The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 323. Unsettled： Climate and Science ｜ Dr. Steven Koonin

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everyone. I'm continuing my investigation today into the, well, I'd say energy and environment nexus,

00:01:16.040 investigating the apocalyptic nightmare that's our hypothetical future.

00:01:19.700 And I've been talking to a lot of people recently about that.

00:01:22.100 Today, I get to talk to Dr. Stephen Kunin, who's extremely well qualified to be discussing both issues, energy and environment.

00:01:31.680 He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a university professor at New York University,

00:01:37.820 with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics.

00:01:44.000 Dr. Kunin's current research focuses on climate science and energy technologies.

00:01:48.480 Through a series of articles and lectures that began in 2014,

00:01:52.940 Kunin has advocated for a more accurate, complete, and transparent public representation of climate and energy matters.

00:02:00.900 He wrote a best-selling book, Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, was published in 2021.

00:02:10.300 Kunin has a multi-dimensional career.

00:02:12.440 He served as undersecretary for science in the U.S. Department of Energy from 2009 to 2011,

00:02:17.980 where he led the inaugural Quadrennial Technology Review.

00:02:22.000 Before joining the government, he spent five years as chief scientist for British Petroleum,

00:02:27.780 helping them think through the development of alternatives to fossil fuels.

00:02:32.320 For almost 30 years, he was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech,

00:02:36.000 and he also served there for nine years as vice president and provost,

00:02:40.540 facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers,

00:02:44.940 and catalyzing multiple research initiatives.

00:02:48.160 In addition to the National Academy of Sciences,

00:02:51.360 Kunin's memberships included the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,

00:02:55.860 and the Jason Group of Scientists,

00:02:58.420 who solved technical problems for the U.S. government.

00:03:00.640 He's been a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analysis since 2014,

00:03:06.020 and is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

00:03:12.600 He served similarly for Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Labs.

00:03:18.760 He has a B.S. in physics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT.

00:03:24.700 He's the author of the classic 1985 textbook, Computational Physics,

00:03:29.760 and has published 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics,

00:03:34.460 astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science.

00:03:41.120 Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Kunin today.

00:03:45.540 Okay, so the first thing that we need to point out to everyone

00:03:49.440 is that Dr. Kunin is, by any standard, an outstanding scientist.

00:03:55.540 200 publications would put him in, at minimum, the top 1% of published research scientists.

00:04:02.280 So, and Caltech's a deadly institution, or at least it was up there with MIT,

00:04:07.380 and one of the jewels in the University of California system.

00:04:11.220 And then it not only...

00:04:12.600 No, no, no, no, no.

00:04:13.820 It's a private university.

00:04:15.360 It's not one of the universities.

00:04:16.240 Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

00:04:17.700 Oh, that's right.

00:04:18.680 It's Caltech.

00:04:19.620 Caltech.

00:04:20.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:20.560 That's right.

00:04:20.980 My mistake.

00:04:21.480 My mistake.

00:04:22.340 Yeah.

00:04:23.200 A small West Coast technical school, as we used to describe it.

00:04:26.260 Right, right, right, right.

00:04:27.760 So, do you think that there's a STEM school in the U.S.

00:04:32.060 that has a better reputation than Caltech other than MIT?

00:04:34.840 Well, you know, I used to like to say, when I know both institutions very well,

00:04:40.680 I used to like to say Caltech was like the best fifth of MIT.

00:04:45.100 It's about one-fifth the size.

00:04:46.980 Right.

00:04:47.340 But in terms of, again, it depends on which discipline you're looking at,

00:04:51.680 but overall, you can't really distinguish between Caltech and MIT,

00:04:57.100 and in some domains, Stanford.

00:04:59.400 Right.

00:04:59.680 These are all really good schools.

00:05:01.340 Right, right.

00:05:01.800 And the best of science and engineering, not only the education,

00:05:06.100 but for this discussion, more importantly, the research.

00:05:09.600 Okay, so now you also, another thing for everyone to consider here is that

00:05:14.000 Dr. Coonan has also not only worked as a researcher and a lecturer, etc.,

00:05:21.200 but he also worked as a scientific administrator.

00:05:24.760 I think that's probably the right phraseology within the university system,

00:05:28.460 so was able to evaluate and track and learn about a variety of different scientific disciplines,

00:05:34.580 but then also worked in the private sector for BP.

00:05:37.100 We should address that right off the bat.

00:05:39.060 And then in government.

00:05:40.140 So you really have a broad, very, very broad background professionally.

00:05:45.480 Now, I suppose the thing, the appointment in principle that makes you least credible

00:05:51.040 on the climate denial front is probably your posting at British Petroleum,

00:05:56.260 because people...

00:05:56.840 Yeah, yes.

00:05:57.860 Yeah, so Cal, let's talk about that.

00:05:59.620 So why doesn't that just make you a shill for BP, let's say?

00:06:03.500 Right, so I'm, this is about 1980, 90, sorry, 2004.

00:06:11.220 And I had, my name had been fed into a search that BP was running for the chief scientist.

00:06:19.280 And eventually I get a call from the then CEO, John Brown, and he says,

00:06:24.960 come, come be chief scientist.

00:06:27.500 And I said, I don't know anything about the oil business or the energy business.

00:06:32.220 I know energy is conserved.

00:06:33.920 I'm a physicist.

00:06:34.940 But I don't know about practical energy.

00:06:37.860 And he says, don't worry, you'll learn.

00:06:40.320 And they brought me in not to help them find oil or gas.

00:06:47.640 They were very good at that.

00:06:48.760 They didn't need me to do that.

00:06:50.380 But to figure out what Beyond Petroleum, which was the tagline at the time,

00:06:55.200 what Beyond Petroleum really meant in terms of technologies, in terms of viable businesses.

00:07:02.580 And so I picked up the family and we moved from Pasadena to London.

00:07:06.420 I moved from academia to the private sector.

00:07:08.940 And 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,

00:07:19.120 just learning all this stuff about practical energy.

00:07:23.140 In 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.

00:07:39.680 So it was a wonderful experience.

00:07:43.500 And 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.

00:07:54.300 And 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.

00:08:02.800 Okay, well, let's delve into that a little bit.

00:08:05.040 So you opened up two avenues of questioning there, I would say.

00:08:08.720 One is, well, three, why did you decide to go to leave academia and go to the private sector?

00:08:16.080 What did you learn about, say, beyond petroleum?

00:08:20.440 I mean, first of all, I think it's rather peculiar in some real sense that British Petroleum has as its motto, beyond petroleum,

00:08:26.900 given that the fossil fuel industry is so necessary and stable, but it's very interesting that they have done that.

00:08:33.060 And then, so I'm very curious to pick your brain about what you actually saw as promising, if anything, on the alternative energy front.

00:08:42.180 So, 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?

00:08:52.900 Oh, yeah, okay.

00:08:54.740 Okay.

00:08:55.020 Wow, that's a very broad palette.

00:08:57.800 Let me just talk personally, why did I decide to leave?

00:09:00.720 Yeah.

00:09:01.020 I had been provost, which is second in command at Caltech, for nine years when BP approached me.

00:09:08.920 Nine 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.

00:09:21.060 I 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.

00:09:36.240 So, 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.

00:09:46.320 And those were the motivations.

00:09:48.740 I was just interested in energy at the time.

00:09:53.340 Of course, there was the opportunity to go live in London and get exposed to a much bigger world than I was involved with in Pasadena.

00:10:03.160 Right, right.

00:10:04.720 So, a lot of that was driven by curiosity.

00:10:07.360 Sounds like it.

00:10:08.200 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:08.460 A lot of my, you know, a lot of my life is about curiosity.

00:10:12.400 Yeah, sounds like it.

00:10:13.160 I'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.

00:10:21.400 I 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.

00:10:30.420 Right.

00:10:30.700 And I've just had great fun doing that.

00:10:33.780 Right, right.

00:10:34.720 So, go ahead.

00:10:36.760 Oh, I was just going to return now to this issue of what did you learn on the energy front?

00:10:43.400 I mean, what did you see as promising, let's say, outside of petroleum?

00:10:48.380 And in what manner and why was BP interested in that?

00:10:52.220 And, yeah, so BP was interested like a lot of energy companies at the time, and still for several reasons.

00:11:04.820 One is, look, the purpose of a private company is to make money, and to do it legally, and to do it predictably.

00:11:15.740 They have to do that in the environment, the regulatory environment, the technology, the economics, these days the stakeholder environment.

00:11:26.820 And 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,

00:11:40.120 if only because that's where the stakeholders and the government were going.

00:11:45.740 And I think that nicely segues into, you know, what did I learn about business?

00:11:52.040 We can talk about energy in a minute.

00:11:53.960 But what I learned is, first of all, it is about making money, and it is about reliably delivering a quality product.

00:12:02.820 It is about taking risk, particularly in the oil and gas business.

00:12:07.980 You 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.

00:12:20.480 So it's a lot of capital up front, big bets, sometimes risky, in a very complicated regulatory environment, particularly for an international company.

00:12:31.680 So, 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.

00:12:42.320 It's a lot harder than just sitting in your office and scribbling on a piece of paper about equations, right?

00:12:48.460 It's very complicated.

00:12:49.900 Another thing I learned is that energy is about scale.

00:12:57.780 You 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.

00:13:10.320 You might be making money, which is fine, but if you want to impact the energy system, it's about scale.

00:13:17.400 And so I'll give you one example just to illustrate that.

00:13:21.100 I was once talking to a famous guy who shall remain nameless, was not an energy expert, but he was a policy guy.

00:13:28.840 And he says, I know what the answer is.

00:13:30.840 We take all of the carbon in the used tires and recycle it into fuel.

00:13:35.260 And, okay, he said this with great passion.

00:13:40.540 And 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.

00:13:50.200 And it turns out it can't make a difference at all, right?

00:13:53.340 It's very tiny.

00:13:55.040 And so people don't understand the scale.

00:13:58.080 Yeah, well, there's nothing more annoying than arithmetic.

00:14:01.820 Yeah, right?

00:14:02.380 Well, you know, that's – now, as a physicist, that's my first inclination, right?

00:14:07.060 How big is it?

00:14:08.120 How much is it going to make a difference?

00:14:09.980 How much is it going to cost?

00:14:12.040 And so on.

00:14:12.480 In the Department of Energy, we used to talk about, you know, new technologies is impacting quads of energy.

00:14:18.240 The U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year.

00:14:21.600 Quads, barrels of oil.

00:14:24.200 The world uses 100 million barrels of oil a day, about.

00:14:27.900 And so what's a quad?

00:14:29.300 What's a quad?

00:14:29.960 A quad is 10 to the 18th joules, roughly.

00:14:34.640 It's actually 10 to the 18th – I'm sorry, 10 to the 15th BTUs.

00:14:39.020 But it's just about 10 to the 18th joules, all right?

00:14:41.800 And the U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year.

00:14:45.600 The world as a whole uses about 550 or 600 quads a year.

00:14:50.700 So think about that for a second in terms of energy.

00:14:53.760 The U.S. is only 4.5% of the world's population, but we use about 20% of its energy.

00:15:00.680 So, not because we're energy pigs or energy gluttons, but in fact, because that energy improves our quality of life enormously.

00:15:13.160 Well, people aren't going to be energy pigs or energy gluttons as a general rule because energy isn't free.

00:15:19.020 And 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.

00:15:29.700 And 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.

00:15:36.880 So what did you see as promising on the alternative to fossil fuel front?

00:15:43.140 Yeah, 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.

00:15:59.100 You know, first of all, it's really hard to get rid of chemical fuels for transportation.

00:16:06.880 If you think about a truck or a train or a plane, you need the energy density that fossil fuels provide.

00:16:18.840 You 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.

00:16:31.140 But when you put the nozzle of the pump in your car, you're wielding about 10 megawatts of power.

00:16:43.760 Whereas if we charge up the battery on an electric car, we're talking about one hundredth of the power flow.

00:16:51.860 So it's really hard to beat the energy in chemical fuels.

00:16:56.160 And so some fraction of the world is still going to run on chemical fuels.

00:17:00.660 The 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.

00:17:10.820 We 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.

00:17:24.420 But there are other biological ways of getting carbon into fuel.

00:17:30.740 And 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.

00:17:46.880 We started a whole institute at Berkeley in Illinois to pursue that.

00:17:51.440 I 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.

00:18:05.940 Do you worry about the competition between cropland utilized for biofuels and food production?

00:18:12.720 Or are you thinking more about oceanic, like algae or algae?

00:18:15.860 No, no, algae doesn't, you know, algae is kind of tough, actually, for various technical reasons.

00:18:22.680 We 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.

00:18:37.900 And is there anything on that front that's viable, like commercial and at scale at the moment?

00:18:45.060 No, no, no, we can't do it.

00:18:47.320 It's the cost, which is really the issue.

00:18:50.660 You know, you've got to break down the cellulose, which is the structural material of the plants, into sugars and then ferment the sugars.

00:18:57.720 And the cost right now is still two to three times what gasoline costs.

00:19:03.960 Okay, well, so we could say, and people do say, well...

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00:20:46.000 Damn the cost. It's real costly if the planet burns up in 100 years. 0.98

00:20:50.660 And 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?

00:20:59.640 Well, I think, you know, as we've seen in France and other places, when you try to do that, people get very upset.

00:21:11.180 And in fact, there's tremendous disruption.

00:21:14.280 And 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.

00:21:25.940 And so you've got to go slow. There is no climate crisis. We can get onto that in a bit.

00:21:32.220 Let us take our time, develop the technologies, introduce them gracefully, and eventually reduce emissions as required.

00:21:40.880 Yeah, well, that graceful introduction doesn't seem to me to be something that can be managed from a top-down perspective very straightforwardly.

00:21:50.320 I 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.

00:22:06.980 And so let me lay out a couple of the problems I see with renewables and tell me what you think about that, okay?

00:22:11.960 Sure, sure.

00:22:12.400 Well, 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.

00:22:22.280 And we've had prolonged periods of wind drought in the winter in the UK, and that's a real catastrophe.

00:22:27.980 Now, people object...

00:22:29.360 Do you know the German word dunkelflaute?

00:22:32.740 Yes.

00:22:33.020 Have you heard that word before?

00:22:34.260 Yes, okay.

00:22:34.900 Which, 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.

00:22:44.700 The German translation is something like a dark stillness.

00:22:48.040 Right, right.

00:22:48.780 Well, 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

00:23:04.600 is 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.

00:23:16.120 Now, 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,

00:23:27.540 the big problem seems to me to be twofold.

00:23:30.300 One 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.

00:23:41.220 And storage itself, everything that needs to be mined and so forth to make batteries, has a non-negligible environmental cost.

00:23:48.840 So it doesn't have to be storage.

00:23:51.440 So let me back up for a second.

00:23:53.080 Yeah, yeah.

00:23:53.340 Okay.

00:23:53.940 So we're on the electrical grid now, and we would like our grid to have three qualities.

00:24:00.360 First of all, it should be reliable.

00:24:02.640 The reliability standard in North America is like one day out of a decade that the bulk power system should go down.

00:24:09.660 The second is we would like it to be affordable.

00:24:12.940 Yeah.

00:24:13.160 If electricity prices get too high, it's a terrible disruption.

00:24:16.820 And the third thing is we'd like it to be clean, both in a local pollution sense, but also in a CO2 emission sense.

00:24:25.240 So reliable, affordable, and clean.

00:24:28.400 I like to think about the old joke during the Cold War, you know, smart, honest, and communist.

00:24:34.700 Choose two out of three.

00:24:36.200 All right?

00:24:36.600 So reliable, affordable, clean.

00:24:39.460 We have a reliable and affordable system based on coal and natural gas.

00:24:43.700 You can be reliable and clean if you do nuclear energy or you do carbon capture and storage with gas or coal.

00:24:52.500 Or you can be affordable and clean with wind and solar.

00:24:58.460 But you can't have all three.

00:25:00.260 The most expensive part of a useful grid is the reliability.

00:25:05.480 Right.

00:25:05.680 It's not the wind and solar.

00:25:08.120 And 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.

00:25:23.320 Which means the cost is going to be at least double because wind and solar are the cheapest.

00:25:28.720 All right?

00:25:29.820 So, and people have done detailed studies using real weather data and costs for wind and solar and nuclear or batteries and so on.

00:25:37.620 And it turns out that we're going to at least double, if not triple, the cost of electricity if we go to a renewable heavy grid.

00:25:45.400 And I don't think that's a very good thing at all.

00:25:47.640 Well...

00:25:47.920 You know, wind and solar can be a supplement to an existing grid, but they can never be the backbone.

00:25:53.580 Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit more, because I just want to highlight for everyone exactly what's being said here.

00:26:03.680 So, 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.

00:26:14.340 And you also need a continuous supply of power that's capable of being reliable during peak usage hours.

00:26:21.620 So, 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.

00:26:32.720 And so, I can't see how anybody can think that's a good idea.

00:26:36.240 Now, 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.

00:26:56.200 Because 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.

00:27:06.360 And so, you complicate the economic infrastructure upon which the provision of reliable fossil fuel and nuclear has already been predicated.

00:27:17.740 You'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.

00:27:28.100 But you're still paying the capital expense.

00:27:30.060 Somebody took out a loan to build that gas plant with CCS.

00:27:34.060 And how are you going to compensate them when they're only being used 10% of the time or less?

00:27:38.880 Okay, 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.

00:27:55.640 System.

00:27:56.280 Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

00:27:57.800 And so, so...

00:27:58.780 There's another problem, and that is the critical materials problem.

00:28:03.240 You mentioned cobalt, I think, a little bit, a while ago.

00:28:07.440 So, 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.

00:28:21.160 Rare earths, cobalt, nickel, copper, not so exotic, but very important.

00:28:26.380 And the world does not have the capacity to produce those materials at the scale and cost that's required.

00:28:33.740 Okay, so now let's talk about cost.

00:28:38.620 So, from what I'm able to understand, and this is fairly basic, is that because energy sits at the base of everything we do,

00:28:47.600 because there's no difference in some real sense between energy and work,

00:28:51.200 and there's no difference between work and even minimal human flourishing, shelter, opportunity for your kids,

00:28:57.780 provision of inexpensive and plentiful food, you know, the fundamental basics.

00:29:02.080 Every time we make energy more expensive, what we do is we tilt hundreds of millions of people

00:29:09.240 who are just starting to struggle their way out of absolute poverty right back into, what,

00:29:15.480 desperate, scrabbling around in the dirt, fundamentally.

00:29:18.720 And so, and then you might say, well, that's absolutely necessary because of limits to growth.

00:29:24.880 The planet just can't tolerate the multitude of people striving for economic security that are currently engaged in that struggle.

00:29:34.360 And so, tough luck to those people.

00:29:36.540 But the thing that really bothers me about that, apart from the fact that it's cruel beyond belief,

00:29:41.940 is that I don't see any evidence at all that tipping hundreds of millions of people back into absolute poverty

00:29:48.280 is going to do anything but make the planet a hell of a lot worse.

00:29:51.960 I mean, the situation in Germany is quite illustrative of that now,

00:29:55.800 because we've got a perfect storm in Germany, as far as I can tell.

00:29:59.340 We've got dependence on a dictator, Putin, or on petro-dictators,

00:30:04.140 because Germany, for example, just made a big deal with Qatar,

00:30:07.720 because Canada sent them away empty-handed.

00:30:10.920 And then energy costs are extremely expensive in Germany,

00:30:14.120 and so lots of industrial enterprises are leaving, going to places like China and the U.S.

00:30:19.520 And then also the entire power structure is now incredibly unreliable,

00:30:25.140 and it's more polluting by a large margin than it was 15 years ago.

00:30:29.120 Yeah, all true, okay, all true, which is incredible for a country that is founded on rationality

00:30:38.220 and sensible engineering and invented many of the technologies that are used

00:30:43.200 in a modern fossil-fuel-based energy system.

00:30:46.560 Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany, right?

00:30:48.680 This is crazy.

00:30:50.120 I think, you know, Mrs. Merkel is at the heart of a lot of those decisions.

00:30:55.400 She is a trained scientist.

00:30:59.100 She's a physical chemist. 0.99

00:31:00.700 I know from talking to people who have talked with her,

00:31:04.100 she understood all of this, but was beholden to the electorate

00:31:08.640 and made the decision based on politics rather than what she knew about energy technology.

00:31:16.300 Yeah, I don't even think that this is based on politics per se.

00:31:20.460 You know, I think what happens to these leaders,

00:31:22.840 and I've seen a fair bit of this in Canada, and I know about it firsthand,

00:31:27.160 and in the U.S. for that matter,

00:31:28.780 is that people get inflamed about a particular issue because they're afraid,

00:31:33.360 let's say climate change,

00:31:34.700 and then the politicians who have very little courage on the electoral front

00:31:39.280 use very, very badly designed public opinion polls

00:31:44.040 to sample people's terror at the level of whim,

00:31:48.000 and then they pander to it.

00:31:49.540 And I don't actually don't think that that's necessary

00:31:52.220 because I don't think there's any evidence at all

00:31:54.480 that that kind of public opinion poll-driven pandering

00:31:58.060 is a reasonable short, medium, or long-term political solution.

00:32:02.640 So it's actually quite a mystery to me how...

00:32:05.300 Go ahead.

00:32:06.220 Go ahead.

00:32:07.040 I was going to say, in these issues, at least for climate and energy,

00:32:11.160 there are underlying scientific and techno-economic realities.

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00:33:24.900 And you cannot violate them without running into big trouble.

00:33:30.820 And Germany is a wonderful example

00:33:32.660 where they just ignored the technical economic realities.

00:33:36.340 The same is true of the climate story

00:33:40.620 where some combination of some of the scientists,

00:33:45.960 the media, the politicians, and the NGOs

00:33:48.600 have quite unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat.

00:33:55.720 Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects.

00:34:00.100 They can't be distilled down into soundbites.

00:34:03.180 What we do involves trade-offs,

00:34:05.940 and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough

00:34:11.580 about those trade-offs to make a decision.

00:34:15.680 Yeah, well, some of that's a problem.

00:34:18.320 It really is, in part, a problem of complexity, right?

00:34:21.600 I mean, because you can imagine that there's an attraction

00:34:25.100 to relatively simple hypotheses.

00:34:29.180 And maybe that's a good one.

00:34:31.380 That's Occam's razor in some sense,

00:34:32.940 although you don't want your explanations

00:34:34.440 to be any simpler than they need to be.

00:34:36.560 And so we have, well, it's reasonable to be concerned

00:34:39.760 about the environment.

00:34:41.240 Part of the environment is climate.

00:34:42.840 Part of climate is carbon dioxide.

00:34:44.740 Maybe we should just focus on carbon dioxide,

00:34:47.000 and then we're doing the right thing.

00:34:49.560 And that's where people get led down the garden path,

00:34:52.220 because you don't get to be a planetary savior

00:34:55.200 by jumping up and down and saying carbon dioxide is bad.

00:34:59.580 Like, that's too oversimplified,

00:35:02.020 and the politicians capitalize on that.

00:35:04.880 Right.

00:35:05.240 So let me give you one simpler response to that,

00:35:09.800 which I found to be pretty effective.

00:35:12.820 And I would credit Alex Epstein for your general thought,

00:35:16.420 right, whom I know you've spoken with.

00:35:18.580 There are one and a half billion of us in the developed world,

00:35:23.340 U.S., Canada, EU, Japan, and so on.

00:35:27.220 And we enjoy abundant energy.

00:35:29.780 It's a little more expensive at the moment

00:35:31.340 because of market issues,

00:35:32.820 but by and large, we've got a great deal of energy,

00:35:35.740 and it lets us live the kind of lives we live.

00:35:39.640 There are six and a half billion people on the planet

00:35:42.580 who don't have that energy.

00:35:45.260 And as they develop, as they improve their lives,

00:35:49.640 their energy demand is going to grow.

00:35:52.800 And the only way, sorry, not the only way,

00:35:56.020 but the most effective way to let them have that energy

00:35:59.060 is by fossil fuels.

00:36:01.600 Electricity, gas, coal, transportation, oil.

00:36:05.940 And I think Alex very effectively argues

00:36:09.120 that it is immoral to deny them the opportunity

00:36:13.540 to develop with adequate energy.

00:36:16.800 Yeah, well, we can...

00:36:17.740 And I've not heard of an adequate response to it.

00:36:19.880 I would push that past unethical into the realm of murderous.

00:36:24.300 I think it's absolutely unforgivable for the West

00:36:27.080 to ever say anything about whether or not

00:36:30.240 the developing countries,

00:36:31.480 and that would include China and India,

00:36:32.880 have any right to start moving away from wood and dung,

00:36:35.960 which also kill many, many people

00:36:38.140 while they're burning toward coal

00:36:40.180 and natural gas and nuclear.

00:36:42.960 And I've not heard any leader

00:36:45.860 address that issue directly.

00:36:48.720 I'd love to ask John Kerry

00:36:50.520 or, you know, your leader, Trudeau,

00:36:55.000 or the people in the EU,

00:36:57.100 where is your morality

00:36:58.480 about these six and a half billion people?

00:37:00.660 There is no good answer.

00:37:02.460 Well, this is the argument

00:37:03.820 as far as I can understand it.

00:37:05.640 And I've been trying to follow along,

00:37:07.960 let's say, on the psychological front,

00:37:09.760 trying to piece this together.

00:37:11.580 It's something like,

00:37:13.800 pay now or pay later.

00:37:15.480 Sure, many, many people are going to suffer

00:37:17.680 if we raise energy prices

00:37:20.200 and put on limits to growth,

00:37:21.960 but that will be nothing compared

00:37:23.600 to the suffering of people

00:37:25.360 50 to 100 years down the road

00:37:27.780 if we don't take emergency action now.

00:37:31.040 So that's the basic argument.

00:37:32.580 Okay.

00:37:32.860 Nonsense.

00:37:33.560 Okay, why?

00:37:34.380 Okay, that's not what the science says.

00:37:37.680 Okay?

00:37:38.360 Let me start with, again,

00:37:40.760 something pretty simple.

00:37:42.220 Let's look at the last 120 years.

00:37:45.280 Okay?

00:37:45.760 Since 1900 to now,

00:37:48.580 the globe has warmed

00:37:49.700 about 1.3 degrees Celsius.

00:37:52.700 In that time,

00:37:55.640 we've seen the greatest improvement

00:37:57.540 in human betterment

00:37:59.160 we've ever seen.

00:38:00.860 The population has gone up

00:38:02.300 by a factor of five

00:38:04.100 in that 120 years.

00:38:07.140 The GDP per capita

00:38:09.500 has gone up by a factor of seven.

00:38:11.760 Longevity increased from 32 years

00:38:14.420 to the current 72 years

00:38:16.420 across the globe.

00:38:18.180 Literacy fraction has gone up enormously.

00:38:21.000 Fraction in extreme poverty

00:38:22.320 has gone down

00:38:23.000 and so on,

00:38:23.700 even as the globe warmed

00:38:25.460 another 1.3 degrees.

00:38:28.400 Now,

00:38:29.240 the IPCC projects,

00:38:31.080 best guess right now,

00:38:33.080 about another 1.3 degrees

00:38:35.600 of warming

00:38:36.220 in the next 100 years.

00:38:38.940 To think

00:38:39.880 that that additional warming

00:38:42.280 is going to

00:38:43.780 reverse

00:38:44.540 or even significantly derail

00:38:47.020 the progress we've had

00:38:48.600 is just nonsense.

00:38:50.980 Okay?

00:38:51.120 And in fact,

00:38:52.260 the IPCC reports

00:38:53.540 say that,

00:38:54.900 at least on the economic front,

00:38:57.300 a few degrees of warming

00:38:58.680 is a few percent hit

00:39:00.400 on the GDP.

00:39:01.780 Which will increase anyway,

00:39:03.240 substantially over the next 100 years.

00:39:05.020 Yes, yes.

00:39:05.240 So,

00:39:05.700 instead of going up by 400%,

00:39:08.200 that'll go up 385%

00:39:10.000 or something.

00:39:10.660 Right, right, right.

00:39:11.120 Which is within the uncertainty,

00:39:13.180 well within the uncertainty prediction.

00:39:15.080 So,

00:39:15.300 the notion of a climate catastrophe

00:39:17.720 is just nonsense.

00:39:20.300 Okay,

00:39:20.660 so I'm going to push you.

00:39:22.000 And it says it right there

00:39:22.780 in the reports.

00:39:23.480 Okay,

00:39:23.820 I'm going to push you on that

00:39:25.940 and I'm going to try to take

00:39:27.640 the hypothetical

00:39:29.120 alternative scientific perspective.

00:39:31.760 So,

00:39:32.560 back,

00:39:33.740 I guess it was 100 years ago,

00:39:35.560 150 years ago,

00:39:37.340 something like that,

00:39:38.720 Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay

00:39:41.500 on population and extinction

00:39:44.660 in some real sense.

00:39:45.820 And so,

00:39:46.280 for all those of you who are listening,

00:39:48.120 you need to know this idea.

00:39:49.520 So,

00:39:50.480 Malthus,

00:39:50.980 who was quite a smart

00:39:51.980 observer,

00:39:55.000 noted that in natural populations,

00:39:57.460 there are often cycles

00:39:58.440 of boom and bust.

00:39:59.500 And so,

00:40:00.240 under standard natural conditions,

00:40:03.280 a population of animals,

00:40:04.880 and that would range anywhere

00:40:06.360 from single-celled animals,

00:40:07.920 say in a Petri dish,

00:40:09.060 up to deer,

00:40:10.860 you know,

00:40:11.220 grazing on the plains,

00:40:12.820 a population would expand

00:40:15.160 until it consumed

00:40:16.960 all of the available resources

00:40:18.920 that would be mostly food

00:40:20.460 in the case of animals,

00:40:21.920 and then having over-consumed

00:40:24.500 would precipitously collapse.

00:40:26.700 And that's balanced

00:40:27.680 in the natural world

00:40:28.640 to some degree

00:40:29.300 by predation

00:40:30.160 and the intercommun...

00:40:31.860 and inter...

00:40:32.600 what would you say?

00:40:33.320 Competition between different species.

00:40:35.300 But fundamentally...

00:40:35.840 Between species, yeah.

00:40:36.880 Right.

00:40:37.200 But fundamentally,

00:40:38.440 given limited resources,

00:40:40.900 a given population

00:40:41.820 will expand

00:40:42.480 until it exceeds

00:40:43.380 the carrying capacity

00:40:44.420 of the environment.

00:40:45.600 Now,

00:40:46.260 Malthusian biologists

00:40:48.240 assumed that that model

00:40:50.280 was relevant

00:40:52.240 to human beings

00:40:53.400 by assuming that

00:40:54.580 we were subject

00:40:55.220 to the same constraints.

00:40:56.520 And so,

00:40:56.820 you really saw this

00:40:57.620 kicking into high gear

00:40:58.720 in the 1960s

00:40:59.940 where people like

00:41:01.100 Paul Ehrlich,

00:41:01.940 who has plenty of sins

00:41:03.140 on his conscience,

00:41:04.560 let's say,

00:41:05.540 made the case

00:41:06.340 in the mid-60s

00:41:07.920 along with the Club of Rome

00:41:09.080 that by the year 2000,

00:41:10.960 we'd have so many

00:41:11.680 bloody mouths

00:41:12.400 to feed on the planet

00:41:13.420 that commodity prices

00:41:14.820 would shoot through the roof

00:41:15.900 and everyone would starve.

00:41:16.920 I remember reading

00:41:18.000 as you probably did

00:41:19.200 The Limits to Growth,

00:41:20.300 right?

00:41:20.660 Right.

00:41:20.860 The Forrester book,

00:41:22.780 right?

00:41:23.080 Right.

00:41:23.500 And the time...

00:41:24.040 Of course, we know now...

00:41:24.960 Yes.

00:41:25.280 Well, the time frame prediction

00:41:27.640 was the year 2000.

00:41:29.200 Now, one of the things

00:41:29.840 we should point out

00:41:30.780 that if you're

00:41:31.400 putting forward

00:41:32.640 a scientific hypothesis

00:41:34.020 that's testable

00:41:35.800 and falsifiable,

00:41:38.260 it's incumbent upon you

00:41:39.660 to specify

00:41:40.300 the appropriate time frame.

00:41:42.100 Of course.

00:41:42.200 You don't get to say

00:41:43.420 the human race

00:41:45.100 is heading for

00:41:46.480 an uncontrollable

00:41:48.560 Malthusian catastrophe 0.78

00:41:50.120 sometime in the next

00:41:52.260 10,000 years.

00:41:53.480 It's like,

00:41:53.920 you can just go away

00:41:55.160 with those ideas.

00:41:56.060 If you can't specify 0.99

00:41:57.060 the damn time frame, 0.98

00:41:58.460 then you should 1.00

00:41:59.120 shut the hell up. 0.98

00:42:01.020 Verifiable, 0.78

00:42:01.740 testable hypotheses

00:42:02.940 are the essence

00:42:04.060 of science.

00:42:05.020 Right?

00:42:05.580 Absolutely.

00:42:06.240 So, okay,

00:42:06.880 so people like Ehrlich

00:42:07.940 who predicted,

00:42:09.000 for example,

00:42:09.560 that commodity prices

00:42:10.540 were going to spike

00:42:11.260 through the roof

00:42:11.920 by the year 2000

00:42:12.920 and everyone was

00:42:13.720 going to starve

00:42:14.240 are wrong.

00:42:16.420 And the reason

00:42:16.980 they're wrong,

00:42:17.620 at least in part,

00:42:18.480 is because the

00:42:19.140 Malthusian predictions,

00:42:21.160 they don't apply

00:42:22.220 to people.

00:42:22.820 And I think the reason

00:42:23.820 they don't apply

00:42:24.660 in some fundamental sense

00:42:25.940 is because we're capable

00:42:27.840 of the death

00:42:28.940 of our ideas

00:42:29.860 instead of the death

00:42:30.980 of our bodies.

00:42:32.000 Right?

00:42:32.180 So we can adapt.

00:42:33.740 Yeah, adaptability

00:42:34.940 is maybe the defining

00:42:36.740 characteristic of humans.

00:42:38.460 All right?

00:42:38.920 We are wonderfully adaptive.

00:42:40.180 people live, you know,

00:42:41.980 from Hudson Bay

00:42:42.860 down to the equator

00:42:43.960 and we do just fine.

00:42:46.960 And I think

00:42:48.160 at least to judge

00:42:49.760 by past experience,

00:42:51.120 you have to have faith

00:42:52.500 that we as a species

00:42:54.500 will figure it out

00:42:55.840 because we've always

00:42:56.960 done that in the past.

00:42:57.960 Yeah, we've done it

00:42:58.700 under more trying conditions

00:43:01.060 than we have now,

00:43:02.060 I might say.

00:43:02.740 Absolutely.

00:43:03.620 You know,

00:43:03.840 and there's a lot

00:43:05.380 of brain power

00:43:06.300 available in the world

00:43:07.320 now too

00:43:07.840 and that's one

00:43:08.440 of the massive benefits

00:43:09.640 of having a larger population.

00:43:11.640 I mean,

00:43:11.880 there's more smart people

00:43:13.220 alive now,

00:43:14.000 especially smart

00:43:14.740 and educated people

00:43:15.660 than there has been

00:43:16.420 at any point in the past.

00:43:17.820 And we've got to

00:43:19.400 let them,

00:43:20.440 you know,

00:43:21.060 do their thing.

00:43:22.000 All right?

00:43:22.480 And that's got to do

00:43:23.360 with governance

00:43:23.900 and regulation

00:43:24.760 and so on.

00:43:25.620 But absolutely,

00:43:26.700 there's tremendous

00:43:27.360 human capacity right now.

00:43:28.860 Okay, now,

00:43:29.700 the IPCC,

00:43:30.940 why don't you explain

00:43:31.800 exactly what that is

00:43:32.940 and also tell everyone,

00:43:34.380 because all the climate doomsters

00:43:36.760 hypothetically predicate

00:43:38.520 their propositions

00:43:40.120 on the IPCC reports,

00:43:42.300 which,

00:43:42.820 and they're regarded

00:43:44.900 by,

00:43:46.060 as gold standard.

00:43:47.060 People like Bjorn Lomberg

00:43:48.280 also accept

00:43:49.100 the IPCC prognostications,

00:43:51.380 but have pointed out,

00:43:52.680 like Epstein

00:43:53.280 and you have pointed out too,

00:43:54.880 that,

00:43:55.540 well,

00:43:55.860 it's one thing

00:43:56.560 to read the IPCC report

00:43:58.520 and then it's another

00:43:59.400 to read the summary

00:44:00.520 and then the summary

00:44:01.500 of the summary,

00:44:02.320 which is mostly

00:44:02.900 what people read.

00:44:03.780 And it starts to become

00:44:04.860 non-scientific

00:44:05.900 and political

00:44:07.040 or theological

00:44:07.900 as it gets condensed.

00:44:09.300 So what do you think

00:44:10.560 the IPCC reports

00:44:12.280 actually say,

00:44:14.120 apart from the fact

00:44:15.000 that we're looking at

00:44:15.760 about a 1.3 degree

00:44:17.520 increase in average temperature

00:44:19.940 in the next 100 years?

00:44:22.500 Yeah.

00:44:22.900 So we do see,

00:44:25.320 we have seen in the past

00:44:26.540 an increase

00:44:27.460 in the Earth's temperature.

00:44:29.060 The IPCC will say

00:44:31.000 that's consistent

00:44:31.980 with it all being driven

00:44:33.500 by human influences,

00:44:35.900 but they allow

00:44:37.060 for the possibility

00:44:37.980 that there's natural

00:44:38.980 variation in there.

00:44:40.560 So that's just

00:44:41.500 on the temperature.

00:44:42.800 What they say

00:44:43.540 about extreme weather events

00:44:45.040 is that apart

00:44:46.160 from things

00:44:46.720 directly associated

00:44:47.700 with the temperature,

00:44:49.000 like record high temperatures

00:44:51.320 or heat waves,

00:44:52.780 you don't see much trends

00:44:54.480 globally.

00:44:55.920 There's,

00:44:56.360 you know,

00:44:57.180 drought,

00:44:58.100 hard to see a trend.

00:45:00.880 Hurricanes

00:45:01.440 or tropical cyclones,

00:45:03.260 hard to see any trend

00:45:04.540 at all

00:45:05.080 over a century.

00:45:06.060 Maybe there's a little thing

00:45:07.100 we can talk about

00:45:07.960 afterward.

00:45:09.460 Sea level rise,

00:45:11.500 proceeding at the rate

00:45:13.080 of one foot

00:45:13.900 a century globally,

00:45:15.580 different locally,

00:45:16.500 we can talk about that

00:45:17.660 a little bit

00:45:18.360 if you want.

00:45:19.120 Mid-latitude,

00:45:20.040 severe storms,

00:45:21.500 and so on.

00:45:22.500 Not much going on

00:45:24.040 at all.

00:45:24.580 It's hard to find trends.

00:45:26.300 It doesn't mean

00:45:27.200 that the trends

00:45:27.860 aren't there,

00:45:28.840 but they've just not emerged

00:45:30.400 from the data.

00:45:32.040 Okay, so I want to...

00:45:33.060 The IPC...

00:45:33.580 Sorry, go ahead.

00:45:34.940 I was going to talk

00:45:36.040 a little bit about the IPC.

00:45:37.100 Yes, please do.

00:45:38.040 So this is an exercise

00:45:39.940 carried out by the UN

00:45:41.780 roughly every six

00:45:44.000 or seven years.

00:45:45.900 They convene

00:45:47.620 a thousand scientists

00:45:49.080 from countries

00:45:50.760 around the globe

00:45:51.720 who are supposed

00:45:53.300 to survey,

00:45:55.680 assess,

00:45:56.300 the scientific understanding

00:45:58.260 of human-induced

00:46:00.960 climate change.

00:46:01.940 That's really important

00:46:02.820 because they focus on,

00:46:04.340 you know,

00:46:04.600 what might be attributable

00:46:05.740 to humans

00:46:06.240 as opposed to

00:46:07.320 natural climate change,

00:46:08.820 which is an important

00:46:10.620 part of the story.

00:46:12.880 And so they split up

00:46:14.360 into various working groups,

00:46:16.180 write very detailed,

00:46:17.780 thousand,

00:46:18.540 two thousand page

00:46:19.540 long reports

00:46:20.840 that actually,

00:46:22.320 in my opinion,

00:46:22.920 do a pretty good job

00:46:24.300 of assessing

00:46:26.080 the science.

00:46:28.340 Those reports

00:46:29.760 are then

00:46:30.480 packaged,

00:46:32.420 if you like,

00:46:32.840 or summarized

00:46:33.740 into summaries

00:46:34.540 for policymakers

00:46:35.560 where the scientists

00:46:37.380 don't have

00:46:38.420 as much of a hand

00:46:39.740 in writing

00:46:41.300 those summaries.

00:46:42.380 The governments

00:46:42.960 intervene quite a bit.

00:46:44.900 And when you compare

00:46:46.180 the summaries,

00:46:46.900 which is what

00:46:47.920 serious people

00:46:49.080 would read

00:46:49.600 if they're not

00:46:50.060 climate scientists,

00:46:51.240 to what's actually

00:46:51.840 in the reports,

00:46:52.520 there's lots

00:46:53.380 of disconnect.

00:46:54.120 And I can give you

00:46:54.860 some examples

00:46:55.800 at some point.

00:46:57.060 And then, of course,

00:46:57.680 you get the media

00:46:58.540 where you have journalists

00:46:59.840 who don't know

00:47:00.580 very much at all

00:47:01.560 about the science.

00:47:02.960 They're on a climate beat

00:47:04.220 in the newspaper,

00:47:05.920 and so they have to

00:47:07.020 provide climate stories

00:47:08.860 that catch the attention.

00:47:10.380 And then you've got

00:47:10.980 the politicians

00:47:11.640 who grab on

00:47:12.460 to all of this.

00:47:13.440 And so at the end

00:47:14.420 of this long game

00:47:15.420 of telephone,

00:47:16.400 what comes through

00:47:17.300 is very little reflective

00:47:19.120 of what the actual

00:47:20.360 science says.

00:47:21.420 All right?

00:47:22.320 So, okay.

00:47:23.020 So now you hear

00:47:23.780 very frequently

00:47:24.620 that 97%

00:47:27.460 of scientists

00:47:28.460 agree that,

00:47:30.220 well,

00:47:30.860 global warming exists

00:47:31.960 or climate change exists.

00:47:33.520 But my understanding

00:47:34.400 of that is the following.

00:47:35.600 And so correct me

00:47:36.340 if I'm wrong.

00:47:37.880 So 97%

00:47:39.980 of scientists

00:47:40.880 agree that

00:47:42.500 there is

00:47:43.620 credible evidence

00:47:44.860 that some

00:47:45.580 proportion

00:47:47.160 of the current

00:47:48.380 trend towards warming

00:47:49.620 is attributable

00:47:50.680 to human activity

00:47:52.540 and more specifically

00:47:53.480 to carbon dioxide.

00:47:54.600 So it would be

00:47:54.880 some fraction

00:47:55.640 of the 1.3 degrees

00:47:57.660 that have...

00:47:58.480 Yeah, right, right.

00:47:59.180 Whether it's a half

00:48:00.360 or whether it's whole,

00:48:01.680 I think people

00:48:02.720 would disagree on.

00:48:03.860 Right, right.

00:48:04.560 And there's some

00:48:05.240 disagreement

00:48:05.960 about exactly

00:48:06.940 the range

00:48:07.660 of hypothetical

00:48:08.940 temperature increase

00:48:10.120 over the last

00:48:10.660 hundred years

00:48:11.180 or the next hundred.

00:48:12.060 Okay, so that's

00:48:12.720 the 97%.

00:48:13.680 What percentage

00:48:15.200 of scientists

00:48:16.460 do you suppose

00:48:17.560 actually take

00:48:18.820 an apocalyptic view

00:48:20.200 specifically

00:48:21.220 in relationship

00:48:22.160 to carbon dioxide?

00:48:23.900 Do you have any idea,

00:48:25.000 any sense of that?

00:48:26.240 No, you know,

00:48:27.200 no, and you know,

00:48:28.220 the 97% number

00:48:29.560 is a made-up number

00:48:30.400 also based on

00:48:31.320 an entirely flawed study.

00:48:33.800 I think, you know,

00:48:35.460 the scientists

00:48:36.040 are not behaving

00:48:37.080 as though

00:48:37.960 it were apocalyptic.

00:48:39.420 I would say

00:48:41.140 95% of them

00:48:42.680 are not

00:48:43.280 in that camp.

00:48:44.520 But, look,

00:48:45.180 that's just

00:48:45.760 my anecdotal perception.

00:48:49.100 You know,

00:48:49.400 I sit down

00:48:50.020 and talk to these folks

00:48:51.000 a lot.

00:48:51.580 Yeah.

00:48:51.940 Right, and, you know,

00:48:53.060 none of them

00:48:53.700 are kind of

00:48:54.320 jumping off the roof

00:48:55.320 and saying,

00:48:57.220 my God,

00:48:58.100 we'd better do something

00:48:59.400 or we're headed

00:48:59.920 for climate hell.

00:49:02.220 A climate highway

00:49:03.440 to hell

00:49:03.860 or something

00:49:04.320 is what

00:49:04.780 the Secretary General

00:49:06.700 of the UN

00:49:07.760 said a couple months ago.

00:49:09.280 Right, well,

00:49:09.840 so that...

00:49:10.440 No, we're not.

00:49:11.480 Okay, look,

00:49:12.240 this is,

00:49:12.980 it's an issue.

00:49:14.000 It's a long-term problem.

00:49:15.860 We can deal with it,

00:49:18.340 but there's no reason

00:49:19.820 to ring alarm bells.

00:49:21.980 Okay, well,

00:49:22.700 then I'm going to play

00:49:24.260 devil's advocate

00:49:25.040 from another direction

00:49:26.220 for a moment.

00:49:26.920 So, I would say

00:49:28.020 of all the data points

00:49:30.260 that I've encountered

00:49:31.260 over the last 15 years

00:49:34.420 investigating the nexus

00:49:36.300 between energy

00:49:37.160 and environment,

00:49:37.960 and the data point

00:49:40.280 that's leapt out

00:49:41.540 at me most strongly

00:49:42.660 is the fact

00:49:43.440 that since the year 2000,

00:49:46.560 the world has greened

00:49:48.080 by 15%

00:49:49.460 and primarily

00:49:50.680 in semi-arid areas.

00:49:52.200 So, let's just walk

00:49:53.140 through that

00:49:53.620 for a second.

00:49:54.480 So, 15% is a lot.

00:49:56.900 It's bigger than

00:49:57.500 the entire landmass

00:49:58.600 of the United States.

00:49:59.960 And green is a lot different

00:50:01.660 than brown or dead.

00:50:03.060 And semi-arid means

00:50:04.880 that plants are growing

00:50:06.280 in places that are

00:50:07.720 damn near deserts.

00:50:09.080 And as far as I can tell, 0.99

00:50:10.500 that's pretty much

00:50:11.200 the opposite

00:50:11.900 of what the climate apocalypse

00:50:13.500 prognosticated.

00:50:16.220 And more than that,

00:50:18.460 I can't shake the suspicion,

00:50:20.880 and I would love

00:50:22.000 to be corrected on this

00:50:23.100 if you can see somewhere

00:50:24.100 that I'm wrong,

00:50:25.260 why the hell

00:50:26.080 isn't that good news?

00:50:27.360 Especially when it's also

00:50:28.820 allied with the fact

00:50:30.220 that our crops

00:50:30.940 are much more productive

00:50:32.060 as a consequence, too.

00:50:33.220 So, I could say,

00:50:34.240 hey, look at this.

00:50:35.460 It turns out

00:50:36.040 that there's no more

00:50:36.920 effective way

00:50:37.900 of delivering fertilizer

00:50:39.460 for plants worldwide

00:50:41.340 than to burn fossil fuels.

00:50:44.260 Yeah.

00:50:44.680 So, let's back up

00:50:46.420 on the science

00:50:47.060 for a second first.

00:50:48.360 So, plants love CO2.

00:50:50.760 All right?

00:50:51.080 We pump CO2

00:50:52.120 into greenhouses

00:50:53.180 in order to get

00:50:54.320 the plants

00:50:54.880 to grow better.

00:50:56.540 Right now,

00:50:57.180 in the atmosphere,

00:50:58.020 the concentration

00:50:58.780 is about 420.

00:51:00.220 parts per million

00:51:01.280 of CO2.

00:51:02.160 We raise it

00:51:02.940 to over 1,000

00:51:04.000 parts per million

00:51:05.020 in greenhouses

00:51:06.080 to help the plants grow.

00:51:08.500 The CO2 not only

00:51:09.840 lets them grow faster,

00:51:11.300 but it lets them

00:51:12.140 use water more efficiently.

00:51:14.060 Right, right.

00:51:14.340 They don't have to

00:51:15.020 open up the stomata

00:51:16.440 and lose water as much.

00:51:18.900 You're 15% 1.00

00:51:20.180 since 2000.

00:51:22.580 If you'd asked me,

00:51:23.620 I would have said

00:51:24.180 it's more like 40%

00:51:25.600 since the 1980s.

00:51:27.660 All right?

00:51:27.980 So, yeah.

00:51:28.720 Things are growing

00:51:30.060 better on Earth

00:51:31.440 since 1980.

00:51:32.860 Wow.

00:51:33.060 Something called

00:51:34.020 the Leaf Area Index

00:51:35.580 has gone up.

00:51:36.540 NASA produces maps

00:51:38.540 that show this.

00:51:39.900 They write press releases

00:51:41.340 that show this,

00:51:42.840 but somehow

00:51:43.580 it's not really present

00:51:45.380 in the media.

00:51:46.400 Okay, so how come

00:51:48.140 we're not,

00:51:48.860 how come we can't

00:51:50.160 take the stance

00:51:50.940 that carbon dioxide

00:51:51.840 is a net good?

00:51:53.000 Because that's such

00:51:54.180 an alloping statistic.

00:51:55.600 40% since the 1980s.

00:51:58.180 I mean,

00:51:58.600 I don't know

00:51:59.340 of another set

00:52:00.640 of data

00:52:01.180 that has,

00:52:02.300 well,

00:52:02.480 let's call that

00:52:03.220 that scale.

00:52:05.000 Right?

00:52:05.280 That's really something.

00:52:06.560 And green...

00:52:07.400 That's important, right?

00:52:08.800 And if you look

00:52:09.520 at the agricultural yields

00:52:11.200 and so on,

00:52:12.200 whether it's in the U.S.

00:52:13.280 or India,

00:52:14.520 has been going gangbusters

00:52:16.380 on producing crops.

00:52:19.560 You know,

00:52:19.980 this is certainly

00:52:20.860 one of the benefits.

00:52:22.400 And it's a significant one.

00:52:24.120 That has to be weighed

00:52:25.460 against hypothetical,

00:52:27.540 detrimental effects

00:52:30.020 from global warming.

00:52:32.160 And the net of them

00:52:33.340 is a few percent.

00:52:35.100 Again,

00:52:35.340 it's in the noise.

00:52:36.340 You can't distinguish it.

00:52:38.200 There are other factors

00:52:39.340 about human well-being

00:52:40.540 that are much more important

00:52:42.100 than whether the climate's

00:52:43.460 changing or not.

00:52:44.840 So, you know,

00:52:45.600 if I were to be

00:52:46.480 a little snarky,

00:52:48.080 it's almost

00:52:48.700 a nothing burger.

00:52:50.040 The science says that.

00:52:51.280 If you read the reports,

00:52:53.280 but the detrimental effects

00:52:56.240 get hyped up

00:52:57.860 by various players.

00:53:00.740 The other thing

00:53:01.760 that I've seen

00:53:02.360 the drum being beat

00:53:03.540 about quite assiduously,

00:53:05.980 let's say,

00:53:06.480 in recent years,

00:53:07.760 and maybe,

00:53:08.340 I don't know

00:53:08.840 how much you know

00:53:09.640 about this.

00:53:10.140 I don't know enough

00:53:10.860 about it.

00:53:11.820 That's for sure.

00:53:13.340 There are people

00:53:14.560 who are claiming

00:53:15.360 now,

00:53:16.720 and maybe this is

00:53:17.520 because some of the shine

00:53:18.500 has gone off

00:53:19.100 the climate apocalypse

00:53:21.880 that were headed

00:53:23.060 for a mass extinction.

00:53:24.540 And I read a couple

00:53:25.300 of computer models

00:53:26.160 the other day

00:53:26.740 that were published

00:53:27.440 saying that there's

00:53:28.720 like a domino effect

00:53:30.180 with regards

00:53:30.700 to mass extinction.

00:53:31.960 And, I mean,

00:53:32.500 there are a lot of people,

00:53:33.740 and although there's

00:53:34.780 a lot of greenery now,

00:53:35.960 and there's more forest

00:53:36.880 in the northern hemisphere,

00:53:38.060 so, you know,

00:53:38.520 those are powerful,

00:53:39.520 countervailing proclivities.

00:53:40.820 But do you have

00:53:42.220 any specific knowledge

00:53:44.040 about our effects

00:53:46.500 on the mass extinction front?

00:53:48.140 Yeah.

00:53:48.480 No, you know,

00:53:49.340 like a senior academic

00:53:51.020 as you and I are,

00:53:52.720 you're reluctant

00:53:53.420 to talk about things

00:53:54.580 you don't know much about.

00:53:56.860 And I'm very careful

00:53:58.440 about that.

00:53:59.740 I don't know about

00:54:01.060 the projections

00:54:02.340 you're talking about,

00:54:03.660 but I'm a priori

00:54:05.080 very suspicious

00:54:06.080 because these are

00:54:08.340 complicated physical,

00:54:09.760 biological systems

00:54:11.700 and small effects

00:54:13.780 can have a big influence.

00:54:16.240 And so I'm skeptical.

00:54:17.660 If I were to look

00:54:18.340 at those papers,

00:54:19.420 one of the first things

00:54:20.440 I would ask is,

00:54:22.200 how well have you

00:54:23.120 reproduced the past?

00:54:24.800 Because unless you

00:54:25.800 can reproduce

00:54:26.400 the dominant changes

00:54:28.180 that we've seen

00:54:29.020 over the last

00:54:29.720 hundred years,

00:54:30.820 thousand years,

00:54:31.660 whatever,

00:54:32.500 I don't have much confidence

00:54:34.460 in your ability

00:54:35.200 to predict.

00:54:35.620 Well, okay,

00:54:36.400 let's talk about

00:54:37.200 models some more.

00:54:38.080 So one of the things

00:54:39.000 I want to point out

00:54:39.840 to people,

00:54:40.360 and you tell me

00:54:41.040 what you think

00:54:41.540 about this,

00:54:42.140 is that it is

00:54:43.400 perfectly possible

00:54:44.540 to produce

00:54:45.920 pretty damn good

00:54:47.680 computer models

00:54:49.480 that predict

00:54:50.460 the behavior

00:54:51.600 of the stock market

00:54:52.680 in the past.

00:54:54.060 And the stock market's

00:54:54.960 very complex,

00:54:55.760 of course,

00:54:56.180 because it's an index

00:54:57.660 of, well,

00:54:58.880 the sum total

00:54:59.620 of human economic activity

00:55:01.220 plus political activity.

00:55:02.500 So it's a very

00:55:03.240 dynamic system,

00:55:04.120 and it's full of

00:55:04.800 weird feedback loops

00:55:06.120 because as soon

00:55:06.760 as you can predict

00:55:07.600 it,

00:55:08.200 you perturb the system.

00:55:09.940 But in any case,

00:55:11.220 here's the fundamental

00:55:12.280 point.

00:55:13.120 It doesn't appear

00:55:13.880 to me at all

00:55:14.460 that the stock market

00:55:15.460 is more complex

00:55:16.360 than the climate.

00:55:17.520 And if you could

00:55:18.240 produce a model

00:55:19.000 that could predict

00:55:19.780 the climate,

00:55:20.660 then you could

00:55:21.180 produce a model

00:55:22.760 that would predict

00:55:23.280 the stock market.

00:55:24.120 And if you could

00:55:24.680 produce that model,

00:55:26.160 even if you only

00:55:27.020 were right 51%

00:55:28.940 of the time,

00:55:30.340 consistently,

00:55:31.520 you would soon

00:55:32.480 have all the money.

00:55:34.080 And I don't see

00:55:34.800 anybody who's

00:55:35.660 developing these

00:55:36.420 very complex models

00:55:37.660 who has all the money,

00:55:39.320 so I don't think

00:55:40.140 that they can make

00:55:41.200 models that can

00:55:42.560 model the behavior

00:55:43.340 of systems that complex.

00:55:44.980 And so let's talk

00:55:45.700 about models a bit.

00:55:46.960 So let's talk

00:55:48.000 about models a little bit.

00:55:49.120 Let me back up again

00:55:50.580 and talk about

00:55:51.560 some of the basics.

00:55:53.900 The most used models

00:55:55.660 for the climate system

00:55:57.400 are what are called

00:55:58.220 general circulation models.

00:56:00.580 They cut the atmosphere

00:56:02.380 and the ocean up

00:56:03.540 into cubes

00:56:05.060 about 100 kilometers

00:56:07.460 on a side,

00:56:08.340 60 miles on a side,

00:56:10.420 and going up

00:56:11.660 20 layers

00:56:12.400 in the atmosphere

00:56:13.180 and then 20 layers

00:56:15.160 down in the ocean.

00:56:17.260 And we have,

00:56:18.640 a difference to the

00:56:19.360 stock market is

00:56:20.140 we have some

00:56:20.860 underlying physical laws,

00:56:23.560 laws of conservation

00:56:25.160 of energy,

00:56:26.240 mass, momentum,

00:56:27.640 and so on,

00:56:28.300 that govern

00:56:29.260 how the air,

00:56:30.840 the radiation,

00:56:31.740 both sunlight

00:56:32.700 and heat radiation,

00:56:34.560 water vapor,

00:56:35.460 flow through these boxes.

00:56:37.540 Newton understood those,

00:56:38.840 or Euler,

00:56:40.240 back in the 19th century

00:56:41.620 or even earlier.

00:56:43.220 And we can build

00:56:45.340 such models

00:56:46.300 and use computers.

00:56:48.440 So you wind up

00:56:49.260 with a,

00:56:50.040 I've ordered,

00:56:50.560 10 million boxes

00:56:51.800 covering the earth,

00:56:53.480 going up and down

00:56:54.460 in the ocean,

00:56:55.340 the atmosphere.

00:56:55.840 And then you follow

00:56:57.320 the flow of stuff

00:56:58.840 through these boxes

00:57:00.000 every 10 minutes,

00:57:01.980 10 minute time steps.

00:57:03.680 And you do that

00:57:04.660 for a century or so,

00:57:06.960 and you got some description

00:57:08.440 of what you think

00:57:09.300 is the climate.

00:57:10.740 But there are lots

00:57:11.680 of problems

00:57:12.560 with that.

00:57:14.500 One is that

00:57:15.480 60 miles on a side

00:57:17.180 is not sufficient

00:57:18.900 to describe

00:57:20.300 the difference in climate

00:57:21.840 between New York

00:57:23.000 and Washington, D.C.

00:57:24.200 or New York and Toronto,

00:57:25.800 for example.

00:57:26.400 So that's one.

00:57:27.060 And so the second

00:57:29.140 is a lot of phenomena

00:57:31.020 happen on much

00:57:32.320 smaller sizes.

00:57:33.940 Think about

00:57:34.420 thunderheads,

00:57:35.420 for example.

00:57:36.400 They happen

00:57:37.260 on a few mile scale.

00:57:39.220 So you have to make up

00:57:40.480 some assumption

00:57:41.360 about what's going on

00:57:42.380 inside each of these boxes.

00:57:44.200 And different people

00:57:45.000 make different assumptions.

00:57:47.680 A third

00:57:48.260 is that

00:57:49.380 the boxes

00:57:50.220 are not really cubes,

00:57:51.600 but they're pancakes

00:57:52.500 because the atmosphere

00:57:54.040 is really thin

00:57:56.040 compared to the size

00:57:57.460 of the Earth,

00:57:57.940 and the ocean

00:57:58.380 is also pretty thin.

00:58:00.080 And so you have

00:58:01.060 to make up

00:58:01.860 assumptions

00:58:02.760 about how things

00:58:04.260 move vertically

00:58:05.200 that are not

00:58:06.680 directly tied

00:58:07.660 to the fundamental

00:58:08.840 physical laws.

00:58:11.260 So all of those

00:58:13.080 make a lot of trouble,

00:58:14.860 and that's why

00:58:15.380 the world has

00:58:15.960 50 different

00:58:16.740 such models,

00:58:17.900 and to get predictions,

00:58:19.500 they average

00:58:20.060 all of them together.

00:58:21.320 Okay, so

00:58:22.340 let's take that apart

00:58:24.920 just so everyone

00:58:25.640 understands.

00:58:26.400 So the first is

00:58:27.160 these models

00:58:27.900 are not very

00:58:28.500 high resolution,

00:58:29.860 either spatially

00:58:30.900 or temporally.

00:58:31.860 So you have to use

00:58:32.980 huge cubes

00:58:33.780 plus your only

00:58:34.660 sampling...

00:58:35.120 Temporally,

00:58:36.260 well,

00:58:36.920 temporally is pretty good,

00:58:37.960 10 minutes.

00:58:40.020 Spatially,

00:58:40.780 it's terrible.

00:58:42.340 But we also,

00:58:43.320 well,

00:58:43.900 perhaps on the

00:58:45.060 temporal side,

00:58:45.760 I mean,

00:58:45.940 the thing is

00:58:46.500 we're looking at

00:58:47.360 relatively small

00:58:48.520 deviations in temperature,

00:58:50.600 right?

00:58:50.780 If it's one degree

00:58:51.500 over a century,

00:58:52.500 this is not

00:58:53.320 a huge effect,

00:58:54.280 and what that means

00:58:55.260 is that the models

00:58:56.300 aren't high resolution

00:58:57.620 enough to be accurate

00:58:58.900 to that scale.

00:59:00.200 They're simply not.

00:59:01.240 That's true.

00:59:02.000 That's true.

00:59:02.800 Now,

00:59:03.140 that doesn't,

00:59:03.740 okay,

00:59:04.120 that doesn't mean

00:59:04.780 we shouldn't model

00:59:05.860 because our models

00:59:07.660 get better and better

00:59:08.500 all the time,

00:59:09.400 but there's a big

00:59:10.720 difference between

00:59:11.500 modeling something,

00:59:12.500 even if you can make

00:59:13.300 it accurate to predict

00:59:14.280 the past,

00:59:15.420 and being able

00:59:16.160 to model the present,

00:59:17.320 but there's a

00:59:17.960 walloping difference

00:59:18.920 between being able

00:59:19.740 to model the present

00:59:20.620 and being able

00:59:21.240 to model climate

00:59:22.140 a hundred years

00:59:23.200 from now

00:59:23.740 because the errors

00:59:24.540 compound as you

00:59:25.700 predict out into

00:59:26.680 the future.

00:59:28.100 Well,

00:59:28.540 yes,

00:59:29.080 that's certainly true,

00:59:30.540 although you hope

00:59:31.220 to be describing

00:59:32.040 averages that are

00:59:33.240 reasonably well

00:59:34.280 predicted.

00:59:35.660 You know,

00:59:35.940 there's several comments

00:59:37.000 about that.

00:59:38.000 One is,

00:59:39.380 you know,

00:59:39.700 human influences

00:59:41.140 are small.

00:59:42.800 They're,

00:59:43.080 as you say,

00:59:43.560 a one percent effect.

00:59:44.840 We're concerned

00:59:45.920 about a rise

00:59:46.640 of two degrees,

00:59:48.160 whereas the Earth's

00:59:48.680 surface temperature

00:59:49.460 is about 300 degrees,

00:59:51.580 so it's like

00:59:52.100 a one percent effect.

00:59:53.860 The second is,

00:59:54.800 we're interested

00:59:55.420 not in describing

00:59:56.700 the climate,

00:59:57.920 but in describing

00:59:58.720 how the climate

00:59:59.560 responds

01:00:00.320 to those influences.

01:00:02.680 That's the big question,

01:00:04.420 and that's an order

01:00:05.680 of magnitude

01:00:06.220 harder job

01:00:07.280 than describing

01:00:08.460 the climate itself.

01:00:09.800 The third thing is,

01:00:11.960 we're looking

01:00:12.480 over timescales

01:00:13.640 of 100,

01:00:14.580 150 years,

01:00:16.320 and we have

01:00:17.060 terrible data

01:00:18.340 to describe

01:00:19.940 what happened

01:00:20.620 in the past.

01:00:22.260 Yes,

01:00:22.580 we have reasonable

01:00:23.460 confidence about

01:00:24.340 the average global

01:00:25.200 temperature,

01:00:26.160 but what goes on

01:00:27.080 in the oceans,

01:00:27.940 which is really

01:00:28.620 where climate happens,

01:00:30.220 the oceans are the

01:00:30.980 long-term component

01:00:31.980 of the system,

01:00:33.200 we have terrible data

01:00:34.520 until about

01:00:35.980 20 years ago

01:00:36.820 when we started

01:00:37.780 putting out floats

01:00:38.800 of various kinds.

01:00:39.580 Well,

01:00:39.980 how good is

01:00:40.720 the ocean data?

01:00:41.600 I mean,

01:00:41.780 the ocean's

01:00:42.220 pretty damn deep,

01:00:43.200 and it's not like

01:00:44.400 we can measure

01:00:45.060 everything that's

01:00:45.740 happening in the ocean.

01:00:46.860 I can't imagine

01:00:47.720 we understand

01:00:48.720 long-term current flows

01:00:50.700 from the depths

01:00:51.480 well enough

01:00:52.160 to be predicting

01:00:53.460 climate alteration

01:00:54.940 on the scale

01:00:55.500 of a few degrees.

01:00:56.560 That just strikes me

01:00:57.460 as unbelievably

01:00:59.100 preposterous.

01:01:00.960 Right.

01:01:01.280 Studies that have

01:01:02.120 attempted to reproduce

01:01:03.380 the warming

01:01:04.420 of the ocean

01:01:05.280 show that the ocean

01:01:07.100 was warming

01:01:07.780 at about

01:01:08.380 half the current

01:01:09.600 rate

01:01:09.900 even as the

01:01:11.340 little ice age

01:01:12.420 started to end.

01:01:14.220 And so

01:01:14.700 untangling

01:01:15.820 this long-term

01:01:16.900 natural variability

01:01:18.120 from the effect

01:01:19.400 of human influence,

01:01:20.260 which has only

01:01:20.820 really been

01:01:21.480 significant

01:01:22.400 for the last

01:01:23.480 70 or 80 years

01:01:25.140 or so,

01:01:25.660 is a very,

01:01:27.000 very difficult

01:01:27.620 problem,

01:01:28.720 maybe the central

01:01:29.740 problem in climate.

01:01:31.320 Okay.

01:01:31.520 Now you talked

01:01:33.060 about when you

01:01:33.600 were at BP,

01:01:34.480 you got somewhat

01:01:35.580 excited about the

01:01:36.460 possibility of biofuel.

01:01:37.900 We didn't really

01:01:38.420 continue down that

01:01:39.560 road.

01:01:40.940 What are your

01:01:42.720 thoughts on the

01:01:43.500 nuclear front,

01:01:44.320 let's say,

01:01:45.500 and did you see

01:01:47.240 developments there

01:01:47.980 that you regarded

01:01:48.780 as, like,

01:01:49.880 a lot of people

01:01:50.860 talk about modular

01:01:51.780 nuclear power,

01:01:52.680 for example.

01:01:53.080 Right.

01:01:53.840 So,

01:01:54.080 right.

01:01:55.440 So,

01:01:55.820 full disclosure,

01:01:56.620 first,

01:01:56.920 you know,

01:01:57.180 I began life

01:01:58.140 as a nuclear

01:01:58.660 physicist.

01:01:59.260 Right.

01:01:59.800 And so

01:02:00.280 the atom is my

01:02:01.380 friend.

01:02:02.640 I'm a scientist,

01:02:03.680 not an engineer.

01:02:04.800 I don't think I

01:02:05.440 could build a

01:02:06.100 credible nuclear

01:02:07.940 reactor,

01:02:08.560 but I certainly

01:02:09.160 understand how

01:02:10.440 they work in

01:02:11.100 great detail

01:02:11.960 and understand

01:02:12.680 the economics

01:02:13.300 and the business

01:02:14.000 and so on.

01:02:14.920 I think if the

01:02:16.100 world is serious

01:02:17.140 about reducing

01:02:18.380 carbon dioxide

01:02:19.740 emissions,

01:02:21.040 nuclear power

01:02:21.840 has to be a

01:02:22.740 big part of

01:02:24.260 the future.

01:02:26.480 Essentially,

01:02:27.320 zero emissions,

01:02:28.840 reasonably economic,

01:02:30.820 and a demonstrated

01:02:32.320 technology,

01:02:33.360 right?

01:02:33.900 Roughly 20%

01:02:34.980 of U.S.

01:02:35.520 electricity

01:02:36.020 comes from

01:02:37.060 fission.

01:02:38.180 80% of French

01:02:39.840 electricity

01:02:40.480 comes from

01:02:41.080 fission.

01:02:41.440 Maybe it's 75%

01:02:42.380 now.

01:02:43.000 So, you know,

01:02:43.620 we know how

01:02:44.300 to do this.

01:02:46.000 The problem

01:02:46.740 is that the

01:02:47.620 big ones,

01:02:48.440 particularly in

01:02:49.220 the U.S.,

01:02:49.640 the existing

01:02:50.260 power plants,

01:02:51.020 of which there

01:02:51.620 are about

01:02:52.680 90-something

01:02:53.540 now in

01:02:55.340 the U.S.,

01:02:56.460 are

01:02:57.640 very expensive.

01:03:02.200 You have to

01:03:02.640 put down a lot

01:03:03.480 of money at

01:03:04.120 the beginning,

01:03:05.780 $10,

01:03:06.300 $20 billion,

01:03:07.460 and then you

01:03:08.220 don't start to

01:03:08.960 pay it off

01:03:09.620 until 30 years,

01:03:11.500 hence when you

01:03:12.120 sell the

01:03:12.460 electricity that

01:03:13.260 you've been

01:03:14.160 making.

01:03:15.220 And so you

01:03:15.640 need a stable

01:03:16.560 and sensible

01:03:17.380 regulatory

01:03:18.040 environment for

01:03:19.660 these big

01:03:20.220 capital expenses.

01:03:21.820 Well, look,

01:03:22.920 I mean,

01:03:23.160 we were

01:03:23.400 building

01:03:23.720 nuclear power

01:03:24.960 plants,

01:03:25.780 you know,

01:03:26.160 60 years ago,

01:03:27.240 and so we

01:03:28.180 should be

01:03:28.540 better at it

01:03:29.180 now,

01:03:29.440 especially at

01:03:30.000 the modular

01:03:30.420 level.

01:03:30.940 So one of

01:03:31.360 the things

01:03:31.680 I'm curious

01:03:32.260 about,

01:03:32.680 well,

01:03:32.860 two,

01:03:33.140 I suppose,

01:03:33.640 is to

01:03:34.360 what degree

01:03:35.040 does insane

01:03:36.360 regulation make

01:03:37.880 nuclear power

01:03:38.960 unbelievably expensive?

01:03:40.520 And then the

01:03:41.160 second question

01:03:41.780 would be,

01:03:42.740 given that

01:03:43.340 insane regulation

01:03:44.360 does make

01:03:45.060 nuclear power

01:03:45.720 extremely expensive,

01:03:47.080 do you think

01:03:47.680 there's any

01:03:48.300 possibility at all,

01:03:49.600 practically speaking,

01:03:50.560 that that red 0.78

01:03:51.380 tape could be

01:03:52.220 reversed?

01:03:52.800 I mean,

01:03:53.280 Germany just

01:03:53.860 built an LNG

01:03:54.760 port in like

01:03:55.620 five months,

01:03:56.460 so, you know,

01:03:57.220 it's obvious we

01:03:58.100 can get our act

01:03:58.740 together when we

01:03:59.400 need to.

01:03:59.520 We can do this.

01:04:00.520 Yeah, yeah.

01:04:01.040 I think, you

01:04:02.240 know, regulation

01:04:03.020 has been a

01:04:04.960 big part of why

01:04:06.320 big nuclear is

01:04:07.600 expensive.

01:04:09.320 I'm all for

01:04:10.380 making sure these

01:04:11.640 things are safe.

01:04:12.700 We have to do

01:04:13.440 that.

01:04:13.760 That's the

01:04:14.140 primary consideration,

01:04:15.420 and the industry

01:04:16.120 believes that as

01:04:17.280 well.

01:04:17.940 The problem is

01:04:19.200 that in the

01:04:19.840 U.S.,

01:04:20.560 we have built

01:04:21.940 every reactor

01:04:23.080 custom built.

01:04:24.760 They're all

01:04:25.220 different, right?

01:04:26.520 Even if the

01:04:27.380 names are more

01:04:28.120 or less the

01:04:28.580 same, in detail,

01:04:29.880 they're different.

01:04:30.780 The hope is,

01:04:31.940 with small

01:04:32.420 modular reactors,

01:04:33.780 is to focus

01:04:34.700 the regulation so

01:04:36.160 that you can get

01:04:36.920 one design

01:04:37.860 approved, and

01:04:39.420 then you can

01:04:39.840 make a hundred

01:04:40.420 of them.

01:04:41.100 Right.

01:04:41.380 And ship

01:04:42.280 them around the

01:04:42.900 country.

01:04:43.360 You build

01:04:43.700 them in a

01:04:44.040 factory, and

01:04:44.640 you put them

01:04:44.980 on a flatbed

01:04:45.740 rail car and

01:04:47.620 bring them to

01:04:48.440 the site.

01:04:49.560 It would

01:04:50.140 also ease

01:04:50.860 the economics

01:04:51.580 because you

01:04:52.780 pay for the

01:04:53.280 first one, and

01:04:54.360 then you use the

01:04:55.000 cash flow from

01:04:55.880 it to finance

01:04:57.000 the second one

01:04:57.680 and the third

01:04:58.100 one and so

01:04:58.660 on at a

01:04:59.440 site.

01:04:59.840 Yeah, well,

01:05:00.240 I read that

01:05:00.760 Rolls-Royce is

01:05:01.660 doing that.

01:05:02.340 They've got a

01:05:02.860 proposal.

01:05:03.280 So Rolls-Royce is

01:05:04.080 doing that.

01:05:05.020 Right.

01:05:05.660 So in the U.S.,

01:05:07.240 there are two

01:05:07.960 companies, I

01:05:08.820 remember the name

01:05:09.640 of one of them,

01:05:10.160 called NewScale,

01:05:11.240 and I think they

01:05:12.140 hope to have the

01:05:13.400 first one in the

01:05:14.440 ground within the

01:05:15.980 next five or six

01:05:16.880 years.

01:05:18.720 You know, you've

01:05:19.480 got to come down

01:05:20.220 the learning curve.

01:05:21.040 Right now, the

01:05:21.660 costs are more

01:05:22.640 expensive than big

01:05:23.800 nuclear per

01:05:24.600 kilowatt hour

01:05:25.400 produced, but as

01:05:27.240 they come down

01:05:27.780 the learning curve

01:05:28.420 and build more

01:05:29.140 of these and so

01:05:29.940 on, the costs

01:05:31.560 should come down.

01:05:33.000 They'll still be

01:05:33.600 more expensive

01:05:34.180 than gas, for

01:05:36.000 example, to make

01:05:36.840 electricity, but at

01:05:38.360 least you won't

01:05:39.060 have the CO2

01:05:40.020 issues.

01:05:41.360 The waste issue,

01:05:42.360 which people talk

01:05:43.120 about also with

01:05:43.980 respect to

01:05:44.540 nuclear, is a

01:05:45.700 technically solved

01:05:46.880 problem.

01:05:47.680 Okay, how?

01:05:48.200 How is it solved?

01:05:51.540 Monitored

01:05:52.020 retrievable

01:05:53.660 storage.

01:05:54.720 You put it

01:05:55.360 underground, you

01:05:56.460 monitor it, the

01:05:57.840 waste decays, the

01:05:59.980 heat from the

01:06:01.400 waste decays.

01:06:02.960 After a hundred

01:06:03.760 years, it's almost

01:06:06.060 all gone, and then

01:06:07.360 you can pull it

01:06:07.920 back out if you

01:06:08.680 needed the energy

01:06:09.520 in it.

01:06:09.920 You know, we only

01:06:10.440 burn about 5% of

01:06:12.260 the uranium in the

01:06:13.760 waste, that's

01:06:15.700 there in the

01:06:16.320 waste.

01:06:17.800 And so, it's

01:06:18.620 soluble.

01:06:19.780 So, okay, I

01:06:21.300 started looking into

01:06:22.240 the sorts of

01:06:22.800 things we're

01:06:23.200 talking about

01:06:23.780 about 10 years

01:06:24.620 ago, and maybe

01:06:25.980 15 years ago.

01:06:26.960 Okay, so one of

01:06:27.500 the things that

01:06:28.040 really shocked me,

01:06:29.640 well, there are

01:06:30.100 two things.

01:06:30.640 The first was that

01:06:31.420 when I started

01:06:31.960 looking into the

01:06:32.820 energy and

01:06:33.320 environment nexus

01:06:34.120 in detail, I got

01:06:35.600 more optimistic

01:06:36.440 rather than less.

01:06:38.120 And I thought,

01:06:38.780 oh my God,

01:06:39.380 things are a lot

01:06:40.180 better than I

01:06:40.760 thought they were.

01:06:41.920 People are getting

01:06:42.500 richer at a 0.55

01:06:43.180 stunning rate.

01:06:44.140 It looks like

01:06:44.600 there's a positive

01:06:45.260 relationship between

01:06:46.240 population growth and

01:06:47.360 wealth.

01:06:48.040 The planet is

01:06:48.780 cleaner and better

01:06:49.480 off in many ways

01:06:50.380 than it's been for

01:06:51.840 a very long time.

01:06:53.180 But there's real

01:06:53.760 reasons for optimism.

01:06:55.920 And then I also,

01:06:57.980 so that was shocking,

01:06:58.880 then I also learned,

01:06:59.800 and this was also

01:07:00.480 shocking, that there's

01:07:02.720 a very positive

01:07:03.600 relationship between

01:07:04.900 GDP and

01:07:06.820 environmental, let's

01:07:08.180 call it, awareness

01:07:08.820 and concern.

01:07:09.500 So it looks like

01:07:10.360 once you get

01:07:10.880 people up to

01:07:11.600 about the point

01:07:12.260 where in their

01:07:13.600 country the average

01:07:14.560 GDP is $5,000

01:07:15.960 per person, people

01:07:17.660 can stop scrabbling

01:07:19.340 around in the dirt

01:07:20.180 and burning

01:07:20.720 everything and

01:07:21.400 eating everything

01:07:22.040 in sight and they

01:07:22.760 can start to think

01:07:23.520 about what sort of

01:07:24.540 environment they'd

01:07:25.720 like to have for

01:07:26.360 their children and

01:07:27.020 grandchildren.

01:07:27.280 The technical name

01:07:28.960 is the Kuznets 1.00

01:07:29.720 curve, which you

01:07:30.400 probably have.

01:07:31.100 Right, right,

01:07:31.600 right, right.

01:07:32.360 And so then I

01:07:33.880 thought, oh well,

01:07:34.500 isn't this

01:07:34.920 interesting?

01:07:35.640 What this should

01:07:36.360 mean is that if

01:07:37.240 we wanted to, we

01:07:38.960 could work really

01:07:39.660 hard internationally

01:07:40.600 to make energy

01:07:41.640 cheap and we

01:07:42.660 could pull billions

01:07:43.800 of people, the

01:07:44.560 remaining people in

01:07:45.700 the world, out of

01:07:46.640 abject poverty and

01:07:48.300 the consequence of

01:07:49.160 that would be that

01:07:50.320 they would start to

01:07:51.140 become locally

01:07:52.020 concerned about

01:07:52.880 environmental

01:07:53.580 maintainability and

01:07:55.340 sustainability and

01:07:56.720 then everyone would

01:07:57.400 have enough to eat

01:07:58.220 and they'd all be

01:07:58.880 educated plus the

01:07:59.940 planet would be 0.95

01:08:00.560 better off and

01:08:01.180 then the question

01:08:01.920 was, okay, and

01:08:03.060 here's a question

01:08:04.260 that we can really

01:08:04.900 delve into, why the

01:08:06.280 hell aren't we

01:08:06.960 doing this?

01:08:07.640 It's like instead

01:08:08.480 we're buying this

01:08:09.380 crazy apocalyptic

01:08:10.780 narrative that's

01:08:12.100 making the planet

01:08:12.860 worse, that's

01:08:13.560 driving energy costs

01:08:14.700 up, that's

01:08:15.500 destabilizing us

01:08:16.760 sociopolitically,

01:08:18.260 when as far as I

01:08:19.840 can tell the pathway

01:08:20.800 forward to abundance

01:08:22.400 and sustainability is

01:08:24.800 pretty damn obvious

01:08:26.000 and also not

01:08:27.220 particularly expensive.

01:08:28.860 So what the hell's

01:08:30.260 going on?

01:08:31.740 So I will quote two

01:08:34.360 folks relevant to this.

01:08:36.060 One is H.L.

01:08:37.740 Mencken, who was

01:08:39.460 a journalist writing

01:08:40.580 in the early part

01:08:42.120 of the 20th century

01:08:42.980 in the U.S., very

01:08:45.000 astute, very

01:08:46.340 acerbic, and he's 0.70

01:08:47.880 got a line in one

01:08:48.680 of his books, which

01:08:49.420 I'll try to

01:08:50.060 reproduce, the

01:08:51.340 purpose of

01:08:52.040 practical politics

01:08:53.340 is to keep the

01:08:54.900 electorate alarmed

01:08:56.180 by a series of

01:08:57.680 mostly imaginary

01:08:58.860 hobgoblins so

01:09:00.320 that they can be

01:09:01.060 clamoring to be

01:09:02.340 led to safety.

01:09:03.460 And you see the

01:09:05.440 politicians grabbing

01:09:06.560 on to these issues,

01:09:07.820 whether it's the

01:09:08.640 climate, whether

01:09:09.720 it's immigration,

01:09:11.140 they do it on both

01:09:12.160 sides, right, all

01:09:13.200 sides, the missile

01:09:13.900 gap in the 60s.

01:09:15.860 You know, whatever

01:09:16.480 the truth was behind

01:09:17.760 these, the politicians

01:09:19.120 amp it up in order

01:09:21.000 to get the electorate

01:09:22.160 to actually do

01:09:23.540 something, right?

01:09:24.880 So that's one quote.

01:09:26.820 The second is, there

01:09:28.160 was this guy named

01:09:28.940 Anthony Downs, who

01:09:30.960 was an economist

01:09:31.980 working in the

01:09:33.860 60s through the

01:09:35.060 90s or 2000s.

01:09:36.960 He was first at

01:09:38.500 UCLA and then at

01:09:39.960 Brookings, so he 0.98

01:09:40.720 was quite on the

01:09:41.900 left.

01:09:42.560 Had a number of

01:09:44.120 insights to his

01:09:45.800 credit, but one of

01:09:47.180 them was what he

01:09:48.240 calls the issue

01:09:48.980 attention cycle,

01:09:50.940 namely some issue,

01:09:52.560 whether it's

01:09:53.060 pesticides or climate,

01:09:55.380 bubbles among the

01:09:56.380 experts for a while.

01:09:58.280 Nobody pays much

01:09:59.140 attention to it.

01:09:59.940 It suddenly bursts

01:10:01.540 into the public

01:10:02.960 consciousness, and

01:10:05.180 everybody gets both

01:10:06.960 alarmed but also

01:10:08.380 enthusiastic about the

01:10:10.640 ease with which

01:10:11.460 they're going to

01:10:11.920 solve it.

01:10:12.620 Then everybody

01:10:13.360 discovers, boy, this

01:10:14.880 is going to be really

01:10:15.940 hard to solve, and

01:10:17.560 eventually the issue

01:10:18.680 fades with time or

01:10:21.040 morphs into something

01:10:22.380 else.

01:10:22.960 And I think we are

01:10:24.340 at kind of that

01:10:25.240 third phase now with

01:10:27.100 the climate where

01:10:28.120 everybody is realizing

01:10:28.940 really realizing just

01:10:30.460 how hard, and I

01:10:32.000 would say almost

01:10:32.660 impossible, it's

01:10:33.920 going to be to

01:10:34.860 reduce emissions.

01:10:36.200 Certainly net zero

01:10:37.300 by the end of the

01:10:38.180 century looks like

01:10:39.740 it's just not going

01:10:40.620 to happen at all.

01:10:41.920 And so I think

01:10:43.020 that's what's going

01:10:43.800 on.

01:10:43.960 Well, I'm going to

01:10:45.480 add some psychological

01:10:46.720 layering to that, and

01:10:47.800 you can tell me what

01:10:48.380 you think of this.

01:10:48.920 Well, so first of all,

01:10:50.620 people are tilted

01:10:51.820 towards attention paid

01:10:54.160 to negative events.

01:10:56.040 And so, for example,

01:10:57.980 people are much more

01:10:59.080 hurt by a loss of

01:11:00.340 $5 than they are made

01:11:01.980 happy by a gain of

01:11:03.120 $5.

01:11:03.720 So we're quite

01:11:04.260 loss-sensitive.

01:11:05.320 Now, I think the

01:11:06.700 reason we're loss-sensitive

01:11:08.220 is that, well, you can

01:11:09.860 only be so happy, but

01:11:11.220 you can be 100% dead.

01:11:14.500 And so being more

01:11:15.820 sensitive to threat

01:11:17.180 in terms of magnitude

01:11:19.260 of response per unit

01:11:20.880 of reinforcement makes

01:11:22.140 sense given that we're

01:11:23.240 finite and vulnerable.

01:11:24.440 And then we also have

01:11:25.760 the problem that any

01:11:27.940 given threat, almost

01:11:30.320 any given threat, could

01:11:31.720 in principle be

01:11:33.340 personally and socially

01:11:34.840 apocalyptic.

01:11:36.020 So, for example, it

01:11:38.780 could be the case that

01:11:40.580 the aches and pains

01:11:42.340 that you're experiencing

01:11:43.640 today are the ground

01:11:45.860 zero for an epidemic

01:11:47.080 that'll kill one-third 0.98

01:11:48.460 of the United States,

01:11:49.720 right?

01:11:50.060 I mean, it's very

01:11:50.780 unlikely, but it

01:11:51.620 happened with the

01:11:52.260 Black Death.

01:11:53.140 And, I mean, the

01:11:54.260 possibility of an

01:11:56.020 apocalyptic outcome

01:11:56.980 is always non-zero.

01:11:58.780 And, in fact, in

01:11:59.580 personal life, it's

01:12:00.680 always 100%, because

01:12:02.100 the worst thing that

01:12:03.040 could possibly happen

01:12:04.020 to you will for sure

01:12:05.600 happen to you.

01:12:06.840 And so I think...

01:12:07.140 Will eventually

01:12:07.620 happen.

01:12:08.020 Well, right.

01:12:08.520 And so I think one

01:12:09.300 of our problems is

01:12:10.320 that because we're

01:12:11.620 sensitive to negative

01:12:12.620 information,

01:12:13.640 and because there's

01:12:14.380 always a potential

01:12:15.280 apocalypse bubbling

01:12:17.220 away in the background,

01:12:18.460 it's very hard for us

01:12:20.160 to distinguish

01:12:21.140 collectively between

01:12:22.520 threats that are

01:12:23.380 valid apocalyptically

01:12:25.100 and those that aren't.

01:12:26.460 And then we tend to

01:12:27.340 err on the side of

01:12:28.520 panic, let's say.

01:12:30.240 And that wasn't such

01:12:31.420 a bad thing when

01:12:33.060 our responses weren't

01:12:35.700 as large as the

01:12:36.760 potential problems.

01:12:37.780 Because now what

01:12:38.700 happens is that if we

01:12:39.780 stampede in one

01:12:40.860 direction, we're so

01:12:42.380 powerful that the

01:12:43.280 bloody stampede can 0.92

01:12:44.360 be much worse than

01:12:45.220 the problem.

01:12:46.340 Yeah, absolutely.

01:12:47.780 You know, Bill

01:12:48.380 Nordhaus won a Nobel

01:12:50.020 Prize in economics in

01:12:51.320 2018, I think, for one

01:12:54.100 of the things he won

01:12:54.860 it for was the

01:12:56.060 realization that there's

01:12:57.340 an optimal way in

01:12:59.360 which to decarbonize.

01:13:01.240 If you do it too

01:13:02.380 rapidly, it's too

01:13:03.840 disruptive, and you

01:13:05.360 deploy immature

01:13:06.320 technology.

01:13:07.180 You do it too

01:13:08.360 slowly, carbon dioxide

01:13:09.800 builds up and

01:13:10.660 promotes a greater

01:13:12.000 risk.

01:13:12.680 So I think people

01:13:13.820 need this kind of

01:13:15.120 multi-decade, if not

01:13:17.120 century, perspective

01:13:18.520 on making these

01:13:20.400 changes, but also

01:13:21.740 going back in time

01:13:23.280 the realization that

01:13:24.540 we have managed

01:13:25.940 much worse threats

01:13:28.140 and crises.

01:13:29.640 And as Bjorn

01:13:31.520 Lomborg says, we

01:13:32.420 should cool it a

01:13:33.500 bit.

01:13:34.200 Relax, think it

01:13:35.480 through, and do

01:13:37.080 it in a deliberate

01:13:37.920 manner.

01:13:38.220 Yeah, well, we're

01:13:38.840 also not that good,

01:13:41.580 particularly now, at

01:13:43.500 adopting, say, a

01:13:45.080 few centuries-long

01:13:46.200 time frame.

01:13:46.900 And it's not

01:13:47.280 surprising, because we

01:13:48.100 don't live that long.

01:13:49.100 But, I mean, if you

01:13:50.000 look at medieval

01:13:51.080 Europe, there was the

01:13:53.140 capacity for sustained

01:13:54.420 imagination.

01:13:55.280 So a lot of the

01:13:55.860 great cathedrals, which

01:13:57.040 were amazing engineering

01:13:58.240 projects for their

01:13:59.220 time, were construed

01:14:01.040 over multiple

01:14:02.740 centuries.

01:14:03.740 People who started

01:14:04.500 them knew they

01:14:05.000 wouldn't finish

01:14:05.520 them.

01:14:05.780 So there was that

01:14:06.800 sense of long-term

01:14:09.260 continuity.

01:14:10.080 But maybe one of the

01:14:11.400 byproducts of a very

01:14:12.860 efficient and hyper-productive

01:14:14.640 capitalist society is

01:14:16.280 that we tend to have a

01:14:18.300 shorter time frame for

01:14:19.460 expectation of

01:14:20.380 results.

01:14:21.600 You know, and there's

01:14:22.020 obviously benefits to

01:14:23.180 that, right?

01:14:23.680 Because why the hell not

01:14:24.940 fix the problem in the

01:14:25.980 next quarter if you

01:14:26.960 can?

01:14:27.620 But there's going to be

01:14:28.340 some issues that

01:14:29.420 require a time scale of

01:14:31.240 centuries.

01:14:32.280 I mean, I think the

01:14:32.860 Biden administration...

01:14:33.640 Go ahead.

01:14:35.000 No, we have, you

01:14:37.440 know, been seduced

01:14:38.920 perhaps by the

01:14:40.180 digital revolution

01:14:41.600 where the technologies

01:14:43.480 change every couple

01:14:44.940 years, right?

01:14:45.680 I mean, you know, if

01:14:46.680 you go back a decade

01:14:47.820 or two, we were using

01:14:49.060 eight-track tapes and

01:14:50.820 so on, and now, of

01:14:51.800 course, it's all MP3s

01:14:54.060 or MP4s or whatever.

01:14:56.540 Energy is very

01:14:57.620 different.

01:14:58.880 The systems need to

01:15:00.220 work as a system.

01:15:01.360 The facilities last

01:15:04.020 decades, and we demand

01:15:06.600 high reliability.

01:15:08.580 So energy changes on

01:15:10.780 multi-decade timescales.

01:15:12.740 It doesn't change every

01:15:14.480 year or two.

01:15:15.420 And people have, they

01:15:17.060 have come to expect that

01:15:18.740 things can change

01:15:19.480 rapidly when, in fact,

01:15:21.020 there are good physical

01:15:21.920 and economic reasons why

01:15:23.600 energy cannot change.

01:15:25.580 Right, well, so that's a

01:15:26.920 complex cognitive problem

01:15:28.400 too, right?

01:15:28.940 To be able to

01:15:29.500 distinguish between

01:15:30.520 those problems that are

01:15:31.680 amenable to rapid

01:15:32.720 solution and those

01:15:34.160 problems that aren't,

01:15:35.260 that's not a trivial

01:15:36.300 cognitive exercise.

01:15:37.700 It's not obvious a

01:15:38.740 primary, especially if

01:15:39.640 you don't have

01:15:40.020 specialized knowledge.

01:15:42.260 Right, or if you

01:15:43.500 don't have experience,

01:15:44.540 I mean, not to knock

01:15:45.700 the younger generation,

01:15:46.840 I have three kids

01:15:47.520 myself, and, you

01:15:48.500 know, they're all

01:15:49.920 wonderful people.

01:15:50.720 But if you're a 22-year-old

01:15:53.380 just having graduated

01:15:54.580 from undergraduate

01:15:56.480 education, you don't

01:15:58.920 have the perspective.

01:16:00.200 I certainly didn't.

01:16:02.220 And getting this

01:16:03.220 perspective through

01:16:04.200 life experience, through

01:16:05.720 reading more and

01:16:06.760 understanding more about

01:16:08.220 the world, gives you a

01:16:09.960 different view of these

01:16:11.440 things.

01:16:11.940 Some people say that,

01:16:13.060 you know, you and I

01:16:13.940 will not be around to

01:16:15.360 see the worst

01:16:16.060 consequences of climate

01:16:17.840 change.

01:16:18.460 But we have seen the

01:16:20.620 world navigate far more

01:16:22.280 difficult problems.

01:16:23.040 Yes, yes.

01:16:23.820 And to do it

01:16:24.680 successfully, not

01:16:26.160 without pain and

01:16:28.000 turmoil, but we will

01:16:30.700 persist as a species.

01:16:32.060 Well, yes, and I mean,

01:16:33.000 I would say that things

01:16:34.440 have turned out quite a

01:16:35.840 lot better than I

01:16:37.780 presumed they would

01:16:38.960 when I was young.

01:16:40.620 I mean, and how old

01:16:41.980 are you, Dr.

01:16:42.840 Coonan?

01:16:43.560 I'm 71.

01:16:44.780 Okay, so you're about,

01:16:45.820 you're 11 years older

01:16:46.900 than me.

01:16:47.480 So, you know, both of

01:16:49.420 us grew up in the

01:16:50.280 Cold War era, and I

01:16:51.940 would say our apocalypse

01:16:53.200 was probably nuclear.

01:16:55.500 And it seems to me that

01:16:56.840 we had more reason to

01:16:58.460 assume that the nuclear

01:16:59.580 threat was a genuine

01:17:00.960 apocalyptic nightmare

01:17:02.140 than the climate

01:17:03.900 apocalypse have now,

01:17:05.440 given what happened in

01:17:06.580 the Cuban Missile Crisis

01:17:07.640 and then again in the

01:17:08.420 1980s.

01:17:09.060 We were damn close a

01:17:10.160 couple of times, and we

01:17:11.260 might be on the

01:17:11.900 threshold now with

01:17:12.800 regards to this war with

01:17:13.960 Russia.

01:17:14.400 So who the hell knows? 0.56

01:17:15.760 Right.

01:17:15.940 But it was certainly

01:17:18.040 the case that among

01:17:18.920 people in my

01:17:21.340 generation, there were

01:17:22.920 a substantial number

01:17:24.120 of young people who

01:17:25.500 were seriously affected

01:17:27.340 enough psychologically

01:17:28.440 by the ever-present

01:17:30.020 threat of nuclear war,

01:17:31.260 let's say, to be very

01:17:32.380 demoralized and

01:17:33.760 disenchanted about the

01:17:34.880 future.

01:17:35.380 To think, well, why

01:17:36.180 the hell bother?

01:17:37.000 Because the probability

01:17:37.940 we're going to end up

01:17:38.740 in a nuclear winter is

01:17:39.860 so high that it's just

01:17:41.400 pointless to do

01:17:42.200 anything.

01:17:42.540 And then there was

01:17:43.860 the usual murmurings

01:17:45.560 in the background about

01:17:46.400 overpopulation and so

01:17:47.720 forth and coming

01:17:48.720 scarcity and all of

01:17:50.380 that.

01:17:50.820 And then really what's

01:17:52.320 happened since then is

01:17:54.180 that pretty much

01:17:56.060 everything globally has

01:17:57.340 got way better than

01:17:58.380 anybody could have

01:17:59.100 possibly imagined.

01:18:00.860 Right?

01:18:01.180 Absolutely.

01:18:01.960 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:02.560 And in very surprising

01:18:03.920 ways.

01:18:04.580 So not only is the

01:18:05.520 planet greener, but

01:18:06.520 it's much better fed.

01:18:07.660 And obesity is a way

01:18:08.720 bigger problem than

01:18:09.680 starvation.

01:18:10.320 And starvation almost

01:18:12.380 never occurs except for

01:18:13.560 political reasons.

01:18:14.680 And I mean, we're

01:18:15.700 Distribution issues.

01:18:16.700 Yeah, exactly.

01:18:17.460 Exactly.

01:18:18.080 And so, you know, all

01:18:19.580 things.

01:18:19.960 Literacy has gone up,

01:18:21.300 communications, mobility,

01:18:23.600 health, longevity.

01:18:25.320 I mean, as I said, over

01:18:26.740 120 years, the world has

01:18:28.240 improved like it has

01:18:29.360 never improved before.

01:18:32.820 Yeah.

01:18:33.180 So then we have, and I

01:18:35.020 mean, it's not like we're 0.97

01:18:35.960 getting stupider. 0.97

01:18:36.680 And I'm a bit concerned 1.00

01:18:38.320 on the AI front, you

01:18:39.820 know, but so far, the

01:18:42.040 additional computational

01:18:43.480 resources we've been able

01:18:44.800 to put at our disposal have

01:18:46.060 been used in a fairly

01:18:47.000 intelligent way.

01:18:47.960 I mean, China is kind of

01:18:49.160 worrisome on the

01:18:49.860 totalitarian front and

01:18:51.260 the nexus.

01:18:52.460 But it isn't obvious to

01:18:53.820 me that China is going to

01:18:54.800 be particularly successful

01:18:56.120 in their totalitarian

01:18:57.280 ambitions.

01:18:58.120 The Chinese themselves 0.58

01:18:59.240 seem to be getting pretty

01:19:00.400 damn sick of having the

01:19:01.560 state interfere with 0.99

01:19:02.400 absolutely everything they

01:19:03.680 do every second of their

01:19:04.920 lives.

01:19:05.300 So I could easily see

01:19:07.520 China undergoing a

01:19:08.720 collapse that's something

01:19:09.880 akin to what happened to

01:19:11.000 the Soviet Union in

01:19:12.060 1989.

01:19:13.480 That system is just too

01:19:14.660 damn unwieldy.

01:19:15.860 And, you know, you see 0.99

01:19:17.720 these people in Iran

01:19:19.140 clamoring away for

01:19:20.440 freedom.

01:19:21.000 And so, you know, maybe

01:19:22.760 we'll see a positive

01:19:23.580 development on that front.

01:19:24.860 That might be nice.

01:19:25.840 And so I just don't see

01:19:27.460 any, okay, first of all,

01:19:28.920 I don't see any reason for

01:19:30.060 an apocalyptic outlook.

01:19:31.300 Look, we could make

01:19:32.460 things a hell of a lot

01:19:33.240 better than they are now.

01:19:34.700 Very, very.

01:19:36.380 Absolutely.

01:19:37.180 Now, who do you see

01:19:38.420 operating at the

01:19:39.440 international level on

01:19:40.680 the leadership front that

01:19:42.560 you regard as, or do you

01:19:44.340 see anyone, that you

01:19:45.540 regard as a credible 0.51

01:19:46.780 advocate for, like, a

01:19:50.120 sensible nexus of

01:19:51.860 environment and energy

01:19:52.980 policies?

01:19:54.540 You know, it's very

01:19:56.300 tough to find that

01:19:57.380 because if you speak out

01:19:59.700 against the prevailing

01:20:01.120 catastrophe narrative,

01:20:04.260 you get shouted down

01:20:05.760 and you get no

01:20:07.640 traction at all.

01:20:09.000 But what I do think

01:20:10.500 is that, again, there

01:20:12.560 are techno-economic

01:20:13.940 realities that will

01:20:16.260 eventually cause the

01:20:18.480 system to do the

01:20:19.720 right thing.

01:20:20.520 I talk in private to

01:20:22.340 leaders of energy

01:20:23.180 companies, to

01:20:24.240 politicians, finance

01:20:26.580 folks, and I think if

01:20:29.180 you and I were having

01:20:30.380 that conversation with

01:20:31.540 them in private, there

01:20:33.640 wouldn't be too much

01:20:34.440 disagreement.

01:20:36.360 But many of these

01:20:37.860 leaders feel captive or

01:20:40.580 beholden, not to

01:20:42.120 shareholders, but to

01:20:43.280 stakeholders, and they

01:20:45.520 dare not say anything

01:20:47.680 that is off the

01:20:50.080 narrative.

01:20:50.520 A lot of that's just

01:20:51.760 straight outright

01:20:52.760 cowardice in my

01:20:53.620 explanation.

01:20:53.720 I mean, you wrote this

01:20:58.880 book, Unsettled, and

01:20:59.800 people went after you,

01:21:00.800 but look at you.

01:21:01.500 You're alive.

01:21:02.260 You seem to be

01:21:02.920 thriving.

01:21:03.680 Your book was quite

01:21:04.500 successful.

01:21:05.360 I mean, how did you

01:21:06.460 escape the apocalyptic

01:21:09.180 consequences of cancel

01:21:10.620 culture?

01:21:11.540 How did you manage that?

01:21:14.060 I think one of the

01:21:16.880 foundations of the book

01:21:19.660 or one of the

01:21:20.180 principles when I wrote

01:21:21.260 it is that I would

01:21:22.580 only use material that

01:21:24.660 was out of the IPCC

01:21:26.160 reports or the quality

01:21:28.040 research literature or

01:21:29.820 the primary data

01:21:30.860 itself.

01:21:31.920 In other words, I

01:21:32.760 wasn't making anything

01:21:33.820 up.

01:21:34.260 It's all traceable back

01:21:35.860 to those gold standard

01:21:38.140 sources.

01:21:39.320 And so people can

01:21:40.460 accuse me, as they have,

01:21:41.660 of cherry picking or

01:21:43.340 not telling the whole

01:21:44.300 story.

01:21:45.200 Of course, I have

01:21:45.760 responses to all of

01:21:47.000 that.

01:21:47.680 But by and large, they

01:21:49.400 have a very hard time

01:21:50.740 criticizing what I've

01:21:52.280 written.

01:21:53.360 They can criticize me,

01:21:54.760 show for the oil

01:21:55.520 industry, not a climate

01:21:57.720 scientist, a denier,

01:22:00.020 et cetera, et cetera.

01:22:01.440 But by and large, I've

01:22:04.320 only gotten very

01:22:05.140 positive reactions from

01:22:07.200 other people who've

01:22:08.120 actually read the book.

01:22:09.800 I mean, I can tell you

01:22:10.680 stories about some of

01:22:12.100 the nonsense criticisms

01:22:13.380 that are involved at me.

01:22:14.700 But I mean, you've been

01:22:15.860 able to do this and,

01:22:17.380 you know, you haven't

01:22:18.720 been like hung and drawn

01:22:20.420 and quartered by the

01:22:21.460 horrible mob.

01:22:22.360 I know that being mobbed

01:22:24.040 can be very unpleasant.

01:22:25.200 And I know many people

01:22:27.040 who've been canceled.

01:22:28.180 And it's a life-changing

01:22:29.640 experience.

01:22:30.380 So I'm not trying to

01:22:31.140 minimize that.

01:22:31.880 But you'd hope that there

01:22:33.280 would be a modicum of

01:22:34.840 courage on the political

01:22:35.800 front so that some people

01:22:37.080 could come out and say,

01:22:38.040 well, you know, we don't

01:22:38.880 really need to go down 1.00

01:22:39.840 this idiot limits to 1.00

01:22:41.520 growth route that we've 1.00

01:22:43.380 been pursuing expensively

01:22:45.540 and counterproductively for

01:22:46.740 60 years.

01:22:47.420 We could just do what we

01:22:49.020 could to make energy more

01:22:50.160 abundant and cleaner and

01:22:51.480 cheaper for poor people.

01:22:52.760 And we could raise their

01:22:54.340 sites to the future.

01:22:57.200 And as the measures that

01:22:59.920 governments are implementing

01:23:01.520 to try to get to that

01:23:03.500 unattainable future, whether

01:23:06.020 it's bans on internal

01:23:07.280 combustion engines or

01:23:09.120 increased renewables that are

01:23:10.740 going to make the grid

01:23:11.460 expensive and unreliable,

01:23:13.060 eventually people will be

01:23:16.860 impacted directly and

01:23:19.080 they'll be mad because it's

01:23:21.160 not being done in a

01:23:22.160 graceful or thoughtful way.

01:23:23.740 And I think people will

01:23:24.660 then say, why are we doing

01:23:25.940 all this again?

01:23:27.600 You know, the U.S.

01:23:28.660 is only 13% of global

01:23:30.740 emissions.

01:23:32.160 And if the U.S.

01:23:32.840 went to zero emissions

01:23:34.300 tomorrow, it would be

01:23:36.900 negated by a decade's worth

01:23:38.840 of growth in the rest of the

01:23:40.540 world.

01:23:41.680 And so, you know, the best

01:23:43.580 thing the U.S. can do is

01:23:44.600 develop technologies, right,

01:23:46.460 to try to get there and not

01:23:48.480 make massive changes itself.

01:23:50.660 Well, it's also the case that

01:23:52.080 the U.S. did lower its

01:23:53.520 carbon output by a

01:23:54.620 substantial amount.

01:23:55.440 And the reason for that was

01:23:56.440 fracking, which is not

01:23:57.880 something that any of the

01:23:58.920 environmental apocalypse

01:23:59.960 would have predicted.

01:24:01.260 In fact, quite the

01:24:01.940 contrary.

01:24:02.300 That's the major reason, the

01:24:05.420 substitution of gas for coal.

01:24:07.360 But another reason is that

01:24:08.820 the renewables have grown.

01:24:10.540 In electricity generation

01:24:11.940 in the U.S.

01:24:12.840 I don't know the exact

01:24:14.120 number now, but wind is

01:24:15.340 something like 13% of U.S.

01:24:17.800 electricity generation.

01:24:19.420 It's got reliability issues.

01:24:21.040 It's got land issues.

01:24:22.220 It's got materials issues.

01:24:23.780 But that's another reason

01:24:25.640 emissions have come down

01:24:26.680 somewhat.

01:24:28.000 Right.

01:24:28.640 So you're, so all things

01:24:30.860 considered, you've remained

01:24:32.580 fundamentally optimistic.

01:24:33.880 You think that's a

01:24:34.620 temperamental characteristic,

01:24:35.740 or do you think that was

01:24:36.900 driven by your exploration

01:24:39.860 of the on-the-ground

01:24:40.940 realities?

01:24:41.660 And then I want to talk to

01:24:42.860 you, too, about, you know,

01:24:43.940 you said you've been accused

01:24:45.020 of not being a climate

01:24:46.360 scientist.

01:24:46.960 And first of all, I don't

01:24:48.300 think there's such a thing

01:24:49.460 as a climate scientist,

01:24:51.380 right?

01:24:51.620 I mean, that's not a

01:24:53.020 category that a scientist

01:24:54.380 falls into.

01:24:55.600 Your basic training was in

01:24:57.800 physics, so maybe we'll

01:24:59.280 return to that just for a

01:25:00.420 moment.

01:25:01.040 What makes you a credible

01:25:03.060 observer on that front?

01:25:04.320 But let's deal with the

01:25:05.420 first issue first.

01:25:07.400 You know, I think

01:25:08.580 temperamentally I'm

01:25:10.020 optimistic.

01:25:11.760 My mother, who's still

01:25:13.400 with us at age 91,

01:25:16.240 was the youngest by about

01:25:19.100 15 years of four

01:25:21.740 children.

01:25:23.320 And she grew up and

01:25:25.080 still has incredible

01:25:26.360 optimism about things.

01:25:28.360 So I think it's partly in my

01:25:30.400 psychological DNA.

01:25:32.200 But, you know, it's also

01:25:34.760 I'm very quantitative.

01:25:37.040 I do numbers.

01:25:38.520 And when you look at the

01:25:40.380 numbers, which are, you

01:25:42.480 know, somebody once said,

01:25:43.740 I think it was Kelvin or

01:25:45.580 Rutherford, unless you can

01:25:47.880 express it in numbers,

01:25:48.820 your knowledge is of the

01:25:49.780 most meager kind.

01:25:51.760 And so most people don't do

01:25:54.000 that, but I do.

01:25:54.900 And I've dug into the

01:25:55.880 climate and energy story.

01:25:57.200 And when you look at the

01:25:58.280 numbers, as I think you said

01:25:59.560 a while ago, it's not so

01:26:01.140 bad.

01:26:02.540 There's no apocalypse

01:26:03.840 in the future.

01:26:07.080 Yes, there are issues, but

01:26:08.700 we will navigate them.

01:26:10.320 So I think it is a

01:26:11.740 combination of both being

01:26:13.560 informed, but also being

01:26:14.860 naturally optimistic.

01:26:16.840 Right.

01:26:17.120 Well, that bit of a tilt

01:26:18.200 towards optimism is what

01:26:19.600 moves people out into the

01:26:20.680 world.

01:26:20.900 And, you know, I also

01:26:21.740 don't know so much if

01:26:22.980 that's properly

01:26:23.720 characterized as optimism

01:26:25.020 or something characterized

01:26:27.160 more accurately, let's say,

01:26:29.300 as useful faith.

01:26:32.160 I mean, there are reasons

01:26:33.540 to assume that things will

01:26:34.660 go to hell in a handbasket, 0.99

01:26:35.880 but there's reasons to 0.99

01:26:36.880 assume that we could manage

01:26:38.760 as well as we have in the

01:26:40.200 past or better.

01:26:41.520 And I think that one of the

01:26:43.100 attributes that tilts us

01:26:45.540 towards managing well in the

01:26:47.500 future is the willingness to

01:26:49.600 have some faith in our

01:26:50.720 ability to adapt and to do

01:26:52.300 the right thing.

01:26:53.720 And, you know, when we're

01:26:55.780 constantly presenting young

01:26:57.240 people with the picture of

01:26:58.420 human beings as destructive 1.00

01:26:59.960 environmental and cultural

01:27:01.320 forces, we squash that

01:27:03.660 natural faith, which is,

01:27:05.660 well, yeah, there's problems

01:27:06.740 because being alive is a

01:27:08.080 problem, but we have a host of

01:27:10.520 potential solutions at hand

01:27:12.360 and we're not without resources

01:27:15.260 in the face of our challenges

01:27:16.740 and the resources are

01:27:17.960 multiplying.

01:27:18.360 This is the second immoral

01:27:21.400 dimension of what the

01:27:23.100 current scene looks like.

01:27:24.920 Not only are we trying to

01:27:27.440 deny six and a half billion

01:27:29.200 people adequate, reliable,

01:27:32.140 affordable energy, but we are

01:27:34.000 particularly in the West

01:27:35.440 depressing the younger

01:27:37.360 generation in a most

01:27:39.120 unreasonable way.

01:27:40.220 They don't want to have

01:27:40.820 children.

01:27:41.380 They think the world is going

01:27:42.360 to go to hell in the next 0.99

01:27:43.360 10 years and so on. 1.00

01:27:45.040 That's complete nonsense.

01:27:46.080 And somebody needs to stand

01:27:48.460 up and say that.

01:27:50.040 And not only do they not

01:27:51.060 want to have children, they

01:27:51.860 don't even want to have

01:27:52.500 sex.

01:27:53.480 I mean, we've really 0.61

01:27:54.300 demoralized a whole

01:27:55.500 generation.

01:27:56.320 And, you know, there is

01:27:57.460 something terribly immoral

01:27:58.620 about that because my

01:28:00.100 hypothesis is that if you

01:28:02.120 think poor people should 1.00

01:28:03.340 starve because energy prices

01:28:04.940 should go up and if you

01:28:06.000 think that demoralizing

01:28:07.260 young people is a good way

01:28:08.940 to ensure the long-term

01:28:09.980 sustainability of the

01:28:11.160 planet, you and I are not

01:28:12.840 on the same side.

01:28:14.960 Not even a little bit.

01:28:16.080 Like, I think it's

01:28:17.240 absolutely reprehensible

01:28:18.440 that we're casting people

01:28:19.520 back into poverty, both

01:28:20.780 in the West, because we're

01:28:22.020 doing that to poor people

01:28:23.100 who are marginal now, but

01:28:24.540 more importantly in the

01:28:25.740 developing world.

01:28:26.800 And this continued

01:28:27.660 demoralization is

01:28:28.920 absolutely inexcusable.

01:28:31.000 I would love to engage

01:28:33.740 with some of the leaders.

01:28:36.020 John Kerry, Bill Gates, my

01:28:38.920 former friend and colleague

01:28:40.480 Ernie Moniz, who was

01:28:41.560 Secretary of Energy, a very

01:28:42.800 good Secretary of Energy,

01:28:43.900 all of whom are on the

01:28:45.940 moralimist side of these

01:28:48.260 things, I'd love to have

01:28:49.940 this kind of conversation

01:28:51.400 with them and ask them

01:28:52.900 about those two immoral

01:28:55.080 dimensions.

01:28:55.900 It's very hard to get a

01:28:58.160 serious discussion.

01:29:00.340 I recently have done four

01:29:02.740 debates with credible people

01:29:05.440 on the other side, presented

01:29:07.840 the arguments against rapid

01:29:10.660 decarbonization, and I'm proud

01:29:12.700 to say I won all four

01:29:14.280 debates by the audience.

01:29:15.480 We should put those in the

01:29:16.380 links to the description, so

01:29:18.200 if you could send those.

01:29:20.020 Yeah, I will send those

01:29:21.580 to you.

01:29:22.680 So the first one was against

01:29:25.000 a climate scientist from

01:29:26.660 Texas A&M, Andrew

01:29:28.380 Dessler, who is much more

01:29:31.160 of a climate scientist than

01:29:32.340 he is an energy guy, and you

01:29:33.660 need both here.

01:29:35.860 The second debate was, and

01:29:38.040 probably in my view the best

01:29:39.760 one, was against Daniel

01:29:41.800 Schrag, who's a professor of

01:29:43.860 earth sciences at Harvard, and

01:29:45.960 has been and still remains a

01:29:47.980 good friend and colleague.

01:29:49.860 The third was against an

01:29:52.120 energy economist at Columbia

01:29:54.560 named Gernot Wagner, and then

01:29:57.620 the fourth was again against

01:29:59.660 Andrew Dessler, who wanted a

01:30:01.700 rematch.

01:30:02.140 And so these, the problem

01:30:05.100 with talking about this is you

01:30:07.040 need to understand both the

01:30:08.400 climate science and the energy

01:30:10.600 side.

01:30:11.920 And there aren't many people, by

01:30:13.440 virtue of my background, I have

01:30:15.480 perhaps been exposed to both in

01:30:17.920 ways that most people have not.

01:30:19.440 Right, right.

01:30:19.900 Well, that's another problem with

01:30:21.480 regards to, let's say, public

01:30:23.880 opinion, is that, well, first of

01:30:26.780 all, most people aren't climate

01:30:28.680 scientists, that's for sure.

01:30:30.460 In fact, they're a very small

01:30:32.180 percentage of the population.

01:30:34.120 And then, as you pointed out, if

01:30:35.720 you add the additional

01:30:36.780 requirement of having some

01:30:38.600 expertise on the energy front,

01:30:40.440 you're taking a very small

01:30:41.800 fraction of a very small

01:30:43.020 fraction of people.

01:30:44.580 And maybe you can count them

01:30:45.900 on, I don't know, maybe they're

01:30:48.340 in the, maybe there's under a

01:30:50.200 hundred of them in the world.

01:30:51.780 There just aren't that many.

01:30:53.720 And so, you know, part of, part

01:30:55.060 of this is also the case that the

01:30:57.160 whole species is starting to

01:30:59.420 wrestle with problems of a level

01:31:02.720 of abstraction and a level of

01:31:04.520 magnitude that are really

01:31:05.640 unforeseen, right?

01:31:07.200 And so we don't, when I worked

01:31:09.480 for the UN committees that were

01:31:11.120 working on the sustainable

01:31:12.200 goals, one of the first things I

01:31:14.140 realized was, oh, no one's an

01:31:17.440 expert in sustainable

01:31:18.600 development.

01:31:19.480 That's not an area of

01:31:21.460 expertise.

01:31:22.380 No one knows how to do this.

01:31:24.060 And so we are, in some sense,

01:31:25.700 casting around in the dark.

01:31:26.960 And part of the problem with

01:31:28.380 that is we do fall into our

01:31:29.840 apocalyptic heuristics very, very

01:31:31.700 easily, especially if that can be

01:31:33.220 weaponized for political purposes.

01:31:35.180 But it's a little hard on young

01:31:36.220 people.

01:31:36.700 It's a little hard on poor people.

01:31:38.920 But, you know, you need to

01:31:40.100 approach these problems with an

01:31:41.700 inquisitive mind because there are

01:31:43.440 so many different dimensions and

01:31:44.860 you want to go out and learn enough

01:31:46.900 about them to be able to ask the

01:31:49.440 right kind of questions to the

01:31:50.860 experts.

01:31:51.300 Yeah, well, you know, the other

01:31:52.240 thing we do to young people, this

01:31:53.640 really made me disenchanted in some

01:31:55.720 ways with what was happening in

01:31:57.180 universities, there were many

01:31:58.400 reasons for that disenchantment.

01:31:59.860 But, you know, the other thing that

01:32:02.140 we convince young people of right

01:32:05.260 when they're in their messianic

01:32:06.920 phase, that's a Piagetian

01:32:08.480 developmental stage between about

01:32:10.040 16 and 20, is that the way forward

01:32:13.160 morally to take your place in

01:32:15.340 broader society is by taking the

01:32:17.680 route of political activism.

01:32:19.540 And that basically means that what

01:32:21.280 you do to be a moral person is to

01:32:23.960 identify the perpetrators of the

01:32:26.000 apocalyptic catastrophe and then go

01:32:28.340 make life miserable for them.

01:32:30.220 Instead of teaching young people that

01:32:32.920 no, you should actually spend a few

01:32:35.280 decades developing the knowledge

01:32:37.320 necessary to make some real progress

01:32:39.160 on these fronts, you shouldn't assume

01:32:40.840 that there's some cabal of enemies

01:32:42.960 that you've identified when you're

01:32:44.660 18 and you certainly shouldn't assume

01:32:47.180 that the mere fact that you're out

01:32:48.700 waving a placard and protesting means

01:32:50.740 that you're on the right side of

01:32:52.120 history or even on your own, or even

01:32:54.140 in relationship to your own

01:32:55.280 psychological development.

01:32:56.440 So my interaction with young people

01:32:59.700 these days is mostly through the

01:33:01.260 courses I teach at NYU.

01:33:03.080 I teach climate and then energy, two

01:33:06.960 separate courses to master's level

01:33:09.000 students.

01:33:09.860 And fortunately, I think already there

01:33:12.440 are a mix of engineers and MBAs, so

01:33:15.160 they have this desire to actually do

01:33:18.200 something positive rather than simply,

01:33:21.480 as you say, wave flags and complain

01:33:23.780 about what's being done.

01:33:25.840 And what I find in both courses is how

01:33:29.380 much the eyes get opened up.

01:33:32.240 Whether it's about the climate science,

01:33:34.180 which I teach almost entirely out of the

01:33:37.140 IPCC and the research literature, or the

01:33:41.420 energy, which I teach, you know, both the

01:33:44.080 technologies, the business, the regulation,

01:33:46.480 and so on.

01:33:48.100 And, you know, I think it's gratifying to

01:33:51.580 see eyes open up.

01:33:52.540 That's one of the great benefits of being

01:33:54.700 a teacher, as you know.

01:33:56.600 But also it shows to me that people can

01:34:00.560 spend a little bit of time to learn some of

01:34:02.920 these basics and then be critically

01:34:06.220 questioning, inquisitive about these very

01:34:09.700 complicated but important subjects.

01:34:11.240 Right. Well, and it's also very heartening to

01:34:13.220 know that you can do that at NYU and that

01:34:15.280 that's working.

01:34:16.500 Yeah. You know, when I was about to

01:34:19.360 publish the book, I sent the manuscript to

01:34:22.660 both the president and the provost, whom I

01:34:25.060 know well, since former academic

01:34:26.860 administrators tend to hang out together.

01:34:30.340 And their response was, you know, Steve, I

01:34:33.380 don't know if I agree with everything you've

01:34:35.100 written, but you've got a right to say it and

01:34:37.060 we support that.

01:34:37.720 Well, thank God for that.

01:34:38.900 So, all right. Well, look, that's probably a

01:34:41.800 good place, time to close.

01:34:43.080 We're at about the end of our 90 minutes

01:34:44.940 here on YouTube.

01:34:45.960 I'm going to talk to Dr.

01:34:47.800 Coonan a bit more on the Daily Wire Plus

01:34:49.580 platform. As many of you who are watching

01:34:51.780 and listening know, I like to take my

01:34:53.900 guests and do some investigation into their

01:34:56.540 particular biography because I think it's

01:34:58.240 useful for people to hear about how

01:35:00.240 people's successful destiny makes itself

01:35:04.040 manifest in their lives.

01:35:05.360 And it also helps please me on the clinical

01:35:09.120 front because I like finding out about

01:35:10.680 people's lives.

01:35:11.460 And so we're going to switch over to the

01:35:12.760 Daily Wire Plus platform to do that for

01:35:14.600 about half an hour.

01:35:15.940 Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to

01:35:17.920 me today and for bringing what you know to

01:35:19.740 the attention of all the people who will be

01:35:21.320 watching this and listening across the podcast

01:35:24.100 platforms and on YouTube.

01:35:25.460 And it's quite positive to be speaking with so

01:35:31.320 many people who are knowledgeable now about

01:35:34.500 the climate apocalypse and who have drawn the

01:35:39.240 conclusion that this is something that we can

01:35:41.060 handle and that we could handle in a very good

01:35:43.320 way if we were even remotely careful.

01:35:46.360 And hopefully that will be, as you pointed out,

01:35:50.160 maybe the tide is starting to turn on this and

01:35:52.280 we're going to start to understand that we can

01:35:54.240 think in terms of centuries and that we can

01:35:55.980 actually manage this.

01:35:58.360 Hello, everyone.

01:35:59.220 I would encourage you to continue listening to

01:36:01.760 my conversation with my guest on

01:36:04.180 dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - January 16, 2023

323. Unsettled： Climate and Science ｜ Dr. Steven Koonin

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