Doubt?

00:01:46.000 Merchants of Doubt. 0.96

00:01:46.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:01:47.000 In fact, I was going to say, you know, that's a fantastic book.

00:01:52.000 By 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.

00:02:01.000 And so then, you know, fast forward to the 80s and you have fluorocarbons and ozone depletion.

00:02:06.000 And in fact, the exact same thing happens.

00:02:09.000 The science is really well established, but the scientists are showing up saying the scientists have it all wrong.

00:02:13.000 And in fact, the arguments they're advancing Are almost exactly the same as the arguments that Dr. Kuhn is advancing.

00:02:19.000 If you take a Word document, you just do global word replace, ozone depletion for climate change, you have exactly the same argument.

00:02:25.000 In 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.

00:02:31.000 If you go to slide 52, this is from 1989, and I think, is it going to show up there?

00:02:36.000 Yes.

00:02:38.000 So this is a quote from something that was said about fluorocarbon.

00:02:43.000 It says, That's exactly the same argument.

00:03:04.000 You know, we don't understand it.

00:03:05.000 It's natural variability.

00:03:07.000 It's identical argument.

00:03:09.000 And keep it back up.

00:03:10.000 In the next paragraph, New York Times reports talks about the disadvantages of CFC substitutes.

00:03:15.000 They may be toxic, flammable, corrosive.

00:03:17.000 They certainly won't work as well.

00:03:19.000 They'll reduce the energy efficiency of appliances. 0.71

00:03:21.000 They'll deteriorate.

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.

00:03:29.000 Eventually, that will involve 100 million home refrigerators, air conditioners in 90 million cars, central air conditioning plants, and 100,000 large buildings.

00:03:37.000 Good luck!

00:03:38.000 Total costs haven't even been added up yet.

00:03:40.000 And again, you know, windmills don't work.

00:03:42.000 You know, the costs are going to be extraordinary.

00:03:44.000 And, you know, you were around the 90s.

00:03:45.000 Do you remember the economic apocalypse that happened when we replaced CFCs? 0.94

00:03:49.000 It didn't happen.

00:03:50.000 The economic apocalypse didn't happen.

00:03:52.000 We replaced them.

00:03:52.000 And none of that happened.

00:03:54.000 What did they replace them with?

00:03:55.000 With other CFCs.

00:03:56.000 So the original F11, F12 got replaced with these things we call HCFCs that are less damaging than the ozone layer.

00:04:03.000 And none of that happened.

00:04:05.000 And those people are the true alarmists in the debate.

00:04:09.000 The people that say we can't do it.

00:04:12.000 Because we can do it.

00:04:13.000 And they're just trying to scare people into not taking action.

00:04:17.000 So, you have a question?

00:04:18.000 No, 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.

00:04:44.000 That's his take, right?

00:04:46.000 I mean, I don't want to put words in his mouth.

00:04:49.000 Certainly he argues that it's difficult to transition.

00:04:53.000 I think he said at one point during his interview with you that fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source, which is not true.

00:04:59.000 In fact, I have a slide on that.

00:05:02.000 If we go to slide 33. So your viewers may not know this.

00:05:10.000 And in fact, a few years ago, fossil fuels were the cheapest energy source, but the prices are plummeting.

00:05:16.000 So this is a plot from Lazard, what they call the levelized cost of energy.

00:05:21.000 And you can see on the left side, it's the price in 2009. And you can see the top dot is solar.

00:05:27.000 And it was extremely expensive in 2009. And then as you go down, 2019, wind and solar are now the cheapest energy sources.

00:05:36.000 Gas is close, but wind and solar, they are the cheap energy sources now.

00:05:41.000 Is it possible to replace all of the fossil fuel energy that we get with solar?

00:05:47.000 Oh, wow, that's a great question.

00:05:49.000 And I guess we'll just sort of let the conversation flow as it wants.

00:05:53.000 So, yeah, let's talk about what it takes to...

00:05:57.000 What would a grid that's carbon-free look like?

00:06:00.000 Okay, so everybody who's capable of tying their shoelaces knows that wind and solar are intermittent.

00:06:07.000 So solar doesn't produce energy at night.

00:06:10.000 Wind doesn't produce energy when the sun's not blowing.

00:06:12.000 So everybody knows that, okay?

00:06:14.000 When the wind's not blowing.

00:06:15.000 When the wind's not blowing, yes.

00:06:17.000 Everybody knows that.

00:06:17.000 So 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.

00:06:28.000 And then the other 25% is what we call dispatchable firm power.

00:06:32.000 So it could be nuclear, could be geothermal, could be hydro.

00:06:36.000 It's a power source you can turn on and off to balance the The variability of wind and solar.

00:06:42.000 So 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.

00:06:51.000 I was under the impression that wind was not very effective, that these windmills don't produce that much power.

00:06:59.000 I mean, some days in Texas, it's half our power.

00:07:02.000 Half of our power comes from wind?

00:07:03.000 Yeah, if it's a windy day, we get an enormous amount of power.

00:07:06.000 Yeah, Texas has an enormous amount of power that we get from wind on windy days.

00:07:10.000 Some days you don't get a lot of power, but you do.

00:07:11.000 That's incredible.

00:07:12.000 I did not know it was half of our power.

00:07:14.000 So conceivably, with solar and with wind, we could power the entire state.

00:07:20.000 And you need some dispatchable power.

00:07:22.000 You need some nuclear.

00:07:23.000 You need some geothermal.

00:07:24.000 You need something that you can balance the renewable energy with.

00:07:30.000 But much less than we're currently using.

00:07:32.000 That's right.

00:07:33.000 And so you might ask reasonably, why use wind and solar at all?

00:07:37.000 Why just build 100% nuclear?

00:07:39.000 And that would work.

00:07:40.000 And I would actually support that.

00:07:41.000 But that's much more expensive.

00:07:43.000 Wind and solar are very cheap at this point.

00:07:46.000 And in fact, the marginal cost of wind and solar energy is zero.

00:07:49.000 They produce an extra joule of energy at no cost because they don't have any fuel.

00:07:54.000 So 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.

00:08:07.000 Because there are going to be times when they don't produce.

00:08:10.000 We know that's going to happen.

00:08:12.000 So wind and solar also rely on, there has to be some sort of battery that collects the energy, correctly?

00:08:20.000 No, no.

00:08:21.000 Solar does, right?

00:08:22.000 No, they really don't.

00:08:24.000 So that's part of why you need to have dispatchable energy.

00:08:27.000 You don't really need energy storage on a grid.

00:08:30.000 Now, 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.

00:08:41.000 So you can shift the energy a few hours.

00:08:43.000 So you might want to use batteries for that, but you don't really need long-term storage To run the grid.

00:08:48.000 You just need some sort of dispatchable power to balance the renewable.

00:08:52.000 So 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?

00:09:01.000 No, no.

00:09:01.000 It'd be industrial-scale batteries.

00:09:03.000 And 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.

00:09:11.000 Right, but what I'm saying is, for individual homes, most of them have battery backup systems.

00:09:15.000 They have systems that store the solar, correct?

00:09:18.000 Like, I used to have a system like that.

00:09:20.000 Yeah, you know, I actually don't know the statistics.

00:09:23.000 I think most people that have solar panels that are housed don't have batteries.

00:09:26.000 I think some people do, but most don't have solar.

00:09:28.000 So they connect to the grid as well?

00:09:30.000 Yeah, so they're using...

00:09:31.000 But if the grid goes down, that means their solar power is down as well, right?

00:09:35.000 That's right.

00:09:36.000 So 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.

00:09:42.000 And the reason to do that is for safety of the power line workers.

00:09:46.000 They don't want...

00:09:47.000 If the power line workers think there's no power on the grid, They don't want these solar panels feeding power in.

00:09:53.000 They walk in and they get shocked.

00:09:54.000 So the solar panels actually are designed to shut off when the power goes out.

00:09:58.000 Now you can put a battery on your house, you can have it disconnect from the grid, and you can basically make your house a little island.

00:10:05.000 But most people don't do that.

00:10:07.000 If they do do that, is it really possible to power your entire home through solar that way?

00:10:14.000 You know, that's a question of how much you want to invest.

00:10:18.000 You certainly could do that.

00:10:20.000 I think if you have big enough batteries, you could do that.

00:10:23.000 But the grid is a good, reliable backup most of the time.

00:10:27.000 And so I think that's what most people rely on.

00:10:29.000 They just hook up to the grid.

00:10:30.000 And, you know, when they're not generating enough power, there's pulling energy off the grid.

00:10:35.000 And when they're generating excess power, they're pushing it onto the grid.

00:10:37.000 Right.

00:10:38.000 But 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.

00:10:46.000 Like if the big freeze happens again and everything shuts off, you'll have a refrigerator, you'll have heat.

00:10:50.000 Right, right.

00:10:51.000 Oh, yeah.

00:10:52.000 No, I think that's right.

00:10:54.000 And I would love to have a house like that.

00:10:56.000 But most people don't have houses that can disconnect from the grid.

00:11:00.000 So most of the people that do have solar power, they have solar power and they're attached to the grid.

00:11:04.000 So solar is just a way of saving money and saving energy costs and saving your energy consumption.

00:11:10.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:11:10.000 So it's a way to pay less money for your power because you're not buying money off the grid.

00:11:16.000 And with wind, they have these massive wind farms, right, where they have these giant propellers in the air.

00:11:24.000 That's right.

00:11:25.000 How much energy does one of those things generate? 0.64

00:11:27.000 So order of magnitude, something like 10 megawatts is sort of a general number for it.

00:11:33.000 And to give you an idea, a megawatt is sort of a diesel locomotive.

00:11:38.000 So kind of 10 diesel locomotives.

00:11:40.000 A big coal-fired power plant is order a gigawatt, a billion watts.

00:11:45.000 So you can think of 100 windmills as about equal to a nuclear power plant.

00:11:51.000 Really?

00:11:51.000 Is that strong?

00:11:53.000 Well, I mean, if we're talking order of magnitude, you know, maybe it's 200. Yeah, but these big windmills, these windmills are enormous.

00:11:58.000 Have you ever seen one?

00:11:59.000 Yeah, I have.

00:12:00.000 They're pretty crazy. 0.91

00:12:01.000 They're enormous.

00:12:02.000 I mean, if you haven't seen one, you just can't imagine how big they are.

00:12:06.000 Yeah, we saw one.

00:12:07.000 We 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.

00:12:21.000 Yeah, obviously it didn't happen.

00:12:23.000 I know that doesn't make any sense, but that's how big it is.

00:12:24.000 Yeah, no, they're enormous.

00:12:26.000 But I think the important point here is wind and nuclear are not exactly substitutable powers.

00:12:33.000 Again, they play different roles in the grid.

00:12:37.000 You mentioned the Texas freeze.

00:12:39.000 Let'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.

00:12:47.000 And so, you know, Texas, we have a lot of wind and solar.

00:12:50.000 We also have a lot of natural gas.

00:12:52.000 So in Texas, natural gas is the power source that backs up the renewables.

00:12:56.000 When the renewables are not producing, natural gas is supposed to step in And back it up.

00:13:02.000 I mean, that's the way our grid actually works.

00:13:04.000 We run as much wind and solar as we can, and anything else is made up with natural gas.

00:13:10.000 There's a little coal, a little nuclear.

00:13:11.000 And so during the Texas freeze, the renewables went down.

00:13:16.000 They were not producing very much power.

00:13:18.000 And again, people play this up like this is a problem with renewables.

00:13:21.000 This is not a problem with renewables.

00:13:22.000 We know renewables stop producing some of the time.

00:13:26.000 And when that happens, you rely on your firm dispatchable power to make it up.

00:13:30.000 And that was the failure.

00:13:31.000 The gas system did not back up the renewables.

00:13:35.000 And why was that?

00:13:36.000 That's a really excellent question.

00:13:37.000 So it didn't back up because the gas supply essentially was choked off.

00:13:43.000 So 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.

00:13:51.000 So heavier hydrocarbons, water, and at the very cold temperatures, It actually froze the wells, so the gas couldn't get out.

00:14:00.000 It plugged the wells up.

00:14:01.000 And then what happened is, so you get this reduction in natural gas flow, and so then the power started to go down.

00:14:08.000 And this was very sudden.

00:14:09.000 This was in the middle of the night on February 15th, 2021. The power started to go down.

00:14:14.000 And then what happened was, a lot of the natural gas infrastructure is powered by electricity.

00:14:18.000 They 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.

00:14:26.000 And so you lost even more natural gas.

00:14:28.000 So it was really this cascading problem with the natural gas system are the dispatchable power.

00:14:36.000 And, you know, that event cost about $200 billion.

00:14:43.000 Between how much we had to pay for gas, plus all the damage, all the pipes that froze and burst.

00:14:48.000 I mean, it was an enormously expensive event.

00:14:52.000 One of the most expensive events Texas has ever experienced.

00:14:55.000 For 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.

00:15:07.000 But instead, we're spending all that money You know, repairing houses that were destroyed because the natural gas system failed.

00:15:13.000 I 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.

00:15:25.000 And, you know, we could fix this if we wanted to, but we're not.

00:15:28.000 And we're just sitting here paying money.

00:15:30.000 Year after year for these failures of fossil fuel systems.

00:15:33.000 Now, people have a fear of nuclear power based on Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukushima and the like.

00:15:40.000 What is the current technology?

00:15:43.000 When you're looking at nuclear technology in 2022, how much safer is it?

00:15:48.000 How much more effective and efficient is it?

00:15:50.000 And what's the best example of a new, modern nuclear power plant?

00:15:56.000 Yeah, so let me just say, right off the top, I'm not an expert on the details of nuclear power.

00:16:02.000 Certainly, people are worried about nuclear power, meltdowns, etc.

00:16:07.000 The way I look at it is you have to trade off costs and benefits, and you look at climate change.

00:16:14.000 I mean, we can go over the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels, and I'd be happy to do that.

00:16:18.000 And 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.

00:16:27.000 Now, 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.

00:16:36.000 And maybe those will come out.

00:16:38.000 But even with kind of existing technology, from what I understand, I'm willing to take the risk.

00:16:43.000 My 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.

00:16:54.000 Yeah, I mean, every time you have a disaster, people go into it, and they say, what went wrong?

00:16:58.000 And then you learn lessons, and you incorporate those into the new plants.

00:17:02.000 I mean, you do that with plane design.

00:17:03.000 You do that with any kind of big industrial thing.

00:17:06.000 So there's no question in my mind that that's right, that they're safer today than they were in the past.

00:17:13.000 But 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.

00:17:22.000 By no means am I one of these nuclear bros that you might see on Twitter who, you know, fusion is 10 years away.

00:17:29.000 I would also take geothermal.

00:17:31.000 What are the nuclear bros saying?

00:17:33.000 Oh, you know, there are people on Twitter who will say, you know, fusion is right around the corner.

00:17:37.000 You call them nuclear bros?

00:17:39.000 Why do you call them nuclear bros?

00:17:40.000 They're usually sort of aggressive, youngish men. 0.99

00:17:44.000 They probably watch this show.

00:17:45.000 They're probably steaming angry right now and are on Twitter.

00:17:48.000 They're actually on Twitter right now searching for me.

00:17:50.000 So there's like nuclear fans?

00:17:52.000 Is that what you're saying?

00:17:53.000 Oh, yeah.

00:17:54.000 You should.

00:17:54.000 Here's a test.

00:17:55.000 Go on your Twitter feed and say something like, I hate nuclear.

00:17:57.000 Just say that and tweet it out and see what the reaction is.

00:18:00.000 I don't read Twitter.

00:18:02.000 All right, well.

00:18:02.000 Fortunately.

00:18:03.000 Yeah, okay.

00:18:04.000 But I just post and ghost.

00:18:05.000 I got out of there.

00:18:06.000 Yeah, that's a good way to do it.

00:18:08.000 But 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?

00:18:29.000 You know, I think they're honestly enthusiastic about nuclear power.

00:18:33.000 Well, they're young guys who are pros.

00:18:34.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:18:35.000 That seems odd to me.

00:18:36.000 You know, this is my experience on Twitter, so, you know, your mileage may vary. 0.99

00:18:41.000 They might be fucking with you. 0.99

00:18:42.000 They might have found you to be a little sensitive. 1.00

00:18:44.000 Do you know that they do that?

00:18:46.000 They find a little soft spot, they start poking?

00:18:48.000 That is true, but, you know, like you, I don't respond on Twitter a lot.

00:18:52.000 I view it as kind of a push medium.

00:18:53.000 Good for you.

00:18:54.000 So, there's nuclear people that are maybe a little overly enthusiastic about nuclear.

00:19:00.000 Yes, that's a good way to put it.

00:19:01.000 And 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?

00:19:18.000 Like, he put a bunch of percentages.

00:19:21.000 How much of it is agriculture?

00:19:22.000 How much of it is transportation?

00:19:24.000 Do 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?

00:19:43.000 No, I think the numbers he gave are pretty accurate.

00:19:45.000 And let me just sort of preface this by saying, I think that the facts that Steve Koonin gives are largely accurate.

00:19:52.000 I could dispute one or two, but the things he says are right.

00:19:55.000 But you have to understand that he's really acting like a defense attorney for carbon dioxide.

00:20:01.000 And a defense attorney, they don't lie.

00:20:04.000 They get disbarred if they go in front of a court and lie.

00:20:06.000 But what they do is they give you this carefully curated Picture of reality.

00:20:10.000 Just like, you know, you sit down with the defense attorney and he explains why his client is innocent.

00:20:16.000 You're going to walk away thinking, you know, that person's getting railroaded.

00:20:19.000 Of course he didn't do it.

00:20:20.000 Because you're not hearing the whole thing.

00:20:22.000 And so it's not that what he said was wrong.

00:20:26.000 In fact, many times he said, no one's ever been able to prove anything I say is wrong and I have footnotes for everything.

00:20:30.000 And that's correct.

00:20:30.000 It's what he's not saying.

00:20:33.000 It's the where he emphasizes his uncertainty.

00:20:37.000 And lack of uncertainty.

00:20:38.000 That's really what's misleading, I think, in the argument.

00:20:41.000 Can you give me an example of that?

00:20:42.000 Oh, sure.

00:20:43.000 So he spent five minutes, well, maybe not five minutes, two minutes talking about climate models and how hard it is to do.

00:20:48.000 And, you know, it's like climate models are very uncertain.

00:20:51.000 And then At another point, he talks about the economic models.

00:20:55.000 He says, warming of, and again, I don't know the exact quote, but warming of two or three degrees, why that's 4% of GDP. That's nothing.

00:21:01.000 And, you know, economic models are terrible.

00:21:04.000 If you don't believe the climate models, the economic models are absolutely awful.

00:21:08.000 And I can go in, I can explain that.

00:21:10.000 In fact, let me tell you a story about economic models and why you should not believe them.

00:21:15.000 And we'll get back to how he doesn't talk about the uncertainty in those at all.

00:21:18.000 So in the 2010s, the Obama administration put out this thing called the social cost of carbon.

00:21:24.000 And that's basically the cost of the damages from one ton of carbon out of the atmosphere.

00:21:29.000 So they say, if you emit one ton of carbon, we have our economic model and it's going to cost $35 of damage.

00:21:37.000 And they have a way of doing it.

00:21:39.000 I won't go into details.

00:21:40.000 Then the Trump administration comes in and they redo the calculation and they get $3.

00:21:46.000 Now, what changed?

00:21:48.000 It wasn't the science.

00:21:49.000 It was the assumptions going into the economic model.

00:21:53.000 The 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.

00:22:06.000 Do we care about damages to the rest of the world?

00:22:09.000 Do we care about damages to future generations?

00:22:11.000 That's not a scientific question.

00:22:12.000 That's a moral question.

00:22:13.000 And these economic estimates are completely suffused with value judgments.

00:22:18.000 And they're really...

00:22:19.000 I mean, I could go on about...

00:22:21.000 Could you just expand upon what those economic damages would be and how it would affect people?

00:22:26.000 Sure.

00:22:27.000 So, you know, damages of...

00:22:29.000 Okay, so let's talk about the impacts of climate change.

00:22:32.000 Actually, let me get to that in a second.

00:22:33.000 Let me just wrap up what I'm saying.

00:22:34.000 So the economic estimates are absolutely unreliable, in my view.

00:22:39.000 And Dr. Coonan, he didn't even mention that there was uncertainty in it.

00:22:42.000 He says it's 4%, as if that's a perfect number. 1.00

00:22:46.000 And that's a classic merchant of doubt strategy.

00:22:50.000 This number over here, which convicts my...

00:22:52.000 which is not good for my client, that's a terrible number.

00:22:55.000 Let me tell you why.

00:22:55.000 This number, this supports my client.

00:22:57.000 It's perfect.

00:22:59.000 And so that's a classic merchant of doubt strategy.

00:23:01.000 And, you know, he does that repeatedly.

00:23:03.000 It's not wrong. 0.84

00:23:04.000 I can't say what he said was wrong, but I can say there was a choice he made to bolster his client.

00:23:11.000 Now, which is carbon dioxide.

00:23:13.000 Now, let's talk about the impacts of climate change is what you're asking.

00:23:16.000 So let's talk about the...

00:23:17.000 So when you warm the climate, you do a bunch of things.

00:23:20.000 Not just the impact of climate.

00:23:22.000 You're saying that he is not looking at it in terms of like how it affects the world.

00:23:27.000 Well, 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.

00:23:37.000 And 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.

00:23:50.000 That's my opinion.

00:23:51.000 In fact, I have a slide that shows the damages.

00:23:54.000 Let me find out where that one is. 0.59

00:23:57.000 So in your opinion, he's looking at it leniently.

00:24:00.000 I just Googled that, and yesterday this is a news article from a federal court decision.

00:24:07.000 It says federal judge halts Biden administration from using social cost of carbon.

00:24:13.000 Can you scroll up so I can read what it says?

00:24:15.000 Federal 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.

00:24:32.000 Huh.

00:24:33.000 Right.

00:24:34.000 So it says there $51 per metric ton.

00:24:37.000 So that's the value.

00:24:38.000 If this were the Trump administration, they would put $5 per metric ton on that.

00:24:43.000 And again, you know, which value is right?

00:24:45.000 And this shows you that there's huge uncertainty in the estimates.

00:24:49.000 So 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.

00:25:04.000 So how much of an effect does this have on what you're saying?

00:25:07.000 This is noise.

00:25:09.000 I 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.

00:25:20.000 So 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.

00:25:30.000 Yeah, I think this is actually a lot less than what you're trying to...

00:25:33.000 This is probably some...

00:25:34.000 Scroll back up to the top so I can read the headlines again.

00:25:37.000 So it's saying the federal judge halts Biden administration from using the social cost of carbon.

00:25:44.000 They're not...

00:25:48.000 Stopping people from using that.

00:25:49.000 What they're saying is the Biden administration reversed the Trump administration.

00:25:52.000 And when you do that, there are certain rules about how an administration can change an executive order from a different one.

00:26:01.000 And what they're saying is they didn't quite follow the right procedures.

00:26:03.000 I haven't read this, but that's my interpretation.

00:26:06.000 It says here the plaintiffs did not challenge a particular use of the Biden administration's social cost figure, but rather its potential applications.

00:26:15.000 So, I guess what they're saying is that they don't want the Biden administration applying this idea of social cost.

00:26:24.000 Right.

00:26:24.000 And if you look at it, it's Louisiana and West Virginia.

00:26:27.000 Those are fossil fuel producing states.

00:26:29.000 And, 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.

00:26:42.000 But this doesn't challenge sort of—this doesn't have any impact on what I'm saying about these economic estimates Are not reliable.

00:26:49.000 And so when Dr. Koonin says it's only 4% of GDP, you know, maybe it's 4%, maybe it's 80%.

00:26:57.000 80%?

00:26:59.000 Sure.

00:26:59.000 Could you go to slide 28 now?

00:27:03.000 So, to give you an idea of how economists have no idea what the impact does, this is a plot of the damage.

00:27:13.000 So, it's the reduction of GDP as a function of temperature.

00:27:17.000 Now, unfortunately, this is in Celsius.

00:27:19.000 To convert from Celsius change to Fahrenheit change, it's multiplied by 2, about 2. So, 5 degrees Celsius is about 9 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:27:27.000 And you can see that These estimates don't agree at all.

00:27:31.000 You know, some people say that a 5-degree warming Celsius, about 9 degrees Fahrenheit, would only reduce GDP by, you know, 8%.

00:27:38.000 But that's a giant number, isn't it?

00:27:40.000 8% is...

00:27:42.000 Well, this way...

00:27:43.000 Is anybody forecasting that kind of a rise in temperature?

00:27:47.000 No, but let me...

00:27:49.000 So why use that?

00:27:50.000 Well, I'm just saying, at the end, you can look at...

00:27:52.000 I mean, let's go to 3 degrees.

00:27:53.000 So 3 degrees...

00:27:54.000 But is anybody even saying 3 degrees?

00:27:57.000 Yeah, three degrees is where we're at, and three degrees centigrade, about five degrees Fahrenheit.

00:28:00.000 That's where we're going now.

00:28:02.000 In how much of a time period?

00:28:03.000 That's 2100. So in 2100, we will be five degrees warmer.

00:28:07.000 Overall?

00:28:08.000 Global average, yes.

00:28:09.000 Wow.

00:28:10.000 So five degrees is high.

00:28:13.000 That's at the very top end of the worst, worst case scenario.

00:28:16.000 Three degrees Celsius, five degrees Fahrenheit.

00:28:19.000 I'd never heard it that high.

00:28:20.000 I'd heard like a couple of degrees.

00:28:22.000 Maybe I'm reading the wrong stuff.

00:28:24.000 Well, okay, so if you're...

00:28:26.000 This is where being an American is a disadvantage.

00:28:28.000 You know, we talk in Fahrenheit.

00:28:30.000 In Celsius, it is a couple degrees.

00:28:31.000 It's three degrees Celsius.

00:28:32.000 That's a couple degrees.

00:28:33.000 They tried to push that on us when I was in school.

00:28:35.000 We should have just accepted it.

00:28:36.000 We should have accepted it.

00:28:37.000 And soccer.

00:28:38.000 They were trying to push soccer as well, remember?

00:28:40.000 That is correct.

00:28:41.000 Yeah, so 3 degrees Celsius is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:28:45.000 That is where we're going.

00:28:46.000 And 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.

00:29:00.000 It's going to be worse than this.

00:29:02.000 And the reason there are lower limits is because the majority of them add in, they do this what we call a bottom-up approach.

00:29:10.000 They say, okay, what's the effect of agriculture?

00:29:12.000 And what's going to be the effect of sea level rise?

00:29:14.000 And what's going to be the effect of warmer temperatures on productivity?

00:29:17.000 And they kind of sum them up.

00:29:18.000 But they leave out all of these things.

00:29:21.000 Ocean acidification.

00:29:22.000 How do you even value that?

00:29:24.000 Permafrost melting.

00:29:25.000 How is that?

00:29:25.000 All of these things are left out of many of these estimates.

00:29:29.000 And so, you know, the important thing, again, I can't get over is we have no idea what the cost of climate impacts are going to be. 0.98

00:29:37.000 Anybody who tells you that they know what three degrees is going to be like is either a liar or a fool. 0.91

00:29:43.000 We have no idea. 0.98

00:29:44.000 Now, I then cannot tell you it's going to be bad.

00:29:48.000 But I think it could be bad.

00:29:49.000 It could be very bad, especially when you look at the Texas freeze.

00:29:53.000 I mean, that was a really bad event.

00:29:55.000 That was $200 billion of damages.

00:29:58.000 That's a unique event, though, isn't it?

00:30:00.000 Isn't it also unique in that Texas has its own grid?

00:30:03.000 Sure.

00:30:03.000 Every event is unique in its own way.

00:30:05.000 But the point I'm trying to make here is how vulnerable we are to these climate impacts.

00:30:12.000 You know, we're extremely vulnerable to these changes.

00:30:15.000 And so this idea that it's going to be nothing.

00:30:18.000 It's going to, you know, instead of, you know, you won't even notice it.

00:30:21.000 I mean, nobody can tell you if that's right or not.

00:30:24.000 And in many ways, that's the biggest reason to act on climate change, because we don't know.

00:30:29.000 This raise in temperature and the associated cost that's involved, what would that cost be because of?

00:30:36.000 Would it be flooding near the coasts?

00:30:38.000 Would it be drought?

00:30:41.000 What would be the added costs?

00:30:44.000 Oh, it's everything.

00:30:45.000 I mean, we live in a world that is optimized for the temperature range that we're in.

00:30:52.000 So when you build a bridge, for example, the engineer says, okay, what's the temperature range that this bridge can experience?

00:30:57.000 Because bridges expand and contract, and you have to make sure that it's like, okay, this is the range.

00:31:02.000 And then as you depart from that—I have some slides on that, which I will look up as I'm talking.

00:31:09.000 Can you go to 46— We're just now getting to the point where we're beginning to depart from the range of infrastructure.

00:31:17.000 So, for example, you can see on the left, Heat Wave made this bridge too swole to function.

00:31:22.000 And so that's one thing.

00:31:24.000 And you say, well, that, okay, that one thing by itself, it's probably a bridge that opens.

00:31:30.000 Oh, right, right, right.

00:31:32.000 And then, yeah, it looks like it is.

00:31:35.000 And then the other one, does it look like it is?

00:31:39.000 Well, I don't know the details of that bridge, to be honest.

00:31:41.000 I'm sure in the comments...

00:31:42.000 It's got the lights.

00:31:43.000 Yeah.

00:31:44.000 Are those lights the ones that they use when they...

00:31:47.000 That's in Chicago.

00:31:47.000 I can check real quick.

00:31:48.000 Yeah, check that.

00:31:49.000 Because that seems weird.

00:31:51.000 But in any event...

00:31:52.000 I've seen this many places where bridges...

00:31:54.000 It gets too hot and the bridges...

00:31:56.000 They have to close the bridges because they...

00:31:57.000 So it's because of the asphalt and...

00:31:59.000 They expand.

00:32:00.000 They're made of metal and stuff that expands when it heats up.

00:32:03.000 And...

00:32:05.000 The slide on the right, which you can't see more, shows some train tracks.

00:32:08.000 And again, when you build train tracks, you assume a temperature range.

00:32:12.000 So it does lift.

00:32:13.000 There it is, yeah.

00:32:14.000 So it got too swole from...

00:32:16.000 That's wild that they lift like that.

00:32:18.000 So it got too swole and then it wouldn't disconnect and separate.

00:32:23.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:32:24.000 And then the one on the right, that looks really old.

00:32:26.000 Like, what is that from?

00:32:28.000 You know, I don't know exactly when that picture was taken.

00:32:30.000 Extreme heat caused railroad tracks in New Jersey to buckle, giving them a spaghetti-like look.

00:32:35.000 Because they expand too much.

00:32:36.000 Or because they made it in New Jersey. 0.71

00:32:38.000 Yeah, a bunch of mobsters that cut corners.

00:32:40.000 What do you think, Jamie?

00:32:42.000 I've never seen that before, but that is pretty wild.

00:32:44.000 It's because there's a body under there that's decomposing.

00:32:46.000 Aha! 0.94

00:32:47.000 So that is crazy.

00:32:48.000 Like, I did not know that if it got that hot that it would turn and wiggle like that.

00:32:53.000 Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.

00:32:55.000 They're pointed towards each other and they expand.

00:32:57.000 And if they expand into each other, they buckle.

00:33:00.000 And the thing you have to understand is we have...

00:33:04.000 Trillions of adaptations exactly like that to the climate.

00:33:07.000 You know, when the Pacific Northwest heat wave occurred, pavement in Portland was buckling because it just got too hot.

00:33:15.000 They never expected it to get to 120 degrees.

00:33:18.000 Right.

00:33:19.000 Or however, 150, however it got that high.

00:33:21.000 And so when the temperature departs the range that we're kind of in now, we're just...

00:33:28.000 There it is.

00:33:29.000 Oh, there it is.

00:33:29.000 Actually, I had...

00:33:30.000 Why roads in the Pacific Northwest buckled under extreme heat?

00:33:33.000 Oh, wow, look at that.

00:33:34.000 That's crazy.

00:33:35.000 Yeah.

00:33:35.000 Looks like a little volcano underneath it.

00:33:37.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:33:37.000 And I mean, this is going to be incredibly expensive to fix, the trillions of tiny adaptations we have.

00:33:45.000 And so this idea that this is not going to be expensive, nobody has any idea how expensive this is going to be.

00:33:51.000 Nobody.

00:33:52.000 And so again, for somebody to come on here and confidently say it's going to be 4% of GDP, With this much warming, that's defense lawyer.

00:34:00.000 That's what defense lawyer says. 0.92

00:34:02.000 You know, my client's a great family man, and it's going to be, you know...

00:34:06.000 Here's another one.

00:34:06.000 Heat's so strong in rural Australia, bent a railroad track.

00:34:09.000 Look at that.

00:34:10.000 That one's nuts. 0.87

00:34:11.000 That's even crazier than the one in New Jersey. 0.98

00:34:14.000 That is insane.

00:34:15.000 Is that real?

00:34:15.000 I don't know.

00:34:16.000 I think they're fixing it.

00:34:16.000 I don't know.

00:34:17.000 I can't tell.

00:34:18.000 Oh.

00:34:18.000 Well, it's just even if they are fixing it, how'd the metal get bent like that?

00:34:21.000 Look how the rocks and gravels pushed to the side.

00:34:26.000 So 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.

00:34:40.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, what does a defense lawyer do?

00:34:43.000 You know, my client is an upstanding family man.

00:34:46.000 You know, CO2 is plant food.

00:34:47.000 My client, you know, could not have done it.

00:34:50.000 It was somebody else.

00:34:51.000 You know, he was talking about ocean circulation.

00:34:53.000 It's ocean cycles.

00:34:54.000 He mentioned that during his interview.

00:34:55.000 And 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.

00:35:04.000 And I'd be happy to go over why we're so...

00:35:06.000 I mean, twice you asked him what fraction of the warming Is due to humans.

00:35:11.000 And he basically blew you off several times saying, we have no idea.

00:35:15.000 And that's one of the things that's absolutely wrong.

00:35:17.000 Okay, so what fraction of the warming is due to humans?

00:35:20.000 So the best estimate is that it's 100%.

00:35:23.000 It's all the warming.

00:35:24.000 So let me explain why that's the case.

00:35:26.000 So begin with, let's be clear, we're talking about the warming over the last century plus, last 150 years.

00:35:32.000 So if you could go to slide 23, let me explain, and I'm going to give you kind of a cartoon version.

00:35:38.000 This is actually how I teach my undergrad class.

00:35:41.000 What we call detection and attribution.

00:35:43.000 And the first thing you have to realize is that if the climate changes, there has to be a physical reason.

00:35:51.000 If a house is burglarized, somebody did it.

00:35:54.000 And if the climate is changing, there has to be a reason.

00:35:56.000 So we can list the suspects.

00:35:58.000 So this is from the usual suspects, of course.

00:36:00.000 And we know what's changed the climate in the past, and so we can investigate this.

00:36:05.000 We know that continental drift, the fact that the continents are moving, that can change the climate.

00:36:10.000 We know that the sun's output, the sun is the ultimate source of energy for our climate.

00:36:14.000 If the sun gets brighter, that could cause climate change.

00:36:18.000 Orbital variations.

00:36:19.000 That's what actually drives the ice ages.

00:36:20.000 It's the fact that the Earth's orbit varies over long timescales.

00:36:25.000 Ocean cycles.

00:36:26.000 That's what he said.

00:36:27.000 Things like El Nino.

00:36:28.000 He said, you know, that could be it.

00:36:31.000 And then finally, you have greenhouse gases.

00:36:33.000 So can you go to the next slide?

00:36:35.000 And so we can exclude all the suspects.

00:36:38.000 We can exclude continental drift.

00:36:39.000 It's too slow.

00:36:40.000 The continents haven't moved in the last century.

00:36:43.000 Orbital variations, also too slow.

00:36:45.000 That's a 100,000-year process.

00:36:47.000 The sun, we have observations.

00:36:49.000 We measure the output of the sun.

00:36:50.000 It's not getting brighter, at least since we've been measuring them from the 70s.

00:36:55.000 Ocean cycles, that one actually is the hardest one To exclude, but we don't have any evidence to support it.

00:37:02.000 So imagine, you know, someone was on trial, and the only evidence that they did it was that they didn't have an alibi.

00:37:10.000 There was actually no evidence that they did it.

00:37:11.000 If you were in a jury, you wouldn't convict them.

00:37:13.000 You know, they said they were home playing their Xbox, but nobody saw them.

00:37:16.000 And so they obviously murdered that person.

00:37:18.000 You would not convict somebody for whom the only evidence Is absence of an alibi.

00:37:24.000 And for ocean cycles, that's the only thing you can point to.

00:37:28.000 We can't rule it out, but we don't have any evidence that it did it.

00:37:32.000 And then you have greenhouse gases. 0.98

00:37:34.000 So I like to call greenhouse gases the world's dumbest criminal. 0.99

00:37:37.000 It dropped its wallet at the crime scene. 1.00

00:37:40.000 It fingerprints.

00:37:41.000 There's videotape of it committing the crime.

00:37:43.000 It was bragging to his friends that it did it.

00:37:46.000 You know, when they arrested him, all the stolen stuff was in the trunk.

00:37:50.000 Can you go to the next slide?

00:37:51.000 So, 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.

00:38:00.000 And there's no other explanation.

00:38:02.000 And you put it all together, the scientific consensus is that we're responsible for all of the warming, 100%.

00:38:11.000 So there's a lot of people that are just listening to this, so we'll read this off.

00:38:15.000 The different things you highlighted are, Oh, sure.

00:38:18.000 Theoretical reasons why adding CO2 will warm the climate.

00:38:22.000 CO2 is going up.

00:38:24.000 Geologic record shows correspondence between CO2 and temperature.

00:38:28.000 Fingerprints and climate model support.

00:38:30.000 Yeah, I could talk a little bit more about this.

00:38:33.000 So 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.

00:38:42.000 We've known that since Arrhenius in the 1890s.

00:38:45.000 We also know that carbon dioxide is going up.

00:38:48.000 All right?

00:38:48.000 I mean, I don't think there's any dispute about that.

00:38:50.000 It's going up because humans are consuming fossil fuels.

00:38:53.000 That's the main reason.

00:38:55.000 And so you put those together, and in the 1890s, people were predicting that we would see global warming.

00:39:01.000 I mean, that was 1890s.

00:39:02.000 They said, we can't see it yet because we don't have measurements, but this is going to warm the climate.

00:39:06.000 So indeed, when you see the climate going up, you think, okay, that makes sense.

00:39:10.000 If you look back at the paleo record, we have reasonable estimates of what the climate was back a billion years.

00:39:18.000 Not super good, and you have to infer them.

00:39:20.000 There's obviously uncertainty in that.

00:39:22.000 But 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.

00:39:30.000 And so you can see this correspondence between low CO2 and lots of ice.

00:39:35.000 It'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.

00:39:43.000 You put that slide back up so I make sure I don't forget.

00:39:45.000 Is there any instances of high CO2 but low temperatures?

00:39:49.000 You know, I have, let me, actually, can you go to slide 26?

00:39:54.000 Actually, I can show you the data.

00:39:57.000 So 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,

00:40:13.000 to 250 parts per million, which is about 60% of what it is today.

00:40:19.000 And the blue shows how far down, that goes with the right-hand axis, that shows how far down the ice went.

00:40:27.000 And you can see that in periods when the CO2 was low, there was a lot of ice.

00:40:34.000 Now, you can also see there's some variability that doesn't necessarily reflect itself with ice.

00:40:39.000 So 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.

00:40:46.000 But there are lots of other things that could be going on.

00:40:48.000 A single outlier like that, you don't want to use to contradict the overarching picture of the trend.

00:40:57.000 And so going back to that line, the next one is called fingerprint.

00:41:00.000 So what a fingerprint is, is it's a way to separate various forcing agents.

00:41:07.000 So for example, if the sun were causing climate change, we would expect the entire atmosphere to warm.

00:41:12.000 That's a prediction that you can work that out just theoretically.

00:41:16.000 If greenhouse gases are causing the warming, the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere cools.

00:41:23.000 So that's a fingerprint.

00:41:24.000 And indeed, that's what we see.

00:41:26.000 We see the lower atmosphere warming, we see the upper atmosphere cooling.

00:41:30.000 That's a fingerprint of carbon dioxide.

00:41:32.000 What would it normally be?

00:41:34.000 If there wasn't the amount of greenhouse gases, how do you determine?

00:41:39.000 Is there a percentage in terms of what's warm in the lower atmosphere versus cool in the higher atmosphere?

00:41:44.000 Right, right.

00:41:45.000 So we're just looking at trends.

00:41:46.000 So we're not concerned with what's normal.

00:41:50.000 We're just concerned with what's been happening over the last...

00:41:53.000 We've been measuring upper atmosphere maybe 50 years on balloons.

00:41:57.000 And over that 50 years, you can see temperatures going down.

00:42:01.000 Actually, probably not 50 years, maybe 30 years.

00:42:02.000 You can see temperatures going down in agreement with what you would expect from adding carbon dioxide.

00:42:09.000 There's some other things going on.

00:42:11.000 There's ozone depletion, which also affects the trends in the stratosphere.

00:42:14.000 How do we know that the temperature in the upper atmosphere goes down when you add carbon dioxide?

00:42:20.000 Okay, that's a good, you know, I often ask that question to graduate students.

00:42:25.000 So basically, what's a good way to think about it?

00:42:30.000 So 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.

00:42:42.000 So 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.

00:42:51.000 If you add it to the upper atmosphere, you actually increase the ability to radiate to space.

00:42:56.000 And so by adding to the upper atmosphere, it's radiating directly to space, and so it actually can cool the atmosphere.

00:43:02.000 In the lower atmosphere, it doesn't have the ability to radiate directly to space, and it basically just traps heat.

00:43:08.000 Now, 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.

00:43:14.000 But the important thing is, this is really firmly established, theoretically.

00:43:18.000 And I doubt Dr. Kuhn would argue with that.

00:43:21.000 So 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.

00:43:33.000 It's important to say this is not a model result.

00:43:35.000 This is fundamental physics.

00:43:39.000 This is just a few equations.

00:43:40.000 This is not a global climate model.

00:43:42.000 You don't need that kind of model.

00:43:44.000 This is just simple physical principles applied to the problem.

00:43:48.000 Does anybody argue against this?

00:43:50.000 I don't think anybody would argue with that point, that fingerprint.

00:43:53.000 So that fingerprint shows that greenhouse gases are responsible for a clear and measurable warming.

00:44:01.000 Yeah, I mean, here's the point.

00:44:02.000 Let me just reiterate this.

00:44:03.000 Dr. Coonan, he doesn't say anything that's wrong.

00:44:05.000 He just doesn't talk about it.

00:44:07.000 So he's never going to talk about the CO2 fingerprint because that doesn't support his client.

00:44:12.000 So do you think he's doing this because of his...

00:44:16.000 I mean, do you have an opinion about this?

00:44:18.000 Is he doing this because of his past, working for BP, working for previous administrations?

00:44:24.000 He worked for the Obama administration, which was a more environmentally friendly administration than the Trump administration.

00:44:30.000 But what do you think would be the reason or the motivation behind doing something like that?

00:44:37.000 I don't care to speculate.

00:44:38.000 I actually have no idea what causes people to say these things.

00:44:41.000 But as I said before, he's not unique.

00:44:46.000 He's not the first person in climate change to say this.

00:44:49.000 What is kind of interesting is over time, the Coonan-like person has changed their views quite a bit. 1.00

00:44:55.000 In the 1990s, the people like him were saying the Earth's not warming.

00:44:59.000 And then they were saying humans aren't having an effect.

00:45:01.000 And then as those arguments became increasingly ridiculous, now he actually has quite...

00:45:07.000 In many respects, I think we actually agree on a lot of things.

00:45:11.000 He agrees the Earth is warming.

00:45:12.000 He agrees humans are having influence.

00:45:13.000 He's always playing up uncertainty to get to a conclusion that his client is...

00:45:18.000 He's trying to create reasonable doubt.

00:45:19.000 He's doing what a defense lawyer does.

00:45:21.000 Reasonable doubt is his product.

00:45:23.000 In fact, there's a memo from a tobacco executive which explicitly says that's our goal.

00:45:28.000 We're not trying to win the debate.

00:45:29.000 We're not trying to convince people that smoking is safe.

00:45:31.000 We're trying to create doubt in the mind of the general public.

00:45:34.000 And that's exactly the goal here.

00:45:37.000 It's not to prove that – because you can't prove that carbon dioxide is not.

00:45:41.000 He's just trying to create doubt.

00:45:42.000 He's trying to slow down action.

00:45:44.000 That's going to be the net effect if he's successful.

00:45:47.000 And again, I don't understand.

00:45:48.000 I'm not going to say why he's doing it.

00:45:50.000 I don't know.

00:45:52.000 Now, 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.

00:46:09.000 Not really.

00:46:10.000 Well, it depends exactly on what you're talking about.

00:46:12.000 So if you look at the last thousand years, there's no period like the last hundred years.

00:46:16.000 In what way?

00:46:18.000 I mean, I wish I had a slide of it.

00:46:20.000 I don't.

00:46:20.000 But I mean, the last thousand years, the temperature was basically pretty flat.

00:46:23.000 And we've had a one degree rise in temperature in the last...

00:46:27.000 You know, it does look like a hockey stick.

00:46:28.000 You've probably heard of the hockey stick.

00:46:29.000 It does kind of look like a hockey stick.

00:46:31.000 And, you know, so the paleo record doesn't really support...

00:46:38.000 The historical record doesn't show anything like last century.

00:46:41.000 Now, let me be clear.

00:46:42.000 The argument in favor of carbon dioxide is not that you can't go into the historical record and ever find anything like that.

00:46:51.000 That's not the argument.

00:46:52.000 The argument, as I laid it out, is we know Carbon dioxide traps heat.

00:46:57.000 We know that.

00:46:58.000 That's fundamental physics.

00:46:59.000 We know we're adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

00:47:01.000 That's fundamental physics.

00:47:02.000 We know the Earth is warming, and it's warming about as much as our theories suggest.

00:47:06.000 So a lot of what this is, is it's just kind of a shiny object to distract you.

00:47:11.000 Like, let's talk about Greenland melting in 1930. That's a distraction.

00:47:15.000 It 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.

00:47:22.000 So there are these aberrations and you look at long periods of time where it does get unusually warm or it does get unusually cool.

00:47:30.000 But what you're saying is, make no mistake about it, what's happening right now is unusual and it's caused by humans.

00:47:39.000 I wouldn't say it's unusual.

00:47:40.000 I mean, if you go back 60 million years, there was no ice anywhere on the planet.

00:47:44.000 There were palm trees in Wyoming.

00:47:45.000 There were alligators in the Arctic.

00:47:47.000 It was a different world.

00:47:49.000 It was also a high CO2 world, by the way, and that's not a coincidence.

00:47:52.000 So I wouldn't say it's unusual.

00:47:55.000 What I say is humans are driving this warming.

00:47:57.000 And, 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.

00:48:09.000 We've never experienced the kinds of warming that's coming.

00:48:13.000 And it could be a terrible, terrible ride.

00:48:18.000 Nobody really knows.

00:48:19.000 And let me be clear, I'm speaking now as a parent, as a citizen, not as a scientist, because science doesn't tell you this.

00:48:26.000 My opinion, as someone who knows a lot about this, is I don't want to run the experiment.

00:48:29.000 I don't want to see if Dr. Coonan is right and the impacts are small.

00:48:33.000 I think we should take action.

00:48:34.000 And the key thing is, we can take action at very low cost.

00:48:38.000 Because, and we haven't talked about it, fossil fuels are incredibly expensive.

00:48:42.000 Not the price you pay at the well, but the cost to society is extremely high.

00:48:46.000 So, you know, we can take action at low cost.

00:48:50.000 It's a risk.

00:48:51.000 We should do this.

00:48:51.000 I'm speaking, again, that's my personal opinion, not as a scientist, because science doesn't tell you that.

00:48:56.000 That's my personal opinion as a citizen.

00:48:58.000 What 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.

00:49:11.000 Yeah, if you mean unusual that way, I would agree with that.

00:49:14.000 And that this is very measurable.

00:49:16.000 Absolutely.

00:49:17.000 There's no debate in the scientific community about this.

00:49:20.000 So 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,

00:49:37.000 I should say?

00:49:38.000 Yeah, well, okay, so we know basically how to decarbonize our economy.

00:49:44.000 I mean, we can do it.

00:49:44.000 And in fact, if I have a good slide, which I think really, probably up front, which really shows this.

00:49:52.000 I will keep talking while I look for this.

00:49:54.000 So yeah, we know how to decarbonize.

00:49:56.000 Oh, can you go to slide 37?

00:49:59.000 So, you know, fossil fuels have already lost.

00:50:01.000 So they're already on their way out.

00:50:04.000 This plot is the ERCOT. So ERCOT is the Texas grid.

00:50:07.000 And this shows the power that's getting connected to the Texas grid by source.

00:50:13.000 And the horizontal line shows the different sources and the bars are different years.

00:50:19.000 Don't worry about the different years.

00:50:20.000 You can see nobody's hooking fossil fuels up to the Texas grid.

00:50:24.000 There's a little bit of gas, but it's mainly wind and solar.

00:50:27.000 And there's actually a little bit of battery.

00:50:28.000 It 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.

00:50:38.000 I can't believe how big solar's impact is.

00:50:41.000 I would have never guessed that.

00:50:43.000 Fossil fuels have already lost, and the reason they've already lost is they're expensive.

00:50:47.000 You 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?

00:50:55.000 So, it's wind and solar.

00:50:57.000 They're winning in the marketplace.

00:51:00.000 And 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.

00:51:12.000 It says renewable energy has another record year of growth, says IEA, and another record year of renewable energy despite COVID-19, blah, blah, blah.

00:51:21.000 290 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.

00:51:32.000 On current trends, renewable energy generating capacity will exceed that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026. I would have never guessed that.

00:51:42.000 Yeah, I mean, this is new.

00:51:44.000 Where are these solar panels located that are gathering up this much power?

00:51:49.000 I mean, they're everywhere.

00:51:50.000 It's rooftops, it's large solar plants.

00:51:53.000 Are you talking about in Texas or in the world?

00:51:55.000 Yeah, I mean, anywhere.

00:51:56.000 Yeah, I mean, it's everywhere.

00:51:57.000 Or, you know, in California, they're about to put solar panels over a canal.

00:52:02.000 There's lots of space to put solar panels.

00:52:05.000 So, for example, I would love it if they put solar panels on the parking lot outside my building.

00:52:10.000 Because, you know, you walk out in July and get in your car, and it's, you know, 300 degrees in there.

00:52:15.000 Not literally, but it feels that way.

00:52:16.000 And so I would love to have, you know, there are lots of places to put solar panels that don't affect use at all.

00:52:22.000 Rooftops, parking lots, canals.

00:52:25.000 And so there's lots of space to put this.

00:52:27.000 And, you know, it's already as cheap.

00:52:31.000 I mean, you can make an argument that maybe it's not cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel, but it's very close.

00:52:37.000 And if you look at the trend, the trend is so steeply down, you know that in a few years, renewables are going to wipe out fossil fuels.

00:52:45.000 Now, what about when it comes to automobiles?

00:52:48.000 Well, I mean, electric cars are much better than internal combustion cars.

00:52:51.000 Have you ever driven one?

00:52:53.000 Yeah, I have one.

00:52:53.000 I have a Tesla.

00:52:54.000 Yeah, so I mean, it's much better than an internal combustion.

00:52:57.000 The 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.

00:53:06.000 Yeah, you know, the people make it.

00:53:08.000 I always find it ironic that the people who make those arguments are often people who will then tell you, you know, the free market works.

00:53:15.000 And we should get the government out, let the market.

00:53:18.000 So what does the free market do if cobalt becomes rare?

00:53:21.000 So people are smart, and the free market will innovate.

00:53:24.000 They'll figure out ways to substitute other minerals for that. 0.84

00:53:28.000 I mean, the market will innovate its way out of this.

00:53:32.000 If you believe in the free market, you believe the market will find some solutions.

00:53:35.000 I think they've scaled it, though.

00:53:37.000 This 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.

00:53:48.000 Physically 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.

00:53:59.000 I mean look, I would be very skeptical of that.

00:54:02.000 Remember when they said we were running out of oil?

00:54:04.000 Yeah, but that's a different thing, isn't it?

00:54:06.000 I mean, we've been extracting oil for a long time.

00:54:08.000 We've only been making electric cars for a couple decades.

00:54:10.000 Right, but my point's about innovation.

00:54:13.000 Sure.

00:54:14.000 So if it turns out there's some mineral, you know, some element, cobalt or something like that, the engineers are smart.

00:54:23.000 They'll figure out a way around that.

00:54:24.000 I mean, I can't really speak authoritatively.

00:54:27.000 This is not my area, so I can't give you an authoritative answer.

00:54:29.000 But I generally believe in the free market.

00:54:32.000 And in this case, I think the free market will work to solve that problem.

00:54:35.000 But I mean, you know, I'm not an expert in that.

00:54:39.000 So let me just say that.

00:54:40.000 Right.

00:54:40.000 But that's a key problem here, right?

00:54:44.000 Well, 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.

00:54:51.000 And 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.

00:55:02.000 So a lot of them are, you know, in Africa.

00:55:05.000 And I do think you don't want to create problems where the mining is.

00:55:10.000 And so I do think that's an issue.

00:55:13.000 Rare earth magnets mostly made of, say that word, neodymium?

00:55:18.000 Yeah, neodymium.

00:55:19.000 Dimium.

00:55:19.000 Are widely seen as the most efficient way to power electric vehicles.

00:55:23.000 China controls 90% of their supply.

00:55:26.000 Oh, great.

00:55:27.000 Prices of neodymium oxide more than doubled during a nine-month rally last year and are still up 90%.

00:55:34.000 The U.S. Department of Commerce said in June it's considering an investigation into the national security impacts of neodymium magnet imports.

00:55:43.000 Yeah, 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.

00:55:54.000 And so once electric cars pick up, the innovation is going to be extremely impressive.

00:56:00.000 And the reason I say that is not because, you know, pie in the sky, because that's our history.

00:56:04.000 The history of environmental regulations It's causing advances in technology.

00:56:11.000 You see that all the time.

00:56:12.000 Just that plot of the price of solar and wind, that's driven by concern for climate change.

00:56:18.000 It wasn't just like it happened to happen then.

00:56:20.000 It happened because people see renewable energy as a future, and so there was a lot of work done to produce that energy more cheaply.

00:56:28.000 And I think that's what's going to happen with electric cars.

00:56:31.000 I 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.

00:56:42.000 But 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.

00:56:52.000 Yeah, I mean, there's a huge amount of research.

00:56:53.000 I'm not a battery person, so I really can't speak on what the cutting edge of batteries is.

00:56:58.000 But something, if it was innovative, would change everything.

00:57:00.000 Right.

00:57:00.000 And I mean, the thing I realize is, that's extremely valuable.

00:57:03.000 If you're a company that makes batteries, and you can come up with a different compound, something like that, that's gold.

00:57:11.000 And so, they're going to do that.

00:57:15.000 And that's the way innovation in the free market works.

00:57:18.000 So that's a hope, but this is something that's a necessity, right?

00:57:21.000 If we are going to use electric automobiles for every person on the planet, this is a necessity.

00:57:27.000 And right now, there's just a hope that the free market steps in and finds some sort of a viable solution.

00:57:33.000 Well, as of right now, There's enough of these minerals.

00:57:35.000 I mean, you can go- There is?

00:57:36.000 Sure.

00:57:37.000 As of right now, you can go buy a Tesla.

00:57:38.000 I mean, the question is, can we- Yeah, but they're very expensive.

00:57:41.000 Like, 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.

00:57:53.000 Yeah, no, that's right.

00:57:54.000 And I do think that you'll see the price of those come down because that's the way the market works.

00:57:58.000 Well, actually, what is a Model 3?

00:58:00.000 A Tesla Model 3 is like, it's not too bad.

00:58:03.000 I think they start somewhere around then.

00:58:07.000 And that's an amazing car for that amount of money.

00:58:12.000 Forty?

00:58:12.000 Forty-five.

00:58:13.000 Forty-five.

00:58:13.000 So a little bit more.

00:58:14.000 So it's not the cheapest car.

00:58:16.000 No, but you're right.

00:58:17.000 Most 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,

00:58:38.000 you know, the most exciting things for me is Ford and their F-150 truck.

00:58:42.000 I mean, yeah, you live in Texas, you know that you pull up to light, every other car is a F-150, it seems.

00:58:47.000 And did you see the new commercial they had during the Super Bowl of the Chevy Silverado that's electric?

00:58:52.000 I did not see that, but I heard about all the electric car commercials.

00:58:55.000 They pissed a lot of people off because they used the Sopranos theme song, and then the kids from the Sopranos were in the ad.

00:59:01.000 But the car, the new Chevy Silverado electric, looks amazing.

00:59:04.000 It looks cool.

00:59:06.000 It looks like...

00:59:07.000 See if we can find a photo of it.

00:59:10.000 It looks like a Silverado, but it looks futuristic.

00:59:14.000 There it is.

00:59:14.000 Look at that thing.

00:59:15.000 That's electric.

00:59:16.000 That thing's sick. 1.00

00:59:18.000 It looks like a Silverado, but just a little bit more streamlined, a little bit more futuristic.

00:59:24.000 Oh yeah, and if you get in and drive one, it's like, get rid of my internal combustion engine car.

00:59:30.000 I mean, they drive better, they're cheaper to operate, you have lower maintenance issues. 0.99

00:59:34.000 Like I said, I have a Tesla, and I have the stupid one. 0.99

00:59:37.000 I have the Plaid. 1.00

00:59:38.000 It's ridiculous. 0.99

00:59:39.000 It's the most ridiculous car I've ever driven. 0.99

00:59:41.000 That's the one car I would never get rid of. 0.94

00:59:43.000 So have you ever actually gone somewhere and accelerated, done the quarter mile as fast as it can?

00:59:49.000 Of course I have.

00:59:51.000 How dare you ask me that question?

00:59:52.000 Yeah, it's preposterous.

00:59:54.000 It's zero to 60 in 1.9 seconds.

00:59:56.000 I had my kids in it the other day.

00:59:57.000 I'm like, are you ready?

00:59:58.000 I'm like, let's go!

00:59:59.000 And it's like, when you accelerate on the highway, it's literally like you're on a roller coaster.

01:00:04.000 You can't believe it's that fast.

01:00:06.000 And it's silent.

01:00:07.000 So when you pass people, you don't even feel like a douchebag.

01:00:12.000 If you need to merge in traffic, it's not making a loud noise, you're just going, whee!

01:00:19.000 It's a much less aggressive way of merging with traffic.

01:00:23.000 So do you drive with full self-drive on?

01:00:26.000 No.

01:00:26.000 I don't trust that.

01:00:27.000 Yeah.

01:00:28.000 That seems a little sketch.

01:00:29.000 I 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.

01:00:36.000 But no. 0.99

01:00:37.000 I keep my fucking hands on the wheel. 0.99

01:00:39.000 Yeah, that's smart. 1.00

01:00:40.000 It just doesn't...

01:00:41.000 I mean, I get it.

01:00:42.000 I get it works, but it's like, you don't want to be a statistic.

01:00:46.000 Right, right.

01:00:47.000 And it works 99.9% of the time.

01:00:49.000 Not enough.

01:00:50.000 But it's that 0.1.

01:00:51.000 Yeah, it's also, it's like, I want to, if I see someone acting weird up there, I want to slow down.

01:00:56.000 You know, if I see some guy who looks like he's drunk, I want to move over.

01:00:59.000 You know, I want to be, I don't want to just zone out.

01:01:02.000 Right.

01:01:03.000 But 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.

01:01:08.000 Because, 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...

01:01:13.000 For ten minutes, just relax.

01:01:14.000 You 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.

01:01:21.000 Yeah, I think on the highway is where I would probably trust it the most.

01:01:23.000 But even then, when you see someone acting weird, sometimes you want to drive defensively.

01:01:30.000 You want to make maneuvers.

01:01:31.000 Yeah.

01:01:31.000 Yeah, the human brain is really amazing at its ability to assess situations.

01:01:35.000 You just wonder, you know, the AI's not there yet.

01:01:37.000 Maybe it'll get there at some point.

01:01:39.000 Yeah, I don't think the AI's going to spot drunks that good.

01:01:41.000 Because, you know, like, I'm good at spotting a guy who's either on a phone or drunk.

01:01:45.000 Or then, you know, they're kind of like drifting a little bit. 1.00

01:01:49.000 I'm like, this fucking guy. 0.99

01:01:50.000 And I'll either slow down or I'll get ahead of him. 1.00

01:01:53.000 I generally like to slow down. 1.00

01:01:54.000 I like to keep my eye on those fucks. 1.00

01:01:58.000 So, yeah, electric cars are awesome. 0.99

01:02:00.000 I'm a big fan.

01:02:02.000 And if they do innovate and figure out some sort of a way to...

01:02:06.000 I should ask Elon about that, actually.

01:02:08.000 Like what they're going to do, what the plan is in terms of mass distribution.

01:02:13.000 Yeah, no, I think, you know, I'm sure he's thinking about it.

01:02:16.000 He has to be.

01:02:17.000 He's probably got an idea.

01:02:18.000 The person who cracks it will be rich.

01:02:20.000 Well, one of the possibilities, and it sounds really ridiculous, but one of the possibilities is asteroid mining, right?

01:02:26.000 I mean, because they've found these asteroids.

01:02:29.000 Possibility.

01:02:30.000 I 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.

01:02:38.000 Too difficult.

01:02:39.000 Yeah, it's too—I mean, you know, you have to go somewhere, get the asteroid, bring it back, you know, mine it.

01:02:44.000 It's a hard problem.

01:02:45.000 Yeah.

01:02:46.000 Okay.

01:02:47.000 So that's automobiles.

01:02:50.000 The 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?

01:03:10.000 Right.

01:03:11.000 So let me begin by saying nobody talks about shutting all this stuff off tomorrow.

01:03:15.000 It's like, you know, we're going to shut this off tomorrow.

01:03:17.000 There's debates about how fast to decarbonize.

01:03:21.000 My 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.

01:03:33.000 Then you just don't replace it with fossil fuel infrastructure.

01:03:36.000 And, you know, that's certainly achievable.

01:03:38.000 What are the offenders in order?

01:03:40.000 So, coal is the worst greenhouse, the worst fossil fuel.

01:03:45.000 You know, someone I know calls coal the enemy of the human race.

01:03:48.000 Do you remember when Trump called it clean coal?

01:03:51.000 Yeah, so they, you know, there's some people on Madison Avenue that's like, how do we rebrand this?

01:03:56.000 You know, clean coal.

01:03:58.000 It's alliterative.

01:03:59.000 But it's like the least clean thing you think of.

01:04:02.000 You think of grabbing coal and you're getting it everywhere.

01:04:04.000 You think of it being in the air.

01:04:07.000 Yeah, so coal actually kills millions of people from air pollution around the world every year, tens of thousands of Americans.

01:04:14.000 In addition, it releases the most amount of greenhouse gases per unit of energy you generate.

01:04:21.000 So that's the worst thing.

01:04:24.000 That's the worst fossil fuel, and we want to get rid of that as soon as we possibly can.

01:04:28.000 And the Americans that are dying from it, they're dying from actual coal, from poisoning in the air?

01:04:33.000 No.

01:04:34.000 So coal puts out these chemicals, these small particulates.

01:04:38.000 They often are referred to as PM2.5.

01:04:40.000 It's a particulate matter with a size less than 2.5 microns.

01:04:44.000 And if you breathe those in, those actually go deep into your lungs.

01:04:47.000 They get in your bloodstream.

01:04:48.000 And 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.

01:05:03.000 And, you know, it's tens of thousands of Americans every year from coal.

01:05:09.000 And, you know, this is something, again, the anti-climate people, they don't talk about it.

01:05:14.000 It's just it's not something that supports their case.

01:05:16.000 So they just leave that out.

01:05:17.000 Where is this happening the most in this country?

01:05:20.000 What's the most polluted by coal?

01:05:22.000 That's a good question.

01:05:23.000 I don't know exactly where it is, but it's anywhere that's downwind of a coal-fired power plant.

01:05:28.000 Let's find that out.

01:05:30.000 Places in America most polluted by coal?

01:05:34.000 I'd never heard that.

01:05:35.000 I didn't know that that many people are dying from coal poisoning every year.

01:05:38.000 Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call it coal poisoning.

01:05:40.000 I would call it air pollution.

01:05:41.000 Because it's really...

01:05:42.000 But it's directly a result of coal.

01:05:43.000 Exactly, yes.

01:05:44.000 So it's coal poisoning.

01:05:45.000 Yeah.

01:05:46.000 Coal poisoning sounds better. 0.99

01:05:47.000 Yeah, I mean, it's...

01:05:48.000 Air pollution sounds like it's inevitable.

01:05:49.000 I'll tell you, that's a good branding, coal poisoning.

01:05:52.000 Yeah, it is.

01:05:53.000 Coal poisoning.

01:05:53.000 It is.

01:05:53.000 That's exactly right.

01:05:54.000 How about make t-shirts that say, fuck coal, and just put like an asterisk over the U? I would wear that. 0.99

01:06:02.000 What do we got, Jamie?

01:06:03.000 Anything?

01:06:05.000 I don't think that list is super prevalent, so I'm trying to find it.

01:06:10.000 Because it's just bringing up a lot of, like, these coal plants are contaminators.

01:06:14.000 Right.

01:06:15.000 Is there an area in North America most polluted by coal?

01:06:19.000 I was also going to say, the way I Googled it, it's probably going to give me a small city.

01:06:22.000 I Googled U.S. city most coal pollution, but, like, that's not, you know, they're not in giant cities.

01:06:27.000 But even that small cities, it might be enough to, you know, kill thousands of people.

01:06:32.000 What do we have for, is it giving you a list?

01:06:35.000 A place in Indiana.

01:06:37.000 What's that called?

01:06:40.000 I mean, this story was written in Evansville, but I think it's just outside of that.

01:06:45.000 Evansville.

01:06:45.000 I know somebody from Evansville.

01:06:47.000 Can you go to slide 50?

01:06:49.000 This will blow your mind.

01:06:50.000 It says there's seven coal plants within 30 miles of this spot.

01:06:53.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:06:54.000 Yeah, you do not want to live there. 1.00

01:06:55.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:06:56.000 See what that sky looks like. 0.98

01:06:58.000 Google Evansville. 0.99

01:07:00.000 Who the fuck do I know? 0.99

01:07:01.000 I know someone from Evansville. 1.00

01:07:04.000 Whoa! 0.71

01:07:05.000 That is nasty.

01:07:07.000 Go back to that again.

01:07:09.000 Go back to the beginning again.

01:07:12.000 Give me some volume on this.

01:07:13.000 Let me hear what they're saying.

01:07:16.000 Southwest Indiana has some of the worst air in the country.

01:07:19.000 People are suffering there.

01:07:20.000 I think the air quality stinks.

01:07:22.000 You can fill your chest.

01:07:24.000 On a daily basis, how difficult it is to breathe.

01:07:29.000 There was a fine dusting of ash.

01:07:32.000 It was all over the kids' playset.

01:07:35.000 These streets would be just black with coal.

01:07:38.000 All the way up through the courthouse square would be covered with coal dust.

01:07:42.000 It's the sacrifice zone.

01:07:44.000 Those folks have been listered with particulate matter, nox and socks and acid rain for decades.

01:07:51.000 There's an inherent conflict between fossil fuel industries and public health and the environment.

01:08:01.000 Our future generations rely on our protests here today.

01:08:06.000 I think these conflicts aren't going away anytime soon.

01:08:23.000 What is this documentary?

01:08:24.000 Is it called America's Super Polluters?

01:08:29.000 That's horrible.

01:08:30.000 When you just look at the sky from there, so these poor people that live in this area.

01:08:35.000 Scroll up so I can read that, please.

01:08:37.000 No, no, I'm sorry, down.

01:08:39.000 Evansville, Indiana.

01:08:40.000 To 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.

01:08:50.000 In fact, nearly every direction you go will take you to a coal plant, seven within 30 miles.

01:08:56.000 Collectively, they pump out millions of pounds of toxic air pollution.

01:09:00.000 They throw off greenhouse gases on par with Hong Kong.

01:09:04.000 Or Sweden.

01:09:05.000 Industrial 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.

01:09:22.000 Wow, this is horrible.

01:09:24.000 Look at what this says here.

01:09:25.000 It merged two federal data sets to create an unprecedented picture of air emissions.

01:09:29.000 They 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.

01:09:43.000 So how does the EPA allow those Plants to stay open.

01:09:47.000 I 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?

01:09:57.000 How are they allowing that?

01:09:58.000 I mean, have you seen our political system?

01:10:01.000 I have.

01:10:04.000 We 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.

01:10:14.000 Let me show you a, I have a good slide that shows that.

01:10:18.000 Can you go to 48?

01:10:21.000 And just, I mean, just in Texas, there are two bills.

01:10:26.000 One bill, you know, this is the state of freedom, where people should be allowed to do what they want to do.

01:10:32.000 Well, some communities had the audacity to say, we don't want any drilling in our city limits.

01:10:38.000 And, of course, the Texas state government stepped in and said, oh, no, you cannot rule your own life.

01:10:43.000 We rule your life for you.

01:10:45.000 And this is a fracking bill.

01:10:46.000 That's right.

01:10:47.000 But I mean, it was really a drilling bill.

01:10:49.000 So they said you cannot drill in the city limits.

01:10:51.000 They passed a law and they said you can't drill in the city limits.

01:10:54.000 And the Texas legislature came in and said, no, you have to have drilling.

01:10:57.000 If people, you know, we're not going to let you ban drilling.

01:11:00.000 Okay, so it says...

01:11:02.000 Saying that Texas needs to avoid a patchwork of local regulations that threaten oil and gas production.

01:11:08.000 Governor Greg Abbott on Monday signed legislation that would preempt local efforts to regulate a wide variety of drilling-related activities.

01:11:17.000 So this is different though than the coal-powered plant.

01:11:21.000 Drilling is fracking and drilling for oil and also natural gas, right?

01:11:27.000 It 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.

01:11:39.000 So 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.

01:11:50.000 And effectively, that's what happens.

01:11:52.000 These 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.

01:12:04.000 If you go to the other side, there's another Texas law where they said...

01:12:10.000 Texas passes law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses.

01:12:15.000 So the state of Texas won't work with you if you divest from fossil fuels.

01:12:20.000 And again...

01:12:22.000 What?

01:12:22.000 So they passed a law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses.

01:12:28.000 Well, the state won't work with a company.

01:12:32.000 So the state won't work with a nuclear company, a company that's making solar?

01:12:38.000 Imagine 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.

01:12:45.000 Then the state of Texas would not work with them in some capacity.

01:12:49.000 Oh, I see.

01:12:50.000 It'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.

01:12:59.000 And 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.

01:13:08.000 Right, so Texas won't invest in these companies that divest.

01:13:12.000 Right, won't work with them.

01:13:13.000 Won't work with them.

01:13:14.000 And the idea is that this is probably good for the economy.

01:13:19.000 That's how they're looking at it in some way?

01:13:21.000 Or is it just that they've been manipulated by special interest groups?

01:13:24.000 Well, you know, I have my theory about that.

01:13:27.000 I'd love to hear your theory.

01:13:28.000 Yeah, my theory is that these people care about getting reelected.

01:13:33.000 And I think that one of the things that helps them get reelected is getting a lot of money from fossil fuel companies.

01:13:39.000 So I do think that drives it.

01:13:41.000 I also do think that being pro-fossil fuel in a primary in Texas is probably an advantage.

01:13:48.000 But that doesn't take away the fact that, you know, the state is moving to curtail freedoms to enforce fossil fuel use, basically.

01:13:59.000 And this is a state where, you know, we believe in freedom.

01:14:02.000 Right.

01:14:03.000 This is not Indiana, right?

01:14:05.000 Evansville, Indiana, the place that's the worst with the seven power plants and a 30-mile range.

01:14:09.000 How does that happen?

01:14:11.000 Like, how does anybody allow that to take place?

01:14:14.000 And is there any effort to try to stop that from taking place?

01:14:18.000 Yeah, I mean, certainly people are—you saw that March.

01:14:21.000 I mean, people are mad about it.

01:14:22.000 There 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,

01:14:40.000 and it would really have caused them to be phased out pretty rapidly.

01:14:44.000 And that got hammered in Congress.

01:14:48.000 Actually, it wasn't a bill.

01:14:49.000 It got hammered in the court system.

01:14:51.000 It got sued.

01:14:53.000 All of these states sued.

01:14:54.000 It went through the court system and it got overturned.

01:14:56.000 And it essentially got abandoned.

01:14:59.000 And the states are presumably suing because there's some sort of a financial interest by the people that are putting these politicians in place.

01:15:08.000 Yeah, that's basically right.

01:15:09.000 I mean, I don't have a slide of it.

01:15:11.000 You might be able to find it by Googling.

01:15:13.000 There was an article, I think it was North Dakota, was canceling a lot of wind leases in order to prop up their coal.

01:15:20.000 So 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.

01:15:33.000 Is there any sort of technology that can extract the particulate matter that these coal plants eject into the atmosphere?

01:15:42.000 You know, that's a good question.

01:15:43.000 I don't know...

01:15:44.000 Oh yeah, that's it.

01:15:45.000 That's the article.

01:15:46.000 Very good.

01:15:46.000 How coal holds on in America, in North Dakota coal country, Officials rally to save a coal-fired power plant at renewable energy's expense.

01:15:56.000 Look at that.

01:15:56.000 Is that real?

01:15:57.000 Look at the disgusting smoke that's pumping.

01:16:02.000 Imagine living there and seeing that pumping into the air where you're raising your children.

01:16:07.000 Yeah, I know.

01:16:08.000 I would not want to live downwind of that thing.

01:16:11.000 I would say, though, most of the smoke is probably water vapor.

01:16:14.000 But there is some particulate matter in there as well, right? 0.86

01:16:17.000 It's definitely putting a lot of crap into the atmosphere.

01:16:20.000 And a lot of carbon dioxide. 0.89

01:16:22.000 It's just stunning that knowing what they know about Evansville, that they haven't put the kibosh on that.

01:16:29.000 Well, you know, it goes to show you, I think, in our current political system, a lot of people don't have a lot of power.

01:16:40.000 You know, its districts are gerrymandered.

01:16:44.000 There's no limits on campaign giving.

01:16:47.000 And 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.

01:16:55.000 If you go to Houston, you look around like the Ship Channel, the most polluted places are the poorest places.

01:17:00.000 Those people have no political power at all.

01:17:02.000 And, you know, they could go talk to their Sort of like the water in Flint, Michigan.

01:17:07.000 Yeah, it's exactly the same.

01:17:10.000 Those people have no power and they can't lobby.

01:17:15.000 Maybe their representative is pushing it, but there's not this groundswell of support in the rest of the legislature doing something about it.

01:17:22.000 So 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.

01:17:30.000 We have to think about the effect of the particulate matter and the pollution and what it's doing to people's health.

01:17:36.000 Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

01:17:38.000 So go to slide 50. This is, I mean, this is actually, I think this will blow your mind.

01:17:44.000 So this is a study that came out that in 2018, fossil fuel air pollution was responsible for one in five deaths.

01:17:51.000 Worldwide?

01:17:52.000 Worldwide.

01:17:52.000 Not in the U.S. That's crazy.

01:17:54.000 And a lot of those were in places like India that have really, really terrible air. 0.87

01:17:58.000 Is that the place that has the worst air?

01:18:00.000 Probably at this point, I would say it probably is.

01:18:02.000 Delhi. 0.98

01:18:03.000 They have a lot of two-stroke motors and things like that that really put out a lot of crap.

01:18:08.000 Can you scroll down, Jamie, so we can see what this says? 0.85

01:18:10.000 No, that's it.

01:18:11.000 That's the screenshot.

01:18:12.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

01:18:12.000 You can Google that, but go to the next slide.

01:18:14.000 Go to the next slide.

01:18:15.000 I think this is the other point.

01:18:17.000 So, in addition to pollution deaths, let's go through the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels.

01:18:22.000 So there's climate change, there's pollution, it's killing millions of people.

01:18:25.000 It also is bad for the economy because of the price swings.

01:18:28.000 Now, we have electric cars, so we don't really care, but if you own a gas car, The price is going up to $4, goes down to $2.

01:18:36.000 That's economically destabilizing.

01:18:38.000 And in fact, we know that a lot of recessions have been caused or they've been started by price swings from fossil fuels.

01:18:46.000 So 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.

01:18:54.000 You know, it's like gas is $2 a gallon.

01:18:56.000 Should 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?

01:19:01.000 I mean, you don't know what the price is, so it's hard to do it.

01:19:05.000 Can you go to the next slide?

01:19:06.000 Oh, no, don't go to the next slide.

01:19:08.000 So, in addition, fossil fuels are a national security issue.

01:19:12.000 So, you know, we invaded Iraq.

01:19:15.000 You know, why do we do that?

01:19:16.000 We did it twice.

01:19:17.000 So 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.

01:19:31.000 And 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.

01:19:37.000 So if you buy a barrel of oil from West Texas, the price of that is set by the entire world.

01:19:42.000 And so that gives people like Vladimir Putin, gives people like Saudi Arabia the ability to manipulate the price of oil and hammer our economy. 0.76

01:19:51.000 So, for example, two years ago in 2020, Saudi Arabia and Russia got into a price war Drove down the price of oil.

01:20:00.000 The oil futures actually went negative here for a few days.

01:20:05.000 And that actually demolished, obliterated the Texas oil industry.

01:20:11.000 I mean, there were layoffs, there were bankruptcies.

01:20:13.000 It was really hard economically.

01:20:15.000 And 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.

01:20:24.000 And if you look right now, You know, Putin sitting on this big gas supply that goes to Europe.

01:20:31.000 And, you know, there are all these implied threats about gas supply being sent to Europe.

01:20:36.000 And Europe is, you know, they need the gas.

01:20:38.000 And so he's got his, you know, he's got his hand around their necks.

01:20:42.000 And, you know, that's not a good situation to be in.

01:20:43.000 So this is not a thing that we can look at in terms of a compartmentalized problem.

01:20:49.000 Absolutely not.

01:20:49.000 Like there's just one problem.

01:20:51.000 There's these, all of these things chain together and they cause a cascade of issues.

01:20:55.000 Right.

01:20:55.000 That's right.

01:20:56.000 And you combine that with the fact that we can switch.

01:21:00.000 You know, it's not like this is terrible and we don't have any alternative.

01:21:03.000 I mean, if we didn't have any alternative, I would fully support fossil fuels because we need power.

01:21:07.000 But we have an alternative that's not that expensive.

01:21:11.000 You know, people have done the studies.

01:21:13.000 We know solar and wind are reasonably cheap.

01:21:16.000 You build some dispatchable power, build some, even though they may be expensive, build some nuclear plants.

01:21:20.000 We could get off, largely get off fossil fuels.

01:21:23.000 There's some edge cases that it's hard.

01:21:29.000 We could decarbonize the electric grid.

01:21:36.000 We know how to do that.

01:21:37.000 Well, just that Indiana area alone with the seven power plants within a 30-mile range, I mean, that seems insane.

01:21:44.000 It seems like there should have been a solution offered up decades ago for that.

01:21:48.000 Yeah, there should have been.

01:21:49.000 But, you know, there's a lot of, you know, look at, you know, it goes back to, like, our government.

01:21:56.000 Look at the Senate.

01:21:56.000 So in order to get anything passed to the Senate, you've got to get all the senators voting.

01:22:02.000 You know, forget even 60 votes for the filibuster.

01:22:06.000 For reconciliation, they're trying to get the Build Back Better plan, which would have had a lot of climate stuff in.

01:22:11.000 They couldn't get Manchin, Joe Manchin, senator from West Virginia.

01:22:14.000 They couldn't get him to vote on it.

01:22:15.000 To vote for it.

01:22:16.000 So, I mean, you know, that's the problem.

01:22:19.000 The problem is dysfunction in our government.

01:22:21.000 It's not a science problem.

01:22:23.000 It's not a technology problem.

01:22:25.000 It's a governmental problem.

01:22:27.000 And I think the U.S. over time is just, you know, our political system is not responding to the needs of the people.

01:22:33.000 It's responding to the needs of people who are very rich.

01:22:35.000 So this Build Back Better plan would have had something in there about eliminating these kind of power plants?

01:22:41.000 Yeah, 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.

01:22:55.000 Isn'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?

01:23:03.000 Like, 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.

01:23:12.000 And he's like, do you think any of these people that are trying to pass this have read through this?

01:23:15.000 And they probably haven't.

01:23:17.000 The problem is the shenanigans that go along with politics, right?

01:23:20.000 Yeah, I mean, that's a political problem.

01:23:22.000 And, you know, people vote.

01:23:24.000 I'm sure that guy, whoever it was, voted for bills exactly like that, the ones he thought would help his career and help his constituents.

01:23:31.000 You know, that's an excuse of the day.

01:23:34.000 Perhaps.

01:23:34.000 Yeah.

01:23:35.000 We're guessing.

01:23:36.000 Yeah.

01:23:36.000 He might be very principled.

01:23:38.000 He very well could be.

01:23:40.000 That's right.

01:23:40.000 You laugh when you say that, though.

01:23:42.000 You're laughing, too!

01:23:43.000 I know!

01:23:44.000 I'm with you.

01:23:45.000 Because that's how goofy the world we're living in when it comes to politics.

01:23:48.000 It is.

01:23:48.000 I mean, it's really hard...

01:23:50.000 It's really hard when you see how these people behave to think that they actually have our best interests in mind.

01:23:55.000 And to think that this is all we have. 0.99

01:23:57.000 All we're offered is like crap and crap and crap. 0.99

01:24:01.000 It's like the idea of the free market in terms of politics has never really manifested. 0.99

01:24:07.000 There's never been some better solution to the way we handle things now.

01:24:12.000 It'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.

01:24:20.000 And when they get elected, they bullshit us, and they get into office, they still do the same thing over and over and over again.

01:24:25.000 It's like a magic trick that we keep falling for. 0.98

01:24:28.000 It's like Lucy pulling that ball away from Charlie Brown every time he goes to kick it.

01:24:32.000 I mean, every time, it's the same thing.

01:24:35.000 Yeah, but I wouldn't blame us as much.

01:24:38.000 I mean, there's a lot of things that the politicians do to sort of entrench their power.

01:24:42.000 You know, gerrymandering is a classic thing.

01:24:44.000 You know, if they gerrymander correctly, your vote doesn't count.

01:24:47.000 I mean, they've literally taken your vote away from you.

01:24:51.000 You know, you wonder once you get into a situation like that, how do you get out of it?

01:24:56.000 Because you can't vote the people out because, you know, they've literally said it so you can't do that.

01:25:00.000 And 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.

01:25:10.000 It's so hard.

01:25:11.000 You see like these Nancy Pelosi characters, these career politicians, it's like how would you ever get rid of these people?

01:25:17.000 They're so embedded into the system.

01:25:22.000 Yeah.

01:25:28.000 Yeah.

01:25:30.000 Yeah.

01:25:36.000 And, you know, he was denied a mail-in ballot.

01:25:38.000 I mean, he's 93. And it turns out he made a slight— They denied him a mail-in ballot?

01:25:42.000 They denied him because he didn't quite fill out the paperwork exactly right.

01:25:46.000 And, I mean, my wife had to finally call and fix it. 1.00

01:25:49.000 But, I mean, you know, they're making democracy harder.

01:25:52.000 And this is all to entrench their power.

01:25:55.000 So what can be done right now that we're not doing?

01:26:01.000 Well, I mean, we just need to make a decision that we're going to phase out fossil fuels.

01:26:06.000 I mean, as I said before, this is a political problem.

01:26:08.000 It's not a technical problem.

01:26:09.000 It's not a scientific problem.

01:26:11.000 It's we need to make a decision.

01:26:12.000 We need a policy.

01:26:13.000 And, you know, if you talk to economists, they will tell you we need to price.

01:26:19.000 You need to put a price on emissions.

01:26:21.000 So 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.

01:26:28.000 And you need to price that.

01:26:30.000 If you do that and you make people pay the full cost of their actions, that would go a long way towards fixing the problem.

01:26:36.000 Well, I would imagine like in Evansville, it'd be non-profitable.

01:26:41.000 I mean, it seems like the amount of money that those...

01:26:43.000 I mean, there should be some sort of a crazy class action lawsuit. 0.54

01:26:46.000 Yeah, no, I learned about it today watching it same as you did.

01:26:51.000 Yeah, that does seem like a terrible injustice.

01:26:54.000 So when you read a book like this that is essentially a non-alarmist perspective, you think...

01:27:01.000 I 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.

01:27:13.000 And by the time they wake up to it, the amount of issues that we have will have multiplied.

01:27:19.000 Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of things are going on.

01:27:21.000 So let me give you an example.

01:27:22.000 So if you look at where, for example, solar panels, China dominates the market in solar panels.

01:27:28.000 And in 2007, I testified before the Texas House of Representatives.

01:27:32.000 I said, you know, Texas has an opportunity.

01:27:35.000 We could dominate solar panels.

01:27:37.000 We could start moving now, and if we don't...

01:27:40.000 You mean construction and manufacturing?

01:27:42.000 Yeah, manufacturing.

01:27:43.000 We could become the Saudi Arabia of solar energy by building these solar panels.

01:27:49.000 And I said, if we don't, we're going to be buying from China or France.

01:27:52.000 Now, we're not buying from France, but we are buying them from China.

01:27:55.000 Why did you say France?

01:27:56.000 Because people hated France back then.

01:27:58.000 Remember the Freedom Fries?

01:27:59.000 I thought France is...

01:28:01.000 That's a good thing.

01:28:01.000 That's what I thought you were going with.

01:28:03.000 Yeah, I know.

01:28:04.000 I was purely pandering... 1.00

01:28:05.000 Freedom Fries are so stupid. 1.00

01:28:07.000 I was pandering to the people on the committee to get them to agree with me. 1.00

01:28:12.000 And so...

01:28:14.000 And 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.

01:28:22.000 We're going to be buying it from, you know, wind turbine manufacturers in Europe and from China, solar panels from China.

01:28:27.000 So we're giving away the economics.

01:28:29.000 It'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.

01:28:41.000 In addition, you're right, emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is effectively irreversible on any time scale that we care about.

01:28:48.000 What 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.

01:29:02.000 Once it goes up to some level, 420, it takes a very long time for that to come down.

01:29:07.000 Hundreds of thousands of years before it gets back down to pre-industrial.

01:29:10.000 And so we're going to be warming the climate for thousands of years.

01:29:15.000 So people in the year 3000, the year 4000, their climate will be determined by the decisions we make.

01:29:21.000 Decisions we make will determine the climate for a very long time.

01:29:23.000 And so we really don't have time to wait 40 or 50 years.

01:29:28.000 And, 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.

01:29:36.000 I think future generations beg to differ on that.

01:29:39.000 You know, they're going to be affected by this for a very long time.

01:29:43.000 And to me, that's one of the most challenging parts of this is the very long timescale of our impact.

01:29:49.000 Yeah.

01:29:49.000 Is there any potential for a technology that extracts carbon from the atmosphere?

01:29:53.000 Oh, yeah.

01:29:54.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:29:55.000 People are working on that.

01:29:56.000 So that's a big—they call it direct air capture.

01:29:58.000 That's a big deal.

01:30:01.000 It's expensive.

01:30:02.000 It takes a lot of energy to do that.

01:30:04.000 So in order to do that, you really have to think about the energy system and where that energy is going to come from.

01:30:10.000 You don't want to burn coal to generate energy to pull— Yeah, that would just be this closed-loop money-losing system.

01:30:16.000 So you need to think carefully about what you're doing.

01:30:18.000 You know, people talk about other things, fertilizing the ocean.

01:30:23.000 Some people talk about trees.

01:30:25.000 Trees, it turns out, I'm pro-tree.

01:30:27.000 Let me be clear.

01:30:27.000 Excuse me, one step at a time.

01:30:28.000 Fertilizing the ocean?

01:30:29.000 Sure.

01:30:30.000 So, yeah, yes.

01:30:31.000 So, sometimes I get so excited about talking about this, I go 100 miles an hour.

01:30:36.000 I love it.

01:30:37.000 So, right.

01:30:38.000 So, in a lot of places in the ocean, it's nutrient limited.

01:30:42.000 So, in other words, the amount of algae that grow is limited by one certain nutrient.

01:30:48.000 And in a lot of places, it's iron.

01:30:49.000 So if you drive a cargo ship full of iron and you just dump it out the back, you could grow a lot of plankton.

01:30:57.000 The plankton would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then they would die and they would sink.

01:31:01.000 So 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?

01:31:10.000 Yeah, that's the theory.

01:31:11.000 I don't think anybody seriously talks about that for a number of reasons.

01:31:15.000 Mainly, we really don't know if it would work.

01:31:19.000 And how much iron would we need and where would we get it?

01:31:21.000 Yeah, you know, I'd be honest.

01:31:24.000 I probably shouldn't have used that as an example because that's not something people seriously talk about.

01:31:28.000 Okay.

01:31:29.000 But that was just an example of other ideas that people have come up with in the past.

01:31:34.000 What are other ones?

01:31:35.000 Well, there was an article a couple years ago about trees, planting a trillion trees.

01:31:39.000 Turns out that that's not a particularly good idea for a couple of reasons.

01:31:42.000 First of all, and let me say I'm pro-tree.

01:31:45.000 I'm not anti-tree.

01:31:46.000 That's a risky stance.

01:31:48.000 I know.

01:31:49.000 You're going out there.

01:31:50.000 You're pro-tree.

01:31:51.000 I am pro-tree.

01:31:51.000 Are you a tree hugger?

01:31:53.000 Yes, I would hug a tree.

01:31:56.000 And so the problem with planting a lot of trees to pull carbon out of the atmosphere is that you need a lot of land.

01:32:03.000 It's not clear where that land would come from.

01:32:05.000 And then the biggest problem is a tree is not a good long-term tree.

01:32:09.000 Storage for carbon because you have a forest, it grows up, and then the forest burns down.

01:32:14.000 All that carbon's back in the atmosphere.

01:32:16.000 And so you need to be able to store carbon for a very long time.

01:32:19.000 So trees, even though I think we should be playing trees, I love trees, they're not a way to solve this problem.

01:32:25.000 One 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.

01:32:36.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:32:36.000 I mean, so we know that of the carbon that we've added to the atmosphere, a quarter of it has gone into the biosphere.

01:32:42.000 So a quarter of the carbon we add goes into the biosphere.

01:32:47.000 A quarter goes into the ocean.

01:32:48.000 So the stuff that goes in the ocean is acidifying the ocean.

01:32:51.000 So that's ocean acidification.

01:32:52.000 The quarter that goes into the land does green it.

01:32:56.000 So there's a corresponding negative effect to all the greening.

01:32:59.000 There's also, you have to think about acidifying the ocean at the same time.

01:33:02.000 So with all the green, if you're saying a quarter and a quarter, that's literally half, right?

01:33:06.000 Yeah, so half the carbon we add doesn't stay in the atmosphere.

01:33:11.000 Gets absorbed by the ocean or by plants.

01:33:13.000 Exactly, yes.

01:33:14.000 And so if they did plant a massive amount of plants everywhere, it still wouldn't be enough.

01:33:22.000 Yeah.

01:33:22.000 If there were an easy way to pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere that way, we would be doing it.

01:33:28.000 Now, I don't remember where I saw this.

01:33:30.000 I'm sure I saw it on the podcast.

01:33:32.000 Jamie probably pulled it up.

01:33:35.000 I think it was in China.

01:33:36.000 I forget where it was, where they had essentially a skyscraper-sized air filter that they were going to center in a city.

01:33:44.000 This is different, but this is similar.

01:33:47.000 World's biggest machine capturing carbon from the air turned on in Iceland.

01:33:52.000 Operators say the Orca plant can suck 4,000 tons of CO2 out of the air every year and inject it deep into the ground to be mineralized.

01:34:02.000 Is that a lot?

01:34:03.000 4,000 tons?

01:34:04.000 So last year, human emissions were probably 40 billion tons.

01:34:09.000 So this is not meant to be a major...

01:34:12.000 No, it's not.

01:34:13.000 This is not meant to be a major...

01:34:15.000 This is sort of a proof of concept, is how I would look at it.

01:34:17.000 So 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.

01:34:34.000 It would be equivalent to about all of the infrastructure we have to produce that much.

01:34:38.000 So think about all of the wells, all of the power plants, exactly.

01:34:43.000 So it's certainly theoretically possible.

01:34:46.000 It may be that we end up doing it, but I don't think we can rely on that.

01:34:50.000 You do not want to bet the farm or your kids' futures on that.

01:34:56.000 Jamie, there's an image right there.

01:34:57.000 Click on that article.

01:34:58.000 It says, sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought.

01:35:03.000 So this is from Nature.

01:35:05.000 It says, estimated cost of geoengineering technology to fight climate change has plunged since a 2011 analysis.

01:35:12.000 Now, 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?

01:35:32.000 Yeah, just like when I was talking about batteries, there is so much money in this.

01:35:36.000 If you could come up with a cheap way, if you could do this for $50 a ton, you would be richer than crisis.

01:35:41.000 I mean, you'd be the richest person in the world if you come up with a way to do that.

01:35:44.000 And carbon is valuable too, right?

01:35:46.000 They could use it for things.

01:35:47.000 Yeah, you got to pump it underground.

01:35:48.000 Oh, really?

01:35:49.000 As long as you use it for some way, it's never going to escape. 0.99

01:35:52.000 What if you fuck up underground? 0.99

01:35:53.000 What if you pump it in there and fuck that up, too? 0.99

01:35:55.000 You 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.

01:36:04.000 And we know how to drill.

01:36:06.000 We know how to do that.

01:36:07.000 That's pretty well understood.

01:36:08.000 Talk to me about fracking.

01:36:10.000 Now, I saw that documentary, the Josh Fox documentary.

01:36:14.000 I don't remember what it's called.

01:36:16.000 Is that one of the water on fire?

01:36:17.000 Yes.

01:36:18.000 Yes.

01:36:19.000 Is that valid?

01:36:20.000 Like, what do you think is about fracking and what are the issues that it causes?

01:36:26.000 You know, I don't have a specific view of fracking compared to regular natural gas production, non-fracking natural gas.

01:36:32.000 We've just got to stop doing it.

01:36:33.000 I mean, all of it.

01:36:34.000 Just all natural gas production?

01:36:36.000 Yeah, I mean, over the next few decades, not tomorrow.

01:36:38.000 But, you know, natural gas, it failed during the Texas pandemic.

01:36:43.000 During the Texas cold spell.

01:36:45.000 And, you know, in Europe right now, natural gas is extremely expensive.

01:36:49.000 And so remember how I talked about a grid has intermittence and it has to have dispatchable firm power.

01:36:55.000 So if you go to the UK, their dispatchable firm power is natural gas.

01:36:59.000 And 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.

01:37:05.000 Natural gas is incredibly expensive right now.

01:37:07.000 They are paying out the wazoo for it.

01:37:09.000 We need to stop with commodity fuels. 0.94

01:37:12.000 We should be going to nuclear geothermal.

01:37:13.000 I think geothermal is a dark horse.

01:37:15.000 I actually think very highly of geothermal.

01:37:17.000 Geothermal, if you go back 10 years, the issue was always in the drilling.

01:37:21.000 But our drilling has gotten so good because of fracking, actually.

01:37:25.000 The advances in the ability to drill.

01:37:27.000 How ironic.

01:37:28.000 Explain geothermal to me.

01:37:30.000 So geothermal is, you extract heat from the ground, then you use that in...

01:37:34.000 Heat from lava?

01:37:36.000 Yeah, I mean, certainly in certain places, like Iceland, for example, or California, there are places that's geothermal.

01:37:42.000 They're actually pretty good at getting it not just from...

01:37:45.000 Or they're getting better at getting it not just from these really high temperature places, but that's the traditional geothermal.

01:37:51.000 You inject some water down, it gets really hot because of lava and just really hot rocks.

01:37:57.000 How deep do you have to go to do that?

01:37:58.000 I think thousands of feet.

01:38:00.000 So miles?

01:38:01.000 Yeah, a thousand feet's a mile.

01:38:02.000 Five thousand feet's a mile, right?

01:38:04.000 Isn't that what it is?

01:38:05.000 So 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?

01:38:14.000 Yeah, or like any kind of conventional power.

01:38:18.000 It 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.

01:38:23.000 That's kind of the traditional way.

01:38:24.000 And 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.

01:38:34.000 So I think that that's sort of the dark horse candidate.

01:38:38.000 Instead of nuclear, maybe we go with geothermal as dispatchable.

01:38:41.000 And then you don't have to worry about the fallout.

01:38:43.000 Yeah, you don't have to worry about all the known disadvantages of nuclear.

01:38:46.000 Now, fracking is used for not just natural gas, but also oil, correct?

01:38:53.000 Yeah, so they get both out of these fracked wells.

01:38:56.000 And in a lot of cases, they really care about the oil, and they just vent the natural gas to the atmosphere.

01:39:00.000 Or they don't vent it.

01:39:02.000 Sometimes they do, but they should flare it.

01:39:05.000 Light it on fire? 0.75

01:39:06.000 Yeah, light it on fire.

01:39:06.000 So if you look at a satellite image of North Dakota from night, you can probably find one.

01:39:11.000 You can actually see the fires, all these natural gas, all these wells flaring natural gas, and they just keep the oil.

01:39:19.000 But while they're doing that, they have to be doing some sort of damage to the atmosphere, right?

01:39:23.000 Oh, yeah.

01:39:24.000 They're releasing a lot of carbon dioxide and fugitive methane, so not all the methane may burn.

01:39:30.000 That's interesting.

01:39:30.000 You call it fugitive methane.

01:39:32.000 Yeah.

01:39:32.000 And the other thing about it is it produces air pollution.

01:39:35.000 You're burning methane, so you're getting crap blowing down wind.

01:39:38.000 It's very noisy. 0.83

01:39:39.000 Probably smells terrible.

01:39:40.000 Yeah.

01:39:41.000 I mean, it's really...

01:39:41.000 It's not good.

01:39:43.000 I mean, wind and solar...

01:39:45.000 By far are socially better sources of energy.

01:39:49.000 So wind, solar, geothermal, and then potentially nuclear.

01:39:54.000 Yeah, I mean, in my mind, I kind of think about three different categories.

01:39:58.000 You have wind and solar.

01:39:59.000 Those are your intermittents.

01:40:01.000 You 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.

01:40:11.000 And then you have your firm dispatchable power.

01:40:15.000 It 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.

01:40:24.000 That has not been demonstrated to be something that we can do at scale yet.

01:40:31.000 Then there's nuclear, there's geothermal, and then there's hydro.

01:40:34.000 If you live in a place where that's available, the geology is available.

01:40:40.000 Now, 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.

01:40:56.000 One 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.

01:41:05.000 Yeah, that's very sad.

01:41:07.000 And let me just say, when I say we should get off fossil fuels, I'm not talking about non-emissive, non-emitting processes like plastic.

01:41:19.000 I think plastic plays a key role in our society.

01:41:21.000 We do create too much.

01:41:23.000 That's a whole different problem that needs to be solved.

01:41:24.000 But I think it's perfectly consistent that we continue producing oil to produce plastics until we can find a way to solve that.

01:41:31.000 I'm just really talking about generating energy with fossil fuels.

01:41:35.000 Isn't there potentially different kinds of plastics that can be created from alternative sources?

01:41:43.000 Yeah, you're way outside of what I know scientifically.

01:41:47.000 I think there's biodegradable plastics that are made from plant matter.

01:41:51.000 Yeah, no, I wouldn't be surprised at all.

01:41:54.000 See if you, like, Google, I think it's one of the problems with hemp being not illegal anymore, but it was for the longest time.

01:42:03.000 Google plastic from hemp and whether or not it's scalable.

01:42:08.000 Because, you know, obviously there's, you know who Boyan's slot is?

01:42:12.000 I don't.

01:42:13.000 He'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.

01:42:28.000 But, you know, that Pacific garbage patch, which is insane. 1.00

01:42:34.000 It's as big as the state of Texas, if not bigger, right? 0.92

01:42:36.000 It's depressing.

01:42:37.000 It's enormous.

01:42:38.000 It's so crazy when you see how big it is, like, on a map.

01:42:42.000 And that it's all waste, and it's all within the last 70, 80 years from the advent of petrochemical products.

01:42:50.000 Yeah, 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.

01:42:58.000 Uh-oh, here it goes.

01:42:59.000 Despite claims about hemp plastics' ability to clean oceans and limit landfill growth, the truth is less universally positive.

01:43:07.000 If current plastic consumption patterns persist by 2050, the oceans will contain more plastic than fish by weight. 0.99

01:43:13.000 Holy shit! 0.97

01:43:15.000 According to World Economic Forum report, in the meantime, plastics will continue to leach into the human body. 0.99

01:43:22.000 And while scientists debate the certainty of toxicity studies determining that bifenol A, BPA plastics, are carcinogenic, the FDA will continue to review BPA safety,

01:43:38.000 and of course, plastic consumption will increase petroleum consumption, wrecking havoc on the environment and geopolitical stability.

01:43:48.000 What about other things that affect our environment?

01:43:53.000 You know, one of the things that people always like to point to...

01:43:55.000 Crypto.

01:43:56.000 Is that bad?

01:43:58.000 Well, I mean, they're using a lot of power for it...

01:44:01.000 To generate crypto?

01:44:01.000 To generate crypto, and that's...

01:44:03.000 I 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?

01:44:14.000 You know, one thing I've noticed about Bitcoin is it seems to mainly be used by Bitcoin bros and by...

01:44:22.000 Don't point to me, man.

01:44:23.000 No, not you.

01:44:24.000 You did, though.

01:44:25.000 I did point to you, sorry.

01:44:27.000 Easy.

01:44:28.000 Easy.

01:44:28.000 Yeah, no, I meant...

01:44:29.000 Jamie's a Bitcoin bro.

01:44:30.000 Yeah, easy.

01:44:30.000 I meant Bitcoin bros are on the same family tree as nuclear bros.

01:44:34.000 Oh, okay.

01:44:34.000 Yeah, I mentioned Bitcoin on Twitter and you will be inundated.

01:44:37.000 Yes.

01:44:37.000 And let me just be clear to anyone listening.

01:44:38.000 I'm not mentioning Bitcoin, so you don't have to go to my Twitter feed.

01:44:42.000 And it's also used by criminals.

01:44:44.000 And so while I understand the allure of Bitcoin...

01:44:48.000 They also use all sorts of money.

01:44:49.000 Criminals also use houses and they drink water.

01:44:52.000 Yeah, but 99% of the houses are used by honest people, whereas with crypto...

01:44:58.000 We probably don't want to talk about crypto.

01:45:00.000 I realize now that was a strategic mistake.

01:45:03.000 No worries, no worries.

01:45:04.000 I know where we're going with this.

01:45:05.000 So, 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.

01:45:20.000 Vegan 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,

01:45:40.000 but it's a carbon-neutral environment.

01:45:43.000 Yeah, so you've opened a whole can of worms there.

01:45:45.000 So what we've been talking about so far is just emissions from energy.

01:45:49.000 Yes.

01:45:50.000 And 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.

01:45:56.000 We can solve that problem.

01:45:57.000 When you get into agriculture, agriculture is actually a huge problem.

01:46:00.000 Source of emissions for climate.

01:46:02.000 And that is a much more difficult problem to solve.

01:46:06.000 I'm not saying it's not solvable, but with energy, with power, there's a real clear path.

01:46:12.000 We know the solutions.

01:46:13.000 We know the technologies.

01:46:14.000 It's really just a political problem.

01:46:16.000 You know, it's not as clear that with agriculture that, you know, we're going to be able to do that as easily.

01:46:23.000 And I think that a lot of it will end up being a political problem.

01:46:27.000 But the agriculture sector exerts enormous power in our society.

01:46:32.000 You know, why do you think we have ethanol blended into our gas?

01:46:35.000 You know, it's not because that's actually a good way to use corn.

01:46:38.000 You know, it comes from corn.

01:46:39.000 They make ethanol and they blend in the gas.

01:46:41.000 It's because, in this really weird quirk, Iowa's the first state that nominates presidents.

01:46:45.000 So everybody who wants to be elected president has to go to Iowa and say, I'm in favor of blending ethanol into gas.

01:46:51.000 I mean, that's why we have it.

01:46:52.000 You know, and Rick Perry, he would lambast that all the time when he was governor of Texas.

01:46:58.000 And then he ran for president, and all of a sudden he supported it.

01:47:00.000 You know, so you have these really weird political things going on in agriculture.

01:47:05.000 It's very powerful politically.

01:47:06.000 But I do think that, you know, that's something that we have to work on, you know, getting our emissions down from agriculture.

01:47:14.000 Is there, I mean, have you ever studied this?

01:47:17.000 Is there like a long-term solution to a viable carbon-neutral farming system?

01:47:22.000 You 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.

01:47:35.000 You just have to really convince farmers that it's in their interest to do it.

01:47:38.000 And so you talk about, well, maybe we could pay farmers to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and things like that.

01:47:44.000 Well, 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.

01:47:54.000 One of the problems morally and environmentally that we have with farming in this country is factory farming of animals.

01:48:01.000 Because it's horrific.

01:48:03.000 I mean, everybody's seen the videos, and it's like you know about the amount of waste that it causes and what it does to the environment.

01:48:11.000 And also...

01:48:12.000 Monocrop 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,

01:48:28.000 all the different bugs.

01:48:29.000 You have to kill a lot of stuff.

01:48:31.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that you've got to realize that our agricultural system is optimized for profit.

01:48:37.000 It's not optimized for anything else.

01:48:39.000 And so factory farming is a way to produce the most pounds of hogs, you know, per dollar you're spending.

01:48:47.000 And 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.

01:48:59.000 You'll have less climate impacts.

01:49:02.000 You'll have these moral benefits.

01:49:03.000 And 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.

01:49:17.000 You 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.

01:49:27.000 And, 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.

01:49:35.000 I 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.

01:49:47.000 Yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

01:49:49.000 And I do think, yeah, I do think that there's a lot of, certainly that is a tremendous cost.

01:49:55.000 But the problem with that is kind of the same problem that we have with fossil fuels, is people want to do what they want to do.

01:50:01.000 They want to be able to go to Whataburger like you, sir. 1.00

01:50:04.000 Look at you there, you guilty bastard. 1.00

01:50:06.000 I love Whataburger. 1.00

01:50:09.000 That's the problem.

01:50:10.000 That is the problem.

01:50:13.000 For the record, I was driving in.

01:50:15.000 Hey, for the record, that's what everybody says.

01:50:18.000 That's what fast food's all about.

01:50:19.000 You don't have time to pull over and bust out a hibachi and cook a steak. 1.00

01:50:24.000 That's right.

01:50:25.000 Yeah, and even if you did, who's growing that cow?

01:50:27.000 And how's it being grown?

01:50:28.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

01:50:29.000 Yeah, 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.

01:50:48.000 Yeah, so let me sort of talk about agriculture in general.

01:50:52.000 I 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.

01:50:58.000 Just, you know, farmers, agricultural systems are one of the most tightly managed by humans.

01:51:05.000 Of all the systems we have, that's the one that humans manage.

01:51:07.000 And so there's a lot of capacity for adaptation.

01:51:12.000 Right.

01:51:33.000 You know, hate Al Gore.

01:51:34.000 They do it because they get paid.

01:51:36.000 You know, they get a monthly check for doing that.

01:51:39.000 And so you can convince people to do the right thing if you financially incentivize them to do it.

01:51:44.000 And that's the key.

01:51:45.000 That is really the key.

01:51:46.000 That's always the key.

01:51:47.000 Money always talks.

01:51:48.000 I mean, if there's one absolute truth in everything having to do with this problem, it's money talk.

01:51:53.000 But isn't that part of the problem that got us to this position in the first place?

01:51:57.000 Potentially when you're talking about growing corn, for instance, for ethanol.

01:52:01.000 One of the things that we do is we subsidize farmers to grow corn.

01:52:04.000 Oh, yeah.

01:52:05.000 I mean, money talks got us into this.

01:52:07.000 You know, the fossil fuel companies want to make money.

01:52:09.000 And, you know, they do whatever they can to make money.

01:52:13.000 If 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.

01:52:24.000 They look at their job as to make the most money possible.

01:52:27.000 And if you believe that's your job, and most corporations, I think, do, Then you're willing to do anything to do that.

01:52:33.000 You'll buy politicians because it's legal.

01:52:35.000 It's completely legal to buy a politician in this country.

01:52:38.000 Now, 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?

01:52:55.000 Yeah, so keep it up slide 11. So let me sort of lay out sort of our choices here.

01:53:07.000 No, that's not it.

01:53:09.000 11, yeah, that's it.

01:53:10.000 So this is a bar chart that kind of shows sort of our possible climate future.

01:53:16.000 So the one on the left that goes to about 10 degrees Fahrenheit, that's the temperature change from an ice age.

01:53:22.000 So I think we can all agree, if the Earth went to an ice age, that would be very bad.

01:53:27.000 Can we agree on that?

01:53:29.000 I agree.

01:53:30.000 And that's surprisingly, most people don't know that.

01:53:32.000 That's only 10 degrees away.

01:53:34.000 If we cool the planet by 10 degrees, we would have an ice age.

01:53:38.000 And it would be an economic catastrophe.

01:53:41.000 I mean, I can't...

01:53:43.000 Not just economic, right?

01:53:45.000 Yeah, absolutely.

01:53:45.000 It would be a catastrophe in every way, shape, or form.

01:53:47.000 We wouldn't be able to grow food.

01:53:49.000 Right.

01:53:50.000 So we've already warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.

01:53:53.000 That's the green bar.

01:53:54.000 So we're already 20% of the way to an ice age.

01:53:57.000 Ice age amount of warming.

01:53:58.000 We're going in the opposite direction, obviously.

01:54:00.000 Ice age is down.

01:54:00.000 But we're going up 20% of an ice age amount of warming.

01:54:05.000 Business as usual, that's BAU, that's about 5 degrees Fahrenheit.

01:54:09.000 That's half of an ice age.

01:54:11.000 Okay, so that should scare the crap out of it.

01:54:15.000 Half of an ice age in terms of temperature change, an ice age of warming.

01:54:19.000 I 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.

01:54:32.000 I mean, really, you know, Mad Max.

01:54:36.000 Now, whether you want to take action on that, that actually is not a scientific question.

01:54:42.000 Some people might look and go, Mad Max is cool.

01:54:43.000 I would love to live in Mad Max.

01:54:45.000 And so they might not be worried about it.

01:54:47.000 You know, some people might say, humans will adapt.

01:54:50.000 I have this infinite wisdom, infinite, you know...

01:54:57.000 Confidence.

01:54:57.000 Confidence, thank you.

01:54:58.000 Infinite confidence in humanity that we'll figure out some way to do it.

01:55:01.000 And I hate government regulation, so bring on the heat.

01:55:04.000 You 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.

01:55:11.000 I look at COVID, I look at the Texas blackout, and I think, we're going to F this up.

01:55:16.000 When 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.

01:55:32.000 Yeah, so that's actually happening.

01:55:34.000 So agriculture is moving.

01:55:36.000 You can actually look at the average acre of corn that was grown, and it's actually moved about 150 kilometers north and to the west.

01:55:44.000 So north and west is higher altitude, so to cooler regions.

01:55:48.000 And that's actually right.

01:55:49.000 So eventually, agriculture will move into Canada.

01:55:53.000 At some point, it's going to move as far north as it can move.

01:55:56.000 And this is over what period of time that it's moved to 150 kilometers?

01:55:59.000 Probably a couple decades.

01:56:02.000 That's not a lot of time.

01:56:04.000 That's not.

01:56:04.000 A couple decades is pretty recent.

01:56:06.000 And we haven't seen that much warming.

01:56:08.000 We've seen about a third of the business-as-usual warming.

01:56:13.000 But, so agriculture, as I said before, agriculture is one of the most intensively managed and adaptable systems we have.

01:56:20.000 So saying agriculture will be fine, that is not a very, that should not give you any reassurance.

01:56:26.000 Let's talk about some other things.

01:56:27.000 Would it be easier if we just invaded Canada and took over?

01:56:31.000 And then grow our stuff up there if it gets too warm?

01:56:33.000 Because I think we probably should invade anyway at this point.

01:56:36.000 They seem like they need our help.

01:56:38.000 You know, they put, like, gravy on fries.

01:56:40.000 I'm not sure.

01:56:41.000 You've never had gravy on fries?

01:56:42.000 I have not had gravy on fries.

01:56:43.000 You've never had poutine?

01:56:44.000 I have not had poutine.

01:56:45.000 I'm not sure.

01:56:46.000 Oh, my God.

01:56:46.000 You should shut your mouth until you haven't, because it's amazing.

01:56:48.000 Fair enough. 0.87

01:56:49.000 How dare you?

01:56:50.000 Fair enough.

01:56:50.000 All 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.

01:57:00.000 Let's talk about something that's unadaptable.

01:57:02.000 For example, permafrost melting.

01:57:04.000 So, you know, we're melting all this permafrost at the top of the world.

01:57:07.000 You know, how do you adapt to that?

01:57:08.000 You 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.

01:57:17.000 So you build a house on permafrost, you say, okay, that's my foundation.

01:57:19.000 And then the permafrost melts and the house splits.

01:57:21.000 When you say the North, what are you talking about?

01:57:23.000 Where?

01:57:23.000 Oh, like anything, you know, Alaska, Siberia.

01:57:26.000 They're building houses on permafrost up there?

01:57:28.000 Yeah.

01:57:28.000 Yeah, they build, they build, they put the foundation on the permafrost with the assumption the permafrost is never going to melt.

01:57:35.000 And it melts, then it'll soften, and then the houses will sink.

01:57:38.000 Exactly.

01:57:38.000 The house just splits.

01:57:39.000 It doesn't sink.

01:57:40.000 You know, you have these, it becomes structurally, you know, uninhabitable.

01:57:44.000 And that happens with roads.

01:57:46.000 That happens with all this infrastructure.

01:57:48.000 In addition, you know, as you heat up the permafrost, it starts emitting greenhouse gases.

01:57:53.000 Things like methane, carbon dioxide.

01:57:54.000 I 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.

01:58:04.000 Right.

01:58:04.000 So that's certainly a possibility that scientists worry a lot about.

01:58:07.000 And that's one of the worst case scenarios.

01:58:09.000 Because if that happens, then we lose the ability to stop climate change.

01:58:13.000 Because even if we stop our emissions, it's what we call a feedback system.

01:58:18.000 And so permafrost is one really hard to adapt to impact.

01:58:23.000 And there's ocean acidification.

01:58:24.000 How do you adapt to that?

01:58:25.000 The oceans are more acidic.

01:58:26.000 You know, what are you going to do?

01:58:28.000 And then there are the things that are extremely expensive.

01:58:30.000 So imagine sea level rises.

01:58:33.000 You've got to build these seawalls.

01:58:35.000 You know, you have to do it around Houston.

01:58:37.000 You have to do it around New York.

01:58:38.000 These are tens of billions of dollars.

01:58:40.000 I 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.

01:58:55.000 Building, you know, things to keep people alive and the temperature gets really hot.

01:58:59.000 Building new infrastructure for agriculture.

01:59:01.000 Because remember, as the agriculture moves, the infrastructure has to move.

01:59:04.000 All of your grain processing plants that were down here, you've got to rebuild them up here.

01:59:08.000 And so we're going to be spending all of our time and all of our money just trying to stay alive.

01:59:12.000 You're not going to have money to buy, you know, to buy a new iPhone or to go to college.

01:59:17.000 You know, it's all, you know, because that money is all going to be tax money.

01:59:20.000 I mean, you know, that's where it's going to come from.

01:59:23.000 And let me just add one thing, which I think is really important here.

01:59:27.000 You know, a lot of people are concerned about the freedom aspect of this, as I am.

01:59:33.000 You know, we saw with COVID that disasters often come with more government intervention in our lives.

01:59:41.000 You know, when COVID hits, you've got to wear a mask.

01:59:43.000 And in certain situations, you've got to get vaccinated.

01:59:46.000 And people don't like that, and I understand that.

01:59:49.000 What do you think is going to happen if there's a food shortage?

01:59:52.000 What do you think is going to happen if we have to relocate Miami?

01:59:55.000 It's going to be massive government intervention.

01:59:57.000 If 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.

02:00:08.000 Have you debated anyone about this?

02:00:14.000 So, okay, so I have not debated anybody about this.

02:00:18.000 Actually, I take it back.

02:00:18.000 I debated this person, Richard Lindzen, in 2010. My feeling is that I won't debate the science.

02:00:25.000 So the science is set.

02:00:26.000 You know, temperatures are warming, humans are a cause.

02:00:29.000 I'm happy to debate policy, because I think policy needs to be debated.

02:00:33.000 So if someone wants to debate energy policy with me...

02:00:35.000 Why wouldn't you debate the science?

02:00:37.000 Because the science has already been debated in the scientific system.

02:00:40.000 I understand that.

02:00:41.000 But 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.

02:00:51.000 You know, I disagree with that entirely.

02:00:53.000 How so?

02:00:53.000 Because in a one-on-one debate, without the ability to fact-check people...

02:00:58.000 Why couldn't you fact-check them in real life?

02:01:01.000 In real time.

02:01:02.000 Real time.

02:01:02.000 Because, I mean, how do I do that?

02:01:04.000 He says, this paper says this.

02:01:05.000 And I'm saying, do you want me to read the paper?

02:01:08.000 Well, I mean, it would be a debate that would take a week.

02:01:11.000 So we do a week.

02:01:13.000 I mean, I don't even think it would take a week.

02:01:15.000 But there's certain points that you could get.

02:01:17.000 Where you would go over them and we could kind of establish those points in advance.

02:01:22.000 Like where's the contention?

02:01:25.000 Like where's the disagreement?

02:01:26.000 And why does he feel this way and why do you feel this way?

02:01:30.000 And I feel like if we established like a set of parameters or a set of areas of contention, Well, we can certainly talk about that.

02:01:37.000 I think we need to work that out.

02:01:39.000 But let me just sort of finish what I was saying.

02:01:41.000 That, you know, the scientific system of peer-reviewed papers followed by replication, you know, important results are always replicated by other people.

02:01:51.000 That's how science determines What is right?

02:01:54.000 And 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.

02:02:04.000 But policy is different.

02:02:06.000 You know, policies are value judgments, and I think you do have to have public debates about that.

02:02:09.000 So, you know, I think we do need to get out there and advocate for what we think we should do.

02:02:15.000 What he said is that he got into this because he brought a bunch of people together to discuss what the science is.

02:02:24.000 And he said the science is not nearly as settled as he thought it was when he first started examining it.

02:02:30.000 And that's why he wrote this book and that's why he took a deep dive into the data.

02:02:37.000 You know, that may well be true.

02:02:38.000 I can't comment on why he did what he did.

02:02:41.000 Well, that is why he did what he did.

02:02:42.000 That's what he said.

02:02:43.000 But 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.

02:02:53.000 And I heard Steve Coonan say this.

02:02:55.000 And then there's people that hear you and go, well, he's right and Steve Coonan is wrong.

02:03:01.000 Because 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...

02:03:09.000 These kind of...

02:03:10.000 This could be settled.

02:03:11.000 At least it can be explained in a way that a rational person could have a more informed opinion of what's going on.

02:03:22.000 Yeah, you know, I think you overestimate the ability to settle these issues in a debate.

02:03:27.000 And I will say, you're absolutely right.

02:03:30.000 You 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.

02:03:40.000 And so, yeah, you're absolutely right.

02:03:42.000 And, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's very frustrating to me to hear someone like Dr. Kuhn.

02:03:49.000 And 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.

02:03:57.000 They're afraid to say it.

02:03:58.000 I mean, let me ask you, why would I be afraid?

02:04:00.000 What do you think?

02:04:01.000 What bad would happen to me?

02:04:02.000 Well, I don't think you're afraid at all.

02:04:04.000 But I do think that there are some people that agree with him that do not want to talk about it publicly.

02:04:10.000 I'm not saying they're correct.

02:04:11.000 But what are they afraid of?

02:04:11.000 What are they afraid of?

02:04:12.000 They're afraid.

02:04:13.000 Well, there's, I think, being called a climate science denier, being called a conspiracy theorist, being maligned for your opinions.

02:04:23.000 I think that's a real thing in this day and age, don't you?

02:04:27.000 You know, I think that certainly everybody gets pushback.

02:04:31.000 I mean, I get a lot of pushback.

02:04:33.000 You know, I get hate emails.

02:04:35.000 Yeah, but you're on the right side of it in terms of general consensus.

02:04:38.000 But the point is, I'm still getting a lot of pushback.

02:04:40.000 Everyone gets pushback.

02:04:41.000 Right, so the pushback doesn't change.

02:04:43.000 Yeah, you certainly know that.

02:04:45.000 But, you know, Dr. Kuhn is an example that you can have a great career taking his position.

02:04:51.000 You know, he's on the Joe Rogan Show.

02:04:53.000 I mean, how great is that?

02:04:54.000 Yeah, but I mean, the point is, it's not like...

02:04:56.000 But you're here too.

02:04:56.000 That's a bad argument.

02:04:57.000 No, no, but I'm saying is he still has a good career.

02:04:59.000 And in fact, the only reason I'm on is because he was on.

02:05:02.000 You would not have had me on.

02:05:04.000 Of course I would have.

02:05:05.000 Well, all right.

02:05:05.000 That's not true.

02:05:06.000 I definitely would have.

02:05:07.000 All right, well...

02:05:07.000 Listen, I don't know anything about client science, so I would be more than...

02:05:11.000 I did not have you on just because of that.

02:05:13.000 I had you on certainly as a result of him being on, but I most certainly would have had you on anyway.

02:05:19.000 Right, right.

02:05:20.000 Well, again, so we can talk about how to do it.

02:05:23.000 I'd be open to discussions about sort of parameters.

02:05:26.000 You 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.

02:05:34.000 He said, make people write down their views.

02:05:37.000 I mean, that's what we do in the peer-reviewed literature.

02:05:39.000 He said, I don't want to just have a debate.

02:05:41.000 Make them write down their things and give citations and stuff.

02:05:44.000 And, 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.

02:05:52.000 It's much harder to get crackpot ideas out.

02:05:55.000 I 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.

02:06:04.000 But 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.

02:06:11.000 My take on what you're saying is there's certain things that you're saying that are irrefutable.

02:06:15.000 First 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.

02:06:24.000 All that stuff's horrific.

02:06:26.000 The 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.

02:06:38.000 And 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.

02:06:52.000 I just, I wish there was no gray area.

02:06:58.000 I wish there was no legitimate intelligent people that thought differently.

02:07:05.000 That's where it gets confusing because I feel like, I read his book and it was pretty fascinating.

02:07:11.000 I'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.

02:07:21.000 And 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.

02:07:33.000 Yeah, you have to look at the whole menu of disadvantages.

02:07:36.000 And if you do that, you realize we really should be phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible.

02:07:41.000 And we really should be taking into account what's happening with these increased levels of pollutants in our atmosphere.

02:07:52.000 This is not very simple.

02:07:54.000 You know, I get very upset when we were talking about that.

02:07:57.000 What is that Josh Fox movie called?

02:08:01.000 What the hell is it called?

02:08:02.000 The fracking movie. 1.00

02:08:05.000 Frack Nation or some shit. 0.99

02:08:06.000 What is it called? 0.99

02:08:07.000 Remember?

02:08:09.000 I'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?

02:08:21.000 How is that a dismissable thing?

02:08:24.000 If 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.

02:08:37.000 You can't only look at...

02:08:38.000 But look at the market.

02:08:39.000 Oh, so these people have to move out of their farm.

02:08:41.000 But they paid them off.

02:08:42.000 But where's that water going?

02:08:44.000 Where's that polluted water going? 0.97

02:08:46.000 What kind of an effect does it have on the animals?

02:08:48.000 What kind of effect does it have on the plant life?

02:08:50.000 Is it leaking into the atmosphere?

02:08:53.000 What's happening?

02:08:54.000 And how long do we...

02:08:55.000 How long does it take before we know what's happening?

02:08:58.000 Is this something that's real simple, that you can, you know, cut it off right there, and then there's no more damage done?

02:09:03.000 Or is this something that leaches out into our environment for decades or hundreds of years to come?

02:09:09.000 Yeah, and I mean, you make a lot of good points.

02:09:12.000 The impacts, especially on people of modest means, who are significantly impacted, Yeah.

02:09:27.000 Yeah.

02:09:29.000 Yeah.

02:09:30.000 Yeah.

02:09:41.000 I 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.

02:09:56.000 You know, carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

02:09:59.000 They should be held accountable for that.

02:10:01.000 And right now they're not.

02:10:02.000 And that actually is the core of the problem.

02:10:04.000 If they were actually being held accountable, fossil fuels would be gone very quickly.

02:10:08.000 Because it wouldn't be profitable.

02:10:09.000 Exactly.

02:10:09.000 It'd be non-economic.

02:10:10.000 And so really what you're talking about is what economists call externalities, which are costs imposed on people who are outside of your transaction.

02:10:19.000 And that's really the problem.

02:10:20.000 There are these free...

02:10:23.000 It's like you walk over your fence, you throw your trash in your neighbor's yard.

02:10:26.000 If you can do that for free, why wouldn't you?

02:10:28.000 But you can't do it because your neighbor would get mad.

02:10:31.000 But that's essentially what a lot of corporations are doing right now.

02:10:36.000 And we let them get away with it because they are so politically powerful.

02:10:39.000 They've gotten to the point where they're more powerful than any non-corporate entity.

02:10:45.000 They're more powerful than the people.

02:10:46.000 I think that's a great point, and I think that's a good way to end this.

02:10:50.000 Could you direct people online to, like, what's the best place to see your work?

02:10:56.000 My SoundCloud?

02:10:57.000 No, I don't know.

02:10:58.000 I do not have a SoundCloud.

02:11:00.000 Is that one of the dad jokes your kids warn you about?

02:11:02.000 Yes, that is one of my dad jokes.

02:11:04.000 You should be rapping about climate change.

02:11:06.000 Maybe you could be on TikTok.

02:11:07.000 There is a climate change rapper who's actually quite good.

02:11:10.000 Really?

02:11:10.000 Yeah, I would say...

02:11:11.000 I doubt that's true.

02:11:12.000 I'd say if people want to see me, they should follow me on Twitter, Andrew Dessler.

02:11:16.000 I'm always tweeting about climate.

02:11:17.000 Spell that, please.

02:11:18.000 A-N-D-R-E-W-D-E-S-S-L-E-R, one word. 1.00

02:11:23.000 Okay, on Twitter.

02:11:24.000 Do you have an Instagram as well?

02:11:26.000 I do not have an Instagram.

02:11:27.000 No, okay.

02:11:27.000 Good for you.

02:11:28.000 Well, thank you very much for coming here.

02:11:30.000 I really appreciate it.

02:11:31.000 Oh, it's been great.

02:11:31.000 I really enjoyed it.

02:11:32.000 I enjoyed it, too.

02:11:33.000 It was very enlightening.

02:11:33.000 And I think it helped a lot.

02:11:36.000 It helped to balance things out.

02:11:37.000 All right, good.

02:11:38.000 Thank you.

02:11:38.000 And hopefully I'll talk to you again someday.

02:11:40.000 Yes.

02:11:40.000 Well, hopefully he'll respond and maybe we can get something together.

02:11:43.000 Okay, good.

02:11:44.000 I think it would be very enlightening for people.

02:11:47.000 I really do.

02:11:47.000 I think it would help a lot.

02:11:48.000 Okay, good.

02:11:49.000 Thank you.

02:11:49.000 Appreciate you.

02:11:50.000 Thank you.

02:11:50.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 16, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1777 - Andrew Dessler

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