Documentary on the consequences of denying energy to poor countries premieres in Calgary
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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
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Hi, my name is Leah Muschid. I'm a reporter here at the Western Standard and today I have a guest
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named John Robson. He's the Executive Director of Climate Discussions Nexus, which offers a forum of
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open debate on the topic of climate change and information and policy suggestions on climate
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change as well. He's also a journalist, he's a historian, and he has made multiple documentaries
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on the climate as well as other documentaries. So, John, today, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
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My first question to you is on the topic of one of your documentaries made in 2017, which was
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The Environment, A True Story. So, basically, I know you told me that this documentary started
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your organization, Nexus. So, why don't you tell me a little bit why this documentary was
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so important, starting your organization as well, a little bit about the documentary itself.
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As you said, I'm a journalist, a disreputable profession, but someone has to do it.
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And I've been writing on a whole range of issues for a long time, including climate.
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And I'd made documentaries on World War I and on Canada's constitution. And then I thought to myself,
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the debate on climate is very one-sided because anybody who has doubts about the orthodoxy
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is liable to get steamrolled. There are a number of rhetorical clubs that the alarmists will use.
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And I decided to make a documentary that tried to cover the whole of the debate to deal with all
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the important issues, including the important arguments in favor of climate alarmism and why I
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thought that they were not convincing. So, that if you watch that, you would be ready to speak up.
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If you had doubts, you'd have a sense that you knew what lines of attack you were likely to be
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subjected to and how to answer them. And as a result of that, I was contacted by people saying
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we should start an organization that does a weekly newsletter on the subject of climate and
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looks at the exaggerations, looks at the misstatements of fact, looks at the strange
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leaps of logic, so that somebody who reads the newsletter will feel that they're comfortable
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speaking up on the issue because they know how they're liable to be attacked, including the
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classic, oh, 97% of scientists agree that there's a man-made crisis. And they won't just be bullied
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out of the arena. And so, we started doing the newsletter, and we made a few videos as well.
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And for about the first year, to be honest, the uptake was limited. And then suddenly,
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we went viral. And particularly, it was a longer video that we made, not long, but 25-minute range,
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addressing this claim that 97% of scientists say that there is an urgent man-made climate crisis.
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And we went into the details. Who did the surveys? What questions did they ask? Who did they ask them
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to? What strange stuff did they do with their samples? And within a couple of months, that video
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had hundreds of thousands of views. And so, it turned out that what people really wanted was videos. So,
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we now primarily make videos, though we do still do the newsletter. And what they want is for us to look
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at the critical things in the debate, and the exaggerations, and the misrepresentations. And
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because people are busy, they've got jobs, they've got lives, they can't spend all their time researching
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climate. But they need to be ready. If someone's going to say to them, 97% of climate scientists say
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this, they have to be able to say, no, actually, that's not right, and here's why. If people say,
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but don't you know that hurricanes are getting worse? They need to know, actually, we have good data on
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hurricanes, run back many decades, they're not getting more common, they're not getting stronger.
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And so, we give people what they need to enter the debate with confidence that they're not going to
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get blindsided. Okay, well, on that note, so you're saying that you guys now make more video content.
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So, the most recent documentary that you've done is on Cineball. So, why don't you tell us a little
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bit about that documentary? We're very excited about it. Actually, we just held the premier and
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Calgary on the 14th. And it's our first full-length documentary. Most of our videos are around 15
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minutes long. And occasionally, the editors can't make me stop, and they go on to 20. But on this one,
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again, you have to go in the debate to where people are, you have to talk to the audience about things
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that they're concerned about, and show them, if they've been misinformed, or misled, how it happened.
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And one of the things that people say in the climate debate is that those companies that make
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hydrocarbon fuels, the gas company, the oil company, and so on, they don't care about people.
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They're just a short-term profit. They're going to burn up the planet, which is a pretty stupid plan,
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since they're on it too. But it's actually completely wrong. And we had this chance because we
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met Magot Wade, who's this extraordinary entrepreneur and activist who's from Senegal.
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And as a result, we were able to meet people in Senegal and go and ask this question.
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What happens if the alarmists get their way? Suppose that they are able to prevent Africans
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who are living in poverty from developing fossil fuel resources, from getting electricity from natural
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gas, from getting electricity from oil, even from some folks, under which they live.
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The hoeing sand by hand. People, if you hear Senegal, you might think to yourself that we're
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in the rainforest. But it's actually, it's on the very west tip of the bulge of Africa.
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It's semi-arid. It's south of Mauritania. There are wild camels. And people that are scraping
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a living out of some very unpromising soil. In the village, half of Senegalese don't have
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electricity. Their schools don't have lights. They don't have air conditioning. There aren't
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factories. There aren't jobs. So people come to the cities. Boys come to the cities to beg.
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Girls are left back home to be forced into polygamous marriages. It's horrendous what happens
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to people because of energy poverty. And so we wanted to be able to show them this is what the
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activists are trying to perpetuate. They don't know it. I'm not saying the activists are consciously
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evil or anything of that sort, but they are culpably ignorant. They don't understand the
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implications of their policies. And so it's called, the documentary is called In the Dark,
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Senegal as a Case Study in Energy Poverty. Because we wanted to underline just how cruel and thoughtless
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it is to deny poor countries the right to develop the kind of power that we take for granted.
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These activists in rich countries, they know the light switch is going to go on. They know that in
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the ER and the hospital, the machines are going to have power, the respirators and the x-ray machines
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and everything. They take for granted the benefits of abundant, affordable, reliable energy. And then
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they go and deny it to a billion people in the world or more. And we wanted to make very clear
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how bad that is. And so that anybody debating the subject knows what the trade-offs are,
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knows what the implications of the policies are. It's not enough that it sounds good.
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Okay. Well, that's pretty interesting. I guess on that topic, I remember in your first documentary,
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which I also watched, like the environment one, you were talking about how lots of famous people,
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like, for example, one that stood out to me was Bill Nye, because I used to watch his videos in
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science classes when I was younger. So they were talking about basically how they should
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criminal investigations should be done on people engaging in discussions like these ones.
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And so there's lots of people like famous people suggesting that, yeah, criminal charges should be
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laid against people who are talking about climate change and like questioning the narratives that are
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put forth by like a bunch of climate activists. So I don't know, my question would be, since you
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relating back to like the Senegal documentary, and you're kind of warning, do you expect, like,
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I don't know, that it would ever come to a point where it would be put into the criminal code,
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either in Canada or anywhere else in the West, or even if it has that I'm not aware of?
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You know, I would like to push that idea aside as foolishness. But unfortunately,
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there does seem to be a significant appetite, primarily on the left, for criminalizing speech
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they disagree with. And I'm a John Stuart Mill fundamentalist on free speech. I mean,
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on Liberty, he gives these three great reasons why we should listen to ideas that are unfamiliar or
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even upsetting. The first one, of course, is it might turn out to be true. And a number of
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occasions in the past, things that were thought to be incontrovertible have been overturned by
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debate, including, you know, William Wilberforce convincing the British to abolish slavery.
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The second thing is that even if something we think is true, and we debate it turns out to be true,
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we have a much stronger and livelier apprehension of why it's true. Those should be a kind of dogmatic
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statement we recite to a vibrant truth that we live. And the third reason is that sunlight destroys
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evil. That if you suppress bad ideas, they fester in the dark. And so to me, I think it's very
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revealing when you see people who are afraid to debate an issue and reach for the policeman's
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truncheon to silence views they don't share, including on climate. What are the alarmists so
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scared of? They say that their argument is ironclad, the science is settled, only a lunatic could doubt it.
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And then you invite them to debate and they refuse. Are they actually worried that they don't really
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know the subject nearly as well as they pretend to? Are they concerned they got up on stage if Bill
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Nye were to get up with me in front of an audience that I would actually convince them and he would
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fail to? Because if not, I can't understand why they're not saying, bring it on. Let those fools
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babble and we will refute them. But they're obviously very afraid to do it. They won't debate.
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And as you say, a number of people seem to think the shortcut here is just to ban dissent from
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orthodoxy. And how do they have this image of themselves as free spirits and support government
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censorship at the same time? It's a very strange combination of views.
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Yeah, that doesn't really make any sense. Kind of, yeah, hypocritical. But I guess what I also
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wanted to touch on is like one of the ones you also mentioned, the 97% of scientists agree,
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which is, I guess, factually not true. Because in your environment documentary as well,
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you said it's actually 2.38% of scientists agree. Could you explain more like what exactly do you mean
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by that in what you said in the documentary, if you recall?
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Well, the first thing is when someone says 97% of scientists agree, the first question you should
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be thinking is who asked them and who did they ask? Because if you look around the world, there are
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obviously a lot of scientists, right? There are a lot of fields of science and these fields all have
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tens or hundreds of thousands of practitioners. So how would you go about establishing what
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scientists thought? And by the way, you'll see some people say 97% of climate scientists,
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some people say 97% of the world scientists. And those are two very different claims. But even if
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it was climate scientists, then, okay, what constitutes a climate scientist? We're doing astrophysicists
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here, atmospheric physicists, certainly geologists, chemists. Who are these people? And however you
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define it, you're going to get millions, literally millions of them. So who contacted millions of
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people and asked, and what did they ask them? And the answer turns out to be that people sent surveys
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to a few tens of thousands of people. And the one that got the most apparent overwhelming response,
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the questions were, do you think it is warmer today than in 1850? And do you think humans have had
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some impact on the environment? And of course, you're going to get an overwhelming yes response to both
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of those things because we were coming out of the Little Ice Age in 1850. Obviously, it's gotten a
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little bit warmer, though it's not clear how much. And as for have humans had any impact on the
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environment? Well, as soon as somebody dumps a can of paint in a river, humans have had some impact on
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the environment. Another survey, they set out tens of thousands of responses. They got back thousands
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and they winnowed them down to the ones they liked. And if you look at the climate discussion nexus
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video on the 97% solution, it goes into the details on these surveys. But the upshot of it is that
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they were not asked what Barack Obama and his very famous tweet that 97% say that there is an urgent
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man-made crisis. They were not asked, is it urgent? They were not asked, is it a crisis? They were not
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asked, is it man-made? And so that was, again, I'm not suggesting that Obama was committing fraud,
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but he was being very, very culpably sloppy. He didn't know what he was talking about and he
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shouted it. And then all kinds of people repeated it. And for another thing, they would say, if I
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tried to raise the issue, they'd say, oh, you're not a climate scientist. Yeah, well, neither is Barack
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Obama, neither is Breda Thunberg, right? Now, these people, they're very selective in their attempts to
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shut you out of the debate. But if you look at those surveys, you realize that 97% number is wrong.
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And as soon as people understand, first of all, it's not true that there's an overwhelming
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scientific consensus. And second, the people who say so don't check their facts. Then they're
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emboldened to say, okay, what else are they telling us that's not true? And another example, of course,
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is more and more wildfires. The Canadian government puts out about three press releases a week about,
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oh, there's more wildfires. But we've got good wildfire numbers going back decades, and there are not
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more wildfires. That's simply not true. Other things, are the seas rising faster at the moment
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than they were 30 years ago? There's some debate on that. But it looks like maybe, yes, but it's all
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just within the realm of natural fluctuation. So again and again, the more you get into the
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climate alarmist claims, the more you realize that they're as sloppy as they are belligerent.
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And that's a terrible combination if you're actually trying to find the truth.
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Hmm. Well, I guess talking about finding the truth and stuff, this question just kind of
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occurred to me. I know you said, like, obviously, people want to watch videos and stuff. But you
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think also, I don't know if you would know, but do you think lots of youth are also watching your
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videos? We do attempt to figure out the demographics. But to some extent, of course, I mean, we can't make
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people watch our videos. All we can do is put out what we think is important and useful information
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in a way that is engaging. Because people are busy. They've got lives. I used to work as a newspaper
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editor. And I had to remind my colleagues periodically that nobody has to read our paper.
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So if it's boring, they'll just turn the page. And I think that anybody who is considering dropping by
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to watch our videos, please do so. I think you will find that they are as entertaining as they
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are informative. Well, we don't say things for a fact. We're not into clickbait. But we respect the
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fact that your time is limited. And we're going to give you an experience that will be valuable to
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you. In every respect, you'll come out better informed, better able to articulate what you
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believe. And you won't feel that it was drudgery. We don't serve cod liver oil over at the climate
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discussion nexus. No, from what I watched from your videos, I completely agree. And I think as well that
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the reason I mentioned youth is because I definitely think like this is something I feel like should be a part
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of the curriculum in science classes or even in universities for certain classes, these science
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courses, because I definitely think most of the climate narrative is still pushed in the curriculum.
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So that's also why I mentioned that. But for the next question, I kind of wanted to also touch on
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the natural cycle of warming and cooling of the planet and how this is kind of proof that
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climate change is just a natural kind of process that the earth always goes through. Maybe you could
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explain more about that. That's an excellent point. And it's an excellent point partly because you will
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often hear alarmists say that people like me deny climate change. And this again, it's preposterous
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ignorance or worse, because actually what's critical to our view of the whole situation. And as you
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mentioned, I'm a historian by training. And when climate change first came up, I thought one of the
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really fishy things about this is they claim that the climate didn't change until the Industrial
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Revolution. And I know that's wrong. Even within recorded history, and certainly prehistory, the climate
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has changed constantly. And even since the last glaciation, the warm period that we're currently in the
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Holocene, you know, the ice age didn't end, there's still significant ice at the poles. But since the last
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glaciation, the temperature has fluctuated dramatically, it shot up to the climate, the Holocene, the
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Holocene climatic optimum, and then it went down again, came up for the Minoan warm period down in
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the Iron Ages, dark, sort of dark ages, back up for the Roman warm period down again for the classic
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dark ages up into the medieval warm period down to the Little Ice Age. And none of that correlates with
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atmospheric CO2. We have decent proxies, though not absolutely reliable ones. It's not driven by CO2.
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And then you get a period of about 30 years in the latter part of the 20th century where temperature
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and atmospheric CO2 are rising. And that's the narrow foundation on which their theory rests.
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But the further back you look, you look back into the Pleistocene. This is the last 2.58 million
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years, which is ice at both poles. And you see that there are long periods of cold glaciation. And
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then there are these brief interglacials. And the previous three interglacials, including the
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Emian, were warmer than the Holocene. Yet again, atmospheric CO2 was lower, clearly no human
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influence. Anatomically modern humans weren't even around. And the whole anthropogenic global warming
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theory can't begin to explain that stuff. And it's preposterous to call us deniers when it's them who can't
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face the historical record because everything about it shouts, no, you're wrong. CO2 is not the control
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knob on the global thermostat. Hmm. Yeah. Well, that's pretty interesting, too, because definitely
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I didn't know about that until very recently when I started watching, like, for example, your videos
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and like Friends of Science as well. I know they talk about that stuff, too. So, yeah. But let's see.
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Okay. Since you said that your video about documentary about the Senegal climate change, I mean,
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case study for climate change and policies and stuff, was done in Calgary. Why don't you tell me,
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why did you guys choose Calgary? We chose Calgary partly because we have a number of friends out there
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and also because I feel that the Canadian energy industry has in some ways not done a good enough
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job of standing up for themselves. They thought governments would be reasonable, which as a historian
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is a view that I find a little hard to believe. And we think it's essential that when they're
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criticized for being indifferent to human suffering, you know, when you're involved in a debate of this
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sort, you need to meet the audience where they are. You need to acknowledge the claims of your critics
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and you need to answer them. And so I wanted to encourage people who do work in Canada's
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magnificent energy industry. Michael Binion calls it a modern miracle. And it is. It's astonishing
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the things that we enjoy thanks to hydrocarbon energy. I wanted to encourage them. Understand
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that people think you're indifferent to human welfare and don't say, yeah, but look at the
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money we're making or any of that stuff. Don't say, look at the tax revenue. Say, no, that's completely
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wrong. Look at the kinds of ways in which people suffer, including in Senegal. We went to one village
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where they've got one solar panel and it peters out when the sun goes down and they don't have
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indoor plumbing and they don't dare go out at night in the dark because of all the snakes and so on.
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And we talked to people who they cook with wood, they get smoke in their eyes, they breathe it in,
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especially in the rainy season, they're cooking indoors, backbreaking labor, carrying it on their
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head for miles, no medical clinic. This is what happens if you deny people fossil fuels. And so if
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you're going to say, look, we think humanity's giving off too much CO2, then at the very least,
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let's say, okay, Canada maybe, or the United States, advanced countries should do something
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about it, including China, but don't ask Africans to sacrifice. Half the people in the world with no
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access to electricity live in sub-Saharan Africa. And if you're going to say, that's fine by me,
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I think they should keep living that way. At least go and see it. Better yet, go and share it.
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Try it on. As Abraham Lincoln once said about slavery, anytime he heard someone defending it,
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he had an urge to try it on them. Understand the implications of this pious statement. And
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the international lending agencies are all in on this, right? They won't lend money to countries for
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natural gas power plants. It's got to be solar. It's got to be wind. At least understand what
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you're doing to people. And for the Canadian energy industry, stand up for yourselves, not as,
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yeah, what are you going to do? Not as, yeah, we're the least bad, but as we transform lives for
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the better. This product brings hope to people. It brings light in the darkness. It is a miracle.
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And we should be proud of what we do. Don't apologize for the industry. Don't duck and hope
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they kill somebody else. Stand up proudly for what the technological proficiency, but also the life
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changing impact of Canada's energy industry. Okay. I think that was well said. And I also think
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that's a great place to end. So thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.
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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,
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that's all I got to say. So thank you everyone. And goodbye.