TRIGGERnometry - Climate Change： What the Data Actually Shows with Geologist Scott Tinker

00:00:00.000 this whole concept that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions why well it's bs right

00:00:09.200 we outsourced it to them completely there's no renewable energy there's no such thing as

00:00:14.100 renewable energy no that's a myth you have to have these collection systems and those come

00:00:17.980 from the earth they're mine for 20 years europe has been flat economically you have to look at

00:00:24.260 that and say intentions, outcomes. If your industries are closing, your people are leaving,

00:00:30.480 it's not going to help the climate. You're hurting the environment because wealthy nations can afford

00:00:36.420 to invest in the environment. In the interim, though, the planet will get warmer and we're

00:00:41.720 going to have to adapt. Yes. That's inevitable. We are adapting. And what allows you to do that?

00:00:48.160 Wealth. Scott Tinker, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you. It's great.

00:00:54.260 It's great to have you here. We want to talk about energy. It's a really important conversation.

00:01:00.880 It's one we've covered from different angles, but you're someone who's got a very sensible,

00:01:04.860 pragmatic, rational approach there, which is why it's great to have you on. Before we get into all

00:01:09.320 of that, tell us a little bit about who you are, your background, how you've come to be

00:01:13.940 sitting here with us. Sure. Well, I'm a geologist by training and studied that and worked in the

00:01:21.800 technical side of the oil and gas industry for 17 years. Built 3D reservoir models and hung off

00:01:28.040 of big cliffs around the world and did field work and that kind of stuff. And then 25, six years ago,

00:01:35.840 I went to university, University of Texas at Austin, to run a research unit that I built into

00:01:41.760 a pretty big thing, 250 people, global energy, environmental, economics, blending research

00:01:47.600 around the world and in that role came to begin to appreciate kind of the interplay between energy

00:01:55.880 and the economy and the environment and how those balance around the world and then along the way

00:02:03.200 started making films with a filmmaker we can get into all that but that eventually ended up in 60

00:02:10.080 countries around the world not in airports actually deep into them and seeing how the

00:02:15.860 the whole world lived. And that's kind of influenced who I am today and what I do.

00:02:22.060 So I've transitioned. Well, Arthur Brooks, he had a great book, right? He talked about the two

00:02:29.240 curves from strength to strength. That first curve for me was a technical scientist. The

00:02:33.800 second curve is an educator. That's carried me along for a while.

00:02:39.340 All right. Well, educate us. What I wanted to ask you is, first of all, to

00:02:44.920 break down the reality of energy patterns and consumption around the world like what is going

00:02:51.560 on because if you live in the western country if you live in the city in the western country

00:02:56.760 is every second car is electric we're making this great energy transition everything's wonderful

00:03:03.260 renewable energy everywhere you know you see sun panels and all of this stuff but that's not quite

00:03:10.800 the reality of the world is it not the whole world no yeah two of my favorite words transition

00:03:16.960 and renewable you know but uh we're not and they aren't and and i i said i said that in a ted talk

00:03:25.560 actually to 1100 kids i went through well we started with food cow and kale to understand

00:03:31.780 energy density and took them through different forms of energy and how some you just get a lot

00:03:37.920 more bang for the buck, but all of them come from the earth. A solar panel comes from the earth.

00:03:43.860 A wind turbine comes from the earth. A battery comes from the earth. It's mined.

00:03:47.620 And then it's manufactured in these collection systems. Collects the sun, light, heat, and motion

00:03:54.960 of the wind, and it's converted into electricity. But those wear out. And then we dump them into

00:04:00.060 landfills, and we do it over and over so there's no renewable energy. There's no such thing as

00:04:04.500 renewable energy no that's a myth we've carried forward in our schools and and the sun and the

00:04:11.560 wind are there but you can't put sun in your car so you have to have these collection systems and

00:04:18.440 those come from the earth they're mine other kinds of energy are denser coal came along at first it

00:04:25.960 was wood and then the sun was the first form of energy it grew the hay that our vehicles of the

00:04:29.540 used oxen and horses. And then we killed whales to get their oils for lighting our homes. And

00:04:37.460 then coal came along. 1805, the first coal train in Wales, actually, commercial coal-powered train.

00:04:43.940 You burn coal, which nature took carbon, plants, and made it really dense for us.

00:04:49.220 So you get a lot of energy when you burn that coal. Heat. Boil water, make steam, turn a turbine,

00:04:54.500 run a generator light and that changed the modern world then oil hydrocarbons carbon and hydrogen

00:05:02.660 not just carbon and coal even denser refine that put in our vehicles that's why we can

00:05:08.580 travel so far the horse and the oxen had to eat a lot of hay a lot of hay to go 500 miles

00:05:16.340 a good tank of gas will get you that far and then methane natural gas came along ch4 more hydrogen

00:05:23.480 than carbon. It'll sound weird, but methane is denser than oil by weight. So it's a much denser

00:05:31.380 form of energy, more hydrogen in it. And then finally, uranium and thorium, the nuclear. So

00:05:36.340 this energy density transition has been happening naturally for a couple of centuries now.

00:05:42.780 And that's where energy in the world is headed. Okay. It's tough to negotiate with physics.

00:05:51.220 and we try all the time politically but but physics eventually wins and so does economics

00:05:58.160 so that's this if there's a transition it's toward that okay now globally you asked

00:06:03.580 um the wealthy world let's just break the world into three parts the emerging economies

00:06:10.880 about half the world four billion people the developing economies another three billion

00:06:15.940 And then the lucky one plus billion of us who were born one lottery, right?

00:06:22.680 And so we have moved through our mix of energy has changed from dominated by coal, less coal

00:06:31.660 now than most of the modern world.

00:06:33.880 Oil is actually percentage-wise decreasing.

00:06:37.500 Natural gas and nuclear increasing in the modern world and solar and wind.

00:06:40.820 And I'm fine with those, by the way.

00:06:42.760 I'm not anti-solar and wind.

00:06:44.380 that's a diverse portfolio is a good thing you know optionality like stocks or real estate

00:06:51.000 options in that portfolio matter but they're not going to replace the dense forms of energy

00:06:56.640 so the rich world has this set of options now scott can i interrupt you there i want to come

00:07:01.640 back to you tracing all the street yeah but you said something that to a lot of people who are not

00:07:06.240 aware of any of this will sound almost unbelievable. It's like what we call renewables,

00:07:15.880 which you say, I mean, it's not renewable. I call them solar and wind.

00:07:18.720 Solar and wind. They will not replace for a denser form of energy. No. Why not?

00:07:25.980 You simply can't, two reasons, two big reasons, a lot of reasons, two big ones. You can't mine

00:07:33.220 enough to create the collection systems of solar panels and wind turbines, which wear out in 15 to

00:07:40.420 20 years. And so you have to keep building them because we don't recycle them. You just can't

00:07:44.660 mine enough to do that because the sun and the wind are so low density, it takes a tremendous

00:07:50.260 amount to collect the energy we need to power the modern world. So Václav Smil is a very bright

00:07:58.100 energy guy out of Canada. And he created a, when I'm talking about density before, I was talking

00:08:03.840 about, you know, per unit weight, how much energy in an ounce or a pound of something.

00:08:10.080 You can't weigh the sun and the wind. So he came up with something called surface power density,

00:08:13.860 which is area, watts per meter squared. So the wind has a very low surface power density,

00:08:25.060 very low. It takes a lot of area to collect energy from the wind. The sun is a little better.

00:08:33.080 But I'm talking about one watt per meter squared or six, not hundreds to 500 to approaching a

00:08:42.100 thousand, which you get from the dense forms of energy. So you literally can't mine and replace

00:08:49.420 enough of that stuff. That's the one reason. The second big reason is there's this weird thing

00:08:55.680 called night, okay? And it happens every day. When night happens, or clouds, you have to have

00:09:06.300 something else there because we like our electricity 24-7. And when the wind goes away,

00:09:13.640 you have to have something else there. That's called intermittent. So the something else there

00:09:19.640 is either a redundant system of natural gas power plants to fire up, or now ever-increasing giant

00:09:27.040 batteries, which have a lower density by weight than dung. Okay, dung, cow dung, is about 40 times

00:09:35.840 denser than a lithium-ion battery by weight. So we're charging these giant batteries which have

00:09:43.600 very little energy density, very low. That's why it takes a thousand pounds of battery to run

00:09:49.200 a nice Tesla S. Let me say that again, a Tesla S, a thousand pounds of battery on that floor bed,

00:09:56.400 7,000 cell phones in one car. Okay. So that's the, it's the physics. It's not judgment.

00:10:03.500 It's just physics. So, you're not going to be able to power the whole world, particularly as

00:10:10.860 the emerging and developing world come into, hopefully, wealth like we have. 1.00

00:10:17.500 They're going to require more energy, more and more energy. And that's a good thing, 1.00

00:10:21.500 not a bad thing. Lift the world up. You just can't do it. So, they'll be a part of a portfolio.

00:10:28.380 And look, I've installed solar in Gunchukwa, Colombia, in the Arhuaco village of Gunchukwa

00:10:34.920 indigenous people. That's all they could have. There's no wires, there's no roads, there's no 0.97

00:10:40.480 pipes. First electricity to them was a three and a half kilowatt solar array. And we put light bulbs

00:10:46.740 in mud huts and ceiling fans and a refrigerator freezer for some medicines. Okay. That's great.

00:10:54.360 that gets them started. But it's light bulbs in a mud hut. We would call that a brownout. 0.99

00:11:02.160 It's not electrified. It's light bulbs. So then this progression, Constantine, has to happen,

00:11:08.860 and that requires very dense energy. Okay? And that's where you're headed toward

00:11:12.800 methane, hydrogen, and nuclear, both fission and fusion. That's dense.

00:11:18.720 In fact, if you look at it by weight, I'm going to say this, uranium and thorium, which

00:11:27.620 run fission reactors, okay, that radioactive breakdown creates a bunch of heat, a lot of

00:11:36.840 heat, and that boils water, makes steam, turn a turbine, run a generator.

00:11:40.480 It's the exact same process as burning coal or gas.

00:11:42.640 It's a thermal process.

00:11:43.460 when you think about the density of a uranium pellet, and I've visited many nuclear reactors

00:11:50.200 and stuff them into these fuel rods, fuel assemblies. A uranium pellet about one centimeter

00:11:55.940 tall and half a centimeter wide has as much energy in it as it'd be enough to drive a car

00:12:03.880 from New York to LA and back to Dallas, Texas. One pellet. That's how much energy is in there.

00:12:11.320 You know how much gasoline that would take?

00:12:13.180 A lot.

00:12:13.980 And gasoline, you know how much hay it would take?

00:12:17.720 So this is why the density wins.

00:12:20.080 This is why to power 8.3 billion people and growing to some point,

00:12:27.360 it's going to take a remarkable amount of dense energy to do that.

00:12:30.180 And it's always on.

00:12:32.300 A nuclear reactor is always running.

00:12:35.140 It doesn't shut down at night or when the wind stops blowing.

00:12:39.160 So, the two reasons are density takes too much stuff and intermittency.

00:12:45.940 All right.

00:12:46.140 And I interrupted you.

00:12:47.420 So, come back to the story about the three portions of the world.

00:12:49.740 And you're thinking, this guy can't answer a question like this.

00:12:52.540 No, it's good.

00:12:53.260 It's not only because I keep interrupting him.

00:12:54.980 You crack on.

00:12:55.580 No, please do.

00:12:56.120 Yeah.

00:12:57.580 So, in the world today, you've seen a very slow transition.

00:13:02.940 If there is one, the transition is in the mix of energy that we're using.

00:13:07.600 The percentage of each fuel each year, it's called primary energy.

00:13:13.100 60 years ago in 1965, that was mostly coal, some oil, and a little bit of gas.

00:13:19.940 Some dams and a few other things dominated by those.

00:13:23.300 Today in the world, it's about 80% coal, oil, and gas.

00:13:29.880 And coal has gone down in that mix as a percentage.

00:13:33.360 Oil is going down as a percentage.

00:13:34.920 Gas has increased.

00:13:35.660 And you got 20% of everything else, mostly nuclear and hydro, some solar, wind, and biofuels.

00:13:42.140 So there's a transition globally in the mix of energy we're using each year. And it's very slow,

00:13:48.900 very driven by physics and economics. It's nice. We have more optionality today than we did in the

00:13:53.540 past. That's a good thing. But if you get rid of coal, oil, and gas, and nuclear, you're down to

00:13:58.300 less than 20% or less of everything else, fewer options, and they're intermittent, some of them.

00:14:03.540 So that's not a good thing. So that's the global transitions happening. Now, I want to be real

00:14:10.020 clear. That doesn't mean coal and oil and gas have gone down in our consumption. That's the

00:14:15.240 percentage each year. In actual units, because the population grows and we're industrializing,

00:14:20.980 coal is still increasing. Again, oil is still increasing. Natural gas is increasing a lot.

00:14:26.820 Nuclear is hung in there, but it's going to take off again. And everything else is growing too.

00:14:30.900 so you see this increase one is uh is kind of a transition the percent and one is an addition

00:14:40.120 in the fuels that we're using we're adding more forms of energy to power the world

00:14:44.080 and that's important to understand you know when kids young people who've been taught other things

00:14:50.880 see this graph of everything increasing they just you know they just can't believe it they think

00:14:58.880 people are telling them a myth or something. They can't believe we still have so much coal,

00:15:03.080 oil, and gas in the world. And it's not going down. And by the way, that's not a bad thing.

00:15:08.820 That's what's lifting up the world now. That's global. If you look where those are geopolitically

00:15:16.880 or geographically, very different mixes around the world. Asia now dominates in coal.

00:15:24.140 They are the largest consumer of coal, Asia, by a lot, and they consume more coal than the rest

00:15:32.580 of the world combined times X. It's very affordable, and it's very reliable to them.

00:15:40.760 And what are they doing with that? They're making electricity to make our crap. 0.99

00:15:47.660 Okay. I promise you, if I look in here, it's made somewhere in Asia. I promise. 1.00

00:15:52.000 us. So this whole concept that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions,

00:16:01.080 okay, why? Well, it's BS, right? We outsourced it to them. Completely. We have just said, hey,

00:16:09.520 you make our crap and we'll be green. It's a shell game. Right. Because there's only one atmosphere. 1.00

00:16:17.660 It's very efficient at moving greenhouse gases around the world, way more efficient than oceans,

00:16:22.380 which is kind of the next big circulatory thing in the world. So if Asia is emitting,

00:16:27.900 especially China, and now there's CO2 to make our crap, 0.95

00:16:33.580 we're not addressing climate change. We're just exporting the problem 0.98

00:16:37.260 and pretending to be green. And countries are doing this, companies are doing this, 0.93

00:16:42.620 they're buying offsets from who? They're not even real. States do this. California's doing this big

00:16:48.980 time. We've reduced our CO2 emissions because you don't make anything anymore. Texas makes your

00:16:54.420 stuff. So this is really a very, really important concept if you're concerned about climate is

00:17:02.260 the reality of the energy mix in the world. Asia dominated by coal, Africa. And then in terms of

00:17:08.980 amounts. Asia consumes, and primary energy again, Asia consumes half of the world's primary energy

00:17:16.120 today, half in Asia alone. Dominated by China, India's starting to grow. They're a quarter of

00:17:23.480 China today. Half the world's energy because they make our stuff. They make the world's stuff. 1.00

00:17:31.040 And then the rest of the world, you look at Africa, which is 1.2 to 3 billion people,

00:17:35.160 very little energy consumption. It's just getting started. Europe and the U.S., we consume about a

00:17:40.940 third of the world's energy. We only have 16% of the world's people, 16% of the population,

00:17:48.680 a third of the energy. We make half the global GDP. Energy creates wealth. Africa and Asia

00:18:00.560 combined are three quarters of the world's population. Three quarters. They only consume

00:18:05.740 half of the world's energy and they make a third of the world's GDP.

00:18:11.700 That's poverty. Three quarters of people, half the energy, a third of the GDP.

00:18:18.080 They don't have the energy to power their own civilizations in the way that we do.

00:18:22.440 And this is a really important dynamic. So seven billion people are living in some

00:18:26.820 state of energy poverty today, from nothing to not reliable and not affordable to them.

00:18:34.840 Seven billion people.

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00:20:01.720 calls, no missed customers. We've touched on it a little bit about the green movement and

00:20:09.980 virtue signaling about, you know, we've only consumed this amount of energy, et cetera,

00:20:15.800 et cetera. What do you think of Britain's net zero policy? Yeah.

00:20:22.620 so when the iea put out their net zero report five years ago this summer and it was a roadmap

00:20:30.160 for global energy and it led to glasgow the cop in glasgow i think it was cop 26

00:20:36.000 a roadmap um i put out a piece that right then that said the road to glasgow is paved with bad

00:20:46.700 assumptions you know it was i think it ran in the hill or something in the u.s

00:20:52.340 They made a huge number of bad assumptions in that.

00:20:55.900 But the biggest one, the most egregious, the most disingenuous, actually, because Fatih

00:21:01.740 Biral, who runs the IEA, is a smart economist.

00:21:05.120 And he knew.

00:21:06.280 He knows.

00:21:07.380 The most egregious of that report was that global energy consumption would decrease.

00:21:15.220 This was 2021.

00:21:17.040 Global energy consumption would go down.

00:21:19.540 In what world?

00:21:21.560 it's our it's not it's way off already and then within that they took coal oil and gas down to

00:21:28.900 nothing and grew biofuels and bioenergies and solar wind to these wild numbers by 2050 none

00:21:35.080 of it is happening still can i just and we'll come back to that okay the question i'm thinking is

00:21:39.580 why if he's such a smart guy if he knows it's such an obvious lie he knows he's going to get

00:21:45.040 found out he's obviously smart why would he lie about something so basic and obvious

00:21:49.900 now you're asking me to understand human nature i tend to deal with data and facts i to the best i

00:21:58.160 can there's a lot of opinions about that but there were a tremendous amount of pressure at that time

00:22:03.020 if you go back to that time to push for climate climate change we have to we have to we have to

00:22:09.900 and the iea is paid by several countries mostly europe and the u.s and so his bosses if you will

00:22:18.120 were European leaders. And there was an interesting circle going on, and he meets with them all the

00:22:23.000 time, and they put out reports about their progress towards net zero. Paris happened,

00:22:28.840 the Paris Accords, which haven't happened, you know, those promises. So, maybe political pressure,

00:22:36.320 maybe it was aspirational. They say it was a scenario, you know, and there's, instead of a

00:22:43.720 forecast well everybody took it as a bloody forecast you know you can call it a scenario

00:22:49.020 and it is a scenario it's not underpinned necessarily by rigorous information and data

00:22:56.740 and understanding otherwise you wouldn't decrease global energy consumption so this is what it would

00:23:00.500 have taken to get to net zero but people used it as a roadmap and many countries here started

00:23:06.740 going down that road and you asked about the uk francis so you know what is why is the uk

00:23:13.420 continue to follow that. I mean, what is Ed Miliband thinking? I don't know. I don't know

00:23:21.400 because most of the world today, well, a big chunk of the world, if you were to list the top 10

00:23:27.120 challenges in the world, go around the world and do it. And I visited a lot of the world. Climate

00:23:32.500 wasn't high on the list. Food, shelter, education, water, healthcare, rights of women, a lot of

00:23:41.140 a lot of important issues on there. Climate didn't make that high up on the list.

00:23:45.940 Western Europe and the U.S. is where it seemed to have gotten overweight, if you will. Given that,

00:23:52.940 people started functioning in a way, some call it greenwashing, some call it virtue signaling.

00:24:01.420 I don't judge the intentions. Maybe the intentions are very real to do your part,

00:24:07.340 but you do have to look at the outcomes. And when the outcomes show Germany, who led with,

00:24:14.220 I won't pronounce it right, but Energywanda, their new energy in 2007, and Europe followed,

00:24:20.400 when you start going down that path, you start looking at the impacts of that, economic impacts.

00:24:26.960 Starting in 2008, the U.S. continued to grow our GDP. China was on a steeper slope. Europe went

00:24:35.220 flat for 20 years. Europe has been flat economically. You have to look at that and

00:24:42.420 say intentions, outcomes. If your industries are closing, your people are leaving, and they're

00:24:49.540 going places where they can afford to operate, it's not going to help the climate. Let me say

00:24:56.100 that again. If your industries aren't functioning and your wealth is decreasing, you're hurting the

00:25:02.420 environment because wealthy nations can afford to invest in the environment. This is a very

00:25:07.620 important, I'll talk about this tomorrow when I close the conference here. You can't just have

00:25:15.800 this binary, are you for the environment? Are you for energy? Or there's something else in there,

00:25:24.240 the economy. Energy underpins healthy economies. Healthy economies can afford to clean up the

00:25:31.320 environment, and we do. The cleanest air in the world is where it's rich. The cleanest water in

00:25:35.800 the world is where it's rich. And we have the biggest economies. We're not hurting the

00:25:41.280 environment. We're protecting the environment through wealth. So if you're imploding your own

00:25:45.660 economies, you're actually running counter to what your intentions were. And this is not trivial.

00:25:54.020 This is one of the most important things that I think the citizenry is not understanding

00:25:59.580 about the policies that are intending to be green,

00:26:06.400 whatever that word means.

00:26:09.260 So, you know, energy, the economy, the environment,

00:26:14.300 and it flows that way.

00:26:17.000 You have to have this energy, security,

00:26:20.140 abundant, affordable, reliable energy,

00:26:21.920 have a healthy economy to clean up the environment.

00:26:26.500 The worst environments in the world I've ever seen

00:26:28.240 are where it's poor.

00:26:29.580 I mean, the land, the soils, the water, the local air, awful, because you can't literally,

00:26:39.160 they have other priorities. Scott, there's going to be a lot of people watching this,

00:26:43.940 particularly young people. And I think it's really important to address their concerns.

00:26:48.520 Yes. Because when people kind of mock them, I don't think, particularly my generation and

00:26:56.400 your generation the younger generations are terrified yeah they talk about climate change

00:27:02.160 and to be fair to them every time i seem to switch on like my laptop or i read the news and i see

00:27:08.500 what's happening in the uk record summer hottest june on record are they right to be worried about

00:27:15.020 the climate yeah again this isn't an this is not a binary answer yes climate the world is warming

00:27:24.120 overall, slowly, about a little over a degree C in a century, and it's continuing to warm,

00:27:32.480 and humans are influencing that. We're putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

00:27:38.020 We've gone from 270 parts per million to 420 parts per million, and that's increasing,

00:27:43.100 and it will for a while. So it is getting warmer globally. It doesn't mean you're going to have,

00:27:50.100 not have cold winters and but the aggregate warmth is happening so that's a concern and it's real

00:27:56.520 okay now the ipcc the intergovernmental intergovernmental panel on climate change

00:28:02.260 which is the big climate confab of the top climate scientists in the world with the un stood up by the

00:28:10.480 un has met 30 times and they put out reports they're called ar you know reports ar6 was the

00:28:18.400 last major report they wrote. Let's separate warming from the impacts of that warming.

00:28:24.880 Let's think about what can hurt both humans and the environment, the extreme weather events.

00:28:32.320 So when you start to look at the data on those, and the IPCC report is very honest about it,

00:28:38.120 AR6, okay, Working Group 1, Chapter 12, Table 12.12. Let's say that again for the young people.

00:28:48.080 go look at that. It's public. AR6, Working Group 1, Chapter 12, Table 12.12 is a summary table

00:28:57.020 of all the extreme weather impacts that we can concern ourselves with.

00:29:04.480 Storms, major storms, frequency and intensity, fires and fire weather, drought and drought

00:29:10.840 intensity, ocean acidification, rates of sea level rise, et cetera, okay? When you look at the table,

00:29:22.060 they run today's impacts, and they look at the historical past, and they say,

00:29:27.120 what has emerged from history, from statistical history, with what they're showing is what hasn't

00:29:34.000 emerged with confidence. So, the white in that table says, this has not emerged from the historical

00:29:39.780 norms with confidence. Most of the table's white. And then they run it on their most extreme at the

00:29:47.620 time scenario. Okay. The 8.5, RCP 8.5 it's called. That's the most extreme warming scenario, which

00:29:56.140 by the way, the IPCC itself has said now won't happen. A brand new paper out this year saying

00:30:01.820 that's much lower. That's not going to happen. Okay. But they ran this table in that most

00:30:07.520 extreme scenario. What would happen in 2050 and what would happen in 2100 with these weather

00:30:12.760 events if we keep just getting hotter? Almost the whole table stays white with confidence they don't

00:30:20.140 emerge from historical norms. Those things I just talked about, it gets warmer, the oceans get a

00:30:26.060 little more acidic, and you see a little bit more rainfall, okay? So when the summaries of those,

00:30:34.360 and particularly the political and media summaries of those come out with the drama

00:30:38.420 and say, it's the worst storm on record. No, it's not. It's not.

00:30:48.900 It's hot as hell in London right now, even for a Texan, you know, or a Michigan guy.

00:30:56.960 That's an unusual warm near the end of June, right? It's been this warm in June before.

00:31:04.360 I promise. I haven't looked it up, but I could go back and find your records. And you've had

00:31:08.440 this kind of heat before in June, sometime, and probably sometime before that. Okay. They haven't

00:31:15.120 emerged from the past. So when I talk, I speak at a lot of universities and I have young people

00:31:20.400 come to me, often very concerned. Their biggest concern is why haven't I heard what you're telling

00:31:26.260 me. I don't know. Why haven't you? I'm upset by it. I understand. It's upsetting if all you've

00:31:36.980 heard is one component of this. But we've got to be not just completely factual. We've got to try

00:31:43.420 to be factually complete. I said that to Senator Manchin's climate hearing five years ago. Factually

00:31:49.940 complete is hard. So they're hearing factual completeness now and it worries them. And a lot

00:31:55.080 of them say, their conversations typically go, I'm upset. What can I do? Where can I see more

00:32:03.120 of this? And then they start asking, what should I do? What would you do for a job? And I say,

00:32:09.040 well, what's your biggest concern? And they'll say something. Go work for that company then.

00:32:15.480 Huh? Go work for a big power company or ExxonMobil? Are you kidding? Yeah. If you want to make real

00:32:21.520 change, go and work there and change it from within. You'll have a lot more influence from

00:32:27.180 within. And you'll, you'll learn a lot too, because there's a lot of data and information.

00:32:30.340 So there's a lot, and they do, some of them go do that. And they come back years later and said,

00:32:34.280 thanks for the advice. It was very powerful. Now I'm going to go work for an NGO. I'm armed

00:32:39.980 with information, better information. So I think the young people have been indoctrinated.

00:32:45.000 i was i'm old okay been around a while i was trained to be terrified of i was i was raised

00:32:54.040 in the cold war trained to be terrified of nuclear in kindergarten we would do drills

00:32:59.140 where we would get under our kindergarten desk preparing for a nuclear attack very scientific

00:33:04.540 because i knew that desk would protect me from even at six i knew

00:33:09.480 maybe not you know i'm gonna be real safe here but that's what i was trained i was

00:33:16.500 trained young people today have been trained to be terrified of climate change and when you and

00:33:23.840 and i'll i'll pull a class how many it happened a young man said why does any of this matter

00:33:30.240 we're all gone in 15 years anyway i said what do you mean we're all gone he said humans we're gone

00:33:36.400 we're toast he goes it's an existential threat to humanity i said you think in 15 years the

00:33:45.000 human race is gone he goes yes i'm not supposed to do this i said how many think that half of

00:33:50.340 the hands in the room went up wow i went home so depressed because this was nine years ago

00:33:57.580 in a big university. We're all still here. Okay. So the language matters a lot and the training

00:34:08.400 matters a lot, but that's a very real fear. So when you have that kind of fear, you have to

00:34:12.980 start looking at the information. And again, not some group that's paid to tell you something else.

00:34:20.860 Go look at the IPCC report itself and their summary table. AR7 is going to come out soon.

00:34:26.180 my guess is that table won't be in it because it's getting ever more focused on a narrative.

00:34:33.680 But that narrative, that extreme event narrative is going, it's getting less and less noisy,

00:34:43.860 less and less and less noisy. In fact, it really isn't even making the radar of some of the big

00:34:48.720 political conversations in Western Europe and the U.S. today. It shouldn't go away.

00:34:54.860 it's one issue, but so is the land, the air, and the water. The pillars of the environment,

00:35:00.440 the land, the air, the water, and the atmosphere, they all are important. And you have to balance

00:35:05.420 those things. You can't have it all. There are trade-offs between these things. You literally,

00:35:11.800 if you want all solar, you hurt the land. All right? There are trade-offs as we go around.

00:35:18.940 It's an optimization problem. We're trying to optimize the different parameters depending on

00:35:22.720 what resources you have, what your educational levels are like, what your political system is

00:35:28.980 like. Every part of the world is different when it comes to dealing with its energy portfolio.

00:35:36.320 There's going to be young people. I really hope there's young people

00:35:39.260 watching this, Scott. It's Constantine. They will be watching.

00:35:43.920 You massively overestimate my feelings. I'm counting on you.

00:35:49.320 Your kids are the age of my grandkids, man.

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00:37:15.540 what would you say to them? Because I talk to some of them and I have friends who are now,

00:37:22.620 you know, in their 60s, 70s and 80s. And they say to me, Francis, my kids don't want to have kids

00:37:30.100 because they're worried about the environment. They don't want to bring up kids. What would

00:37:34.360 you say to young people in their 20s or in their 30s who are terrified of climate? And as a result,

00:37:41.160 it's they don't they're not going to have children. They're not going to do this. They're

00:37:44.560 not going to do that again i'm not a counselor um i want to let's talk about population just

00:37:54.880 for a second and then i'll come back and try to answer that succinctly yeah i host this pbs show

00:38:00.800 with two guests and we did one on population after i read a piece in the new york times which

00:38:05.220 just blew me away so we had these two a canadian and a university professor from ut actually austin

00:38:10.980 the fertility rates globally are plummeting, okay? India went below replacement fertility

00:38:20.300 rate two years ago. 2.1 is replacement, 2.1. Kids per woman.

00:38:29.360 The only place that's still increasing their fertility rates is Africa, and that's coming 0.83

00:38:33.040 down quickly, and a few other countries. South Korea below one, etc. So population demographics

00:38:43.220 are interesting. We were headed toward 11 billion people. We're at 8.3 today. I'll do it this way.

00:38:51.020 And now we're headed toward 10 billion. And then it was 9 billion. It keeps getting lower and

00:38:58.480 closer. The latest demographics say we're going to peak, the global population is going to peak

00:39:07.420 around 9 billion people in 50 years or less, 2075. Peak. And then it doesn't plateau. We don't go to

00:39:20.380 9 billion and chill out for hundreds and hundreds of years. It plummets. The math of that fertility

00:39:27.240 rates plummets. And we go back to 2 billion people on earth in less than 200 years.

00:39:34.680 Took 200 years to go from a billion to eight, back to two. This is a choice. Some wonderful

00:39:42.760 books on this. It's happening globally because of choice. Women, couples are choosing not to have

00:39:49.560 kids. And there are a whole variety of reasons, okay? It's not summer climate fear or what they're

00:39:58.020 bringing their kids into in the world. That's more the wealthy world. Some are, it's expensive

00:40:03.040 to have kids and raise them. Some are, I don't need as many kids. We used to need them for

00:40:10.640 agriculture. Kids died. In the village I described where we put solar, the indigenous village of

00:40:16.820 the Arwako people, half of those kids will die before they become 18. Today's world from a tooth 1.00

00:40:24.400 infection or dysentery, something that wouldn't kill us or breathing indoor smoke, pneumonia,

00:40:33.920 cancer. Okay. So they need the kids. They, they die. That's not happening in a lot of the world

00:40:42.620 anymore. And there are other reasons too. So as this wonderful books march around the world

00:40:48.120 looking at this, we're choosing not to do that. I can't tell you not to choose not to have kids

00:40:56.360 because of climate fear. If that's real in you, that's in you. All I can do is share the information

00:41:04.400 with you and say, the impacts of climate change. When I asked that young man who got dead in 15

00:41:10.620 years, I said, well, what's going to kill you? Huh? Climate is. No, no, no. Climate doesn't

00:41:19.500 kill. Climate is a 30-year moving average of weather. That doesn't kill. What's going to

00:41:25.360 kill you? What's going to kill the human race? Storms. Not really. Storms, the deaths from 0.91

00:41:36.960 climate have gone way down, by the way. That's the data. But storms kill a few people, especially

00:41:42.240 in poor countries who don't have the protection. Heat. Cold kills a lot more than heat. That's

00:41:49.500 just the reality. Those who can control their climate don't die from heat. Those who can't

00:41:56.720 have learned to live with it, and a degree more isn't going to kill them. It's already 40 degrees

00:42:00.820 BC, 41. Drought. Extreme drought could harm big regions, but it's not going to kill,

00:42:08.280 it's not going to wipe out humanity. I mean, we just went through these a step at a time,

00:42:12.700 and you could kind of see the tensions coming down. Okay, here's a guy that's not BSing me

00:42:18.820 with the data. Here's the data. And these are important issues. And there are some really

00:42:27.620 other important issues too. So, all we can do is try to be as factually complete as we can

00:42:35.620 and have young people arm themselves with information, right? And take the time to do

00:42:43.940 that a little bit. It's all there. And maybe mitigate your own fears. If I have a fear of

00:42:50.100 flying, some people terrified of flying, or spiders, or heights, or public speaking,

00:42:58.520 We all go, if I have to do that thing, I have to live with the spiders or fly a lot or public

00:43:03.960 speak, I'm going to go probably learn how to mitigate my fear around that because it may

00:43:08.600 not be rational. People do die from plane accidents, but it's a lot fewer than driving

00:43:13.900 or bicycling. People do fall off cliffs, but it's not very many. And very few people ever died from

00:43:20.820 public speaking, but it's the largest fear. Some people would choose death in the polls over public

00:43:25.440 speaking, literally, as their largest fear, public speaking over death. So we educate ourselves and

00:43:34.480 we need to do that with other things as well, including climate. It's very important. And that

00:43:41.600 way we can have dialogues that will address these issues proportional to their impacts.

00:43:49.420 well this is what you're describing is a um correct me on any of this if i get it wrong but

00:43:57.720 i think what i'm hearing is the way that generations now successfully have been taught

00:44:02.600 to look at this issue is very one-dimensional there's only one variable that we're optimizing

00:44:06.780 for which is saving the planet uh quote unquote uh the level of fear that's been attached to that

00:44:13.480 is vastly disproportionate to the nature of the threat.

00:44:17.540 Correct.

00:44:18.180 And on top of that, you know,

00:44:19.560 one of the things that I wanted to ask you about

00:44:21.560 in the interest of being factually complete

00:44:24.360 is you talk about how Asia is consuming so much energy now, 0.75

00:44:30.260 which, of course, they have to

00:44:31.060 because they have much of the population.

00:44:32.840 But one of the things you talked about

00:44:34.700 in one of your speeches here at ARC

00:44:36.540 was the fact that India is only a quarter as rich as China.

00:44:40.980 And if I was the Indian prime minister, I'm not, but I can only imagine that his number one mission is to get India as rich as China and beyond as quickly as possible.

00:44:53.040 Yes.

00:44:53.440 Right?

00:44:54.480 That being the case, you've talked about the fact that the world still consumes more coal than it ever did, more oil than it ever did, more gas than it ever did. 0.68

00:45:04.180 And I don't imagine the Indians are covering Indian solar panels and wind turbines. 0.63

00:45:09.480 I imagine they're desperate to get their hands on the good stuff, on the dense stuff that you're talking about, and nuclear as well, of course. 0.98

00:45:17.080 So this idea that we are going to reduce our CO2 emissions as a globe in the next 50 to 100 years just seems completely ridiculous to me.

00:45:28.680 Based on that alone, the fact that India will want to catch up, that alone would make it impossible to reduce our CO2.

00:45:38.080 is that fair first of all that's a great summary okay yeah very fair if i'm narendra modi

00:45:44.980 absolutely in fact around narendra modi with this 1.4 billion people more population than china

00:45:52.800 now consumes a quarter of the energy because our economy is a quarter it's right where china was

00:45:57.480 about 28 years ago on slope and then china went boom with energy consumption and economy literally

00:46:03.460 if you slide India left three decades, it looks just like China did. So they're going to do that.

00:46:08.820 Right. So we're about to witness an explosion in energy consumption. Yes, in India. In India,

00:46:14.180 and therefore the globe, because India is so much of it, right? Yeah. That being the case, 0.98

00:46:20.500 it's interesting to me, you talk, look, there are people who say, you know what, climate change is

00:46:25.600 just, it's happening. It's got nothing to do with human activity. You don't say that. You say

00:46:29.960 human activity contributes? To warming. To warming.

00:46:34.020 Contributes or causes the different things? No,

00:46:37.420 our emissions are causing more warming. More warming? Yes.

00:46:42.480 Do you have a percentage estimate on

00:46:44.760 how much of the warming comes from human activity? Not my own research.

00:46:51.640 So, yeah. But of that degree C,

00:46:54.780 degree, degree and a half that we've warmed in the last century,

00:46:58.040 a significant part is from human emissions. Okay, so taking those two things together,

00:47:03.020 A, we're about to witness an explosion in energy consumption, and B, human energy consumption

00:47:10.220 contributes to warming, we're going to see warming. The planet will keep warming over time.

00:47:16.720 But the best estimates, Constantine, are about another degree and a half.

00:47:21.880 Before the decline in population starts to mitigate the problem.

00:47:25.640 and the mix of energy goes towards methane, hydrogen, and nuclear, which is much lower

00:47:31.520 emissions. So we're seeing, we're leaving the carbon world naturally. We're decarbonizing

00:47:38.080 naturally. Wood, hay, coal, oil, less carbon, methane, less carbon, uranium, thorium, and

00:47:48.340 eventually fusion, which is hydrogen, isotopes of hydrogen, no carbon. So we're doing that

00:47:52.920 naturally when we get dense. And India is building nuclear reactors, and they should,

00:47:58.740 I would love for India to build a lot of nuclear electricity, because they could decarbonize much

00:48:04.820 faster, like France did, than going the coal route. They're doing some coal, because they

00:48:10.720 have it. But go, you know, they can skip that long cycle if they just accelerate their methane and

00:48:18.960 their nuclear. Okay, so this is a very good point of which to talk about nuclear then. Because I

00:48:25.700 think with nuclear, from all the evidence that I've seen, nuclear on an averaged out basis is

00:48:34.660 the safest form of energy that we currently have. Yes. The more people have been killed in one dam

00:48:40.180 collapse in China than have been killed by all the nuclear accidents in human history, right?

00:48:44.920 however the big concern with nuclear is um you get a situation where an entire area of land

00:48:54.600 is just like the the area around chernobyl you can't go in there and then people will

00:49:01.340 won't be able to live there for thousands of years and you have a few of those and

00:49:05.340 you know you've got a real real problem interesting though on that just real quick

00:49:09.820 nature moved back to their region around chernobyl because there's no humans oh yeah it's the safest

00:49:16.100 place for animals in the world and they don't have seven heads and nine legs they're they're

00:49:21.200 just normal so i think humans actually will be back in there much sooner okay yes nonetheless

00:49:27.700 i think to most people the idea of you know we build a nuclear reactor in our country and it

00:49:32.780 explodes. Understandably scary. And part of it is, you know, we're not very good at visually

00:49:40.160 seeing the impact of burning coal and how many people that kills, and it kills a lot of people,

00:49:44.860 or a dam collapse in China, which we've never heard about, versus big boom, visually powerful.

00:49:52.220 But also it's like... And tying that to nuclear weapons.

00:49:55.240 Yeah. There's this irrational tie between nuclear electricity

00:49:58.380 and using the plutonium that comes out of the fission products from that

00:50:04.460 and enriching it and making it better for nuclear weapons.

00:50:07.620 So there's this sort of weaponry nuclear power link.

00:50:12.760 It's not irrational, is it?

00:50:13.980 Because, I mean, nuclear reactors can be used to produce...

00:50:17.760 They do produce plutonium.

00:50:20.340 Yeah, it's a byproduct of the process.

00:50:22.060 But still, a lot has to happen to that plutonium before it becomes weapon-grade

00:50:25.080 and then to get to where you can make a weapon.

00:50:27.020 It's not irrational.

00:50:28.040 No.

00:50:28.200 there's a chain there that could happen right but it's nuclear power plants aren't making nuclear

00:50:33.320 weapons no no no of course not yeah i guess what i'm getting at is with nuclear um there is a high

00:50:41.040 low probability high risk uh no low probability high impact yes event that's that is in people's

00:50:51.040 minds a lot take a country like britain in the u.s there's parts of texas you could blow up a

00:50:56.320 nuclear reactor, nobody would notice, right? It's so vast and so not densely populated in parts,

00:51:03.200 right? In the UK, it's a very different conversation, right? So what can you tell

00:51:10.440 us about nuclear, what it might be like in the future, and also the other forms of technology,

00:51:16.020 particularly hydrogen that you mentioned? Where are we with all of that?

00:51:18.920 Yeah, yeah. Progressing towards those, start with hydrogen. Hydrogen is element number one

00:51:25.400 the periodic table it's lighter than helium so it's a it's a tough little booger to keep track

00:51:29.880 of but and you have to make it now there's some natural hydrogen but we haven't explored for it

00:51:37.160 much to use it you have to make it but it's a remarkable fuel and it can be used as a electricity

00:51:45.880 carrier so a fuel cell is run on hydrogen and that's basically electricity carrier run like

00:51:50.920 a battery or you can burn hydrogen i mean the hindenburg was hydrogen okay so but you have to

00:51:59.320 make it and the two easiest ways to make it are to split the methane molecule ch4 the water molecule

00:52:05.720 h2o and then you get your hydrogen um so you do something to natural gas or to water and you get

00:52:12.840 the hydrogen put energy into them split it and you get the hydrogen okay but there's energy in

00:52:17.080 are we doing this already yeah you can do it one's called hydrolysis and one is called steam

00:52:21.480 reforming of methane we do it we don't do it to get large-scale fuels from them but we have to

00:52:26.760 have hydrogen for a lot of processes in the world so we those so why don't we use it for energy yet

00:52:32.120 it's expensive okay so it's not cheap enough no yeah it's not it can't compete yet it's not cheap

00:52:37.600 enough and why do you think it will um the dynamics of energy when always here's when

00:52:45.420 transitions happen, when something better comes along. What's better? Well, a fuel cell might be

00:52:53.020 better than a battery if it's cost competitive. It's always the economics that kick in. We don't

00:53:01.800 recycle because it's too expensive to recycle, so we just make new stuff. It's always the cost

00:53:07.440 that drives these transitions at the end of the day, at scale. A few local people can afford

00:53:13.700 solar panels and wind turbines. Maybe hydrogen fuel cells, but not at scale. So this is the

00:53:20.020 driver of that. It needs to come down to about a buck, buck 50 a kilogram hydrogen to compete

00:53:25.340 with other things in most places. We're not there. That's why people are starting to look

00:53:30.300 for natural hydrogen now. So there's hydrogen. That's a nice thing. Methane, hydrogen, and then

00:53:36.160 nuclear. Two processes to make electricity from nuclear. One is fission, splitting, and one is

00:53:42.360 fusion, colliding, very different inputs to that, uranium, thorium, hydrogen, other isotopes.

00:53:50.100 We already have fission. That's a well-known, it's been around 70, 80 years. We put nuclear

00:53:55.260 reactors on battleships and in submarines. We float them around the oceans. They're running

00:54:00.200 on nuclear reactors, the ones relatively little. So very safe, known process. It's the fear. Yes,

00:54:08.580 the boom is scary. The technologies now have gotten almost inherently safe. They literally

00:54:16.780 shut themselves down if the heating starts to happen. Warfare, I mean, Russia went after

00:54:23.460 Ukraine's reactor. This is kind of an energy war in some ways. You know, weaponized natural gas

00:54:30.960 with Europe, et cetera. So all wars have some energy component to them. So that's real. There's

00:54:37.380 nothing perfect. You can wipe out a solar array too pretty easily or a wind farm and take everything

00:54:42.720 down. So, you know, that's kind of, nuclear is coming. China is leading, of course. They're

00:54:52.420 building more nuclear reactors now than any other country combined. Take China's nuclear reactors

00:54:58.960 under construction. They're more than the next 20 countries combined. Russia's third. India's second.

00:55:06.440 The U.S. isn't even on the top 20 list.

00:55:09.480 We will be again because it's bipartisan.

00:55:12.800 Young people are not scared of nuclear.

00:55:14.360 You ask young people.

00:55:16.300 No emissions, stents, electricity.

00:55:18.380 How about nuclear?

00:55:19.000 Go for it.

00:55:19.840 They weren't trained to be scared of nuclear like I was.

00:55:22.680 They're good with it.

00:55:23.700 And they should be.

00:55:24.900 So I see a nuclear, let's call it a renaissance. 0.99

00:55:28.420 It's coming again and it's being led by China.

00:55:32.480 The Middle East even has reactors now.

00:55:34.780 The UAE has four working nuclear reactors, large-scale gigawatt nuclear reactors today.

00:55:40.660 It's coming.

00:55:42.480 And I think the West needs to get on board and get back after it.

00:55:47.020 Fusion, which is a different technology, is getting closer.

00:55:53.140 Most of us used to laugh and say, yeah, it's 30 years away and always will be.

00:55:57.700 But it's not now.

00:55:59.320 What is nuclear fusion?

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00:57:56.700 it before it's gone. What is nuclear fusion? What is it? It's the colliding of radioactive isotopes.

00:58:09.600 So instead of splitting something to make heat, it's fusing something to make heat.

00:58:14.900 The sun is the best fusion reactor we know.

00:58:18.020 Oh, wow.

00:58:18.760 Okay.

00:58:19.260 And so it is literally fusing these things and creating a tremendous amount of heat.

00:58:24.420 The challenge is constraining the heat.

00:58:26.400 For those really interested, we did a PBS show.

00:58:29.400 One of our episodes was on fusion.

00:58:30.940 Two really smart people.

00:58:32.300 So the challenge there is containing the heat.

00:58:34.420 How do you contain the reaction in the heat?

00:58:37.160 And there's two big approaches to that.

00:58:38.620 anymore. And that heat is used to do what? Boil water, make steam, turn a turbine, run a generator

00:58:44.900 and make electricity. So it's just a different way to create heat. But the cool part about it is

00:58:50.380 it's completely inherently safe. You're not splitting things, you're fusing them. So it

00:58:57.600 literally shuts itself down. Okay. It's almost the perfect energy. If I had to pick one of

00:59:08.120 everything we've talked about. It's the closest to being the answer to unlimited heat to make

00:59:15.380 electricity and heat for other processes. The challenge is really important, I think. If you

00:59:22.360 look at the end-use energy we talked about earlier, only 20% of the energy in the world

00:59:29.100 end-use is electricity today, and it's grown to 20%. 80% is other things, heat molecules

00:59:37.180 for industrial processes, making cement and steel and fertilizers and plastic and all the stuff we

00:59:43.100 do. So as that electricity grows, nuclear fission and fusion can be part of that. But it takes so

00:59:51.580 much heat to make cement and steel. You can't do it with solar and wind. You have to burn something.

00:59:59.820 Six, seven, 800, 900, 1100 degrees to make some of these things that modern societies run on.

01:00:06.220 So nuclear fusion has the potential if you arc it to make that much heat.

01:00:12.860 So you literally transition away from carbon.

01:00:18.340 That's the ultimate decarbonization transition is to those very dense,

01:00:23.040 always on sources of heat, which is a nuclear fission or fusion reactions.

01:00:29.200 And it's high tech.

01:00:32.060 What about nuclear waste, Scott?

01:00:33.240 Yeah. So this doesn't have waste, the fusion. It's steam. Fission does have two sorts of ways. The big towers you see, these conical towers, that's just steam. That's just the steam off the boiling water. That's not CO2 or any other particulate emissions like from a coal plant.

01:00:56.760 the waste out of fission is called fission products they're they're various forms of

01:01:03.720 radioactive things about 95 percent of the energy is used and about five percent of these fission

01:01:11.220 products a little piece of plutonium but the rest of them you have to manage you have to

01:01:18.240 what they typically do is they they solicify those what does that mean uh they blend them

01:01:25.160 with silica. So they become a molecule that's locked up, still

01:01:30.940 very hot and radioactive. And then they put it in canisters.

01:01:35.300 And those canisters are then put into dry casks, which you see

01:01:40.940 mostly on the surface in the US. Or they're put into 3040 foot

01:01:46.560 thick concrete slabs today in France. In our first film, we

01:01:50.200 take you inside the nuclear reactor and show you that the

01:01:53.060 dry cast going down into the concrete slabs where they're hot and radioactive and they're stored

01:01:57.920 forever. And now they're looking at geologic solutions. So putting them down in the earth

01:02:02.040 and the shale and other kinds of rocks and holding them there forever. I say forever,

01:02:07.500 they're radioactive for 20, 30,000 years. They're not hot for that long. They're hot for a couple

01:02:12.400 hundred years before they wouldn't melt themselves and they'd be safe. So I'm not making light of

01:02:18.900 that. There's a real, you got to manage that waste. But the

01:02:21.960 amount of waste is very small for the amount of energy that

01:02:27.560 comes out. I think in the film, we show one human's use of

01:02:32.520 nuclear power is like the size of a coin. That's the waste that

01:02:36.620 comes out of a human's lifetime use, the size of a coin. There

01:02:40.320 are a lot of humans, but compared to coal ash and

01:02:43.200 particulates or CO2 from burning gasoline and other products and methane, or the amount

01:02:51.480 of batteries we're going to be dumping into the earth, which are toxic from our cars and

01:02:57.040 our backing up our solar and wind. Solar panels that are getting dumped in the earth and they

01:03:01.440 have toxic components in them. We don't recycle them. We dump them in the earth. Wind turbine

01:03:06.300 blades, gigantic. We bury them. We don't recycle them.

01:03:10.040 Really?

01:03:10.740 Yeah.

01:03:11.060 Why not?

01:03:11.420 they're not made of recyclable material one they're starting to be but it's the economics

01:03:17.840 again constant and it it costs more money to grab the key things out of a battery and dump the rest

01:03:24.700 the key things out of a solar panel and dump the rest there's there's an energy and cost to all

01:03:29.480 that process it's just cheaper to make them new that's it's just cheaper i mean big box stores

01:03:37.380 they're dumping new TVs from last year's model because it's cheaper to dump them and they're

01:03:44.080 not going to sell them than to make them new. It's nuts. This is a human waste thing that we

01:03:49.880 should get our heads around. I'm all for recycling, reuse, and reprocessing, but we got to get it

01:03:55.400 affordable. That's why we don't do it for the most part. So you're sitting here, the nuclear

01:04:00.000 has those fission products, fusion, it's just sounds too good to be true almost. You got to

01:04:07.720 contain the heat of that reaction. It is a little, it's a little teeny sun, you know, and then you

01:04:13.920 got to contain that heat. Um, you know, those are, that's technology and other things that geothermal

01:04:20.600 we haven't talked about is big deal. The earth is hot. The further you go down in the earth,

01:04:26.360 the hotter it gets. So, a lot of new things are coming. This administration, the Trump

01:04:31.300 administration, is really big on geothermal. So was the prior administration, the Biden

01:04:34.940 administration. Jennifer Granholm, Chris Wright, good friend, big on geothermal. Two kinds. One,

01:04:41.860 if you get enough thermal gradient, you can literally use that hot water to make electricity.

01:04:47.240 Shallow geothermal. Think of a heat pump in your home. You can circulate 50, 60 degree water,

01:04:54.300 and it will cool your home in the summer.

01:04:59.120 Or you can add a little heat to it

01:05:01.060 to warm your home in the winter,

01:05:02.540 but you don't have to add very much.

01:05:05.860 So geothermal is a wonderful form

01:05:08.380 of climate control in homes.

01:05:10.880 A little bit more expensive in most places

01:05:13.140 and other things today,

01:05:14.740 but it won't always be.

01:05:16.240 So geothermal is coming too.

01:05:18.300 And in the interim though,

01:05:19.960 the planet will get warmer

01:05:21.340 and we're going to have to adapt.

01:05:23.860 Yes.

01:05:24.300 That's inevitable.

01:05:25.600 We are adapting.

01:05:27.200 We've been, I mean, humans have been adapting since we were knuckle-dragging two million

01:05:33.520 years ago, human-like things, you know.

01:05:36.740 We've been adapting.

01:05:38.740 I mean, it's really important, a little geologic moment.

01:05:45.200 About every 100,000 years, there's a glacial interglacial cycle.

01:05:51.340 In fact, a Serbian physicist named Milankovic worked this out in house arrest for 20 years

01:05:57.480 by hand. He figured out why. Though it's kind of fun, the Earth's orbit around the sun changes

01:06:04.840 in shape, and the Earth wobbles on its axis and tilts on its axis. When you conflate those three

01:06:10.900 things, the Earth gets closer to and farther from the sun. When it's a little farther,

01:06:16.560 ice age happens we literally see ice come down from the north pole and it covers in the u.s

01:06:24.660 michigan and new york city and minnesota and montana in one to two thousand feet of ice

01:06:32.300 canada is gone that lasts about eighty thousand years and then for about twenty thousand years

01:06:41.140 that ice retreats, and we get more arable land. So, that's a glacial, interglacial.

01:06:50.140 We're in an interglacial period now. It started about 18,000 years ago. It started to warm.

01:06:58.060 The ice retreated. And by the way, when the ice is locked up up there in the poles up here,

01:07:03.300 sea level drops about 300 feet globally, vertically. The Gulf of Mexico used to be

01:07:10.300 way lower than it was just 90, you know, just 20,000 years ago, 25,000.

01:07:16.700 The ice melts, the seas rise, ice retreats, terrible land. That's what we have today. We're

01:07:24.280 in a beautiful interglacial cycle today. It takes, for those first 7,000 years, sea levels are really

01:07:30.060 rising because it's rising about a centimeter a year. And now it rises like a millimeter or less

01:07:35.640 a year, kind of for the next eight, 9,000 years. So here we are. Everything that we talk about,

01:07:41.800 the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, Industrial Revolution has happened in these last eight,

01:07:47.680 9,000 years. Beautiful interglacial. You can't stop that, Milankovitch cyclist. The ice will come back.

01:07:58.520 We're within a few thousand years of it statistically.

01:08:01.080 here comes the ice and we're gonna have a whole different challenge more humans die when it's

01:08:07.980 well i was gonna say if you want to be concerned about the climate changing the ice being over new

01:08:12.120 york that's when i start to get actually worried right that's a big one that's when you're like oh

01:08:17.320 this is real climate that's when it that's a big one and it's it'll happen right this will happen

01:08:22.040 you can't stop it now you might be able to put greenhouse gases i'm being this will sound

01:08:28.700 facetious. It's not. But I'm just playing sci-fi. Put some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,

01:08:33.680 you know, trap some heat. Do other things to keep it warmer and try to hold that back.

01:08:41.080 And we'll see what people do then. What about this? The reason I think

01:08:46.620 smart people are concerned about climate change is this idea of runaway climate change. The idea

01:08:53.020 that if you make things warmer, that causes other changes in the environment. It affects the ocean

01:08:57.760 affects this. So the rate at which it gets warmer accelerates and you never get to the decline

01:09:05.600 and or the slowdown in temperature increase that you talked about.

01:09:12.060 I think it's runaway impacts of that warming. So the rate of warming won't necessarily increase

01:09:18.020 steeply, keeps getting warmer. But what does that do? Does a big ice sheet calf off of Greenland

01:09:25.460 and plunk into the ocean like an ice cube in our water. So what happens then? Because right now

01:09:32.480 it's locked up on land, okay? And if it plunks into the ocean, that can cause more dramatic

01:09:40.780 rates of sea level change, for example. Do you get some feedback loops? There's something called

01:09:48.220 snowball Earth that's happened twice in Earth's history where literally the Earth was covered in

01:09:52.480 ice, the whole earth, snowball earth.

01:09:56.560 The thing I'm talking about, those hundred thousand years, those are high frequency glacial

01:10:01.200 interglacials.

01:10:02.200 10 of those have happened in the last million years, okay, 10, we can see them.

01:10:09.860 And human-like things have been around for all 10 of them.

01:10:16.320 We didn't have modern technology, but they would come closer to the pole or to the equator

01:10:21.720 in cold times, and then they would go back as land opened up again. They'd migrate across from

01:10:29.580 Russia, the Aleutians to the, you know, this all, humans like to survive. Most species do. So we

01:10:37.700 tend to adapt to these changing things. We're not going to stand there as the seas rise. Now,

01:10:48.700 Now, small islands, small island nations, that's hard.

01:10:54.760 If they're poor, they can't adapt.

01:10:57.280 If they're wealthy, they can do like Holland has done or New Orleans and build walls and

01:11:02.620 keep the ocean back.

01:11:04.440 You can afford to do those sorts of things.

01:11:07.140 But small island nations, if seas continue to rise, and they will at some rate, and they

01:11:12.640 have been for 18,000 years, and we're accelerating that a little bit, not much, by the way.

01:11:18.340 The acceleration of that rise isn't much.

01:11:20.300 So they got to adapt to that, adapt to storms, to droughts, to things.

01:11:26.440 And what allows you to do that?

01:11:30.260 Wealth.

01:11:32.720 Okay, this is where the inequity truly exists in the world today.

01:11:37.800 The emerging economies, 4 billion people, developing economies, 3 billion. 1.00

01:11:42.500 They can't adapt like the lucky billion can. 0.89

01:11:46.560 They don't have the wealth to do that, and they should. If there's a global inequity,

01:11:53.840 it's that the wealthy people can afford to make these kinds of adaptive changes.

01:12:01.920 So we've got to get them wealthy.

01:12:03.040 We've got to get them wealthy. We have to accelerate economic growth.

01:12:06.080 That'll be the conclusion of my talk tomorrow. The irony in all this is in order to go from

01:12:11.520 from energy to the economy, accelerate growth, not in population necessarily, in wealth,

01:12:19.280 so that everybody can afford the kinds of things that we have. And everybody knows about them.

01:12:27.920 The first thing you get, I've dropped a solar panel in Maasai country in Kenya, 40-watt panel,

01:12:32.620 cell phone. It's in our film. Yeah, they have to have it because it's called M-Kopa. That's how

01:12:38.560 they pay for their one hour of electricity that day.

01:12:41.580 But they're connected to the world now

01:12:43.440 and a little TV on a battery.

01:12:46.080 I mean, we're literally put in this solar panel.

01:12:49.240 In comes this little thing

01:12:50.680 and there's the cell phone and a little TV.

01:12:52.920 And the first film that came on

01:12:54.820 was one of the more modern Kong versus Godzilla.

01:13:00.860 And these two monsters were doing battle

01:13:03.120 on the TV screen

01:13:04.200 and these little kids on the couch

01:13:06.240 who probably had never seen this their their eyes got real big and i was saying through double

01:13:13.140 translation tell them it's not real because a giraffe had just walked by where we were literally

01:13:17.160 there goes a giraffe and here's kong and godzilla godzilla doing battle and i tell them it's not

01:13:23.660 real you know because they're like you haven't seen those here can you imagine that right your

01:13:29.100 first exposure is something like that. And that's where I'm very passionate about energy poverty.

01:13:39.260 I made a film about it called Switch On. We went around and looked at all that circumstance and

01:13:44.700 how you lift people up with energy and their economies to where they have the kinds of

01:13:52.620 of things, the good things and some of the bad that we do, Constantine and Francis.

01:13:59.660 So I think it's very important to not, some of our intentions and our proposals are holding

01:14:07.660 people down instead of bringing them up.

01:14:13.480 The way to make this change, and it's a continuum from poverty, severe to wealth, isn't to stretch

01:14:21.000 it more it's to bring this to this and everybody move together let's go we can do that that seems

01:14:30.360 a perfect place to end the interview what a pleasure it's been the final question is always

01:14:34.820 the same scott what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be before

01:14:40.480 scott answers a final question at the end of the interview make sure you go to triggerpod.co.uk

01:14:45.300 where you'll be able to see this.

01:14:47.680 What will go first, net zero or Europe?

01:14:51.160 If you were stood in front of Parliament in the UK

01:14:53.320 or any other European country,

01:14:54.960 what would be the simplest bit of data or anecdote

01:14:57.480 you would use to convince them about investing in nuclear energy?

01:15:02.020 What's the one thing we're not talking about

01:15:04.060 that we really should be?

01:15:05.880 Hmm.

01:15:06.120 Yeah, my mind always goes to my own interests and biases, which is education.

01:15:18.440 I think we're really not talking about how to improve our

01:15:25.000 critically thinking, complete education, even in the wealthy world. I think we've left some of that

01:15:34.520 behind, and we need to find a way to have civil dialogues again, to, as Aristotle said, be able

01:15:45.080 to entertain a thought without accepting it. That's what it's all about. We have to be able

01:15:52.920 to have these conversations, even if I don't agree, entertain, don't agree, so that we can

01:15:59.960 advance and learn. If we create situations where some ideas are not welcomed,

01:16:08.520 we're going backwards. And that's especially important as AI comes into the picture. We

01:16:15.720 haven't talked about AI. It's going to play a big role in the energy world,

01:16:21.160 the economics and environment world. But we have to continue the I part of that.

01:16:26.520 Okay. We can't go all A, artificial. Humans have to be involved with all of that,

01:16:39.240 because we're the only ones who really understand if it's putting out nonsense.

01:16:45.800 And it will put out nonsense. So I would say, as we think about AI, just keep the human component

01:16:52.680 very close to that. Accelerate what we do, make it better, but never replace it.

01:17:00.620 Scott, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we put some of

01:17:06.000 your questions to Scott. Is oil actually derived from years of squashed vegetation from 200 million

01:17:13.400 years ago? We were taught this at school and it was often repeated, but I've never had someone

01:17:17.840 explain it to me in a way that makes sense.

01:17:22.680 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - July 29, 2026

Climate Change： What the Data Actually Shows with Geologist Scott Tinker

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