00:02:21.680i'm also an advocate for uh abundant energy i've been an environmental advocate for 30 years
00:02:28.640and i'm also uh in the last few years i've become advocate i've become an advocate of
00:02:34.260of expanding uh drug and psychiatric care for people that are homeless and leading a helping
00:02:42.820to lead a national increasingly national coalition to address the addiction and psychiatric crisis
00:02:48.760in north america oh interesting okay i didn't know that you were interested in that okay we
00:02:54.560could talk about that as well sure what are you doing politically nowadays well you may know that
00:02:59.820i ran for governor in california and i came in third which was on the one hand really exciting
00:03:06.080because that's more than any independent candidate had ever received as governor
00:03:09.480we only had a three we only ran we were only we got in super late so we only had a few months
00:03:13.980on campaign but also disappointing because we didn't make the runoff and so we weren't able
00:03:18.300to fully kind of call the questions on the future of California, which is, you know, has a bunch of
00:03:24.560big issues around homelessness being maybe the biggest one, but also around energy and water.
00:03:29.460So I'm a political independent. As a young man, I was on the radical left. I've become more
00:03:36.000moderate, obviously, since then, but also have felt like the left has gone crazy over the last
00:03:41.480decade or so. So now I identify as an independent, and I am not a member of any political party.
00:03:48.300Cool. So do you think the issues California is facing, you think the major issue is homelessness?
00:03:54.920Well, if I had to really get to the bottom of it, I would say the main issue is nihilism.
00:03:59.340It's the, I think we're dealing with the consequences of people who are trying to do with their politics what religion used to do, and they're doing so unknowingly.
00:04:12.260And so one of the I just published a piece today where I described that, you know, people, you know, particularly Democrats, progressives, they say things that are just obviously false about climate change.
00:04:22.980They say that it's increasing natural disasters. It's not doing that.
00:04:27.400Natural disasters are actually going down because deaths from extreme weather events are going down.
00:04:31.880The cost of extreme weather events are going down. So the number of disasters is going down.
00:04:35.480They claim that they are that, you know, renewables can power the world and that renewables are already cost effective or cheaper than existing power, even as they demand huge subsidies for renewables.
00:04:49.720So they're, you know, and sometimes it's deliberate.
00:04:52.260They know that they're being misleading.
00:04:53.940But other times I think they're just in the grip of a religion, but they don't think of it as a religion at all.
00:04:57.920They think they're just telling the truth.
00:04:59.460So I think that part of what is going on in California is that we're dealing with a very progressive state, a very progressive population.
00:05:05.480that, you know, no longer believes in traditional religion, they moved away from all of that,
00:05:09.760whether, you know, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, but they've ended up creating a
00:05:14.980new religion out of wokeism. And of wokeism, one of the sub variants, of course, is apocalyptic
00:05:20.460environmentalism, but also it includes this obsession with race, this obsession with sexual
00:05:25.400identity. And so I would say that's the underlying problem is that we keep undermining the bases of
00:05:32.220civilization out of this what i'm calling progressive nihilism that also happens to be
00:05:37.000the name of the third book in this trilogy that i'm writing which started with apocalypse never
00:05:41.460and then was san francisco last year and will be progressive nihilism in 2024
00:05:45.660oh that's that's exciting hopefully that'll help people uh how much yeah yeah hopefully well san
00:05:53.640francisco is very interesting i enjoyed that a lot i'd recommend that that was fun that was a great
00:05:58.940title too. Thank you. Can you describe a bit about what's going on in Europe in regards to energy?
00:06:04.900Because I think a lot of people here don't really understand the ramifications of increased energy
00:06:09.960prices or why the energy prices increased in the first place. Sure. So Europe is in the worst
00:06:16.060energy crisis at least in 50 years, but maybe in its entire history. It made a decision 10,
00:06:23.62020 years ago, the big countries did, that they were going to reduce their reliance on nuclear
00:06:28.960power plants, also on coal plants, and they were going to rely more on natural gas imported from
00:06:34.900Russia and more on solar panels and wind turbines, mostly imported from China. And so what we saw is
00:06:42.240that Europe produced three times more natural gas than Russia did 15 years ago, but those numbers
00:06:49.420totally changed. And so Europe now has become completely dependent on Russia for natural gas.
00:06:55.520There was already an energy crisis last year that was brewing, but it has worsened now because
00:07:02.900Russia in retaliation for Europe's support of Ukraine has basically cut off almost all
00:07:08.720natural gas to Europe. And the continent is supposed to shut off its petroleum or oil
00:07:14.360imports as well. So, you know, there's a lot of people that say, well, Europe is going to be able
00:07:19.080get through the winter, they've saved up enough natural gas, but that overlooks something really
00:07:23.620important, which is that they don't have enough natural gas to support the industries that depend
00:07:28.680on natural gas. And that includes things like aluminum, steel, glass, plastics, fertilizers.
00:07:36.180So the consequences are extremely serious, not just for Europe. In Europe, about 70% of the
00:07:42.160fertilizer production has gone down, has shut down. So they're only producing somewhere between
00:07:47.10020 and 30% of the fertilizers they were producing. That means that we're just going to produce less
00:07:52.220food. And that means that there's going to be hunger. Estimated 350 million people are going
00:07:55.900to die of hunger-related diseases this year. Those numbers are going to go up. It's going to
00:08:00.040only get worse over the next several years. We see that about half the steel production
00:08:04.640is shut down in Europe. So what's really happening that's terrifying, should be terrifying
00:08:09.720to people that care about Europe, is that they're de-industrializing. We're going to actually do
00:08:14.820really well in the United States and Canada because we have abundant oil and gas and abundant
00:08:19.660energy. And so a lot of those fertilizer, steel manufacturing companies are going to come from
00:08:24.140Europe and relocate into the United States. But those of us, anybody that cares about Europe
00:08:28.100should be very concerned about what's going on right now. And of course, Americans, we have an
00:08:31.860obligation, a treaty obligation to protect Europe in terms of national security. But if they don't
00:08:37.380have sufficient energy, then it creates all sorts of risks to them in terms of national security.
00:08:42.380So if there's a treaty obligation, then are we in some way obligated to provide natural gas?
00:08:49.500No, only no. I mean, that's the that's the reason we're not. I mean, if it were, then we would be doing it, I presume. But no, I mean, it's more like, you know, Ukraine obviously was not part of the EU or part of NATO.
00:09:01.020So when Russia invaded the United States, Europe and the United States didn't really have any basis to defend it.
00:09:06.940It ended up supporting it with arms. You know, the concern, of course, is that it would somehow entangle the United States or Europe in that war.
00:09:14.660And you sort of see Russia now threatening, making all sorts of threats because they've had some setbacks.
00:09:19.080But it's more like, you know, it's more like the kind of thing you worry about is that Europe ends up in a situation like it was in before World War Two,
00:09:26.680where you end up in a severe economic depression, you end up with hyperinflation, and you end up
00:09:31.860getting leaders in Europe who are very, you know, scary and authoritarian, who start to do things
00:09:38.680like, you know, deprive people of democracy, they start taking other measures that really
00:09:43.180undermine liberal democracy in Europe. Why aren't US and Canada, why haven't they stepped in to
00:09:50.180provide natural gas to Europe? Like, I believe I can't remember where I heard this from, I think
00:09:55.380it was my dad said that people had come to trudeau i don't remember if it was the chancellor of
00:09:59.600germany something like that had come to trudeau and said hey we're in deep trouble can you provide
00:10:04.320us natural gas and trudeau had just been like no the environment is at risk is that true yes that's
00:10:11.340exactly what happened so the chancellor of germany olaf scholls went to canada i believe late last
00:10:17.820month and was begging for liquefied natural gas exports you know canada is rich in natural gas
00:10:23.660So as the United States, you know, there are there are genuine logistical challenges.
00:10:28.240It takes three years to build a gas liquefaction terminal.
00:10:33.380That's a terminal that cools natural gas to very low levels.
00:10:37.840And that turns the gas into a liquid. And then you can put on a ship and send it to Europe.
00:10:41.260It takes a while to build those. But Europe, you know, Europe's in trouble for a while.
00:10:46.480So one that I think the obvious response would be for Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada and President Biden to say, yeah,
00:10:53.200we're going to expedite the production of liquefaction terminals. We're going to get
00:10:56.960them to Europe. We're all in this together. It's obviously also very good for the economies of
00:11:01.940Canada and the United States to be sending gas to Europe. And it's also good for the environment
00:11:06.220because without the natural gas, the Europeans are burning more coal, more diesel, more kerosene.
00:11:13.260They're also burning wood, which is the dirtiest fuel. So it's crazy. It's because both Trudeau
00:11:20.960Biden are scared of upsetting their very progressive voting base. And so that's why
00:11:26.260they're not doing it. But it's a sign of real political cowardice because they both have to
00:11:31.960know, both Trudeau and Biden have to know that they're really hurting Europe by not stepping up
00:11:37.160by expanding gas production. Yeah. I mean, you just described why they should do it in like
00:11:41.92025 seconds. You don't think, like you'd think that that could be described to people. But I mean,
00:11:49.100just say like there are people's lives at risk here like even the progressive left because they
00:11:54.300work on compassion right they could probably get behind hey we need to do this for now because
00:11:59.300people are going to freeze to death can you not support that they can't just say well no we're
00:12:04.500not supporting that not really doesn't make them look good it's a strange situation well you got
00:12:09.880it and i think your point is well taken that that the core value for the left is ostensibly
00:12:15.200compassion. Now, of course, the thing that's undermining that is this idea that climate
00:12:20.160change is an apocalyptic threat. And so if you think that climate change is a world-ending threat
00:12:25.020and you think that, I mean, it's not rational. I think we try to make it rational. But if you
00:12:30.300think that more gas production is going to lock us into the apocalypse, that's how they justify it.
00:12:36.340That's how the activists justify it. The politicians justify it because they're scared
00:12:40.320of the activists. They're scared of the voters. They're scared of the news media is completely
00:12:45.080bonkers. You know, if I mean, really, there's three groups that should be blamed. There's the
00:12:49.460politicians, there's the news media, and then there's the activists, and they all kind of
00:12:54.580manipulate each other. But I do think the crisis is going to get so bad that you're going to see
00:12:59.680significant political change really everywhere, including in North America, but also in Europe.
00:13:05.180And we just did. We've seen conservative governments now come to power in Sweden and
00:13:08.920Italy. I think that's going to continue to happen. So there's a way in which the contradictions
00:13:14.100are piling up and you're going to start to see these anti-energy nihilistic behaviors
00:13:20.580start to, that people are going to start to self-destruct.
00:13:24.460Do you think this is correctable with the right government for these European countries
00:13:27.740or are these European countries really screwed?
00:13:31.920And I think the Saudi Italian, the incoming new Italian prime minister, I believe her
00:13:37.980name is Maloney, striking a very conciliatory speech and also, I think, a very humble speech
00:13:42.780saying that she was going to, and they were all in this together and that this was going to be
00:13:46.800very difficult. That's the right posture to have. This is not a moment for a lot of swagger by
00:13:51.300anybody, but they just need to do everything they can to bring down energy prices. I mean,
00:13:55.560that's just the main event. So they are going to need to burn a lot of coal. They're going to need
00:13:58.840to import a lot of liquefied natural gas. They're going to need to keep their nuclear plants
00:14:03.000operating or restart the nuclear plants. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening in
00:14:07.660both Belgium and Germany. They're continuing to shut down nuclear power plants, which is like
00:14:12.120insane. So there's just a lot that they're struggling, but there's a lot that they can do
00:14:17.900in the short term and medium term in particular. So that's, I think, but you're asking the right
00:14:22.960question, like how much is Maloney really going to be able to do? I would say in the short term,
00:14:27.940it's going to be pretty difficult, but I think in the medium term, more like three to five years,
00:14:36.200the right policies now will make a big difference. I remember growing up hearing how dangerous
00:14:41.260nuclear power was i remember that that was just what i heard it was i didn't know very much about
00:14:45.740it but it was dangerous it polluted a lot and it was a bad form of energy how much of that narrative
00:14:52.380has caused the energy crisis that we're experiencing now that's a good question i would say
00:14:59.100i would i would attribute the war on nuclear to about half of the energy crisis and the other
00:15:04.780half to the war on natural gas. If Europe had made nuclear 70 or 80% of its electricity,
00:15:11.720it would definitely not be having this problem right now. Instead, and that's where it was
00:15:16.020headed after World War II. So in the 1950s, it was promoting nuclear to Europe. Europe needed
00:15:21.160a lot more than we did. They knew that there was basically only two choices for them at the time,
00:15:26.140which was coal or nuclear. And they knew that coal was more polluting. So they wanted to have
00:15:30.000a lot of nuclear. But then there was this war on nuclear that started with the baby
00:15:33.840They were working out the psychological trauma of their fears of nuclear weapons to some extent.
00:15:40.600But then there were also just people that were bad actors who were also just manipulating those fears because they are anti-civilization people.
00:16:03.360Yeah, I mean, it's not rational, right? I mean, it's Rousseau. It's this idea that things were better in the past before we had so much inequality. You know, it's certainly the stuff that you and your dad, you know, talk a lot about. So it's this kind of Rousseauian desire to return to a period before. It's nostalgic. It's sort of the mentality of coddled people. You know, it's sort of like, well, you know, like I think about a child. I think you're a mother, right, Michaela?
00:16:26.780okay yeah so when you i was thinking it was like you know you think of your you say to your child
00:16:30.560you know you can have mac and cheese or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the kid goes i don't
00:16:34.400want either of those i'm not going to eat them the proper response is to say okay you don't have to
00:16:39.960eat yeah you know the the wrong response is to say oh well we'll try to find some other thing you
00:16:45.320know whatever i'll make you something else well it's in that constant idea that somehow you don't
00:16:50.000have to make choices that you can you know that really the choices were the choices for energy
00:16:56.340security in europe were frack for natural gas burn more coal or have more nuclear well they said
00:17:03.140they didn't want that so they just imported all this gas from russia imagining that there would
00:17:07.220be no consequence but there was a serious consequence how is importing natural gas
00:17:13.160better for the climate than using natural gas that isn't imported from russia what difference
00:17:18.500does it make where it's from? Not much. Piped natural gas has somewhat less carbon emissions
00:17:24.920because it's just coming and you don't have to ship it on a ship, which requires the diesel to
00:17:30.120run the ship, or you don't have to use energy to convert it into liquid and then regasify it.
00:17:38.740So just one way to think of it is that every time you add an energy conversion, you're both adding
00:17:43.860cost and adding environmental, some amount of environmental degradation. So an energy conversion
00:17:50.180is just turning something from a gas into a liquid or taking electricity and putting it into a
00:17:55.120chemical battery or from a chemical battery to electricity. This is why in general, what you want
00:18:00.220is very few energy conversions and you want the cleanest form of energy high up the energy ladder.
00:18:06.840So wood and dung are the dirtiest, coal is cleaner than wood and dung, gas is half the carbon
00:18:13.040emissions and you know a small fraction of the air pollution and then uranium is the cleanest
00:18:19.600nuclear is the cleanest form of energy because it doesn't emit any pollution or any waste products
00:18:25.200into the natural environment huh okay so let's talk more about um these i think you said solar
00:18:32.220panels and wind turbines from china yeah some of the wind turbines are produced in europe but a lot
00:18:38.620of the materials are processed in China. China dominates the production of what are called
00:18:43.400rare earth minerals. Most of the minerals that are required for using renewables are processed
00:18:49.320in China. It's lithium, copper, you know, rare earths. So what you're doing, if you're trying
00:18:58.180to use less oil and gas in the United States or in Canada or in Europe, and you're going to then
00:19:02.980go try to use more solar and wind, you're just going to shift your dependency from Russia to
00:19:07.120China. There is talk of bringing those industries back to the United States, but I don't think
00:19:11.220anybody thinks that you'll be able to be able to make solar panels at the same low price that they
00:19:15.180can in China, particularly since the solar panels are being made by Uyghur Muslims who are in
00:19:20.020concentration camps in China. So what Europe shows is that you need to be energy, if not energy
00:19:26.580independent, you need to be energy secure. So Europe either needs to burn coal, it needs to
00:19:32.400frack for natural gas or needs to do a lot more nuclear power naturally the leaders who created
00:19:37.940the crisis in the first place are not doing those things and they're proposing to just shift their
00:19:43.060dependency from russia to china in terms of going from natural gas to renewables you'd think not
00:19:49.140relying on russia or china would be the best option in the intuitive the intuitive sense is the correct
00:19:56.100one yes so you said there are people in concentration camps in china who are making
00:20:02.020the solar panels which should be okay so then the fact that's so bad right
00:20:12.260that's so bad so by is that all solar panels is that solar panels in america too if you buy a
00:20:19.220solar panel can you oh my god like 90 like 90 of the solar panels that you get if you go down to
00:20:24.820the Home Depot, or if they come in and put them on your roof, that's yeah, that's what you're
00:20:28.200buying. That's why. And this is a this is not by the way, this is the US State Department.
00:20:33.760It's the German Bundestag. It's BBC. There's not any debate that these solar panels are being made
00:20:39.580in those conditions. I myself, I just testified in front of Congress about a week ago. And I was
00:20:45.540raising this issue. And I was and I keep raising it with people because it's kind of like, what are
00:20:49.080we doing here? Like, how do we how are we justifying this? The Biden administration said it
00:20:54.140was going to stop importing the solar panels and then it just it just got lobbied by the solar
00:20:59.720industry and just dropped it and it was like well we'll just keep importing solar panels
00:21:03.580like kind of no explanation no moral justification for me it's really uh like a horror movie you know
00:21:13.900it's like yeah you kind of the horror movies they open with you see the solar panels on your roof
00:21:18.880you think they're clean you think they're green they're kind of magic and then the more you learn
00:21:23.940about it you get to that middle part of the horror movie and you realize they're being made by people
00:21:27.800that are basically been enslaved and are living in concentration camps and working in solar
00:21:33.540factories is is really the only work they're allowed to have so it's pretty horrible there's
00:21:42.340no way to sugarcoat it for me it's like i just sometimes i just it's one of the issues that i
00:21:48.340just kind of despair a little bit over because it's it's very dark when you realize especially
00:21:53.460when you kind of people spend have said for decades that we were you know going to say no
00:21:59.440to genocide like genocide was not something that the west was going to tolerate that's obviously
00:22:05.280not the case because not only are we tolerating it we're actually financing it whenever we buy
00:22:09.900solar panels and lithium batteries too by the way they're all sourced from xinjiang province
00:22:16.000yeah let me say something else about it my some of my some of my friends they say well what about
00:22:20.620your iPhone. Your iPhone's made in China too. There's a difference between products that are
00:22:25.740made in Guangzhou province in China, which is where your iPhones are made, and solar panels
00:22:31.060and batteries that are made in Xinjiang province. Guangzhou province, yeah, I mean, it's not great.
00:22:36.680It's still China. There's still facial recognition and creepy, you know, social points, you know,
00:22:42.620totalitarianism. But that's not the same as being rounded up and put in a concentration camp.
00:22:49.440there's a qualitative difference there and i think it's important to recognize that difference
00:22:54.680so you could say well maybe we want to we want less dependence on china overall but we should
00:22:59.400not be importing any solar panels from china at this point i i had heard about the solar panel
00:23:04.980i didn't realize that it was all the solar panels basically is there anyone else who makes solar
00:23:09.580panels there are there are some firms there's actually a firm in california that does they
00:23:15.120just can't compete in terms of course yeah but you said lithium batteries as well so does that
00:23:22.020what do you mean and what how do you avoid those what are those in is that all lithium batteries
00:23:27.480it's not totally clear the best report actually was done by the new york times for their credit
00:23:33.040i criticized them a lot on this stuff but they actually did a really good it just came out with
00:23:36.700a big report about lithium batteries not totally clear um so we're not totally sure we do know
00:23:44.380that the raw materials for solar or polysilicon, over 90% of it comes from Xinjiang province in
00:23:51.400China. So even places that might be making solar panels outside of Xinjiang province
00:23:55.440are still using the main ingredients. And I believe it's the same thing with lithium,
00:24:00.020so that the refining of the lithium is done in Xinjiang province, but it could very well be a
00:24:06.200fair amount of it as well. A lot of the companies that make these products quite understandably
00:24:11.480try to keep it secret where their manufacturing facilities are in part because they don't want
00:24:16.420the scrutiny on human rights and environmental issues this is crazy so people are going to die
00:24:22.640in europe because energy is too expensive because governments in europe have been funding
00:24:29.560concentration camps in china basically that simplifies it but basically wow yeah that's
00:24:36.580And refusing and refusing, I think the more if you want to get to kind of the psychology of it, I think refusing to take responsibility for producing their own energy and sort of behaving like consumers.
00:24:47.500I think we're so used to being able to kind of buy whatever we want from other people, particularly from China, that there isn't a sense in which energy is sort of different.
00:24:58.140It's an important industrial activity. It's like farming. It's like producing steel.
00:25:03.200You need to actually do it in your home country precisely because it's so important. I mean, there's a set of folks, including some pretty otherwise very intelligent economists who kind of look at energy like it's some other commodity, you know, apples and bananas and cement and energy.
00:25:21.680It's like, well, no, but energy is different because everything depends on energy. So if you have an energy crisis, it affects every single sector of the economy, particularly the heavy industries that in places like Germany are how they are wealthy. The reason Germany is the wealthiest, most powerful country in Europe is because it has so much cheap energy to support its industries.
00:25:41.640oh yikes interesting so there's too much virtue signaling basically from from europe being like
00:25:49.100yeah we're at the forefront we're gonna be we're gonna be the green people and now people are
00:25:53.820gonna freeze wow that's terrible yeah too much virtue signaling and also not enough
00:25:58.840in the sense that i wish there had been virtue signaling about the treatment of uighur muslims
00:26:04.460and chinese solar factories it's more like um it's also the ways in which you know we've become
00:26:09.800so ideological, and we've become so disconnected. I mean, Karl Marx, of all people, had a really
00:26:18.960brilliant chapter in his book Capital, where he talked about something called commodity fetishism.
00:26:25.780And what he meant by that is that, you know, in the olden times, you used to know the guy that
00:26:30.740made your shoes, or the guy who made your beef. Well, now, under capitalism, supply chains are
00:26:38.040so disconnected that you don't know the people that made the things that you use and so those
00:26:42.240products end up taking on a kind of they end up taking on a kind of life with their own that's
00:26:46.980what the fetish is in other words you sort of see the iphone but i use my iphone i have a
00:26:51.120relationship to my iphone but i never think about the people that made it i never think about the
00:26:55.400working conditions and so it's actually got gotten worse than that it's not just you don't think
00:27:00.320about it but you actually look at the solar panels and you think that you're saving the world you
00:27:05.100don't think that you're contributing to genocide in China. And so it's really this deep disconnection
00:27:12.120by a lot of people, but particularly progressive elites, because they're the most disconnected from
00:27:20.400the productive sectors of the economy. When you talk to the working people, people who work
00:27:24.780in manufacturing, farming, energy, they're much more skeptical of the things that people claim
00:27:30.980about things like climate change or energy or oh farmers should just use organic fertilizer
00:27:36.580people that are in the productive sectors of the economy are much more skeptical and much more
00:27:40.740likely to say that's not actually true because i know how you produce food i know how you produce
00:27:45.680steel i know how you make products and it's not like that so i think that's part of the problem
00:27:50.720is that those of us that are that are kind of you know what we call anywhere people we're the
00:27:55.820we're the global elites we fly on airplanes we never get our hands dirty we're the ones that
00:28:00.780actually become, they're the ones that are the most kind of delusional, apocalyptic about climate
00:28:06.320change, and also least realistic about what it takes to power a modern economy. This kind of
00:28:12.040sounds similar to people who are saying, well, shut down the beef industry, but they're not
00:28:16.020looking at, well, regenerative farms, for instance, and what that looks like. They're just saying,
00:28:20.440well, everyone should go plant-based. It's like, well, what is that going to do exactly?
00:28:24.580Yeah, the same thing is happening in the Netherlands right now. So I've been writing
00:28:27.540some stories about the netherlands the farmers are actually reduced nitrogen pollution which
00:28:33.920mostly comes from manure through basic farm practices and some amount of technological
00:28:39.840innovation but for example if you clean your barn stalls and you don't allow the manure if you collect
00:28:45.340the manure rather than letting it kind of run off or the liquids coming out and the liquids contain
00:28:50.840all the nitrogen runoff if you just maintain your farm you can reduce the nitrogen pollution
00:28:56.520by a significant amount they already reduced it by 40 percent the government instead of promoting
00:29:02.960those techniques the government has basically said we need to have less livestock farming we
00:29:08.380just need to have less cattle and it's crazy because you can actually significantly reduce
00:29:14.460pollution of all kinds i mean you know in the united states and canada really in all wealthy
00:29:19.020countries we've massively reduced air pollution you might see these old photos from like the 1940s
00:29:24.560where there was like smoke in the streets, the cars were so dirty. I mean, I just, the other day,
00:29:28.360I had a car pass by that held a smoke coming out of its exhaust. And I was like, that's crazy.
00:29:33.760You know, so things have changed, you know, so we're able to do so much with technological
00:29:37.560innovation. And when people are saying, no, you should just use less energy, you should stop
00:29:43.880driving, or you should not have any cows or livestock, you know, that there's an alternative
00:29:47.900agenda going on, that it's not really about reducing pollution, it's using pollution as an
00:29:52.640excuse to advocate what is fundamentally an anti-civilization agenda okay so that is what's
00:30:01.200going on i mean that's what my dad says it said that sounds pretty spot on out there yeah well
00:30:08.000i mean it looks like it one of the things he taught me that i i really like is if you can't
00:30:12.800figure out the reason somebody's doing something look at the consequences right of their behaviors
00:30:18.880yeah yeah and then in infer the cause right so so you yeah so you go so we don't know why
00:30:24.320they're advocating renewables and shutting down the nuclear plants we'll look at the energy crisis
00:30:30.400which is a crisis of civilization it's a crisis that will result in people becoming poorer
00:30:35.680and de-industrializing now it's interesting in this case of course um we did know what they
00:30:42.240were doing because every green party in the world has been attacking industrialization demonizing
00:30:48.080industrialization i mean listen to the way you know progressives and greens talk about
00:30:52.200industrialization they make it sound like a bad word like somehow like life before industry
00:30:58.380was hunky dory as opposed to being deeply brutal you know where women were subjugated to lives on
00:31:04.920the farm where kids were working on farms all the time life was hard and dark and so so yeah the
00:31:10.920the attack on industrialization is really an attack on modern civilization on the prosperity
00:31:16.460and the wealth and the freedom that they allow, that it allows.
00:31:20.260Are companies already moving to the States?
00:31:22.840You said you thought companies like steel manufacturers are going to be moving to the
00:31:49.320Yeah. If you think that the United States and North America and Western liberal democracies are are significantly better at a moral level than China's totalitarian regime, this is great news.
00:32:01.480So what it means is that you want energy to be cheap, not expensive.
00:32:07.160It makes countries more secure. It makes us competitive with our rivals.
00:32:12.360And I think the other thing is that you saw in terms of natural gas, I don't think I mentioned it, but it's important to know that we reduced our carbon emissions in the United States by 22% between 2005 and 2020.
00:32:25.420Most of that reduction was by having cheap abundant natural gas to replace dirtier coal.
00:32:30.980Okay, one thing you mentioned, and I'm just thinking about the ramifications.
00:32:34.480You said rare earth metals, that China controls most of the rare earth metals and that those are in our phones.
00:32:39.900so that also seems seems like an issue not exactly an energy issue but does that mean if
00:32:48.160if something happens between you know china and america relations that our phones are in jeopardy
00:32:54.560well it's not it's the phones it's the solar panels it's the um it's the wind turbines it's
00:33:01.760the batteries. Um, and it, and by the way, rare earths, uh, is a set of minerals. They're not
00:33:09.000super rare, but they're very, or materials. They're super, um, they're just very dilute,
00:33:15.560uh, in the earth's surface. So you just have to mine a lot of it in order to generate sufficient
00:33:22.300quantities of it. And you're going to need a lot more of those, those materials and metals if
00:33:28.280you're going to move to renewables. So that's the problem with it. I can't make the exact statistics,
00:33:34.480but basically the amount of those materials that you need if you're going to use renewables
00:33:44.940is so much higher. So just to give you a sense of it, solar and wind require 300% more copper,
00:33:52.280700% more rare earths than natural gas per unit of energy, 1,000% more steel, concrete, and glass, 4,200% more lithium, 2,500% more graphite.
00:34:07.740And so this is a problem because the way to think about nature protection is that you want to use less of it.
00:34:14.620If you want to save nature, then don't use it and put it in your phones or in your products.
00:34:19.020and so you what you want is a reduced material intensity or what we call you want dematerialization
00:34:26.760and to some extent things like your phones are very important to that because the phone
00:34:30.820replaces your old stereo console systems cameras television sets newspapers books
00:34:38.900alarm clocks like so many things you can imagine that used to be that your phone now replaces so
00:34:44.080your phone is dematerializing all sorts of products but then energy also has a process of
00:34:51.560dematerialization so when you go from coal think about when you go from coal to natural gas you're
00:34:56.860reducing the amount of the earth that you're using for energy you're actually just pulling a gas out
00:35:02.620of the ground it's already radically dematerialized or in the case of nuclear a single coke can of
00:35:08.500uranium can provide me with all the power i need for my entire life it's a tiny amount of the earth
00:35:13.680so anybody who loves nature who wants to protect nature should want to use less of it and that
00:35:19.020means that you want to use more energy dense and less material intensive fuels so going from
00:35:27.560natural gas or nuclear to solar panels and wind turbines and electric cars for that matter means
00:35:33.300you're just going to use much more of of nature and you're going to create these huge frankly
00:35:38.540toxic and polluting mines and all the waste that's associated with them around the world
00:35:42.700Yeah. Okay. That's crazy. So they haven't taken into consideration the mining required for those materials to make these renewable energy sources like solar panels. That's not taken into consideration?
00:35:54.400Well, this is a very important point. So for decades, people have been making this point. Finally, the International Energy Agency, which is the kind of big energy think tank for rich and developed countries, the OECD countries, they came out with a report last year that provided all those numbers that I just rattled off, pointing out saying, well, to make this energy transition, which everyone thinks we're going to make,
00:36:23.180you're going to have to increase the materials. So the amount of materials per unit of energy is
00:36:28.080going to have to go from somewhere around 10% to somewhere around 50%. This is an agency that,
00:36:33.980by the way, is completely promoting renewables. And so they kind of said this, like, well,
00:36:38.460this is just something that's going to have to happen, as opposed to like, wait a second,
00:36:41.840is that something that we want to have happen? Because the alternative is that you could just
00:36:46.260use more natural gas and uranium and not have to increase the material intensity of energy.
00:36:51.460The other important thing about this is that environmental product, the good news is that economic progress and environmental progress go hand in hand. So if you're using less materials for energy, copper, rare earth, steel, zinc, all those things, then you are going to have a lower cost.
00:37:11.260So if you're using more materials, it's going to raise the cost of energy. It's going to be more material intensive. And so renewables make energy much more expensive in multiple ways. There's more materials required, much more land, three to 600 times more land for solar or wind farms than for a nuclear or natural gas plant.
00:37:31.260And then the unreliable nature of the electricity, the wind is particularly super random the way it comes into the grid and then stops blowing and it's just wind, right? Or even solar, like the sun sets, you know, at around the same time of day that people start using a lot of energy, managing all of that unreliability increases the cost of energy.
00:37:51.960so we're really um renewables which were sort of this romantic way to return to the past
00:37:57.960are actually a way of are in that sense that we were just talking about in terms of if you don't
00:38:03.200know the the motivations of somebody they are a way of undermining civilization which depends on
00:38:09.240cheap and reliable energy that's wild things are so much more complicated than we're told
00:38:14.840okay for for storing renewable energy what kind of batteries is renewable energy stored in
00:38:21.960So it's overwhelmingly, I mean, basically the only way to store large amounts of energy from an electrical grid is what we call pumped storage, which is that you pump the water uphill when you have a lot of electricity, like in a dam, and then you run the water back over a turbine when you need it.
00:38:40.360There's a nuclear plant in California that built this pumped hydro system near it, or along with it in California, so that when you had increases in demand, because of course the demand during the day rises at certain times of the day, you were able to have this pumped storage facility.
00:38:58.560everyone has gotten excited about lithium batteries the same thing that's in your phone
00:39:03.240but the problem is they're super expensive so it's about a half a trillion dollars
00:39:08.040for just four hours of backing up the grid in the united states the batteries have yeah it's
00:39:15.340it's it's just financially impossible california has been spending more money on batteries than
00:39:21.720anybody else in the really in the world certainly in the united states and we did not have enough
00:39:27.960batteries that would allow us to shut down our natural gas plants or shut down our last
00:39:33.560nuclear plant, which is why the governor in California, part of the reason why the governor
00:39:36.760in California kept our last nuclear plant operating, decided to. So we almost had blackouts again
00:39:42.040a few weeks ago, proving that even a huge investment in batteries was just not enough
00:39:47.800to be able to back up a state the size of California. Is it true that the governor of
00:39:55.200California at some point told people to stop charging their Teslas? Yeah, well, so what
00:40:01.660happened was on August 25th, the state announced that they were going to phase out internal
00:40:09.920combustion engines, gasoline-powered engines, gasoline-powered cars by 2030. Five days later,
00:40:17.380the government said, don't charge your electric cars between 4 and 9 p.m., otherwise we're going
00:40:23.340to have blackouts so we're clearly not prepared for being able to have all these cars be electric
00:40:30.320just to give you a sense of it but using the the numbers provided by the state we i calculated that
00:40:35.840you would need 10 full-sized new nuclear power plants in addition to the one that we have right
00:40:41.360now in order to just charge the 30 million cars and light trucks that you would that you would
00:40:47.400have if you completely transferred to electric cars and trucks the other thing that they're doing
00:40:51.520And again, I think this speaks to the irrationality and the nihilism. They're phasing out the sale of natural gas heaters in California and furnaces in California in 2030. So you won't be able to buy a natural gas heater for your home after 2030, either as a replacement or for a new home.
00:41:11.100Well, so that means that you're going to have to have an electric heater. And again, you're going to have this huge crisis. They're also been planning to shut down our last nuclear plant one year before then. So it's a combination of people are not thinking it through, but then also a combination of people, they don't care.
00:41:27.560like there's some part of them that you know as Michael Caine says to Batman they just want to
00:41:33.380see the whole world burn and they're actually there's some part of them I think that wants to
00:41:37.540see the chaos and the crisis because they think it's going to get us closer to returning to some
00:41:42.460state of nature so you don't think that these are just people who aren't paying attention I have this
00:41:47.380view of the world and it's slowly burning but my I guess previous view of the world was that
00:41:53.700big mistakes like this were made by people who were really trying to improve things really trying
00:41:58.880to improve things and they're saying well that doesn't matter but the bigger goal is going to be
00:42:03.280such a great future that it it doesn't matter right and you're saying well no there are people
00:42:08.660who are like wow just let the let the world burn and they're at the like top tier government level
00:42:15.380making decisions like let's shut down all the nuclear power plants yeah for sure i mean it's
00:42:20.460it's a little bit of both and sometimes in the same person i mean think about how sometimes when
00:42:25.980we're in a bad mood or when when we're um annoyed at something i we all do it and i see i see people
00:42:34.100say it it kind of goes i hear it from people like conservatives about europe it kind of goes let them
00:42:38.260suffer and it kind of goes they let them deal with the consequences of this well that same thing on
00:42:44.800the left says well you should why should you be able to use electricity whenever you want
00:42:49.760what makes you think that you should have cheap energy cheap electricity and energy the world
00:42:54.360can't afford to have that nature can't afford for you to be such a privileged entitled consumer
00:43:00.660you spoiled you know rich person you should have to do with less because nature wants you to have
00:43:08.420less and then in a like a few hours later or when they have to talk publicly they'll say
00:43:14.560something like well it'll make us all happier because um you know we'll work together to
00:43:21.360deal with these challenges and you know money's not everything and what about nature so you know
00:43:29.400it's always a combination of both it it's like you know it's like it's classic um dark some of
00:43:36.520it's dark triad stuff you know where there's a kind of which is what narcissism machiavellianism
00:43:42.280in sociopathy there's some amount of it which is sort of like um Kathy Bates and the movie Misery
00:43:50.260you know which is like I'm going to take care of you yeah and it's like hey god no please don't
00:43:56.240you know how is fertilizer all wrapped up in this and why is fertilizer so necessary yeah
00:44:03.580Well, so there's, there's three kinds of fertilizer, phosphate, potash, and, and nitrogen. And so nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. And so fertilizer is, yeah, so fertilizer is, is, is nitrogen, fixed nitrogen, basically taking the nitrogen gas and turning it into a salt.
00:44:33.580solid that can be applied so miracle grow that you put on your garden so you put on that's cool
00:44:38.240so that is made from natural gas natural gas is ch4 so there's four hydrogen atoms bonded to a
00:44:46.520carbon atom so if you split the hydrogen atoms off and you fix them you make them into a solid
00:44:53.700then that's how you get fertilizer so if you have a shortage of natural gas then you have a shortage
00:44:58.800of fertilizer. Why is that essential for modern food production? And is that contributing to the
00:45:04.980food production crisis we're also seeing? For sure. Yeah. I mean, so Europe, because of high
00:45:11.420energy prices, fertilizer production has declined between 70 to 80%. That's catastrophic. I mean,
00:45:18.260it's extremely scary and dangerous. And wow. Yeah. So it's, it's scary. It's bad. I'm sorry,
00:45:27.720what was the oh if you don't I mean just the rule of thumb is that if we didn't have fertilizers
00:45:32.480we would be able to produce just about half as much food as we produce now so that means that
00:45:37.780we would have only enough food for four billion people not for eight billion people so you may
00:45:43.200know you know um that there's a very dark view that some environmentalists have which is that
00:45:50.040the earth should not be able to sustain this many people there's been a philosophy going back a
00:45:55.380couple hundred years that that mass famines are inevitable but it's creepier than that because
00:46:02.020the people that claim that it's inevitable to have mass famine are the ones that are trying
00:46:05.940to reduce the amount of fertilizer that gets produced so they're kind of trying to create
00:46:10.460not kind of they're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy um around fertilizer reductions and so
00:46:17.380we just saw in sri lanka the the government under the advice of a lot of western environmentalists
00:46:24.080said we're going to just ban synthetic fertilizer and the result was crash of you know just they
00:46:31.120couldn't produce enough food for their people and the whole economy crashed and ended up bringing
00:46:35.000down the government what what are your forecasts for the next year i suppose in europe like are
00:46:44.040they in trouble not just for a like a very cold winter but also for food shortages like really
00:46:50.240places in europe or yeah i mean as usual the people that will suffer the most of the poor
00:46:55.920both in europe but around the world so europe because it's rich it's going to end up buying
00:47:00.620a lot of the liquefied natural gas that the world produces and therefore countries like pakistan
00:47:06.160and bangladesh won't be able to afford as much of that same thing with fertilizer and food so you'll
00:47:12.200see the you know so it's like the crises will occur in places like haiti sub-saharan africa
00:47:17.860poor asian countries europeans are going to like they're not going to starve and they're probably
00:47:26.380not going to freeze to death but they're going to but the germans are almost certainly going
00:47:29.960to lose a bunch of their heavy industries so they're just going to become a lot poorer
00:47:33.100and that's going to occur not just now but over several years over the next three to five years
00:47:40.080things are going to be bad because that's how long it's going to take to significantly
00:47:44.280increase energy production either from natural gas or from from nuclear or from coal and by then
00:47:52.460they're going to have lost a bunch of industries and some industries are just going to be like hey
00:47:55.700we're out of here we're going to go and relocate into the united states or into some other country
00:47:59.540where there's or canada where there's cheap and reliable energy so that's the that's the concern
00:48:06.040i think on a more optimistic note you know this is clearly a cycle you know we go through
00:48:12.920through civilization goes through cycles and this is clearly a crisis where a lot of people just
00:48:19.100forgot what it takes to run a civilization like you said i mean like i love we're talking about
00:48:24.000like most ordinary ordinary environmentalists they just say things that they don't even know
00:48:29.900what it means oh we can power the world 100 renewables or oh we can use organics and they
00:48:36.220have no idea what that means and so what's happening is that people are having to deal
00:48:40.560with the consequences of their choices that were made in most cases out of misinformation but also
00:48:46.840out of ideology and I think that it's going to be a heavy wake-up call you know my my favorite
00:48:52.800slogan or I don't have a slogan my favorite saying these days is good times make weak leaders weak
00:49:01.720leaders make bad times and bad times make strong leaders strong leaders make good times
00:49:07.280um i think that's the cycle that we're in we've got a bunch of leaders in power where they're
00:49:14.620just doing everything they're doing like literally in europe they're like well we're gonna just move
00:49:18.620to renewables faster it's like you are just delusional so it's like everything they're
00:49:23.460doing is actually making the and biden and trudeau and european leaders are basically
00:49:27.720making the crisis worse so we're seeing a crisis of the west it's interesting to me that already
00:49:34.260the japanese and the south koreans have moved on and so one of the the hypotheses you know not just
00:49:41.640me but others has been that the west is in the grip of a religion it's very similar to the older
00:49:46.240judeo-christian religion we've sinned against nature nature's a kind of victim god nature is
00:49:52.120punishing us with climate change the only way to make right by nature is through renewables
00:49:56.340that's been the dominant ideology in the west for the last you know 30 years but south korea
00:50:03.980in japan they're like over it they're restarting their nuclear plants they're burning coal they
00:50:09.240don't have that they don't have that obsession i think it's because those are cultures that are in
00:50:14.960and that have an ancestor that are focused on an ancestor myth rather than on a myth around a victim
00:50:21.020god and so the victim god story which has been dominant in the west for you know 2,000 2,500
00:50:27.140years is um really been absent so it's almost like we have a particular hardware that
00:50:33.940when belief in god disappeared the new apocalyptic environmentalism and wokeism acted like soft
00:50:40.660like the new software for this our kind of hardware interesting asia they didn't have that
00:50:46.260they were sort of spared that that problem and so they're just getting on with it they're trying to
00:50:51.500produce and they're going to end up doing a lot better than europe okay that all makes sense to
00:50:56.240me um i've had a few other people on my podcast to talk about this and they've brought up you know
00:51:01.300food shortages in europe but it does make more sense to me that the people that would suffer
00:51:05.820would be would be the poor poor people that and then that's also going to be probably less picked
00:51:12.160up too by the media because it's a lot more of a boring story if a poor company has start a poor
00:51:18.380country has starving people than a you know you know germany or something like that yeah they
00:51:23.720have to overthrow the governments in those countries for it to really become a big story
00:51:27.360I mean, we will have famines. And, you know, of course, some people will go hungry in Europe,
00:51:32.860but it just won't be anything like it is in other parts of the world where just because the
00:51:37.760Europeans, because it's still a global market and the Europeans are going to be able to compete
00:51:40.740with poor countries to purchase energy and food. I wanted to talk a bit about, you were talking
00:51:45.960about addiction and homelessness. And so what kind of addiction have you seen that's causing this?
00:51:53.040Yeah, so we are in, and it's in Canada too, we're in the worst drug epidemic in history. There's nothing that compares to it. To give you a sense of it, in the United States, 17,000 people died of drug overdoses and drug poisonings in the year 2000. This year, 107,000 will die. So we're going to see a huge increase, a five-fold, six-fold increase in deaths.