Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way. In his new series, he provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson's new series on Depression and Anxiety: A Guide to Feeling Better on a Positive Place in the World. Today's guest is Dr. Stephen Kunin. Dr. Kunin is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a university professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. He has a B.S. in Physics from Caltech and a Ph.D in theoretical physics from MIT. He is the author of the classic 1985 textbook, Computational Physics, and has published 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics, astrophysics and astrophysics. Before joining the government, he spent five years as Chief Scientist for British Petroleum, he was a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analysis since 2014, and is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served as an independent Governor of the Lander National Laboratory, and he served as Vice President and Provostitute, and served for nine years as a vice president for the National Institute of Science and Technological Development. He s a member of the National Academy of the American Academy of Sciences, who solved technical problems for the U. And he s a former Vice President for the US Government. Today, he's a trustee at the Institute For Defense Analysis. . Dr. Steven Kunin has been a multi-dimensional career, he has a PhD in Physics and a post-doctorate in the field of theoretical physics and theoretical physics, and a bachelors in physics. He sabbatical from MIT and a master s degree from the University of Caltech. And he has served as a professor of physics at Caltech, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT.
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:00:57.420Hello, everyone. I'm continuing my investigation today into the, well, I'd say energy and environment nexus,
00:01:16.040investigating the apocalyptic nightmare that's our hypothetical future.
00:01:19.700And I've been talking to a lot of people recently about that.
00:01:22.100Today, I get to talk to Dr. Stephen Kunin, who's extremely well qualified to be discussing both issues, energy and environment.
00:01:31.680He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a university professor at New York University,
00:01:37.820with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics.
00:01:44.000Dr. Kunin's current research focuses on climate science and energy technologies.
00:01:48.480Through a series of articles and lectures that began in 2014,
00:01:52.940Kunin has advocated for a more accurate, complete, and transparent public representation of climate and energy matters.
00:02:00.900He wrote a best-selling book, Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, was published in 2021.
00:06:50.380But to figure out what Beyond Petroleum, which was the tagline at the time,
00:06:55.200what Beyond Petroleum really meant in terms of technologies, in terms of viable businesses.
00:07:02.580And so I picked up the family and we moved from Pasadena to London.
00:07:06.420I moved from academia to the private sector.
00:07:08.940And I like to say for the first couple of years, I was the world's highest paid graduate student because I had run of the company, run of the industry,
00:07:19.120just learning all this stuff about practical energy.
00:07:23.140In the end, I think I helped them quite a bit over the five years I was there, teaching them how to think about energy, what technologies were promising, what ones might actually make a difference in terms of the environment, but also in terms of a viable business.
00:07:43.500And I would assert one of the problems we have today is that people who talk about energy don't really understand energy systems or the energy businesses.
00:07:54.300And any academic who's working in those fields, I would say, go spend a year in the private sector because it will change your perspective enormously.
00:08:02.800Okay, well, let's delve into that a little bit.
00:08:05.040So you opened up two avenues of questioning there, I would say.
00:08:08.720One is, well, three, why did you decide to go to leave academia and go to the private sector?
00:08:16.080What did you learn about, say, beyond petroleum?
00:08:20.440I mean, first of all, I think it's rather peculiar in some real sense that British Petroleum has as its motto, beyond petroleum,
00:08:26.900given that the fossil fuel industry is so necessary and stable, but it's very interesting that they have done that.
00:08:33.060And then, so I'm very curious to pick your brain about what you actually saw as promising, if anything, on the alternative energy front.
00:08:42.180So, and then I guess the third question is, what did you learn as a consequence of working in private industry that you really didn't know when you were working in academia?
00:09:01.020I had been provost, which is second in command at Caltech, for nine years when BP approached me.
00:09:08.920Nine years is a long time to spend in any job, particularly one that's as demanding as trying to corral 280 faculty together and oversee the research operation.
00:09:21.060I had always been interested in the private sector, and through discussions with colleagues, I understood that energy and climate were hot topics and well worth investigating.
00:09:36.240So, you know, something, as usual, I took a leave first to see how it would work out and was on leave for two years while I was getting settled into BP.
00:10:13.160I've always had fun doing what I'm doing, and with a physicist's tools and physicist's orientation, you just like to do that.
00:10:21.400I mean, as one of my elders once told me when I was a young faculty member, a PhD in theoretical physics is a license to poke your nose into anybody's business.
00:10:36.760Oh, I was just going to return now to this issue of what did you learn on the energy front?
00:10:43.400I mean, what did you see as promising, let's say, outside of petroleum?
00:10:48.380And in what manner and why was BP interested in that?
00:10:52.220And, yeah, so BP was interested like a lot of energy companies at the time, and still for several reasons.
00:11:04.820One is, look, the purpose of a private company is to make money, and to do it legally, and to do it predictably.
00:11:15.740They have to do that in the environment, the regulatory environment, the technology, the economics, these days the stakeholder environment.
00:11:26.820And so I think the CEO at the time, John Brown, was one of the first leaders in the oil business to recognize we had better take this low-carbon business seriously,
00:11:40.120if only because that's where the stakeholders and the government were going.
00:11:45.740And I think that nicely segues into, you know, what did I learn about business?
00:11:53.960But what I learned is, first of all, it is about making money, and it is about reliably delivering a quality product.
00:12:02.820It is about taking risk, particularly in the oil and gas business.
00:12:07.980You invest a lot of money up front in the expectation that over 20 or 30 years, the revenues from the oil you produce, the gas you produce, will pay back.
00:12:20.480So it's a lot of capital up front, big bets, sometimes risky, in a very complicated regulatory environment, particularly for an international company.
00:12:31.680So, you know, one of the things I came to admire were the people who led these organizations, how they managed to juggle so many different dimensions at once.
00:12:42.320It's a lot harder than just sitting in your office and scribbling on a piece of paper about equations, right?
00:12:49.900Another thing I learned is that energy is about scale.
00:12:57.780You know, unless you're really going to introduce a technology that's going to make a material difference, at least at the few percent level nationally or globally, you're not really doing very much.
00:13:10.320You might be making money, which is fine, but if you want to impact the energy system, it's about scale.
00:13:17.400And so I'll give you one example just to illustrate that.
00:13:21.100I was once talking to a famous guy who shall remain nameless, was not an energy expert, but he was a policy guy.
00:13:28.840And he says, I know what the answer is.
00:13:30.840We take all of the carbon in the used tires and recycle it into fuel.
00:13:35.260And, okay, he said this with great passion.
00:13:40.540And so I sat down for a minute after we talked or even as we were talking and I calculated how many cars in the U.S. and how many tires and so on and how much carbon is there.
00:13:50.200And it turns out it can't make a difference at all, right?
00:14:29.960A quad is 10 to the 18th joules, roughly.
00:14:34.640It's actually 10 to the 18th – I'm sorry, 10 to the 15th BTUs.
00:14:39.020But it's just about 10 to the 18th joules, all right?
00:14:41.800And the U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year.
00:14:45.600The world as a whole uses about 550 or 600 quads a year.
00:14:50.700So think about that for a second in terms of energy.
00:14:53.760The U.S. is only 4.5% of the world's population, but we use about 20% of its energy.
00:15:00.680So, not because we're energy pigs or energy gluttons, but in fact, because that energy improves our quality of life enormously.
00:15:13.160Well, people aren't going to be energy pigs or energy gluttons as a general rule because energy isn't free.
00:15:19.020And so everyone is motivated to the degree that they can be motivated by reasonable energy pricing to be as effective and efficient as they possibly can be.
00:15:29.700And I suppose maybe you can produce a small increment in that efficiency by raising the price, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly good solution.
00:15:36.880So what did you see as promising on the alternative to fossil fuel front?
00:15:43.140Yeah, so, right, and let me answer that question in the present day rather than in the 15 years ago when I was thinking hard about those things for BP.
00:15:59.100You know, first of all, it's really hard to get rid of chemical fuels for transportation.
00:16:06.880If you think about a truck or a train or a plane, you need the energy density that fossil fuels provide.
00:16:18.840You know, we run our cars on gasoline or in Europe in diesel, and we want to shift to electric, and I think that shift is slowly underway, though there are many barriers.
00:16:31.140But when you put the nozzle of the pump in your car, you're wielding about 10 megawatts of power.
00:16:43.760Whereas if we charge up the battery on an electric car, we're talking about one hundredth of the power flow.
00:16:51.860So it's really hard to beat the energy in chemical fuels.
00:16:56.160And so some fraction of the world is still going to run on chemical fuels.
00:17:00.660The fuels we use today emit carbon, fossil carbon, because we dig the oil out of the ground and use it to make gasoline, which then enters the atmosphere.
00:17:10.820We could make those fuels out of biological materials, and we've been doing that in the U.S. by making corn ethanol, which is a phenomenally inefficient and not very environmentally friendly way of doing it.
00:17:24.420But there are other biological ways of getting carbon into fuel.
00:17:30.740And when I was in the Department of Energy and in BP, this intersection of biology and energy, making chemical fuels out of biological materials, was something we thought was very promising.
00:17:46.880We started a whole institute at Berkeley in Illinois to pursue that.
00:17:51.440I think it's still in the research and development stage, but if we're going to have transportation fuels for heavy transportation, then I think this biofuels is going to be very important.
00:18:05.940Do you worry about the competition between cropland utilized for biofuels and food production?
00:18:12.720Or are you thinking more about oceanic, like algae or algae?
00:18:15.860No, no, algae doesn't, you know, algae is kind of tough, actually, for various technical reasons.
00:18:22.680We would grow things, but, you know, the idea was to use plants that do not compete for farmland or to use the waste part of the food, of the cellulose, rather than the carbohydrates.
00:18:37.900And is there anything on that front that's viable, like commercial and at scale at the moment?
00:18:47.320It's the cost, which is really the issue.
00:18:50.660You know, you've got to break down the cellulose, which is the structural material of the plants, into sugars and then ferment the sugars.
00:18:57.720And the cost right now is still two to three times what gasoline costs.
00:19:03.960Okay, well, so we could say, and people do say, well...
00:19:07.500Going online without ExpressVPN is like not paying attention to the safety demonstration on a flight.
00:19:13.160Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but what if one day that weird yellow mask drops down from overhead and you have no idea what to do?
00:19:20.620In our hyper-connected world, your digital privacy isn't just a luxury, it's a fundamental right.
00:19:26.060Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport, you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:19:35.360And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:19:38.560With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:19:45.960Now, you might think, what's the big deal? Who'd want my data anyway?
00:19:49.320Well, on the dark web, your personal information could fetch up to $1,000.
00:19:54.240That's right, there's a whole underground economy built on stolen identities.
00:20:46.000Damn the cost. It's real costly if the planet burns up in 100 years.
00:20:50.660And so why not just force people to, or require or incentivize people to, you know, pay three or four times as much for their energy usage now?
00:20:59.640Well, I think, you know, as we've seen in France and other places, when you try to do that, people get very upset.
00:21:11.180And in fact, there's tremendous disruption.
00:21:14.280And in fact, you know, this whole energy transition that we're talking about, if you do it too rapidly, it's tremendously disruptive because energy touches every part of our lives.
00:21:25.940And so you've got to go slow. There is no climate crisis. We can get onto that in a bit.
00:21:32.220Let us take our time, develop the technologies, introduce them gracefully, and eventually reduce emissions as required.
00:21:40.880Yeah, well, that graceful introduction doesn't seem to me to be something that can be managed from a top-down perspective very straightforwardly.
00:21:50.320I mean, first of all, we're seeing a tremendous amount of instability on the energy provision front in Europe at the moment, partly because of winter, partly because of the war, partly because of, I would say, clueless, hypothetically environmentally oriented policies in the past.
00:22:06.980And so let me lay out a couple of the problems I see with renewables and tell me what you think about that, okay?
00:22:12.400Well, the first is that, obviously, and this has really been a problem in the UK recently, you don't get a lot of electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
00:22:22.280And we've had prolonged periods of wind drought in the winter in the UK, and that's a real catastrophe.
00:22:34.900Which, for other people who haven't heard it, it means when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, so you get no electricity from wind or solar.
00:22:44.700The German translation is something like a dark stillness.
00:22:48.780Well, and so we hear a lot of noise about the cost, benefit, and effectiveness of renewables, but the cost of renewable energy on the wind and solar front
00:23:04.600is generally estimated at the cost when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, not when it's dark and there's no wind at all, because the price actually moves towards the infinite at that point.
00:23:16.120Now, the problem technically, as far as I can tell, apart from whatever environmental damage wind and solar might be producing in and of themselves, like the death of birds and bats, for example,
00:23:27.540the big problem seems to me to be twofold.
00:23:30.300One is that they're cyclic on a daily basis and a weekly basis and a monthly basis, and we don't have good storage, and it isn't obvious we're going to have it soon.
00:23:41.220And storage itself, everything that needs to be mined and so forth to make batteries, has a non-negligible environmental cost.
00:25:08.120And because you can have up to a month's worth of dunkelflauta, where the wind and solar are not producing at all, the backup system, whatever it is, needs to be at least as capable as the wind and solar system.
00:25:23.320Which means the cost is going to be at least double because wind and solar are the cheapest.
00:25:47.920You know, wind and solar can be a supplement to an existing grid, but they can never be the backbone.
00:25:53.580Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit more, because I just want to highlight for everyone exactly what's being said here.
00:26:03.680So, because you need a continuous supply of power, and that's particularly true in the winter or perhaps when it's extremely hot, you need a continuous supply of power.
00:26:14.340And you also need a continuous supply of power that's capable of being reliable during peak usage hours.
00:26:21.620So, because wind and solar cannot do that, and we don't have the storage, to use wind and solar, we have to have two parallel power systems.
00:26:32.720And so, I can't see how anybody can think that's a good idea.
00:26:36.240Now, that's especially the case when, if you produce two parallel power systems, you make energy much more expensive, but also you introduce unpredictabilities into the fossil fuel or coal or nuclear end of the equation.
00:26:56.200Because it isn't obvious to the people who are investing in those technologies exactly how much attention is going to be paid to their needs.
00:27:06.360And so, you complicate the economic infrastructure upon which the provision of reliable fossil fuel and nuclear has already been predicated.
00:27:17.740You're going to have to also jigger the economic incentives, because that backup system is going to sit idle a good fraction of the time.
00:27:28.100But you're still paying the capital expense.
00:27:30.060Somebody took out a loan to build that gas plant with CCS.
00:27:34.060And how are you going to compensate them when they're only being used 10% of the time or less?
00:27:38.880Okay, so, I think you could make a radical case that switching to renewables under such a situation, if the renewables are wind and solar, is just ill-advised, period, because of the problem of having to double the energy infrastructure.
00:27:58.780There's another problem, and that is the critical materials problem.
00:28:03.240You mentioned cobalt, I think, a little bit, a while ago.
00:28:07.440So, the renewable technologies for their magnets, for other components, the wiring, use a tremendous amount more of non-exotic, I'm sorry, of exotic materials.
00:28:21.160Rare earths, cobalt, nickel, copper, not so exotic, but very important.
00:28:26.380And the world does not have the capacity to produce those materials at the scale and cost that's required.