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

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump started the development of literacy across the entire world illiteracy was the norm the pastor's home was the first school and every morning it would begin with singing the Christian faith is a singing religion probably 80 percent of Scripps memorization today exists only because of what is sung this is amazing here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Press of Johan goodberg science and religion are opposing forces in the world but historically that has not been the case now the book is available to everyone from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to to civilization itself it is the most influential book in all history and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that some of the scientists the media the politicians and the ngos have quite unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat both climate and energy are complicated nuanced subjects they can't be distilled down into sound bites what we do involves trade-offs and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough about those trade-offs to make a a decision it really is in part a problem of complexity right I mean because you can imagine that there's there's an attraction to relatively simple hypotheses and maybe that's a good one that's Occam's razor in some sense although you don't want your explanations to be any simpler than they need to be and so we have well it's reasonable to be concerned about the environment part of the environment is climate part of climate is carbon dioxide maybe we should just focus on carbon dioxide and then we're doing the right thing and that's where people get LED down the Garden Path because you don't get to be a planetary Savior by jumping up and down and saying carbon dioxide is bad like it it that's too oversimplified [Music] hello everyone I'm continuing my investigation today into the well I'd say energy and environment Nexus investigating the apocalyptic nightmare that's our hypothetical future and I've been talking to a lot of people recently about that and today I get to talk to Dr Stephen coonan who's um extremely well qualified to be discussing both issues energy and environment he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a university professor at New York University with appointments in the stern School of Business the Tandon School of Engineering and the department of physics Dr coonan's current research focuses on climate science and Energy Technologies through a series of Articles and lectures that began in 2014 coonan has advocated for a more accurate complete and transparent public representation of climate and energy matters he wrote a best-selling book unsettled what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why it matters was published in 2021 coonan has a multi-dimensional career he served as under secretary for science in the U.S department of energy from 09 to 11 where he led the inaugural quadrennial technology review before joining the government he spent five years as Chief scientist for British Petroleum helping them think through the development of alternatives to fossil fuels for almost 30 years he was a professor of theoretical physics at Kel-Tec and he also served there for nine years as vice president and Provost facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers and catalyzing multiple research initiatives in addition to the National Academy of Sciences Conan's memberships included the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Jason group of scientists who solve technical problems for the US government he's been a trustee of the institute for defense analysis since 2014 and is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory he served similarly for Los Alamos Sandia Brookhaven and Argonne National Labs he has a BS in physics from Caltech and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT he's the author of The Classic 1985 textbook computational physics and has published 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics astrophysics scientific Community computation energy technology and policy and climate science looking forward very much to talking to Dr coonan today okay so so the first thing that we need to point out to everyone is that Dr coonan is by any standard and outstanding scientist 200 Publications would put him in at minimum the top one percent of published research scientists so in caltech's a deadly institution or at least it was up there with MIT and and one of the jewels in the University of California system and then it not only no no no no no no it's a private university it's not one of the universe oh I'm sorry I'm sorry it's Caltech Caltech yeah yeah that's my mistake my mistake but yeah a small West Coast Technical School as we used to describe right right right right right so do you think that there's an engine do you think that there's a stem School in the U.S that has a better reputation than Caltech other than MIT well uh you know I used to like to say when I know both institutions very well I used to like to say Caltech was like the best fifth of MIT um it's about one-fifth of size right uh but in terms of and again it depends on which discipline you're looking at but overall you can't really distinguish between Caltech and MIT and in some domain Sanford uh these are all really good schools right right and the best of Science and Engineering not only the education but for this discussion more importantly the research okay so now you also another thing for everyone to consider here is that Dr coonan has also not only worked as a researcher and a lecturer Etc but he also worked as a scientific administrator I think that's the probably the right phraseology within the university system so was able to evaluate and track and learn about a variety of different scientific disciplines but then also worked in the private sector for BP we should address that right off the bat and then in government so you really have a broad very very broad background professionally now I suppose the thing the appointment in principle that makes you least credible on the client climate denial front is probably your posting at British Petroleum because yeah yeah so tell let's talk about that so why doesn't that sound so chill like BP right so so um I'm I'm this is about 1980 uh 95 sorry 2004 and I had my name had been fed into a search that BP was running for the chief scientist and eventually I get a call from the then CEO John Brown and he says uh come come beat you scientists and I said I don't know anything about the oil business or the energy business I know energy is conserved I'm a physicist but I don't know about practical energy and he says don't worry you'll learn and they brought me in not to help them find oil or gas they were very good at that they didn't need me to do that but to figure out what Beyond petroleum which was the tagline at the time what Beyond petroleum really meant in terms of Technologies in terms of viable businesses and so I picked up the family and we moved from Pasadena to London I moved from Academia to the private sector and I I'd like to say for the first couple years I was the world's highest paid graduate student because I had one of the company run of the industry just learning all this stuff about practical energy in the end I think I helped them quite a bit over the five years I was there teaching them how to think about energy what technologies were promising what ones might actually make a difference in terms of the environment but also in terms of a viable business so it was a you know a wonderful experience and I would assert one of the problems we have today is that people who talk about energy don't really understand energy systems or the energy businesses and any academic who's working in those fields I would say go spend a year in the private sector because it will change your perspective enormously okay well let's delve into that a little bit so you you opened up two Avenues of questioning there I would say one is well three why did you decide to go to leave academic Academia and go to the private sector what did you learn about say Beyond petroleum I mean first of all I think it's rather peculiar in some real sense that British Petroleum has as its motto Beyond petroleum given that the fossil fuel industry is so necessary and stable but it's very interesting that they have done that and then so I'm very curious to pick your brain about what you actually saw as promising if anything on the Alternative Energy front so and uh and then I guess the third question is what did you learn as a consequence of working in Private Industry that you really didn't know when you were working in Academia oh yeah okay okay wow that that's that's a very broad palette let me just talk personally why did I decide to leave yeah I had been Provost which is second in command at Caltech for nine years when BP approached me um nine years is a long time to spend in in any job particularly one that's as demanding as trying to Corral 280 faculty together and oversee the research operation um I had always been interested in the private sector and food discussions with colleagues I understood that energy and climate were hot topics uh and well worth investigating so you know something uh as usual I took a leave first to see how it would work out and was on me for two years while I was getting settled into BP um and those were the motivations I was just interested uh in energy at the time of course there was the opportunity to go live in London uh and get exposed to a much bigger world than I was involved with in Pasadena right right so there's a lot of that returned by curiosity sounds yeah a lot of my you know a lot of my life is about curiosity yeah it sounds like I've always had fun doing what I'm doing and with a physicist tools and physicist orientation you just like to do that I mean as one of my elders once told me when I was a young faculty member a PhD in theoretical physics is a licensed to poke your nose into anybody's business right and I've just had great fun right doing that right so and go ahead go ahead oh I was just gonna Second Street return return now to this issue of of what did you learn on the energy front I mean what did you see as promising let's say outside of petroleum and and and in what Manner and why was BP interested in that yeah so BP was interested like a lot of energy companies at the time and and still uh for several reasons one is look the purpose of a private company is to make money and to do it legally and to do it predictably uh they have to do that in the environment the regulatory environment the technology the economics these days the stakeholder environment and so I think the CEO at the time John Brown um was one of the first leaders in the oil business to recognize we had better take this low-carbon business seriously if only because that's where the stakeholders and the government were going um I I think that nicely segues into you know what did I learn about business we can talk about energy in a minute but what I learned is first of all it is about making money and it is about reliably delivering a quality product it is about taking risk particularly in the oil and gas business you invest a lot of money up front in the expectation that over 20 or 30 years the revenues from the oil you produce the gas you produce are will pay back so it's a lot of capital upfront big bets sometimes risky uh in a very complicated regulatory environment particularly for an international company so you know one of the things I I came to admire were the people who led these organizations how they managed to juggle so many different dimensions at once it's a lot harder than just sitting in your office and scribbling on a piece of paper about equations right and it's very complicated um another thing I learned is that energy is about scale um you know unless you're really going to introduce a technology that's going to make a material difference at least at the few percent level nationally or globally uh you're not really doing very much you might be making money which is fine but if you want to impact the Energy System it's about scale and so I'll give you one example just to illustrate that I I was once talking to a famous guy who shall remain nameless um was not an energy expert this was policy guy and he says I know what the answer is we take all of the carbon in the used tires and recycle it into fuel and okay he said this with great Passion uh and so I sat down for a minute after we talked or even as we were talking and I calculated how many cars in the U.S and how many tires and so on and how much carbon is there and it turns out it can't make a difference at all right it's very tiny and so people don't understand the scale yeah well there's nothing more annoying than arithmetic yeah right well you know that's then I was a physicist that's my first inclination right how big is it how much is it going to make a difference how much is it going to cost uh and so on in the department owners who used to talk about you know new technologies is impacting quads of energy the US uses about 100 quads of energy a year quads barrels of oil the world uses 100 million barrels of oil a day about and so what and then tons of what's a quad a quad is 10 to the 18th joules roughly it's actually 10 of the 18th um I'm sorry 10 of the 15th BTUs but it's just about 10 of the 18th joules all right and the U.S uses about a hundred quads of energy a year the world as a whole uses about 550 or 600 quads a year so think about that for a second in terms of energy the US is only four and a half percent of the world's population but we use about 20 of its energy so not because we're energy pigs or energy gluttons but in fact uh because that energy improves our quality of life enormously well people aren't going to be energy pigs or energy gluttons as a general rule because energy isn't free and so everyone is motivated to the degree that they can be motivated by reasonable energy pricing to be as effective and efficient as they possibly can be and I suppose maybe you can produce a small increment in that efficiency by raising the price but that doesn't strike me as a particularly good solution so what did you see as promising on the alternative to fossil fuel front promise yeah so uh right and and let me answer that question in the present day rather than in the uh 15 years ago when I was thinking hard about those things for BP uh you know um first of all it's really hard to get rid of chemical fuels for Transportation uh if you think about a truck or a train you really are playing you need the energy density that fossil fuels provide um you know we run our cars on gasoline or in Europe in diesel and we want to shift to electric and I think that shift is slowly underway though there are many barriers but when you put your the nozzle of the pump in your car you're wielding about 10 megawatts of power whereas if we charge up the battery on an electric car we're talking about 100th of the power flow so it's really hard to beat the energy in chemical fuels and so some fresh the world is still going to run on chemical fuels they the fuels we use today emit carbon fossil carbon because we dig the oil out of the ground and uh use it to make gasoline which then enters the atmosphere we could make those fuels out of biological materials and we've been doing that in the U.S by making corn ethanol which is a phenomenally inefficient and not very environmentally friendly way of doing it but there are other biological ways of getting carbon interview and when I was in the department of energy and in BP this intersection of biology and energy making chemical fuels out of biological materials was something we thought was very promising we started a whole Institute at Berkeley in Illinois to pursue that I think it's still in the research and development stage but if we're going to have transportation fuels for heavy Transportation then I think this biofuels is going to be very important do you could do you worry about the competition between cropland utilized for biofuels and food production are you thinking more about Oceanic like algae or LJ no no algae doesn't yeah algae is kind of tough actually for various technical reasons uh we we would grow things um but you know the idea was to use plants that do not compete for farmland or to use the waste part of food of the cellulose uh rather than the carbohydrates and is there is there anything on that front that's viable like commercial and at scale at the moment or or no no no no we can't do it it's the cost uh which is really the issue um you know you got to break down the cellulose which is the structural material of the plants into sugars and then ferment the sugars and the cost right now is still two to three times what gasoline uh costs okay well so so we could say and people do say well damn the cost that it's real costly if the planet burns up in a hundred years and so why not just force people to or require or incentivize people to you know pay three or four times as much for their energy usage now well I think uh you know as we've seen in France uh and other places when you try to do that uh people get very upset uh and in fact there's tremendous disruption and and in fact you know this whole energy transition that we're talking about if you do it too rapidly it's tremendously disruptive because energy touches every part of our lives and so you got to go slow there is no climate crisis we can get on to that in a bit uh let us take our time develop the Technologies introduce them gracefully and eventually we do submissions as required yeah well that that graceful introduction doesn't seem to me to be something that can manage be managed from a top-down perspective very straightforwardly I mean first of all we're seeing a tremendous amount of instability on the energy provision front in Europe at the moment partly because of winter partly because of the war partly because of um I would say clueless hypothetically environmentally oriented policies in the past and but so let me lay out a couple of the problems I see with Renewables and tell me what you think about sure okay sure well the first is that obviously and this has really been a problem in the UK recently you don't get a lot of electricity when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining and we've had prolonged periods of wind drought in the winter in the UK and that's a real catastrophe now people object do you know the the the German word Dunkle flauta Yes you heard that word yes yes okay so yeah which for other people who haven't heard it it means when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine so you get no electricity from wind or solar uh the German translation is something like a dark Stillness right right well um and so we hear a lot of uh noise about the cost benefit and effectiveness of Renewables but that the the cost of renewable energy on the wind and solar front is generally estimated at the cost when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining not when it's dark and there's no wind at all because the price actually moves towards the infinite at that point now the problem technically as far as I can tell apart from whatever environmental damage wind and solar might be producing in and of themselves like the death of birds and bats for example the big problem seems to me to be twofold one is that they're cyclic uh on a daily basis and a weekly basis on a monthly basis and we don't have good storage and it isn't obvious we're going to have it soon and storage itself everything that needs to be mined and so forth to make batteries has no a non-negligible environmental cost so it doesn't it doesn't have to be sewage so let me back up yeah yeah okay so we're on the electrical grid now and we would like our grid to have three qualities first of all it should be reliable the reliability standard in North America is like one day out of a decade that the bulk power system should go down the second is we would like it to be affordable yeah if electricity prices get too high it's a terrible disruption and the third thing is we'd like it to be clean pain both in a local pollution sense but also in a CO2 right emission sense so reliable affordable and clean I like to think about the old joke during the Cold War uh you know smart honest and communist choose two out of three all right so reliable affordable clean we have a reliable and affordable system based on coal and natural gas you can be reliable and clean if you do nuclear energy or you do carbon capture and storage with gas or coal or you can be affordable and clean uh with wind and solar but you can't have all three the most expensive part of a useful grid is the reliability right it's not the wind and solar and because you can have up to a month's worth of Dunkle flauta where the wind and soil are not producing at all the backup system whatever it is needs to be at least as capable as the wind and solar system which means the cost is going to be at least double because wind and solar are the cheapest right all right so and people have done detailed studies using real weather data and cost for wind and solar and nuclear or batteries and so on and it turns out that we're going to at least double if not triple the cost of electricity if we go to a renewable heavy grid and I don't think that's a very good thing at all well you know wind and solar can be a supplement to an existing grid but they can never be the backbone whether you're selling footballs or fine art Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so that you can focus on growing your business Shopify covers every sales channel from an in-person POS system to an all-in-one e-commerce 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supply of power that's capable of being reliable during Peak usage hours so because wind and solar cannot do that and we don't have the storage in in to use wind and solar we have to have two parallel Power Systems and so I can't see how anybody can think that's a good idea now that's especially the case when if you produce two parallel Power Systems you make energy much more expensive but also you you introduce unpredictabilities into the fossil fuel or coal or nuclear end of the equation because it isn't obvious to the people who are investing in those Technologies exactly how much attention is going to be paid to their needs and so you complicate the you complicate the economic infrastructure upon which the provision of reliable fossil fuel and nuclear has already been predicated and so you're going to have to also trigger the economic incentives because that backup system is going to sit idle yeah a good fraction of the time and but you're still paying the capital expense somebody took out a loan to build that gas plant with ccs and how are you going to compensate them when they're only being used 10 percent of the time or less Okay so I I think you could make a radical case that switching to Renewables under such a situation if the Renewables are wind and solar is just ill-advised period because of the problem of having to double the energy uh infrastructure system yeah yeah yeah okay and so so there's another there's another problem and that's the critical materials problem you mentioned Cobalt I think a little bit uh uh a while ago the renewable Technologies for their magnets for other components the wiring use a tremendous amount more of non exotic I'm sorry of exotic materials rare Earths Cobalt nickel copper not so exotic but very important and the world does not have the capacity to produce those materials at the scale and cost that's required okay so now let's let's talk about let's talk about costs so from what I'm able to understand and this is fairly basic is that because energy sits at the base of everything we do because there's no difference in some real sense between energy and work and there's no difference between work and even minimal human flourishing shelter opportunity for your kids provision of inexpensive and plentiful food you know the fundamental Basics every time we make energy more expensive what we do is we tilt hundreds of millions of people who are just starting to struggle their way out of absolute poverty right back into what desperate scrabbling around in the dirt fundamentally and so and then you might say well that's absolutely necessary because of limits to growth we the planet just can't tolerate the the multitude of people striving for Economic Security that are are currently engaged in that struggle and so tough luck to those people but the thing the thing that really bothers me about that apart from the fact that it's cruel beyond belief is that I don't see any evidence at all that tipping hundreds of millions of people back into absolute poverty is going to do anything but make the planet a hell of a lot worse I mean the the situation in Germany is quite illustrative of that now because we've got a perfect storm in Germany as far as I can tell we've got dependence on a dictator Putin or on Petro dictators because Germany for example has just made a big deal with Qatar because Canada set them away empty-handed and then energy costs are extremely expensive in Germany and so lots of Industrial Enterprises are leaving going to places like China and the U.S and then also the entire power structure is now incredibly unreliable and it's more polluting by a large margin than it was 15 years ago yeah all true okay which is incredible for a uh you know credible for a country that is founded on rationality and sensible engineering and invented many of the technologies that are used in a modern fossil also fuel based Energy System nuclear fission was discovered in Germany right this is crazy I think you know Mrs Merkel uh is at the heart of a lot of those decisions she is a trained scientist she's a physical chemist I I know from talking to people who have talked with her she understood all of this but was beholden to the electorate and made the decision uh based on uh politics rather than what she knew yeah well you know about energy technique yeah I don't even think that this is based on politics per se you know I think what happens to these leaders and I've I've seen a fair bit of this in Canada and I know about it firsthand and in the U.S for that matter is that people get inflamed about a particular issue because they're afraid let's say climate change and then the politicians who have very little courage on the Electoral front use very very badly designed public opinion polls to sample people's Terror at the level of whim and then they Pander to it and I don't actually don't think that that's necessary because I don't think there's any evidence at all that that kind of public opinion poll driven pandering is a reasonable short medium or long-term political solution so it's actually quite a mystery to me you know go ahead go ahead I I was going to say in these issues at least for climate and Industry there are underlying scientific and techno-economic realities and you cannot violate them without running into big trouble and Germany is a wonderful example where they just ignored the technical economic realities the same is true of the climate uh story where some combination of some of the scientists the media the politicians and the ngos have quite unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat both climate and energy are complicated nuanced subjects they can't be distilled down into sound bites what we do involves trade-offs and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough about those trade-offs to make a a decision yeah well some of that's some of that's a problem it really is in part a problem of complexity right I mean because you can imagine that there's there's an attraction to relatively simple hypotheses and maybe that's a good one that's Occam's razor in some sense although you don't want your explanations to be any simpler than they need to be and so we have well it's reasonable to be concerned about the environment part of the environment is climate part of climate is carbon dioxide maybe we should just focus on carbon dioxide and then we're doing the right thing and that's where people get LED down the Garden Path because you don't get to be a planetary Savior by jumping up and down and saying carbon dioxide is bad like it it that's too oversimplified and the politicians capitalize on that right so so let me give you one simple response to that which I found to be pretty effective uh and I would credit Alex Epstein free in general thought right and whom I know you've you've spoken with there are one and a half billion of us in the developed world uh US Canada EU Japan and so on and we enjoy abundant energy uh it's a little more expensive at the moment because of Market issues but by and large we've got a great deal of energy and it's gives lets us live the kind of lives we live there are six and a half billion people on the planet who don't have that energy and as they develop as they improve their lives their energy demand is going to grow and the only way sorry not the only way but the most effective way to let them have that energy is by fossil fuels electricity gas coal uh Transportation oil and I think Alex very effectively argues that it is immoral to deny them the opportunity to develop with adequate energy yeah well we can I think I've heard of an adequate response I would push that past unethical into the realm of murderous I think it's absolutely unforgivable for the West to ever say anything about whether or not the developing countries and that would include China and India have any right to start moving away from wood and dung which also kill many many people while they're burning toward coal and natural gas and nuclear and then and I've not heard any leader address that issue directly I'd love to ask John Kerry or you know your Your Leader uh Trudeau or are the people in the EU where is your morality about these six and a half billion people well there is no good answer well this is the argument as far as I can understand it and I I've been trying to follow along let's say on the psychological front trying to piece this together it's something like pay now or pay later sure many many people are going to suffer if we raise Energy prices and put on limits to growth but that will be nothing compared to the suffering of people 50 to 100 years down the road if we don't take emergency action now so that's nonsense okay nonsense okay why that's not what the science says okay let me start with again something pretty simple let's look at the last 120 years since 1900 to now the globe has warned about 1.3 degrees Celsius in that time we've seen the greatest Improvement in human betterment we've ever seen the population has gone up by a factor of five in that 120 years the GDP per capita has gone up by a factor of seven longevity increased from 32 years to the current 72 years across the globe literacy fraction has gone up enormously fraction and extreme poverty has gone down and so on even as the globe warmed another 1.3 degrees now the ipcc projects best guess right now uh about another 1.3 degrees of warming in the next hundred years think that that additional warming is going to reverse or even significantly derail the progress we've had it's just nonsense okay and in fact the ipcc reports say that at least on the economic front a few degrees of warming is a few percent hit on the GDP which will increase anyway substantially over the next yes yes so instead of going up by 400 percent it'll go up 385 right something right which is within the uncertainty well within the uncertainty prediction so the notion of a climate catastrophe is just nonsense okay so I'm gonna I'm gonna put says it right there in the reports okay I'm gonna push you on that and I'm gonna try to take the the hypothetical alternative scientific perspective so back I guess it was a hundred years ago 150 years ago something like that Thomas Malthus wrote his famous uh essay on um population and Extinction in some real sense and so for all those of you who are listening you need to know this idea so Malthus who was quite a smart Observer noted that in natural populations there are often cycles of boom and bust and so under standard natural conditions a population of animals and that would range anywhere from single-celled animals say an impetu dish up to Deer you know grazing on the planes a population would expand until it consumed all of the available resources that would be mostly food in the case of animals and then having over-consumed would precipitously collapse and that's balanced in the natural world to some degree by predation and the inter community and Inter what would you say competition in between different species but fundamental species yeah right but fundamentally given limited resources a given population will expand until it exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment now malthusian biologists assumed that that model was relevant to human beings by assuming that we were subject to the same constraints and so you really saw this kicking into high gear in the 1960s where people like Paul Ehrlich who has plenty of sins on his conscience let's say made the case in the mid 60s along with the club of Rome that by the year 2000 we'd have so many bloody mouths to feed on the planet that commodity prices would shoot through the roof and everyone would start I remember reading as you probably did the limits to growth right the Forester uh book right right and the times we know now yes well in the time frame well the time frame prediction was the year 2000 now one of the things we should point out that if you're putting forward a scientific hypoth Services that's testable and and falsifiable it's incumbent upon you to specify the appropriate time frame you don't of course to say the human race is heading for uh an uncontrollable malthusian catastrophe sometime in the next 10 000 years it's like you you can just go away with those ideas if you can't specify the damn time frame right then you should shut the hell up verifiable testable hypotheses are the essence of science right so absolutely so okay so people like Eric who predicted for example that commodity prices were going to spike through the roof by the year 2000 and everyone was going to starve are wrong and the reason they're wrong at least in part is because the malthusian predictions they don't apply to people and I think the reason they don't apply in some fundamental sense is because we're capable of the death of our ideas instead of the death of our bodies right so we can adapt to yeah adaptability is maybe the defining characteristic of humans all right we are wonderfully adaptive people live you know from Hudson Bay down to the equator and we do just fine uh and I think one at least to judge by past experience you have to have faith that we as a species will figure it out because we've always done that in the past yeah we've done it under more uh trying conditions than we have now I might say absolutely you know and there's absolutely there's a lot of brain power available in the world now too and that's one of the massive benefits of having a larger population I mean there's more smart people alive now especially smart and educated people than there has been at any point in the past and and we've got to let them you know do their thing all right and that's got to do with governance and Regulation and so on but absolutely there's tremendous human capacity right now okay now the ipcc why don't you explain exactly what that is and also tell everyone because all the climate doomsters hypothetically predicate their propositions on the ipcc reports which and they're they're regarded by as gold standard people like Bjorn lomberg also accept the ipcc prognostication but have pointed out like Epstein and you have pointed out too that well it's one thing to read the ipcc report and then it's another to read the summary and then the summary of the summary which is mostly what people read and it starts to become non-scientific and political or theological as it gets condensed so what do you think the ipcc reports actually say apart from the fact that we're looking at about a 1.3 degree increase in average temperature in the next hundred years yeah so we we do see we have seen in the past an increase in the Earth's temperature the ipcc will say that's consistent with it all being driven by human influences but they allow for the possibility that there's natural variation in there so that's just on the temperature what they say about extreme weather events is that apart from things directly associated with the temperature like record high temperatures or heat waves um You Don't See Much Trends globally there's you know uh drought uh hard to see a trend hurricanes or tropical Cyclones hard to see any Trend at all over a century maybe there's a little thing we can talk about afterward uh sea level rise uh proceeding at the rate of one foot a century globally different locally we can talk about that a little bit if you want mid-latitude severe storms and so on not much going on at all it's hard to find Trends doesn't mean that the trends aren't there but they've just not emerged from the data okay so I wanted yeah sorry go ahead I was going to talk a little bit about the IPS please do so this this is an exercise carried out by the UN roughly every six or seven years they convene a thousand scientists from countries around the globe who are supposed to survey assess the scientific understanding of human-induced climate change that's really important because they focus on you know what might be attributable to humans as opposed to Natural climate change which is uh an important part of the story and so they split up into various working groups write very detailed thousand two thousand Page Long reports that actually in my opinion do a pretty good job of assessing the science those reports are then packaged if you like or summarized into summaries for policy makers where the scientists don't have as much of a hand in writing those summaries the governments intervene quite a bit and when you compare the summaries which is what serious people would read if they're not climate scientists so what's actually in the reports there's lots of Disconnect and I can give you some examples at some point and then of course you get the media where you have journalists who don't know very much at all about the science they're on a climate beat in the newspaper and so they have to provide climate stories that catch the attention and then you've got the politicians who grab on to all of this and so at the end of this long game of telephone what comes through is very little reflective of what the actual science says all right so okay so now you hear very frequently that 97 of scientists agree that well global warming exists or climate change exists but my understanding of that is the following and so correct me if I'm wrong so 97 of scientists agree that there is credible evidence that some some proportion of the current Trend towards warming is a attributable to human activity and more specifically to carbon dioxide so be some fraction of the 1.3 degrees that have yeah right right whether it's a half or whether it's whole I think people would disagree on right right and there's some disagreement about exactly the range of hypothetical temperature increase over the last 100 years or the next hundred okay so that's the 97 what percentage of scientists do you suppose actually take an apocalyptic view specifically in relationship to carbon dioxide yeah do you have any idea a sense of that out no you know no I'm and you know the 97 numbers a made-up number also yeah entirely flawed study I think you know the scientists are not behaving as though it were a pop apocalyptic uh I would say 95 of them are not in that camp but look that's just my anecdotal perception um you know I'd say it's hard to imagine folks a lot yeah right and you know none of them are kind of jumping off the roof and and um saying my God uh we'd better do something or we're headed for uh climate Hell highway climate Highway to Hell or something is what the Secretary General of the UN said a couple months ago right well so then no we're not okay well this is it's an issue it's a long-term problem we can deal with it uh but there's no reason to uh ring alarm Bells okay well then I I'm gonna play Devil's Advocate from another direction for a moment so I would say of all the data points that I've encountered over the last 15 years investigating the Nexus between energy and environment the data point that's left out at me most strongly is the fact that oh since the year 2000 the world has greened by 15 and primarily in semi-arid areas so let's just walk through that for a second so 15 is a lot it's bigger than the entire land mass of the United States and green is a lot different than brown or dead and semi-arid means that plants are growing in places that are damn near deserts and as far as I can tell that's pretty much the opposite of what the climate apocalypse um prognosticated and more than that I can't shake the suspicion and I would love to be corrected on this if you can see somewhere that I'm wrong why the hell isn't that good news especially when it's also allied with the fact that our crops are much more productive as a consequence too so I could say hey look at this it turns out that there's no more effective way of delivering fertilizer for plants worldwide than to burn fossil fuels yeah so so let's back up on the science for a second first so plants love CO2 right we pump CO2 into greenhouses in order to get the plants to grow better right now in the atmosphere the concentration is about 420 parts per million of CO2 we raise it to over a thousand parts per million in greenhouses to help the plants grow the CO2 not only lets them grow faster but it lets them use water more information right they don't have to open up the stomata and lose water as much uh you're 15 uh since 2000 uh if you'd ask me I would have said it's more like 40 percent since the 1980s all right so yeah things are growing better on Earth since 1980 wow right something called The Leaf area index has gone up you NASA produces maps that show this they write press releases that show this but somehow it's not really present in the media okay so so how's how come we're not how come we can't take the stance that carbon dioxide is a net good because that's such a developing statistic 40 since the 1980s I mean I don't know of another set of data that has well let's call that that scale right that's really something and green that's that's important right and if you look at the agricultural yields and so on whether it's in the U.S or India has been going gangbusters on producing crops um you know this is certainly one of the benefits uh and it's a significant one that has to be weighed against hypothetical uh detrimental uh effects from global warming and the net of them is a few percent again it's in the noise you can't distinguish it there are other factors about human well-being that are much more important than whether the climate's changing or not so you know if I were to be a little snarky it's almost a nothing Burger the science says that if you read the reports um but uh the detrimental effects get hyped up by various players if you own a small to medium-sized business that kept employees on payroll through covid you may have a big cash refund waiting for you the employee retention credit is a tax credit of up to twenty six thousand dollars per employee right now more businesses than ever qualify the experts at refundspro.com can help you cut through the red tape and qualify for this government program most of their refunds are over one hundred thousand dollars even businesses that have received PPP funds may be eligible and there are absolutely no fees unless you receive a refund there's no reason not to apply if your business experience shutdowns limited capacity supply chain challenges or reduced Revenue due to covid you likely qualify refundspro.com has already helped hundreds of businesses don't lose the refund you're owed by missing the deadline get started today with a free five-minute questionnaire at refundspro.com that's refunds with an s pro.com the other thing that I've seen the drum being beat about quite uh assiduously let's say in recent years and maybe I don't know how much you know about this I don't know enough about it uh that's for sure there are people who are claiming now and maybe this is because some of the shine has gone off the climate um apocalypse that we're headed for a mass extinction and I read a couple of computer models the other day that were published saying that there's a like a domino effect with regards to mass extinction and I mean there are a lot of people and although there's a lot of greenery now and there's more forest in the northern hemisphere so you know those are powerful countervailing proclivities but do you have do you have any specific knowledge about about our effects on the mass extinction front yeah no no you know like a senior academic as you and I are you're reluctant to talk about things you don't know much about um and I'm very careful about that um I don't know about the projections you're talking about but I'm our priori very suspicious because these are complicated physical biological systems and small effects can have a big influence and so I'm skeptical if I were to look at those papers one of the first things I would ask is how well have you reproduced the past Because unless you can reproduce the dominant changes that we've seen over the last 100 years Thousand Years whatever um I don't have much confidence in your ability to predict well okay let's talk about models some more so one of the things I want to point out to people and you tell me what you think about this is that it is perfectly possible to produce pretty damn good computer models that predict the behavior of the stock market in the past and the stock market's very complex of course because it's an index of well the sum total of human economic activity plus political activity so it's a very dynamic system and it's full of weird feedback loops because as soon as you can predict it you perturb the system but in any case here's the fundamental point it doesn't appear to me at all that the stock market is more complex than the climate and if you could produce a model that could predict the climate then you could produce predict produce a model that would predict the stock market and if you could produce that model even if you only got were right 51 percent of the time consistently you would soon have all the money and I don't see anybody who's developing these very complex models who has all the money so I don't think that they can make models that are that can model the behavior of systems that complex and so let's talk about models a bit so so let's talk about models a little bit let me back up again and talk about some of the basics um the most used models for the climate system or what are called General circulation models they cut the atmosphere and the ocean up into cubes about a hundred kilometers on a side 60 miles on a side and going up 20 layers in the atmosphere and then 20 layers down in the ocean and we have a difference to the stock market is we have some underlying physical laws the laws of conservation of energy Mass momentum and so on that govern how the air the radiation both sunlight and heat radiation water vapor flow through these boxes Newton understood those or Euler back in the 19th century or even earlier and we can build such models and use computers so you wind up with a a voted 10 million boxes covering the the earth going up and down in the ocean the atmosphere and then you follow the flow of stuff through these boxes every 10 minutes 10 minute time steps and you do that for a century or so and you got some description of what you think is the climate but there are lots of problems with that one is that 60 miles on a side yeah is not sufficient uh to describe the difference in climate between New York and Washington DC or New York and Toronto for example so that's one and so the second is a lot of phenomena happen on much smaller sizes think about thunderheads for example okay they happen on a few mile scale so you have to make up some assumption about what's going on inside each of these boxes and different people make different assumptions a third is that the boxes are not really Cubes but they're pancakes because the atmosphere is really thin compared to the size of the Earth and the ocean is also pretty thin and so you have to make up assumptions about how things move vertically that are not directly tied to the fundamental physical laws so all of those you know make a lot of trouble and that's why the world has 50 different such models and to get predictions they average all of them together okay so so let's take that apart just so everyone understands so the first is is these models are not very high resolution either spatially or temporally so you have to use huge cubes plus you're only temporary temporary well temporary is pretty good 10 minutes uh well uh spatially right right but it's terrible but we also well perhaps perhaps on the temporal side I mean the thing is is we're looking at relatively small deviations in temperature right if it's one degree over a century this is not a huge effect and what that means is that the models aren't high resolution enough to be accurate to that scale they're simply not that's true that's true now that doesn't okay that doesn't mean we shouldn't model because our models get better and better all the time but there's a big difference between modeling something even if you can make it accurate to predict the past and being able to model the present but there's a walloping difference between being able to model the present and being able to model climate a hundred years from now because the air is compound as you predicted out into the future well yes um that's certainly true although you hope to be describing averages that are reasonably well predicted you know there's several comments about that one is um you know on this human influences are small they're as you say a one percent effect we're concerned about a rise of two degrees was the Earth's surface temperature is about 300 degrees so it's like a one percent effect the second is we're interested not in describing the climate but in describing how the climate responds to those influences that's the big question and that's a order of magnitude harder job than describing the climate itself the third thing is we're looking over time scales of 100 150 years and we have terrible data to describe what happened in the past yes we have reasonable confidence about the average global temperature but what goes on in the oceans which is really where climate happens the oceans are the long-term component of the system we have terrible data until about 20 years ago when we started putting out floats of various kinds well how good is the ocean data I mean the ocean's pretty damn deep and it's not it's not like we can measure everything that's happening in the ocean I can't imagine we understand long-term current flows from the depths well enough to be predicting climate alteration on the scale of a few degrees that just strikes me as a unbelievably preposterous right studies that have attempted to reproduce the warming of the ocean show that the ocean was warming at about half the current rate even as the little Ice Age started to end and and so untangling this long-term natural variability from the effect of human influence which has only really been significant for the last 70 or 80 years or so is a very very difficult problem maybe the central problem in climate Okay now you talked about when you were at BP you you got somewhat excited about the possibility of biofuel we didn't really continue down that road um what do you what what are your thoughts on the nuclear front let's say and and did you see developments there that you regarded as like with a lot of people talk about modular nuclear power for example language so so right so full disclosure first you know I I began Life as a nuclear physicist right and so the atom is my friend uh I'm I'm a scientist not an engineer I don't think I could build a critical credible nuclear reactor but I certainly understand how they work in great detail and understand the economics and the business and so on I think if the world is serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions nuclear power has to be a big part of the future essentially zero emissions reasonably economic and a demonstrate a demonstrated technology right roughly 20 percent of U.S electricity comes from fission uh 80 percent of French electricity comes from fission maybe it's 75 now so you know we know how to do this the problem is that the big ones particularly in the US the existing power plants of which there are about 90 something now uh in the U.S um are um um very expensive you have to put down a lot of money at the beginning 10 20 billion dollars and then you don't start to pay it off until 30 years hence when you sell the electricity that you've been making and so you need a stable and sensible regulatory environment for these big Capital expenses well look I mean we were building nuclear power plants you know 60 years ago and so we should be better at it now especially at the modular level so one of the things I'm curious about well too I suppose is to what degree does insane regulation make nuclear power unbelievably expensive and then the second question would be given that insane regulation does make nuclear power extremely expensive do you think there's any possibility at all practically speaking that that red tape could be reversed I mean Germany just built an LNG port in like five months so you know what it's obvious we can get our act together when we need we can do this yeah yeah I think you know regulation has been a big part of why big nuclear is expensive I'm I'm all for making sure these things are safe we have to do that that's the primary consideration and the industry believes that as well the problem is that in the U.S we have built every reactor custom built they're all different right even if the names are more of us the same in detail they're different the hope is with small modular reactors is to focus the regulation so that you can get one design approved and then you can make a hundred of them right and ship them around the country you build them in a factory and you put them on a flatbed uh rail car and bring them to the site it would also ease the economics because you pay for the first one and then you use the cash flow from it to finance the second one and the third one and so on at a site yeah well Rolls Royce is doing that they've got a proposal so Rolls Royce is doing that might make right so so in the U.S uh there are two companies I remember the name of one of them called new scale and I think they hope to have the first one in the ground within the next five or six years um you know you got to come down the learning curve right now the costs are more expensive than big nuclear per kilowatt hour produced but as they come down the learning curve and build more of these and so on um the costs should come down they'll still be more expensive than gas uh for example to make electricity but at least you won't have the CO2 issues the waste issue which people talk about also with respect to nuclear is a technically solved problem okay how how is it solved monitored retrieve retrievable storage you put it underground you monitor it the waste decays uh the heat uh from the waste decays um after 100 years uh it's almost all gone and then you can pull it back out if you needed the energy in it you know we only burn about five percent of the uranium in the in the waste that that's there in the uh waste and so it's soluble so okay I started looking into the sorts of things we're talking about about 10 years ago and maybe 15 years ago okay so one of the things that really shocked me well there are two things the first was that when I started looking into the energy and environment Nexus in detail I got more optimistic rather than less and I thought oh my God things are a lot better than I thought they were people are getting richer at a stunning rate it looks like there's a positive relationship between population growth and wealth the planet is cleaner and better off in many ways than it's been for a very long time like there's real reasons for optimism and uh and then I also so that was shocking then I also learned and this was also shocking that there's a very positive relationship between GDP and environmental let's call it awareness and concern so it looks like once you get people up to about the point where in their country the average GDP is five thousand dollars per person people can stop scrabbling around in the dirt and burning everything and eating everything in sight and they can start to think about what sort of environment they'd like to have for their children the the technical name is the kuznets curve which you probably right right right right right and and so and so then I thought oh well isn't this interesting what this should mean is that if we wanted to we could work really hard internationally to make energy cheap and we could pull billions of people the remaining people in the world out of abject poverty and the consequence of that they would be that they would start to become locally concerned about environmental maintainability and sustainability and then everyone would have enough to eat and they'd all be educated plus the planet would be better off and then the question was okay and here's a here's a question that we can really delve into why the hell aren't we doing this it's like instead we're buying this crazy apocalyptic narrative that's making the planet worse that's driving energy costs up that's destabilizing us sociopolitically when as far as I can tell the pathway forward to abundance and sustainability is pretty damn obvious and also not particularly expensive so what the hell's going on so so I walk I quote two folks relevant to this one is H.L Menken uh who was a journalist writing in the early part of the 20th century in New York us very astute very acerbic and he's got a line in one of his books which I'll try to reproduce the purpose of practical politics is to keep the electorate alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety and you see the politicians grabbing on to these issues whether it's the climate whether it's immigration they do it on both sides right all sides the missile Gap in the 60s you know whatever the truth was Behind These the politicians amp it up in order to get the electorate to actually do something right so that's one quote the second is there was this guy named Anthony Downs who was an economist working in the 60s through the 90s or 2000s he was uh first at UCLA and then at Brookings so he's quite on the left had a number of uh insights to his credit but one of them was what he calls the issue attention cycle namely some issue whether it's pesticides or climate bubbles among the experts for a while nobody pays much attention to it it suddenly bursts into the public consciousness uh and everybody gets both alarmed but also enthusiastic about the ease with which they're going to solve it then everybody discovers boy this is going to be really hard to solve and eventually the issue Fades with time or morphs into something else yeah and I think we are at kind of that third phase now with the climate where everybody is really arising just how hard and I would say almost impossible it's going to be to reduce emissions uh certainly Net Zero by the end of the century looks like it's just not going to happen so so you know so I think that's what's going on well I'm going to add some psychological layering to that you can tell me what you think of this well so first of all people are tilted towards attention paid to negative events and so for example people are much more hurt by a loss of five dollars than they are made Happy by a gain of five dollars so we're quite low now I think the reason we're lost sensitive is that well you can only be so happy but you can be 100 dead and so being more sensitive and threat in in terms of magnitude of response per unit of reinforcement makes sense given that we're finite and vulnerable and then we also have the problem that any given threat almost any given threat could in principle be personally and socially apocalyptic so for example it it could be the case that the aches and pains that you're experiencing today are the ground zero for an epidemic that'll kill one third of the United States right I mean it's very unlikely but it happened with the black death and I mean the the possibility of an apocalyptic outcome is always non-zero and in fact in in personal life it's always a hundred percent because the worst thing that could possibly happen to you will for sure happen to you and so it will eventually happen well right and so I think one of our problems is is that because we're sensitive to negative information and because there's always a potential apocalypse bubbling away in the background it's very hard for us to distinguish collectively between threats that are valid apocalyptically and those that aren't and then we tend to err on the side of of panic let's say and that wasn't such a bad thing when our responses weren't as large as the potential problems because now now what happens is that if we Stampede in one direction we're so powerful that the bloody Stampede can be much worse than the problem we'll be back in one moment first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question you know Bill nordhaus uh won a Nobel prize in economics in 2018 I think for one of the things he wanted for was the realization that there's an optimal way in which to decarbonize if you do it too rapidly it's too disruptive and you deploy immature technology you do it too slowly carbon dioxide builds up and propose promotes a greater risk so I think people need this kind of multi-decade if not Century perspective on making these changes but also going back in time the realization that we have managed much worse threats and crises and uh as Bjorn Lombard says we should cool it a bit relax think it through uh and do it in a deliberate yeah well we're also we're also not that good particularly now at adopting say a few centuries-long time frame and it's not surprising because we don't live that long but I mean if you look in at Medieval Europe there was the capacity for sustained imagination so a lot of the great Cathedrals which were amazing engineering projects for their time were construed over uh multiple centuries people who started them knew they wouldn't finish them so there was that sense of of of long-term continuity but maybe one of the byproducts of a very efficient and Hyper productive capitalist Society is that we tend to have a shorter time frame for expectation of results you know and there's obviously benefits to that right because why the hell not fix the problem in the next quarter if you can but there's going to be some issues that require a time scale of centuries I mean I think the Bible you know go ahead please no we we have you know been uh seduced perhaps by the digital Revolution where the Technologies change every couple years right I mean you know if you go back a decade or two we were using eight-track tapes and so on and now of course it's all uh MP3s or MP4s or whatever um energy is very different the systems need to work as a system the facilities last decades and we demand High reliability so energy changes on multi-decade time scales it doesn't change every year or two and people have they have come to expect that things can change rapidly when in fact they're a good physical and economic reasons why energy cannot change right well so that's a complex cognitive problem too right to be able to distinguish between those problems that are amenable to Rapid solution and those problems that aren't that's not a trivial cognitive exercise it's not obviously especially if you don't have specialized knowledge right or if you don't have experience I mean not to knock the younger generation I have three kids myself and you know they're all wonderful people but if you're a 22 year old just having graduated uh from undergraduate uh education you don't have the perspective I certainly didn't uh and getting this perspective through life experience through Reading More and understanding more about the world uh gives you a different view of these things some people say that you know you and I will not be around to see the worst consequences of climate change but we have seen the world navigate far more difficult yes yes and and to do it successfully not without pain and and turmoil but um we will persist as a species well yes and I mean I would say that things have turned out quite a lot better than I presumed they would when I was young I mean for and how old you Dr coonan I'm 71. okay so you're about you're 11 years older than me so you know both of us grew up in the Cold War area era and I would say our apocalypse was probably nuclear and it seems to me that we had more reason to assume that the nuclear threat was a genuine apocalyptic nightmare than the climate apocalypse have now given what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis and then again in the 1980s we were damn close a couple of times and we might be on the threshold now with regards to this war with Russia so who who the hell knows right but but it was certainly the case that among people um in in my generation there were a substantial number of young people who were seriously affected enough psychologically by the ever-present threat of nuclear war let's say to be very demoralized and disenchanted about the future to think well why the hell bothered because the probability we're going to end up in a nuclear winter is so high that it's just pointless to do anything and and then there was the you know usual murmurings in the background about overpopulation and so forth and coming scarcity and and all of that and then really what's happened since then is that pretty much everything globally has got way better than anybody could have possibly imagined right there's absolutely yeah yeah and very surprising ways is so not only is the planet Greener but it's much better fed and obesity is a way bigger problem than starvation except and starvation almost never occurs except for political reasons and I mean distribution issues yeah exactly exactly and so you know all things literacy has gone up communications Mobility uh Health longevity I mean as I said over 120 years the world has improved like it has never improved uh before yeah so then we have and and I mean it's not like we're getting stupider and I'm a bit concerned on the AI front you know but so far the additional computational resources we've been able to put at our disposal have been used in a fairly intelligent way I mean China is kind of worrisome on the totalitarian front and yeah but it isn't obvious to me that China is going to be particularly successful in their totalitarian Ambitions the Chinese themselves seem to be getting pretty damn sick of having the state interfere with absolutely everything you do every second of their lives so I could easily see China undergoing a collapse that something akin to what happened to the Soviet Union in 1989 that system is just too damn unwieldy and right you know right you see these people in Iran clamoring away for freedom and so you know maybe we'll see a positive development on that front that might be nice and so I just don't see any okay first of all I don't see any reason for an apocalyptic Outlook we could we could make things a hell of a lot better than they are now very very with absolutely now who do you see operating at the international level on the leadership front that you regard as or do you see anyone that you regard as a credible advocate for like a sensible Nexus of environment and energy policies you know uh it's very tough to find that because if you speak out against the prevailing catastrophe narrative uh you get shouted down and you get no traction at all but what I do think is that again there are techno economic realities that will eventually uh cause the system to do the right thing I talk in private to leaders of energy companies to politicians Finance folks and I think if you and I were having that conversation with them in private uh there wouldn't be too much disagreement but many of these leaders feel captive or beholden not to shareholders but to stakeholders and they dare not say yeah well anything you know is a lot of that is off the narrative a lot of that's just straight outright cowardice in Miami I've lost I mean you you've been you've been uh you know I mean you wrote this book unsettled and people went after you but look at you you're alive you seem to be thriving your book was quite successful I mean how did you escape the the the apocalyptic consequences of council culture like how did you know I I think one of the um foundations of the book or one of the principles when I wrote it is that I would only use material that was out of the ipcc reports or the quality research literature or the primary data itself in other words I wasn't making anything up it's all traceable back to those uh gold standard sources and so people can accuse me as the have of cherry picking or not telling the whole story of course I have responses to all of that uh but by and large they have a very hard time criticizing what I've written they can criticize me show for the oil industry uh not a climate scientist a denier etc etc but by and large um I've only gotten very positive reactions from other people who've actually read the book I mean I can tell you stories about some of the nonsense criticisms yeah yeah but but I mean you've been able to do this and you know you haven't been like hung and drawn and quartered by the horrible mob I know it's I know that being mob can be very unpleasant and I I meant I know many people who've been canceled and it's a life-changing experience so I'm not trying to minimize that but you'd hope that there would be a modicum of Courage on the political front so that some people could come out and say well you know we don't really need to go down this idiot limits to growth uh root that we've been pursuing expensively and counterproductively for 60 years we could just do what we could to make energy more abundant and cleaner and cheaper for poor people and we could raise their we could raise their sights to the Future and as as the measures that governments are implementing to try to get to that unattainable future whether it's bans on internal combustion engines or increased Renewables that are going to make the grid expensive and unreliable eventually people will be impacted directly and they'll be mad because it's not being done in a graceful or thoughtful way and I think people will then say why are we doing all this again you know the U.S is only 13 percent of global emissions and if the U.S went to zero emissions tomorrow it would be negated by a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world and so you know the best thing the US can do is develop Technologies right to to try to get there and not make massive changes itself well it's also the case that the U.S did lower its carbon output by a substantial amount and the reason for that was fracking which is not something that the environmental apocalypse would have predicted in fact quite the course that's that that's the major reason the substitution of gas for coal but another reason is that the Renewables have grown in electricity generation in the U.S I don't know the exact number now but wind is something like 13 of U.S electricity generation it's got reliability issues it's got land issues it's got materials issues but um that's another reason emissions have come down somewhat right so you're so all things considered you've remained fundamentally optimistic you think that's a temperamental characteristic or do you think that was driven by by your exploration of the on the ground realities and then I want to talk to you too about you know you said you've been accused of not being a climate scientist and first of all I don't think there's such a thing as a climate scientist right I mean that's that's not a category that a scientist falls into you your your basic training was in physics so maybe we'll return to that just for a moment what what makes you a credible Observer on that front but let's deal with the first issue first the uh you know I I think temperamentally I'm I'm optimistic uh my mother who's still with us at age 91 uh is was the youngest by about 15 years of uh for uh children and she grew up and still has incredible optimism about things so I think it's partly in my psychological DNA but you know it's it's also I I'm very quantitative I I do numbers and when you look at the numbers which are you know somebody once said I think it was uh Kelvin or Rutherford um unless you can express it numbers your knowledge is of the most meager kind um and so most people don't do that but I do and I've dug into the climate energy story and when you look at the numbers as I think you said a while ago it's not so bad there's no apocalypse uh in the future um yes there are issues but we will navigate them so I I think it is a combination of both being informed but also being naturally optimistic right well that a bit of a tilt towards optimism is what moves people out into the world and you know I also don't know so much if that's properly characterized as optimism or something characterized more accurately let's say as useful faith I mean there are reasons to assume that things will go to hell in a hand basket but there's reasons to assume that we could manage as well as we have in the past or better and I think that one of the attributes that tilts us towards managing well in the future is the willingness to have some faith in our ability to adapt and to and to do the right thing and yeah you know when we're constantly presenting young people with the picture of human beings as destructive Environmental and Cultural forces we squash that natural faith which is well yeah there's problems because being alive is a problem but we have a host of potential Solutions at hand and we're not we're not without resources in the face of our challenges and and the results this is the second immoral dimension of what the current scene looks like not only are we trying to deny six and a half billion people uh adequate reliable affordable energy but we are particularly in the west depressing the younger generation in a most unreasonable way they don't want to have children they think the world is going to go to hell in the next 10 years and so on that's complete nonsense and somebody needs to stand up and say that yeah not only do they not want to have children they don't even want to have sex I mean we've really demoralized a whole generation and you know there is something terribly immoral about that because my my hypothesis is that if you think poor people should starve because energy prices should go up and if you think that demoralizing young people is a good way to ensure the long-term sustainability of the planet you and I are not on the same side not even a little bit like I think it's absolutely reprehensible that we're casting people back into poverty both in the west because we're doing that to poor people who are marginal now but more importantly in the developing world and this continued demoralization is absolutely inexcusable I I would love to engage with some of the leaders uh John Kerry Bill Gates my former friend and colleague Ernie Moniz who was Secretary of Energy a very good Secretary of Energy all of whom are on the more alarmist side of these things I'd love to have this kind of conversation with them and ask them about those two immoral Dimensions it's very hard to get a serious discussion I recently have done four debates with credible people on the other side uh presented the arguments against rapid decarbonization and I'm proud to say I won all four debates we should put those in the links for to the description yeah I will send those uh to you so um the first one was against a climate scientist from Texas A M Andrew destler who is much more of a climate scientist than he is an energy guy and you need both yeah uh here uh the second debate was up and probably probably in my view the best one was against Daniel schrag who's a professor of Earth Sciences at Harvard and uh has been and Still Remains a good friend and colleague the third was against an energy Economist at Columbia named gurda Wagner and then the fourth was again against Andrew descar who wanted a rematch uh and so these the problem with talking about this is you need to understand both the climate science and the energy inside yeah and there aren't many people by virtue of my background I have perhaps been exposed to both uh in ways that most people have right right well that's another problem with regards to let's say public opinion is that well first of all most people aren't climate scientists that's for sure in fact they're a very small percentage of the population and then as you pointed out if you add the additional requirement of having some expertise on the energy front you're taking a very small fraction of a very small fraction of people and maybe you can count them on I don't know maybe they're in the maybe there's under a hundred of them in the world there just aren't that many and so you know part of part of this is also the case that the whole species is starting to wrestle with problems of a level of abstraction and a level of magnitude that are really unforeseen right and so we don't when I worked for the UN committees that were working on the sustainable goals one of the first things I realized was oh no one's an expert in sustainable development that's not an area of expertise no one knows how to do this and so we are in some sense casting around in the dark and part of the problem with that is we do fall into our apocalyptic heuristics very very easily especially if that can be weaponized for political purposes but it's a little hard on young people it's a little hard on poor people yeah but and so you know you need to approach these problems with an inquisitive mind because there are so many different dimensions and you want to go out and learn enough about them to be able to ask the right kind of questions to the expert yeah well you know the other thing we do to young people this really made me disenchanted in some ways with what was happening in universities there were many reasons for that disenchantment but you know the other thing that we convince young people of right when they're in their Messianic phase that's a piagetian developmental State between about 16 and 20 is that the way forward morally to take your place in broader Society is by taking the root of political activism and that basically means that what you do to be a moral person is to identify the perpetrators of the apocalyptic catastrophe and then go make life miserable for them instead of teaching young people that no you should actually spend a few decades developing the knowledge necessary to make some real progress on these fronts you should assume that there's some cabal of enemies that you've identified when you're 18 and you certainly shouldn't assume that the mere fact that you're out waving a placard and protesting means that you're on the right side of history or even on your own or even in relationship to your own psychological developments so my interaction with young people these days is mostly through the courses I teach at NYU I teach climate uh and then energy two separate courses to Master's level students and fortunately I think already they're a mix of Engineers and mbas so they have this desire to actually do something positive rather than simply as you say wave flags and complain about what's being done and what I find in both courses is how much the eyes get opened up uh whether it's about the climate science which I teach almost entirely out of the ipcc and the research literature or the energy which I teach you know both the Technologies the business the regulation and so on and you know I think uh it's gratifying to see eyes open up that's one of the great benefits of being a teacher is as you know but also it shows to me that people can spend a little bit of time to learn some of these base and then be critically questioning inquisitive uh about these very complicated but important subjects right well and it's also very heartening to know that you can do that at NYU and that that's working yeah yeah you know when when I was about to publish the book uh I sent uh the manuscript to both the president and the Provost uh whom I know well since former academic administrators tend to hang out together uh and their response was you know Steve I don't know if I agree with everything you've written but you've got a right to say it and we support that well thank God for that so all right well look that's probably a good place time to close we're at about the end of our 90 minutes here on YouTube I'm I'm going to talk to Dr coonan a bit more on the daily wire plus platform as many of you who are watching and listening know I like to take my guests and do some investigation into their particular biography because I think it's useful for people to hear about how people's successful Destiny makes itself manifest in their lives and it also helps please me on the clinical front because I like finding out about people's lives and so we're going to switch over to the Daily wire plus platform to do that for about half an hour thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and for bringing what you know to the attention of all the people who will be watching this and listening across the podcast platforms and on YouTube and and it's very it's it's quite um positive to to be speaking with so many people who are knowledgeable now about the you know climate apocalypse and who have drawn the conclusion that this is something that we can handle and that we can handle in a very good way if we were even remotely careful and and uh hopefully that will be as you pointed out maybe the tide is starting to turn on this and we're going to start to understand that we can think in terms of centuries and that we can actually manage this hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,113,886

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: reaABJ5HpLk

Length: 98min 8sec (5888 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 16 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/vap0rtranz]

"In these issues, at least for climate and energy, there are underlying scientific and techno-economic realities. And you cannot violate them without running into big trouble.

And Germany is a wonderful example ... the same is true of the climate story, where [...] some of the scientists, the media, politicians, and NGOs, have quiet unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat.

Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects; they can't be distilled down into soundbites. What we do involves trade-offs, and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough about those trade-offs to make a decision."