Western Standard - October 20, 2025


Documentary on the consequences of denying energy to poor countries premieres in Calgary


Episode Stats

Length

22 minutes

Words per Minute

175.33034

Word Count

4,025

Sentence Count

245

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

6


Summary

John Robson is the Executive Director of Climate Discussions Nexus, which offers a forum of open debate on the topic of climate change and information and policy suggestions on climate change. He is also a journalist and historian, and has made multiple documentaries on the climate, as well as other documentaries.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Hi, my name is Leah Muschid. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard and today I have a guest
00:00:14.280 named John Robson. He's the Executive Director of Climate Discussions Nexus, which offers a forum of
00:00:21.100 open debate on the topic of climate change and information and policy suggestions on climate
00:00:27.700 change as well. He's also a journalist, he's a historian, and he has made multiple documentaries
00:00:34.100 on the climate as well as other documentaries. So, John, today, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
00:00:42.440 My first question to you is on the topic of one of your documentaries made in 2017, which was
00:00:49.940 The Environment, A True Story. So, basically, I know you told me that this documentary started
00:00:56.600 your organization, Nexus. So, why don't you tell me a little bit why this documentary was
00:01:02.460 so important, starting your organization as well, a little bit about the documentary itself.
00:01:08.340 As you said, I'm a journalist, a disreputable profession, but someone has to do it.
00:01:13.340 And I've been writing on a whole range of issues for a long time, including climate.
00:01:17.420 And I'd made documentaries on World War I and on Canada's constitution. And then I thought to myself,
00:01:25.000 the debate on climate is very one-sided because anybody who has doubts about the orthodoxy
00:01:31.020 is liable to get steamrolled. There are a number of rhetorical clubs that the alarmists will use.
00:01:37.860 And I decided to make a documentary that tried to cover the whole of the debate to deal with all
00:01:45.300 the important issues, including the important arguments in favor of climate alarmism and why I
00:01:51.360 thought that they were not convincing. So, that if you watch that, you would be ready to speak up.
00:01:57.480 If you had doubts, you'd have a sense that you knew what lines of attack you were likely to be
00:02:03.340 subjected to and how to answer them. And as a result of that, I was contacted by people saying
00:02:09.580 we should start an organization that does a weekly newsletter on the subject of climate and
00:02:15.160 looks at the exaggerations, looks at the misstatements of fact, looks at the strange
00:02:20.400 leaps of logic, so that somebody who reads the newsletter will feel that they're comfortable
00:02:27.400 speaking up on the issue because they know how they're liable to be attacked, including the
00:02:32.900 classic, oh, 97% of scientists agree that there's a man-made crisis. And they won't just be bullied
00:02:39.180 out of the arena. And so, we started doing the newsletter, and we made a few videos as well.
00:02:45.440 And for about the first year, to be honest, the uptake was limited. And then suddenly,
00:02:49.840 we went viral. And particularly, it was a longer video that we made, not long, but 25-minute range,
00:02:59.020 addressing this claim that 97% of scientists say that there is an urgent man-made climate crisis.
00:03:05.240 And we went into the details. Who did the surveys? What questions did they ask? Who did they ask them
00:03:12.180 to? What strange stuff did they do with their samples? And within a couple of months, that video
00:03:17.960 had hundreds of thousands of views. And so, it turned out that what people really wanted was videos. So,
00:03:24.740 we now primarily make videos, though we do still do the newsletter. And what they want is for us to look
00:03:30.180 at the critical things in the debate, and the exaggerations, and the misrepresentations. And
00:03:36.520 because people are busy, they've got jobs, they've got lives, they can't spend all their time researching
00:03:41.640 climate. But they need to be ready. If someone's going to say to them, 97% of climate scientists say
00:03:47.680 this, they have to be able to say, no, actually, that's not right, and here's why. If people say,
00:03:52.440 but don't you know that hurricanes are getting worse? They need to know, actually, we have good data on
00:03:57.380 hurricanes, run back many decades, they're not getting more common, they're not getting stronger.
00:04:02.760 And so, we give people what they need to enter the debate with confidence that they're not going to
00:04:07.580 get blindsided. Okay, well, on that note, so you're saying that you guys now make more video content.
00:04:15.400 So, the most recent documentary that you've done is on Cineball. So, why don't you tell us a little
00:04:21.560 bit about that documentary? We're very excited about it. Actually, we just held the premier and
00:04:27.340 Calgary on the 14th. And it's our first full-length documentary. Most of our videos are around 15
00:04:34.040 minutes long. And occasionally, the editors can't make me stop, and they go on to 20. But on this one,
00:04:40.560 again, you have to go in the debate to where people are, you have to talk to the audience about things
00:04:45.520 that they're concerned about, and show them, if they've been misinformed, or misled, how it happened.
00:04:51.820 And one of the things that people say in the climate debate is that those companies that make
00:04:57.800 hydrocarbon fuels, the gas company, the oil company, and so on, they don't care about people.
00:05:03.340 They're just a short-term profit. They're going to burn up the planet, which is a pretty stupid plan,
00:05:07.340 since they're on it too. But it's actually completely wrong. And we had this chance because we
00:05:13.280 met Magot Wade, who's this extraordinary entrepreneur and activist who's from Senegal.
00:05:18.500 And as a result, we were able to meet people in Senegal and go and ask this question.
00:05:26.060 What happens if the alarmists get their way? Suppose that they are able to prevent Africans
00:05:31.920 who are living in poverty from developing fossil fuel resources, from getting electricity from natural
00:05:39.200 gas, from getting electricity from oil, even from some folks, under which they live.
00:05:52.900 The hoeing sand by hand. People, if you hear Senegal, you might think to yourself that we're
00:05:57.960 in the rainforest. But it's actually, it's on the very west tip of the bulge of Africa.
00:06:02.280 It's semi-arid. It's south of Mauritania. There are wild camels. And people that are scraping
00:06:08.700 a living out of some very unpromising soil. In the village, half of Senegalese don't have
00:06:13.220 electricity. Their schools don't have lights. They don't have air conditioning. There aren't
00:06:17.060 factories. There aren't jobs. So people come to the cities. Boys come to the cities to beg.
00:06:22.140 Girls are left back home to be forced into polygamous marriages. It's horrendous what happens
00:06:27.420 to people because of energy poverty. And so we wanted to be able to show them this is what the
00:06:32.940 activists are trying to perpetuate. They don't know it. I'm not saying the activists are consciously
00:06:36.880 evil or anything of that sort, but they are culpably ignorant. They don't understand the
00:06:42.120 implications of their policies. And so it's called, the documentary is called In the Dark,
00:06:47.180 Senegal as a Case Study in Energy Poverty. Because we wanted to underline just how cruel and thoughtless
00:06:54.580 it is to deny poor countries the right to develop the kind of power that we take for granted.
00:06:59.980 These activists in rich countries, they know the light switch is going to go on. They know that in
00:07:04.480 the ER and the hospital, the machines are going to have power, the respirators and the x-ray machines
00:07:08.960 and everything. They take for granted the benefits of abundant, affordable, reliable energy. And then
00:07:15.360 they go and deny it to a billion people in the world or more. And we wanted to make very clear
00:07:21.520 how bad that is. And so that anybody debating the subject knows what the trade-offs are,
00:07:27.800 knows what the implications of the policies are. It's not enough that it sounds good.
00:07:32.080 It has to do good.
00:07:35.480 Okay. Well, that's pretty interesting. I guess on that topic, I remember in your first documentary,
00:07:44.040 which I also watched, like the environment one, you were talking about how lots of famous people,
00:07:49.780 like, for example, one that stood out to me was Bill Nye, because I used to watch his videos in
00:07:55.240 science classes when I was younger. So they were talking about basically how they should
00:07:59.900 criminal investigations should be done on people engaging in discussions like these ones.
00:08:07.500 And so there's lots of people like famous people suggesting that, yeah, criminal charges should be
00:08:12.600 laid against people who are talking about climate change and like questioning the narratives that are
00:08:18.260 put forth by like a bunch of climate activists. So I don't know, my question would be, since you
00:08:25.260 relating back to like the Senegal documentary, and you're kind of warning, do you expect, like,
00:08:34.040 I don't know, that it would ever come to a point where it would be put into the criminal code,
00:08:38.940 either in Canada or anywhere else in the West, or even if it has that I'm not aware of?
00:08:43.260 You know, I would like to push that idea aside as foolishness. But unfortunately,
00:08:48.540 there does seem to be a significant appetite, primarily on the left, for criminalizing speech
00:08:54.240 they disagree with. And I'm a John Stuart Mill fundamentalist on free speech. I mean,
00:08:58.800 on Liberty, he gives these three great reasons why we should listen to ideas that are unfamiliar or
00:09:04.740 even upsetting. The first one, of course, is it might turn out to be true. And a number of
00:09:11.700 occasions in the past, things that were thought to be incontrovertible have been overturned by
00:09:16.940 debate, including, you know, William Wilberforce convincing the British to abolish slavery.
00:09:22.040 The second thing is that even if something we think is true, and we debate it turns out to be true,
00:09:27.180 we have a much stronger and livelier apprehension of why it's true. Those should be a kind of dogmatic
00:09:32.680 statement we recite to a vibrant truth that we live. And the third reason is that sunlight destroys
00:09:39.500 evil. That if you suppress bad ideas, they fester in the dark. And so to me, I think it's very
00:09:45.500 revealing when you see people who are afraid to debate an issue and reach for the policeman's
00:09:50.300 truncheon to silence views they don't share, including on climate. What are the alarmists so
00:09:56.000 scared of? They say that their argument is ironclad, the science is settled, only a lunatic could doubt it.
00:10:01.260 And then you invite them to debate and they refuse. Are they actually worried that they don't really
00:10:07.480 know the subject nearly as well as they pretend to? Are they concerned they got up on stage if Bill
00:10:13.260 Nye were to get up with me in front of an audience that I would actually convince them and he would
00:10:19.560 fail to? Because if not, I can't understand why they're not saying, bring it on. Let those fools
00:10:25.520 babble and we will refute them. But they're obviously very afraid to do it. They won't debate.
00:10:30.080 And as you say, a number of people seem to think the shortcut here is just to ban dissent from
00:10:36.800 orthodoxy. And how do they have this image of themselves as free spirits and support government
00:10:42.820 censorship at the same time? It's a very strange combination of views.
00:10:47.940 Yeah, that doesn't really make any sense. Kind of, yeah, hypocritical. But I guess what I also
00:10:54.880 wanted to touch on is like one of the ones you also mentioned, the 97% of scientists agree,
00:11:00.720 which is, I guess, factually not true. Because in your environment documentary as well,
00:11:08.560 you said it's actually 2.38% of scientists agree. Could you explain more like what exactly do you mean
00:11:16.300 by that in what you said in the documentary, if you recall?
00:11:19.820 Well, the first thing is when someone says 97% of scientists agree, the first question you should
00:11:26.140 be thinking is who asked them and who did they ask? Because if you look around the world, there are
00:11:32.720 obviously a lot of scientists, right? There are a lot of fields of science and these fields all have
00:11:38.100 tens or hundreds of thousands of practitioners. So how would you go about establishing what
00:11:43.020 scientists thought? And by the way, you'll see some people say 97% of climate scientists,
00:11:48.300 some people say 97% of the world scientists. And those are two very different claims. But even if
00:11:55.200 it was climate scientists, then, okay, what constitutes a climate scientist? We're doing astrophysicists
00:12:00.560 here, atmospheric physicists, certainly geologists, chemists. Who are these people? And however you
00:12:07.820 define it, you're going to get millions, literally millions of them. So who contacted millions of
00:12:13.720 people and asked, and what did they ask them? And the answer turns out to be that people sent surveys
00:12:18.180 to a few tens of thousands of people. And the one that got the most apparent overwhelming response,
00:12:23.900 the questions were, do you think it is warmer today than in 1850? And do you think humans have had
00:12:30.540 some impact on the environment? And of course, you're going to get an overwhelming yes response to both
00:12:36.220 of those things because we were coming out of the Little Ice Age in 1850. Obviously, it's gotten a
00:12:40.820 little bit warmer, though it's not clear how much. And as for have humans had any impact on the
00:12:45.760 environment? Well, as soon as somebody dumps a can of paint in a river, humans have had some impact on
00:12:50.460 the environment. Another survey, they set out tens of thousands of responses. They got back thousands
00:12:56.340 and they winnowed them down to the ones they liked. And if you look at the climate discussion nexus
00:13:01.380 video on the 97% solution, it goes into the details on these surveys. But the upshot of it is that
00:13:07.720 they were not asked what Barack Obama and his very famous tweet that 97% say that there is an urgent
00:13:15.380 man-made crisis. They were not asked, is it urgent? They were not asked, is it a crisis? They were not
00:13:22.120 asked, is it man-made? And so that was, again, I'm not suggesting that Obama was committing fraud,
00:13:27.620 but he was being very, very culpably sloppy. He didn't know what he was talking about and he
00:13:34.580 shouted it. And then all kinds of people repeated it. And for another thing, they would say, if I
00:13:39.200 tried to raise the issue, they'd say, oh, you're not a climate scientist. Yeah, well, neither is Barack
00:13:43.640 Obama, neither is Breda Thunberg, right? Now, these people, they're very selective in their attempts to
00:13:50.160 shut you out of the debate. But if you look at those surveys, you realize that 97% number is wrong.
00:13:55.880 And as soon as people understand, first of all, it's not true that there's an overwhelming
00:14:00.260 scientific consensus. And second, the people who say so don't check their facts. Then they're
00:14:07.100 emboldened to say, okay, what else are they telling us that's not true? And another example, of course,
00:14:11.980 is more and more wildfires. The Canadian government puts out about three press releases a week about,
00:14:16.200 oh, there's more wildfires. But we've got good wildfire numbers going back decades, and there are not
00:14:20.720 more wildfires. That's simply not true. Other things, are the seas rising faster at the moment
00:14:26.920 than they were 30 years ago? There's some debate on that. But it looks like maybe, yes, but it's all
00:14:32.260 just within the realm of natural fluctuation. So again and again, the more you get into the
00:14:37.880 climate alarmist claims, the more you realize that they're as sloppy as they are belligerent.
00:14:42.660 And that's a terrible combination if you're actually trying to find the truth.
00:14:46.380 Hmm. Well, I guess talking about finding the truth and stuff, this question just kind of
00:14:52.680 occurred to me. I know you said, like, obviously, people want to watch videos and stuff. But you
00:14:57.980 think also, I don't know if you would know, but do you think lots of youth are also watching your
00:15:02.620 videos? We do attempt to figure out the demographics. But to some extent, of course, I mean, we can't make
00:15:10.280 people watch our videos. All we can do is put out what we think is important and useful information
00:15:15.740 in a way that is engaging. Because people are busy. They've got lives. I used to work as a newspaper
00:15:21.480 editor. And I had to remind my colleagues periodically that nobody has to read our paper.
00:15:26.000 So if it's boring, they'll just turn the page. And I think that anybody who is considering dropping by
00:15:32.640 to watch our videos, please do so. I think you will find that they are as entertaining as they
00:15:37.320 are informative. Well, we don't say things for a fact. We're not into clickbait. But we respect the
00:15:43.420 fact that your time is limited. And we're going to give you an experience that will be valuable to
00:15:48.660 you. In every respect, you'll come out better informed, better able to articulate what you
00:15:53.420 believe. And you won't feel that it was drudgery. We don't serve cod liver oil over at the climate
00:15:58.420 discussion nexus. No, from what I watched from your videos, I completely agree. And I think as well that
00:16:05.200 the reason I mentioned youth is because I definitely think like this is something I feel like should be a part
00:16:10.960 of the curriculum in science classes or even in universities for certain classes, these science
00:16:15.980 courses, because I definitely think most of the climate narrative is still pushed in the curriculum.
00:16:21.320 So that's also why I mentioned that. But for the next question, I kind of wanted to also touch on
00:16:28.540 the natural cycle of warming and cooling of the planet and how this is kind of proof that
00:16:35.520 climate change is just a natural kind of process that the earth always goes through. Maybe you could
00:16:42.380 explain more about that. That's an excellent point. And it's an excellent point partly because you will
00:16:47.060 often hear alarmists say that people like me deny climate change. And this again, it's preposterous
00:16:54.740 ignorance or worse, because actually what's critical to our view of the whole situation. And as you
00:17:02.840 mentioned, I'm a historian by training. And when climate change first came up, I thought one of the
00:17:07.840 really fishy things about this is they claim that the climate didn't change until the Industrial
00:17:12.400 Revolution. And I know that's wrong. Even within recorded history, and certainly prehistory, the climate
00:17:18.740 has changed constantly. And even since the last glaciation, the warm period that we're currently in the
00:17:24.880 Holocene, you know, the ice age didn't end, there's still significant ice at the poles. But since the last
00:17:30.580 glaciation, the temperature has fluctuated dramatically, it shot up to the climate, the Holocene, the
00:17:36.460 Holocene climatic optimum, and then it went down again, came up for the Minoan warm period down in
00:17:41.400 the Iron Ages, dark, sort of dark ages, back up for the Roman warm period down again for the classic
00:17:47.960 dark ages up into the medieval warm period down to the Little Ice Age. And none of that correlates with
00:17:53.380 atmospheric CO2. We have decent proxies, though not absolutely reliable ones. It's not driven by CO2.
00:17:59.460 And then you get a period of about 30 years in the latter part of the 20th century where temperature
00:18:05.600 and atmospheric CO2 are rising. And that's the narrow foundation on which their theory rests.
00:18:10.900 But the further back you look, you look back into the Pleistocene. This is the last 2.58 million
00:18:16.160 years, which is ice at both poles. And you see that there are long periods of cold glaciation. And
00:18:23.020 then there are these brief interglacials. And the previous three interglacials, including the
00:18:27.340 Emian, were warmer than the Holocene. Yet again, atmospheric CO2 was lower, clearly no human
00:18:33.020 influence. Anatomically modern humans weren't even around. And the whole anthropogenic global warming
00:18:39.120 theory can't begin to explain that stuff. And it's preposterous to call us deniers when it's them who can't
00:18:47.160 face the historical record because everything about it shouts, no, you're wrong. CO2 is not the control
00:18:55.200 knob on the global thermostat. Hmm. Yeah. Well, that's pretty interesting, too, because definitely
00:19:01.460 I didn't know about that until very recently when I started watching, like, for example, your videos
00:19:06.240 and like Friends of Science as well. I know they talk about that stuff, too. So, yeah. But let's see.
00:19:12.420 Okay. Since you said that your video about documentary about the Senegal climate change, I mean,
00:19:19.960 case study for climate change and policies and stuff, was done in Calgary. Why don't you tell me,
00:19:27.020 why did you guys choose Calgary? We chose Calgary partly because we have a number of friends out there
00:19:33.860 and also because I feel that the Canadian energy industry has in some ways not done a good enough
00:19:40.060 job of standing up for themselves. They thought governments would be reasonable, which as a historian
00:19:45.020 is a view that I find a little hard to believe. And we think it's essential that when they're
00:19:51.080 criticized for being indifferent to human suffering, you know, when you're involved in a debate of this
00:19:56.900 sort, you need to meet the audience where they are. You need to acknowledge the claims of your critics
00:20:02.560 and you need to answer them. And so I wanted to encourage people who do work in Canada's
00:20:08.460 magnificent energy industry. Michael Binion calls it a modern miracle. And it is. It's astonishing
00:20:13.540 the things that we enjoy thanks to hydrocarbon energy. I wanted to encourage them. Understand
00:20:20.300 that people think you're indifferent to human welfare and don't say, yeah, but look at the
00:20:25.420 money we're making or any of that stuff. Don't say, look at the tax revenue. Say, no, that's completely
00:20:29.800 wrong. Look at the kinds of ways in which people suffer, including in Senegal. We went to one village
00:20:35.100 where they've got one solar panel and it peters out when the sun goes down and they don't have
00:20:40.240 indoor plumbing and they don't dare go out at night in the dark because of all the snakes and so on.
00:20:45.080 And we talked to people who they cook with wood, they get smoke in their eyes, they breathe it in,
00:20:50.440 especially in the rainy season, they're cooking indoors, backbreaking labor, carrying it on their
00:20:56.000 head for miles, no medical clinic. This is what happens if you deny people fossil fuels. And so if
00:21:03.780 you're going to say, look, we think humanity's giving off too much CO2, then at the very least,
00:21:08.560 let's say, okay, Canada maybe, or the United States, advanced countries should do something
00:21:12.180 about it, including China, but don't ask Africans to sacrifice. Half the people in the world with no
00:21:17.680 access to electricity live in sub-Saharan Africa. And if you're going to say, that's fine by me,
00:21:22.980 I think they should keep living that way. At least go and see it. Better yet, go and share it.
00:21:28.380 Try it on. As Abraham Lincoln once said about slavery, anytime he heard someone defending it,
00:21:33.320 he had an urge to try it on them. Understand the implications of this pious statement. And
00:21:40.620 the international lending agencies are all in on this, right? They won't lend money to countries for
00:21:45.800 natural gas power plants. It's got to be solar. It's got to be wind. At least understand what
00:21:52.120 you're doing to people. And for the Canadian energy industry, stand up for yourselves, not as,
00:21:57.700 yeah, what are you going to do? Not as, yeah, we're the least bad, but as we transform lives for
00:22:04.120 the better. This product brings hope to people. It brings light in the darkness. It is a miracle.
00:22:11.280 And we should be proud of what we do. Don't apologize for the industry. Don't duck and hope
00:22:15.480 they kill somebody else. Stand up proudly for what the technological proficiency, but also the life
00:22:22.760 changing impact of Canada's energy industry. Okay. I think that was well said. And I also think
00:22:30.160 that's a great place to end. So thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.
00:22:36.300 Thank you. Okay. Well, if you guys liked this video, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel,
00:22:41.440 Western Standard, or you can check out our actual website, westernstandard.news. We got a bunch of news,
00:22:48.660 obviously. So you can subscribe for $10 a month or a hundred dollars a year. And yeah,
00:22:54.720 that's all I got to say. So thank you everyone. And goodbye.