Shaun Newman Podcast - #316 - Patrick Moore

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

PhD in Ecology, Co-founder & past president of Greenpeace. November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think   Text me 587-217-8500

What's up, guys, it's Kid Carson. This is Alexandra Kitty. This is Danielle Smith. Hey, everybody. This is Paul Brandt. Jeremy McKenzie, Ragingdissident.com. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Friday, quick turnaround. If you listen to the Thursday night roundtable, a little collaboration I got going on with the Western Standard right now. So it's a quick turnaround. I'm happy you're joining me here Friday. We get a great one on Tap for you today. But before we get there, first things first, If you haven't seen yet or you're interested in it, quick dick, McDick, 22 minutes,

going to be live at the Gold Horse Casino in Lloyd Minster, November 5th. Tickets are on sale. You can find a link to it in the show notes of the episode. Just look there, click on it where you go, and you're off to the races. So that's the cool thing coming up here in November. From the podcast standpoint, for the next couple weeks, we're going to have five a week. We're working this collaboration with the Western Standard, seeing how you guys feel about it,

seeing how I feel about it, seeing how they feel about it. And so I appreciate all the feedback you can give me. If you hate it, love it, have ideas for it, just fire off a text. In the show notes, once again, you all know. The number for the podcast is in there. Fire me a text. Love it or hate it.

I don't really care. At this point, I'm more interested in your thoughts or ideas. If you're like, man, you should roundtable this idea, let's have at it because there's a short little window here where we get to trial it out, see how it feels, and we'll move on from there. So if people don't like it, we're not going to keep doing it. And if people love it, then of course we're going to do our utmost to keep it where it is and everything else.

So you got the text line, shoot me a number, shoot me a number, shoot me a text, and we'd love to have your feedback from it. Obviously, five episodes in five days or five in a week is a lot. a lot. So you guys keeping up on it. I do appreciate that. Curtis Longmere, wherever you're hiding ran into him at the oil show yesterday. He says he's up

to date as of today. Well, Curtis, hats off to you because I'm impressed. And to all you folks who have been texting, you know, I'm hard on, you know, text me your ideas, text me your ideas. There's been a lot of cool text coming in in the last, let alone week, but the last month, two months

probably since I started this dang thing, and I appreciate it all. I love keeping in touch with all of you because, I mean, that's what makes this fun. Somebody asks me, how are you doing? How are you doing? You know, I'm at the Welles' real. You miss some work? You miss some work.

I'm working full time right now, folks. And I've never felt better. This is the most fun I've probably ever had. And it's hopefully delivering some knowledge, entertainment. What are we looking for here? I don't know what the word is. I'm rubbing my eyes right now because I'm like, what is the word for this, you know, a thing I'm doing right now?

I don't know. I'm having fun with it. I hope you are too. I hope if you're a farmer out in the field, you're enjoying this. You're just as pumped as I am every Friday morning or whatever day to the week it is. When it releases, you're just as fired up to hear what's going on. Today, I'm telling you, is a good one again. And I'm going to stop jabber jabber in here.

I'm going to get on to today's sponsors. I ran into Stephen Barber today, which is yesterday as you're listening to it. And I got him coming on, and I'm excited. for upstream data you know he's a guy um at the uh oil and gas show well do you know what upstream data is i assume you do since 2017 they've been pioneering a creative solution for vented and flared natural gas at upstream oil and gas facilities i was looking at the product again yesterday i was like this slick they take uh you know something that is well and we'll see what uh mr barber has to say here in the coming weeks about uh bitcoin and everything else but they take something you know a problem

as deemed by the political entities that be in flared gas, and I'm sure, environmentally and blah, blah, blah, you get the point. Anyways, they take that problem and turn it into something that is deemed, I would say, beneficial from a lot of you, into Bitcoin, that type of thing. They take unused energy, put it into something that can be of use. Anyways, you can find a hell of a lot more in this than me doing what I'm doing right now. Upstreamdata.ca. and if you hang on, go back, or go back episode 163 is when Stephen Barber comes on,

and he's going to be coming on here in the next week. I'm excited for it, and we're going to grill into them about a whole bunch of different things, but they're a cool little company. Go to upstreamdata.com. You can see what I'm talking about, and like I say, I keep jibber jabber in here. I'm four minutes in and I've hardly even started, and if you're listening, thanks for coming on board today. I'm fucking excited.

That's where I'm at. I'm excited for today. I'm excited for the week. I'm excited for the next what's coming. Man, I'm having a happy mood. I mean, five times a week. Curtis Longmere, wherever you're at, wherever you're driving. The fact that you've listened to way up to here is just hats off to you.

Hats off to all of you if you can keep up with this. Because, you know, one of the funny things I hear all the time is, I haven't really been keeping up, but I really appreciate what you're doing. I got no problem with that. Listen, Joe Rogan hammers off. a ton of content and I love Joe and at times I can't keep up so if you're just tuning in today or you've been all the way

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I'm kind of giddy. Went to the oil show. Had a 2 o'clock in the afternoon beverage. I'm telling you, it's a good day. It's Friday. I'm giggly on this side. I hope all you guys are having fun. And I hope wherever you're going this weekend, the sun is shining because I tell you what, September so far has been a pretty damn good month.

Just saying that. Now, let's get on that tail of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methanol chemicals. Delivering to your farm commercial or oil fuel location for more information, visit them at Hancockpetroleum.com. He holds his Ph.D. in ecology. He's a co-founder and past president of Greenpeace. I'm talking about Patrick Moore. So buckle up because here we go.

My name is Patrick Moore and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Patrick Moore. So first off, Patrick, thanks for hopping on. Nice to be with you, Sean, on a beautiful morning here on Vancouver Island. We have a nice late summer. Well, I've been to Vancouver Island before Port Albany, I want to say, and interviewed a lady who survived the perfect storm back in 1991.

And it was quite the place. I'd never been there before. And not only the journey from Saskatchewan, Alberta border out there, certainly traveling the mountains and then the ferry across and everything else, but seeing some of the like just the mass of trees you have on that island is something else. It's a beauty. My mom was born in Port Albany. and I grew up further north on the north end of Vancouver Island, way out in the middle and nowhere at the end of the 45 mile gravel road from Port Hardy and right on the west coast. So it was an interesting childhood that I had.

I had the whole world out in front of me. All the forests and all the ocean, tied flats and down the dock and my own boat by the time I was 10. So I was a lucky kid. You know, if you don't mind starting there, Patrick, I come from a background of being on the farm in Saskatchewan, you know, and certainly there's beauties to growing up that way. I find what you just said, probably 99% of the population never gets to experience something like that. What was so, I guess when you look back at your childhood, what sticks out?

Well, I didn't realize that I was immersed in pure nature from the beginning of my life. And so when I went to Vancouver to boarding school at age 14, because the one-room school in my little village only went to grade 8, and there was only about usually 12 or 15 kids in it. And I went to school by boat every morning from a floating village, my dad's logging camp. I could go on forever about that. But I gained an innate love of nature as a result. And ever since then, all I've emphasized is life science. understanding how we got here, how many billions of years it took to happen, and just the amazing story of life on planet Earth, which even though you have to think there might be life

somewhere else, we don't know of anywhere else that there's life. So, you know, this could be the only planet in the universe that has life on it. And not only does it have life on it, has life that can think and see each other and talk to each other. It's quite amazing when you think about it. And one way I put it is that every single individual of every species on Earth today, there's 1.7 million species. And of those, many of them have millions and like humans have billions of us. Every one of us, insect, plant, human, represents a continuous successful reproduction since the beginning of life. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. We would have been pruned from the evolutionary tree at one time, and our genes would not have passed through to the next generation.

So, I mean, this is the reason that death is important, because if nothing died, there'd be no evolution. It would just stay the same forever. So that was one of the most important things in the history of life was death. So there's some big concepts involved in all of this. And we've got now a society that is looking into a cell phone half its life. And it's really unfortunate that people aren't understanding the more profound realities that exist. And one of which is understanding energy.

If there was no energy, there'd be no motion. If there was no motion, there'd be no time. If there was no time, there'd be no nothing. So people think of energy as something, you know, you plug it into the wall and it works. But the way we're going right now, we are on the way. one hand, they're saying we have to have electric cars, which will double the amount of electricity required, and it has to be there when you want it. At the same time, we're shutting down gas plants and nuclear plants, which are reliable and cost effective and work for many more years

than wind and solar does. Well, wind and solar, every day it doesn't work. And with solar, at night, it doesn't work. It only works for the few brightest hours in the daylight. It And then when there's clouds, there's no energy either. So we have embarked here on a completely ridiculous fantasy. It's like people who live in cities on the 30th floor of a condominium. They don't even know that the trucks are coming in at night with all their food and restocking the shells. And if that stopped, it wouldn't be such a nice place to be. and so there are so many errors being made in the decisions about our future as a society and our energy production

because energy is the basis of all movement and also the basis of all light at night and the basis of heat in our homes in many cases so it is hard to understand how we're going to get out of this mess because there's leaders now in virtually all the Western countries who are committed to this idea that we can run the world on wind and solar with batteries, with batteries that don't even exist yet in the kind of numbers that they would be required to do such a thing. And it's doubtful that there's even enough materials of the lithium and the cobalt

and the neomidium and all the other things that are needed to make these batteries. And if you think about it, if you try to run the world on wind and solar, When the wind and solar are working, which is about 25 to 30% of the time, you have to provide all the energy needed for the city and the industries and everything and now for charging all the cars. So you have to provide that. At the same time, you have to be charging the batteries. And you have to have something like two to three to even four times as much energy as you need for the whole city and the industry because the batteries have to last twice as long as the wind and solar do. it's technically impossible. It simply can't be done.

And the cost would be upwards of 10 times what it is now for your power. And that would make everybody way poorer because we spend quite a lot of money on our energy. And even now. And if you look at Germany, the price of electricity has gone up by three times since they started building out all this wind and solar, which only works when the wind and sun are available. And then therefore you still have to have fossil fuel or nuclear or hydroelectric backup. And then you make them less efficient because they're only working part of the time instead of working all of the time. So their energy becomes more expensive because they're not getting the income that they used to get.

now that the wind and solar is being forced on the utilities and on the people when it's available. That's called the mandate that utilities are required to buy the wind and solar energy when it's available, even if it's more expensive than the fossil or nuclear or hydro. And so that makes everything more expensive. and and then by the time you get up to about 30% wind and solar rate starts becoming unreliable and that's why these blackouts are happening and going to happen more frequently if we don't change course. It's as simple as that. Well, I was saying to you before we started, I sat with Brian Git here on the podcast just before you,

or I guess my latest episode that had been released. and we get into a lot of the technicalities of wind and solar versus, you know, nuclear, natural gas, all these different things, fossil fuels in general. And I guess I find it really interesting, Patrick. Brian has a similar background. Nobody has your background, obviously. But coming from, I don't know what the word is, an activist or a green thought process. I don't know if that's the right word, but you start this conversation out,

living on Vancouver Island, around nature, everything else. For the listener, you were a president of Green piece. You basically pushed against a lot of things that, I don't even know the word, Patrick, but you were against a lot of this.

And now I'm hearing more and more nuclear, fossil fuels. They have their place in the world. world and maybe even more so they need to have their place in the world until we can figure out different ways. I don't know, is it, what happened, Patrick? What changed your thought process? Or have you changed it all?

I haven't. The thing is I haven't changed at all. I'm portrayed as a betrayer because I left Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership. I was on the top committee for all those 15 years, led many campaigns. We started out being against nuclear war. pretty obvious that you should be against nuclear war. And if you're against nuclear war, it means you care about people. So, but as Greenpeace evolved, the peace was kind of dropped, and all it was left was the green. And that's not a balanced situation when you've got

eight billion people coming home every day and needing to eat. So I realized as time went on, two things happened. First, Greenpeace and the rest of the movement decided that humans were the enemies of nature, the enemies of the earth, rather than being should be protected from all-out nuclear war and other scourges and caring about people. So when you stop caring about people, I just don't get it. It's like as if they're thinking we're the only bad species

and all the other species are good, even the cockroaches, which I'm not against cockroaches and thus they eat all my crops. there are challenges in this world. But then the next thing that happened was I found myself the only international director of Greenpeace. For the past six years I was there, I was the only one with any formal science education. The others were political activists, social activists, entrepreneurs wanting to get into the environmental movement, because now you could actually make a decent wage in it. And so it transformed kind of from a volunteer organization with noble ambitions to a business.

And when it became a business, then you have to look for fundraising programs because you got a thousand employees in various countries around the world. And for whatever reason, my fellow directors decided that we should have a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. and they nicknamed chlorine the devil's element and polyvinyl chloride PVC are just known as vinyl which so many things are made from the poison plastic even though it's so not poison our credit cards are made out of it

and so many other things it's actually one of the most inert materials that there is it isn't in any way toxic and they talk about plastic in the ocean now if it's killing the sea. Does it suddenly turn toxic when it goes in the water? No, that's why we wrap our food in it.

That's why we put our food in plastic containers to keep them from being contaminated by something toxic or germs and things like that. Plastic serves that purpose in our whole food chain. So actually, a piece of plastic in the ocean is no different than a piece of driftwood in the ocean. Lots of stuff grows on it. Other species come and eat the things that are growing on it or lay their eggs on it.

And so it is litter. There's no doubt about that. I mean, people don't like the looks of it, right? But it's not toxic. It's not hurting anything. It's actually one amazing fact. And I get in trouble for this because David Attenborough says that adult albatross are feeding plastic bags to their chicks, mistaking it for food, which is a complete and absolute utter lie.

But it's happening on islands thousands of miles out in the ocean so no one can go and see for themselves what's actually happening. What the albatross are actually doing is using partially hard bits of plastic that are floating on the surface of the ocean as a digestive aid in the birds gizzard when they're in the nest because they can't go and get their own digestive aids.

All birds swallow pebbles if they're land birds to help grind the food in their gizzard. Birds have two stomachs. They don't have any teeth, so they can't chew their food like we can before they swallow it. So large, hard bits of food go to their gizzard. And there it is, it's a muscular thing that's going like this. And the hard things that they put in there,

squid beaks, when they feed their chick a squid, the beak becomes a digestive aid and stays in the gizzard and helps pumble the food. They also feed them bits of hard wood, little particles like this. They feed them with bits of hard wood. Also, pumice that comes up from undersea volcanoes is their favorite thing because, you know, it's quite coarse and sharp, and it floats because it's full of air, air bubbles. So they feed them that.

But ever since the last 50, 60 years, they've been able to find hard bits of plastic floating in the ocean. And they include those in the range of materials that they, They give their chicks, not feed their chicks. They give it to them as a digestive aid. And there's been many studies done for 50 years. I've worked with the Connolly family in Ireland on a big, thick document that goes through the whole research that's been done on this on the bird islands all over the world. And there's been no harm ever shown from the birds using bits of plastic as a substitute for the other things.

hard nuts also. If there's a plant growing near the ocean that drops its nuts into the ocean and they float out there, they'll take that and give it to the chick too. So it's much more difficult for seabirds to find the digestive aid substances than it is for land birds, but just go to a place where there's a bunch of gravel and take some pebbles. And landbirds, eagles, owls, ducks, whatever, all feed their chicks, digestive aids in the form of pebbles. And until they can fledge and fly, and then they do that for the rest of their lives. Because those hard things eventually grind themselves up, and they have to keep replenishing them.

I know that's kind of a weird thing to talk about. Certainly. I go, well, I assume the person who's against that goes, it's a man-made object. we don't need man-made objects being ingested by animals and birds and all sorts of different things. They would prefer it to be of the earth, so to speak. You know, you mentioned wood, nuts, pebbles, etc. So I assume it's the optics of it.

It's the look of what's happening. You mentioned people don't like litter in the ocean, right? It's not, I'm trusting you here. Patrick, when you say it's not. causing irreparable harm to the ocean. But as just a regular day person, seeing litter in the ocean doesn't look good. I don't like the feel of that. And so once again, you're talking about my emotions more so than maybe the science of what actually is happening. That's true. And it's easy to pray upon that, especially if you don't like things that have

to do with people. And so if you think everything that people are doing is wrong or bad or has something wrong with it, that colors your opinion of everything. And that is the problem today with the environmental movement is it projects a negative impression of human beings in general. There's too many of us that we're doing all these awful things like building houses and living in them. I don't know. Growing food. Now there's this movement to stop the use of nitrogen fertilizer because it's going to be a greenhouse, turn into a greenhouse gas. It is such a minor issue from that point of view, whereas at least half the human population depends on nitrogen fertilizer for its existence. Because, you know, there were two Nobel

prizes awarded for the technique of fixing nitrogen with hydrogen and making ammonia. It's a very complex process, four stages, high pressure, high heat, and Haber, the Haber Bosch process, it's called. Haber figured out how to do it, and Bosch geared it up to an industrial scale. And each one of those two people received a Nobel Prize, one early in the 1900s and one more around 1930 when it really got going. And it's just nitrogen. I mean, the air is nearly 80% nitrogen, 79% nitrogen. That's the gas that makes up most of the air. When we breathe in to get the oxygen, we also breathe in nitrogen into our lungs. And so this fertilizer that's made, I mean, the whole government of Sri Lanka collapsed recently because the government decided to

stop the import of nitrogen fertilizers, to save money or something. But people started starving to death, and farm meals went down to half. So Netherlands is threatening to do the same thing. And they provide more food to Europe than any other European country, even though they're quite a small land area. What do you think of all that, Patrick? You know, like you sit there and you see all, like, certainly not everybody leading every country is a complete nutter moron.

Somewhere, somebody's got to be staring at this going, like, we're about to kill a whole swath. the people. You know, you talk about energy. We all start Europe right now going, they're talking about people freezing in their homes because, I mean, moving away from some of the different technology we've talked about, you just go, well, what ends up happening that way? Well, the people are harmed. You talk about some of the, you know, mitigating farming yields, crop yields, with fertilizers. You start taking away some of that. Well, then the food supply goes down. What happens there? Well, once again, people are harmed out of that.

What do you sit there and think? You know, like you take a step back. I think it's 197 countries have signed on to the Paris Agreement, which is targeting essentially net zero from just general terms, right? They're trying to combat global warming or limiting global warming. You certainly have a better understanding of it than I will. But like when you stare at all, Are you like, has the world gone insane or what's going on?

Yes, the world has gone insane, especially the western part of it. Russia, China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, they're not so worried about this. The funniest thing is, it's the coldest countries in the world that are most worried about global warming. When, in fact, the climate of the earth today is colder than it was for the previous 250 million years. This is an ice age. That's why there's all those ice caps on the poles. like huge caps of ice. It wasn't like that for most of the history of life and the history of the earth.

I mean, ice ages didn't start happening until at least a billion years after the earth was formed because it was too hot. The earth itself was still hot. But then the crust formed and it cooled down and eventually ice ages occurred. They think that two billion years ago, something along those lines, there was a thing called Snowball Earth, where the ice went almost all the way to the equator. I don't see that they have real proof of that, but there is a hypothesis around it. But there's been other ice ages beside this one.

But the most recent one before this one ended 250 million years ago. It was called a Karoo, the capital A, capital K-A-R-O. You can look it up. It lasted for 100 million years. This one's only been around for 2.6 million. in so far. And they're trying to tell us that the ice age is over. No, that was the last major glaciation,

the most recent major glaciation out of 40 major glaciers during this ice age that have occurred on a fairly regular basis. These last million years every 100,000 years, before that every approximately 40,000 years. And nobody even cares about anything that happened before 1750. You know, that's the pre-induced. industrial age. Yeah, it was 3.5 billion years of life worth of pre-industrial age. And so they're thinking that you only have to go back 250 years to know everything about the earth.

You mentioned humans are the enemies of the earth as one of the two things that Greenpeace, let alone a lot of the, you know, activists maybe now stare at. I always, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, I rationalize in my brain. You know, the population of the Earth, you go back, I mean, only 100 years, and it's a fraction of what it is now. I think at the beginning of 1900, right over 1 billion people on the planet,

one and a half billion somewhere in there. And now, you know, what is it, 120 years later, you're sitting at close to 8 billion people on the planet. It's easy to create a story around that as we are the plague of the earth, so to speak. And it's very easy for even probably the smartest of us to go, actually, that kind of, I guess that kind of makes sense. Like I have no idea how many people the planet can hold. I'm assuming there has been plenty of study done on that. But it feels like we're,

it doesn't matter what it is. You know, you've lived, Patrick, are you 77 or 76? Just a minute now. I think I'm still set. No, I must be 76. Well, there's your math trivia. Some days I forget about those things. In your lifetime, you've lived through a lot of doomsday things. Nuclear war would have been one of the very real present dangers.

I'm sure you can list off a whole plethora of different things. And in my age, born in 86, you know, I believe the year you've lived, left Greenpeace, if I'm correct. In my age, it's been different. You know, we've had Y2K. That was like the world is going to blow up because of, you know, the clock not going or the watch or whatever, not going past the year 1999, right? We had 2012 the year's going to end.

The world's going to end because of what's his pick? And I can't even think of his name right now. But predicting Armageddon. You got all these different Armageddon things. and now it was COVID is going to, you know, the entire population, you're going to have this huge death toll. We've got to lock down the world. And now it's, you know, it's heating back up of if we don't change what we're doing right now. The earth is going to, I actually don't know the answer to this.

The earth is going to what? I don't know. Cs are going to rise? Cs aren't going to rise? I don't know. There have been dooms day predictions since the beginning of civilization. it has never come true in a in a catalytic cataclysmic sense there's never been an actual doomsday that you think population can get high enough where an actual doomsday makes sense

do you do you subscribe to that there there could come a time yes because especially if like the thing that would most cause the people to die would be the net zero policy if it was applied globally. If we actually did try to stop using fossil fuels by 2050, that would be, and then if you cut half the fertilizer out, you would lose half the population of the earth. But that would be because of decisions we made, not because the earth couldn't support more people. So it is clearly, I call it some kind of death wish or self-lobales. clothing within people that is causing this opinion. There's less people in poverty now than there were 30 years ago, either.

Our technology and our knowledge is increasing exponentially. The forests of the earth cover more land now than they did 100 years ago, particularly in China and India, where they have added more new forests than all the rest of the countries put together. But just take Western Germany, which is the most densely populated area of in the West. In 1800, they had a forest cover of less than 10% because wood was being used for almost all energy,

for heating and cooking and factories and glassworks and smelting steel and copper. They were using wood as a fuel. And so they were cutting the forests of Western Europe faster than they could grow back. That's why silviculture or forest as it's called, was invented in Central Europe. And today, Europe has 43% forest cover.

In other words, more than four times, nearly five times, what it had in 1750, 1800 around there. That is a fact. Canada and the United States, actually, between the two of them, have more forest cover now than they did in 1900. Most of the net deforestation, mainly for agriculture, of course,

was done before the Civil War. Because since the Civil War, our ability to grow food has gone up by five times per acre. So we don't need as much land as we used to need to feed the people. In addition, before there were engines to run tractors,

all of the energy on the farm was with animals, pulling tractors and plowing and that sort of thing. That took 20, 5% of the farmland just to feed the draft animals. So only three quarters of the farmland was growing food for people. So when mechanization came around, suddenly there was this vast additional area of land that was available for growing food for people. Then fertilizers were invented, especially nitrogen fertilizer.

See, most people don't realize that most life forms are not capable of getting nitrogen from the air directly. Nitrogen fixing bacteria. How many people know about them? They're one of the most important things in the whole history of life. There's bacteria in the soil that can take nitrogen from air

and turn it into basically nitrogen fertilizer, nitrogen food. And ammonia is the beginning point for that. There are many species of trees and plants that have nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots. They create a home for those bacteria in their roots, a little nest, a nodule, where those bacteria are living

and therefore being protected from anything getting them on the outside. And they give nitrogen to the tree, and in return the tree gives them sugar from photosynthesis, so they're getting their food from the tree or from the plant. All the pea family, for example, the legumes are all nitrogen fixers and can live in basically bare rock because they don't actually need dirt like most trees do. So if people don't understand the life cycle and don't understand the advances that we have made that are actually improving many conditions, like when we went into Europe in the late 70s, and decided to take on the toxics issue because we started with stop nuclear war,

stopped United States and France from their nuclear testing programs. Then we stopped the killing of 30,000 whales in the high seas by Russia and Japan every year. That took five years to do that. While we were doing that, we were also campaigning against the slaughter of 250,000 nursing baby seals

on the ice lows off the east coast of Canada because we didn't think it was right, to club baby seals in front of their mothers while they're still nursing. We wouldn't do that with deer or bears or any land animal, but they were doing it to these seals. And the relationship between a mammal and its baby is an emotional relationship among all mammals. And so we stopped that. And then we focused on toxics.

And that's when it got complicated because, like I say, you don't have to be a marine biologist to want to stop 30,000 whales from being killed. You don't have to be a nuclear physicist to want to stop nuclear war. But when it comes to toxics, toxicology is a very complex scientific subject. The primary rule of toxicology is the poison is in the dose. In other words,

even things that are toxic, if you don't take too much of them, they don't hurt you because your body is capable of dealing with it. but people like to just divide things into toxic and non-toxic. That isn't how toxicity works. It's the same with radiation. The sun is radiation. It doesn't kill us as long as you don't lay out naked for eight hours in it.

Then that would give you quite the burn. And that's radiation that does that. And same with nuclear energy is as long as we're protected from the radiation in the core of the reactor, it's not going to harm us. It's absolutely benign. and the rules have been created that assume that any amount of radiation is bad. And that isn't true for radiation or chemicals because it takes salt. That's my favorite.

I mentioned how Greenpeace decided to ban chlorine worldwide, which is why I finally did have to leave. Because as a scientist, I could not be in an organization that wanted to ban the most important element in public health and medicine. but they were just focusing on some of the toxic substances that are made with chlorine chemistry. And chlorine itself is very toxic. It was used as a weapon in World War I by the Germans. Chlorine gas, it's extremely toxic. But it's also very toxic to bacteria, which is why iodine was the most important thing in the medicine cabinet at my home when I grew up on the north end of the island.

And in many people's homes, putting iodine on a cut prevents it from infection. So there's good and bad. And see, our bodies have a cellular repair mechanism. If they didn't, then anything would kill us. Anything toxic would kill us. But we are actually capable of repairing damage as it's being done, of mending ourselves. Every cell in our body has a cellular repair mechanism. And so as long as you don't overcome the cellular repair mechanism,

In other words, if you apply so much of whatever substance it is, then the cell will die because it can't fix itself as fast as it's being damaged. That's a really important concept in life, in medicine, in toxicology. And it isn't understood in general. So all of a sudden, they decide that chlorine should be banned when, in fact, adding it to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health to prevent cholera. other waterborne communicable diseases from spreading through the population. And 80% of our medicines are made with chlorine chemistry, and 25% of them actually have chlorine in them. Then take table salt.

Table salt is sodium chloride. In other words, it has chlorine in it and sodium in it. It is an essential nutrient for all life. We cannot live without salt. That's why Gandhi went to the sea and made salt in India because the British were taxing it, And because it's an essential nutrient, it was taxing the poor for making salt. And they had to buy it from only certain people. It was sort of like liquor.

You know, you weren't allowed to have a still. You weren't allowed to have a salt pan of your own. So Gandhi did that to show the government that they should let people make salt when not and not tax, or at least not tax it. and the other fact is though is that if you if you take a half a cup of salt and ingest it it will kill you because it'll dehydrate your insides and so salt is not is both an essential nutrient and a highly toxic poison isn't when you use the example of salt isn't that to what we have going on here these days is only one side gets the talk and the side that gets

the talk points out all the bad like absolutely all the bad and that's what we stare at and then we try and fix all the bad without pointing out some of the benefits or maybe a lot of the benefits that come with it well let's talk about carbon dioxide for a minute because that's the very central that's the very central issue of this whole thing it's very clear that's the that's the bad thing they say that's going to cause us all to die or whatever for the earth to burn up. There are so many stupid statements being made around carbon dioxide that it's too high. That's the first thing. It's getting too high. There's too much of it. There's less carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere today than there has been during 99% of Earth's history. It only got low coming into this ice age.

starting half a billion years ago, it began to decline. And it's amazingly interesting why CO2 has been declining in the global atmosphere, not steadily and up and down, up and down, just like the climate goes up and down and up and down. But it's been, the climate has no pattern going back half a billion years. It's gone into warm periods, then cool periods, then warm periods, then cool periods. that it hasn't gone up or down in any significant way. It hasn't gone from cold to hot or hot to cold.

It's just gone up and down, whereas CO2 has definitely gone from about 5,000 parts per million when modern life emerged in the Cambrian period, when multicellular life emerged in the sea, more like jellyfish. And CO2 was at 5,000 parts per million, during the most recent glacial maximum 20,000 years ago. And as I mentioned earlier, there's been at least 40 of them during the Pleistocene Ice Age.

And that means there's been at least 40 interglacial periods between the glacial maximums. And we're in one of those now. But it's still colder now than it was for virtually 250 million years prior to this. Still cold. We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period coming out, of a hot house age that lasted for 200 million years. And so it's colder now than it has been for most of the history of life.

There is far less CO2 in the atmosphere. It went down to 180 ppm from 5,000 over the history of the earth. And at 180, it's only 30 ppm above the death of plants. Because plants don't just need CO2. They need a certain level of it, just like we need. need a certain level of oxygen to survive. If you put someone in a 5% oxygen, they die. Even 10% I believe kills people. So oxygen is verging on 20% of the atmosphere. And that's enough for us to live. But when you go up to the top of Mount Everest, it thins out a lot.

And people have to wear breathing aids up there. Most people, people who got used to it at the high altitude, have learned to be able to be there. But if they went up another 5,000 feet, they would die. So it's really important to understand that CO2 is the basis of all life on earth. No living thing could exist without carbon dioxide as its basis, carbon-based life. When you go to the grocery store, they say this is organic food. Well, for Pete's sakes, all food is organic. Well, salt isn't, but it's not really food. But all the fruits and vegetables we eat, on all the nuts we eat, and all the things like that. They're all organic. Of course they are. They're made of carbon. The true scientific definition of organic is organic chemistry.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon-based compounds, the chemistry of living things. Whereas inorganic chemistry is all the other 90-odd elements, iron, copper, molybdenum, chlorine, all the others are called inorganic chemistry. But the chemistry of life is carbon chemistry, organic chemistry. So you have to start there. And then you look at, well, okay, is there a level of CO2 that would be bad for life? Well, it's certainly above 5,000 parts per million, which is like more than 10 times higher than it is now, even with the CO2 we've added to the atmosphere. Not many people know that

commercial greenhouse growers inject CO2 into their greenhouses to make it two to three times higher than it is in the global atmosphere to get 30 to 60 percent increased yield in their food. That's because plants are living in a starvation environment if they are outdoors today. During the recent glaciation, when it went down to 180, it is believed. that the vegetation died off at higher altitude because the higher you go, the thinner the air gets. And so there wasn't even enough CO2 for the plants to live at altitudes above about 5,000 feet. Whereas today, there's plenty of CO2 for things to live, but the forests of the earth and the crops of the earth are growing much faster now than they did 50 years ago because of the additional

CO2 we've added. It's called the greening of the earth. NASA has published on it. All the science institutions know about it. They try to poo-poo it a little bit by saying, well, it's not really good to have more CO2 because it'll make the Earth too hot. But there's no evidence of that. CO2 has been so much higher, so many times in the past, and the Earth wasn't too hot.

The Earth is actually too cold for life on both poles for most life. And, you know, a funny fact, they say that climate change is going to kill the polar bears. If it wasn't for climate change, there wouldn't be any polar bears. There was no ice on the Arctic for 200 million years before this ice age set in 2.56 million years ago. The only reason polar bears exist is because the Eurasian brown bear, which is a northern European and Russian bear, we call it grizzly bear. in North America. It came here much after the polar bear evolved though, because it came across the Bering Land Bridge just like we did, along with moose and elk and reindeer, which we call caribou. They came from the old world as we did at that time, 15, 16,000 years ago. But the polar bear

came from the Eurasian brown bear as the Ice Age set in and the ice started, coming down to the north shore of Russia and Europe in the winter, the brown bears went out on the ice and found that there were seals with their pups out there and started a certain percentage of those brown bears started going there every year to eat the seals. And 500,000 years later, they had evolved into the polar bear. Divergent evolution of a single species into two different species. they can still breed actually. They're not that far apart genetically that they can't breed.

And they can even have viable young. So technically that means they're still the same species. But one is white and half as big, half again as big as the other one, the polar bear is much bigger than the Eurasian brown bear because it's having to haul 300 pound seals out of a hole in the ice. And it got white because that's camouflage. And its digestive tract has changed quite a bit because it eats almost all meat. and whereas the brown bears eat a lot of vegetation.

Anyways, that's how polar bears got here because the climate changed. And if the climate changes again and the ice goes away, that may be the end of the polar bears. We know it. But they could probably figure out how to come back and survive on the land, maybe to the detriment of the smaller Eurasian brown bears. Who knows that evolution works in mysterious ways, but it doesn't happen overnight. You know, it happens very, very slowly most of the time.

There's a theory called the, I forget what it's called, but it's about punctuated equilibrium is the theory of evolution, that evolution goes along hardly changing at all because the climate stays the same for hundreds of thousands and millions of years. And then suddenly there is a cataclysm, like the asteroid that hit Yucatan and caused the dinosaur extinction. And that causes rapid evolution to occur afterwards because there's all these spaces that are available like all of marine dinosaurs were killed. If that asteroid impact hadn't happened, there'd be no whales because the marine dinosaurs already had that niche occupied, large predatory animals in the sea that could swim fast.

And so it took about five million years after the asteroid impact for the first whales to evolve in the sea. see. It doesn't happen overnight. And we have to start thinking like that about ourselves as well because we're behaving as though everything has to be done tomorrow. And we're making really stupid decisions right now, especially in the West, that people in Europe and North America and Australia and New Zealand in particular do not understand that there's a completely different approach to the future in Russia, China, India, Indonesia, most of South Asia, all of Africa. Like, we've actually adopted a policy that refuses to allow us to help Africa electrify itself with gas or coal.

We won't help them. We think they should have wind and solar energy. Whereas China is quite willing to finance a coal plant with new clean pollution control technology on it. They're doing that to all their own coal plants, making them cleaner, just as we have in the West, where as a kid, even when I was young, the air in my city of Vancouver was filthy and the fall in this. Huge fogs would come because of all the particulate matter in the air. It was an unhealthy place to live. And in London, they had the great death in London from the fogs from the coal burning back in the time. And so the air in,

are big cities which are now 10 times bigger than they were then have air that's more than 10 times cleaner today than they did then. There's a few cities that have inversions that bring in the smog, which is actually nitrogen-based smog caused by the internal combustion engine, taking in the nitrogen in the atmosphere and turning it into N-O-2. And that's a real issue, but it's not like It's not like threatening the existence of humanity. And they're making it seem as though the fossil fuel industry is threatening the existence of humanity, when in fact the fossil fuel industry is responsible for a large majority of us ever being here in the first place. I'm curious, Patrick.

You know, as you go along, I think to myself, you know, here's a guy who identified problems that humanity was causing on the planet. You mentioned nuclear war, the whales, seal killings, you get the point. If you look at the world right now, what are some things then people should be concerned about? Because to me, it almost seems like we're concerned about something that isn't exactly right. They're trying to implicate all of humanity into the destruction of humanity. But let's say we could just wipe that off.

And Patrick says, okay, this is a couple of things. things we should be addressing now because obviously as you as you've alluded to over the course of history we are definitely not perfect and so if you're looking at us right now what are some things Patrick goes you need to be concerned about XYZ there's no such thing as perfect so we can't be perfect and I don't think I don't think you want to I don't know where that that that's one of those words that is kind of like pie in the sky I guess but the first thing I would do is stop war, of course, stop people murdering each other. And I do believe that the United States and Canada to some extent, but the United States in particular now has this a real problem with urban violence.

And that that should be ended. It's so ridiculous looking at it from a Canadian perspective that the people who went to the Capitol and marched and some of them did things they shouldn't do. But it wasn't like burning down cities. And yet those people apparently it was okay for them to do that. And so I just do not understand the, I don't understand the politics in my head. I can't see, you know, they say that Trump was evil

and Biden is, is, is, some kind of role model, you know. And on the other hand, what I ask people then, what did you not like that Trump did, that he did? Not what he said, you know, what he did? What did you think was wrong? Because when Biden came in, he threw the whole thing out. And now there's millions of people coming in that we don't even know who they are

that don't have to show that they've been vaccinated. And one of the best in the world is kicked out of the country. for not being vaccinated. You know, I mean, I just think that place has gone half nuts. So could you say then that one of the problems we face right now is media? And maybe that, maybe that's... Is that ever? That is what do you do about that?

The corporations now and the political parties are able to buy the media. And it's only, it's always been true that scaring people, and making them feel guilty, I say you're driving down the highway and your SUV, you think you're killing your grandchildren, and that makes you feel guilty. You're afraid of that. So fear and guilt put together

makes you open your wallet and send people money. And that is, again, back to the doomsday story. They're trying to make carbon dioxide into a doomsday story when in fact it is the basis of all life on Earth and there's no evidence whatsoever that has ever played a significant role in the Earth's temperature. There's no evidence of that. If you look at the long history of the Earth, the CO2 content, the temperature fluctuation,

they are not correlated strong enough to even begin to think it's a cause-effect relationship. And during this Pleistocene Ice Age, there has been a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature, but it's the temperature that is causing the CO2 to fluctuate. because when the oceans warm during an interglacial period like now, they give off gas, not just CO2, but oxygen and nitrogen and other gases that are dissolved in them. And when the ocean's cool, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The oceans have nearly 50 times as much CO2 in them as the atmosphere. So 1% change in oceanic CO2 makes a big change to atmospheric CO2 because it's so low now in historical terms.

that is what's causing the fluctuation in CO2 through the glaciation period. But before that, when there weren't big ice caps, there's no relationship between CO2 and temperature. As a matter of fact, they were out of sync more often than they were in sync. CO2 would be in going up and temperature would be going down. Anybody can look this up. It's all on even Wikipedia is all you'd have to have to see it. They interpret it incorrectly in a lot of cases because they're on the wrong side.

side of that argument. And, you know, I'm, I have a PhD in ecology, and Wikipedia won't let me say that. They say that my PhD was in forestry. Actually, the head of my PhD committee was a forest ecologist, and I was given my PhD by the Institute of Resource Ecology at UBC, but they won't let me do that. They will not allow me to call myself an environmental consultant because apparently I'm not environmental enough. So they just call me consultant.

I'm curious about this. How you come the full gambit in my opinion, Patrick, it's what's fascinating about your story. You come from the birth of Greenpeace, which, I mean, I think I stand with Rex Murphy on this.

It's pretty much maybe one of the most famous green organizations, if not the one. It is the, It is the one. Okay. There you go. Two, being where people won't acknowledge or let you acknowledge that you're an

environmentalist. I find this very interesting. In the course of your lifetime, you must sit there and wrestle with this all the time. It has to be water off a duck's back, Sean. I can't let that hurt me because sticks and stones and all that. But here's the story. I was there at the beginning of Greenpeace when it wasn't even called Greenpeace.

It was called the Don't Make a Wave Committee. I was on the first voyage of Greenpeace listed as the ecologist on the Greenpeace boat, listed as a founder of Greenpeace on the Greenpeace International Web page. It was still there in 2007, 20 years after I left Greenpeace. It still said I was a founder. I've got the way back machine screenshot of it. I've distributed it to lots of people,

people who don't want to accept it, just ignore it. But lots of people know that I was listed as a Greenpeace founder on the Greenpeace International webpage till 20 years after I left. As soon as I came out in favor of nuclear energy, which I had been wanting to do for a long time, because of all the things we did in Greenpeace,

I made that mistake. Of lumping, because of the threat of nuclear war, we lumped nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons, as if it was a bad thing. Nuclear energy should be lumped in with nuclear medicine, not with nuclear weapons. Nuclear energy is a beneficial use of nuclear technology, as is nuclear medicine.

We use radiation to cure people from cancer. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a good thing. And we use radiation to make electricity. And those 440 nuclear plants running 24-7 around the world should be 4,000. The easiest way to reduce our fossil fuel consumption, and I'm totally in favor of it.

I'm not in favor of increasing fossil fuel consumption unless we're not, if we're doing things that make it necessary to continue to use fossil fuels, such as having all this wind and solar energy, there's no other alternative. They're a pie in the sky on this battery thing. The truth of the matter is,

is that the biggest technology to replace fossil fuels is nuclear energy. There's no doubt about it. Hydroelectric is wonderful, but it's limited to topography and rainfall. So Denmark is flat, so they can't have hydroelectric. Saudi Arabia is dry, so they can't have hydroelectric. So there's lots of places in the world you can't have hydroelectric. You can't have hydroelectric on the ocean, but you can float a barge with a nuclear plant on it in the ocean, or up a river like they do in Moscow from the north,

like they do in Russia, sorry, from the north for remote cities up there. So right now there's 440 nuclear plants operating in the world, nearly 100 in the United States, between Canada and the United States, there's more than 100 nuclear plants operating. With the exception of Chernobyl, no one has ever been hurt by them, never mind killed. There were people killed at Chernobyl because the Russians took their plutonium production reactors meant for making bombs and cookie-cuttered that design all around Russia. It was a bad

design reactor. They were behind the iron curtain and the West had no influence on them. And they put about 22 of those reactors in the former Soviet Union and Russia. And one of them blew up during an experiment that was being conducted by the people from Nuclear Central in Moscow, came down to Chernobyl and told the operators to turn the safety systems off because they didn't want the safety systems interfering with their experiment. It blew up in eight seconds. It was an atomic explosion. The Fukushima and Three Mile Island were meltdowns of the core. They were not a nuclear explosion. Some radiation escaped from them, but not enough to hurt anybody. They should never have evacuated Fukushima because 2,000 people died as a result of the evacuation, whereas no one died as the

result of exposure to radiation at Fukushima. So we've got one of the most, the safe, one of the safest technologies in the world with enough fuel to last for 100,000 years or more, because there's not just the uranium 235, which is the only fissile isotope on earth, which is only 0.7% of natural uranium. That other 99.3% of the uranium can be converted into a fissile fuel, uranium 233, in a reactor. That's what Russia is doing. They have two of them now running on the Caspian. Look up BN 600 and BN-1200. And you will see these, what they're called breeder or fast neutron reactors. They are producing fuel from something that wasn't fuel while they're making electricity. So that's why they're called them breeder, because they're actually producing new fuel as they burn the fuel that's making the electricity.

And then they can take that new fuel out called reprocessing and use it to run a nuclear reactor by itself. And we can keep doing that and doing that and doing that and doing that. And then there's thorium, which is at least five or six times as abundant as uranium in the earth's crust. So nuclear energy is a lot like the parable of Jesus feeding a multitude with one loaf of bread and, no, one fish and four loaves of bread, I think. The amount of uranium 235 there is is minuscule compared to the amount of fuel we can produce because we've figured out how to make a nuclear reactor. we can turn all uranium 238, which is not fissile, but is fertile. Those two words are really important. Fertile means can be made into a nuclear fuel.

And uranium 238 and thorium are both fertile isotopes that can be through tens of thousands of years. That's why it should not be called nuclear waste. It's not because over 90% of the energy is still in that used nuclear fuel. That's one of the reasons why they're storing it so carefully because the people in nuclear industry know that. It's just that under Clinton, the one breeder reactor that was ever built in the United States in the West, it was either in Idaho or I think it was Washington actually, eastern Washington, was shut down and dismantled. And the same thing happened in Japan and France and England. The anti-nuclear movement stopped the evolution of nuclear technology from occurring.

Now, they're talking about small reactors these days. But when they say small, they mean like 300 megawatts. That is not a small amount of energy. It's a lot of energy. The big ones are 1,200, even I think there's 1,600 ones, maybe 12 is the biggest ones. I don't think so. I think it's even bigger ones. They can run whole cities these things.

And they are the 96-odd that are running in the United States. States every day, and people just ignore them or hate them and want them gone when they are the safest, large-scale, continuous technology, cost-effective, the plants can last for up to 80 years. Wind and solar is 20 years. So that means you have to spend four times the money on wind and solar to get the same infrastructure as you do for a nuclear plant. anyways the the world has gone somewhat stupid in the west at least i don't know maybe it's because we're too wealthy and spoiled uh i'm not sure but people are not thinking straight well i think of

bring a little pop culture into this i think of uh batman begins carmine and uh falconi talking to bruce wayne he says you always fear what you don't understand and i think when it comes to nuclear, um, I like how you, I, I like how you said it. Nuclear energy should be lumped in with nuclear medicine,

not nuclear war. And, and right there when you put it that way, Patrick, uh, that makes a lot of sense to me. I'm like, oh,

yeah, like, okay, all right. When, when I would say the majority of my life, and certainly going back for probably the majority of your life, nuclear,

energy has been lumped in with nuclear war. It is a bad thing. We don't want to use it. Look at Chernobyl. Look at Fukushima. Look at all these different examples of how it went bad. I've read about them. I've watched the HBO docu-series on or documentary or whatever they called it on Chernobyl, those different things. And that's what you equate it with. You equate nuclear energy with nuclear war. And one of the things that seems to be on the top of my brain lately is how many different things we really don't understand. And part of that's education. Part of that's the side that is promoting it or talking about it has been silenced. We've lost whether it's public debate or just the ability for the other side to have a bit of a voice where it's

credible. And so when you talk about it, I just keep, to me that makes the most sense. It's been lumped in with the wrong side. And instead of promoting that fact, it's buried. And as a And as long as it's buried, well, you always fear what you don't understand. Let me show the people my book. Does that, is it backwards? No, no, no. So it says fake invisible catastrophes and the threats of doom by Patrick Moore. And below there, the little old man is holding a sign up, just like the guy on the corner saying the end is nigh.

He's saying, you will perish in flames. I borrowed that from Ghostbusters. And you, so fake invisible catastrophes and threats. of doom sounds pretty sensational, but it's actually based on a very sound scientific fact. And that is what I call the unified theory of scare stories. They are all based on things that are either invisible or so remote that no one can see them for themselves like polar bears and coral reefs. Why are polar bears and coral reefs the icons of the Earth is dying movement?

Because no one can go to the North Pole and count them except for a few scientists. It's been proven that their population has increased by five times since 1973 when nobody knows all the Arctic nations signed an international treaty ending the unrestricted hunting of polar bears in 1973. Does Coca-Cola ever tell you about that in their polar bear ads? No. And it's a total lie. There are so many polar bears that the Inuit people in Nunavit, which is the northern treeless polar bear part of Canada,

which has the most polar bears of any country because it has the most area up there, most of its ocean. So the polar bears in Canada can be on the islands of northern Canada in the summer when the ice melt somewhat. And they always show you that picture instead of the one where the entire Arctic is still covered in ice every winter,

not just the whole Arctic, but the oceans around it. The Bering Sea and the Sea at Norway outside the Arctic Circle are covered in ice. The whole of Hudson's Bay is covered in ice. It's below the Arctic Circle. So you've got the polar bear population is so high that the Nunavit people have passed a polar bear management plan, allowing them to defend themselves from polar bears because they're breaking into houses and even killing people. But that is not ever said on the news.

They never talk about that. And then there's the coral reefs, which in 2016, in 2016, it was a, announced that 93% of the Great Barrier Reef is practically dead or is dying or is terminal. Forbes magazine said it was in its final terminal stages, as if there are other terminal stages before the final one. And bleached, 93% of the reef is bleached, which does not mean death, and neither does practically dead, and neither does terminal, and neither does nearly dead mean dead. but that's what they the impression they gave was that 93% of it's dead or at least almost dead now and it's inevitable it will die or whatever just this august it was announced that the coral reef

has more coral cover than at any time in the 36 years they have annually measured its amount of coral so what happened to the 93% well it didn't die obviously or it wouldn't be there anymore But that didn't get much press. The first one about the 93% practically dead went around the world in every media there is. And so there's still a lot of people who think the Great Barrier Reef is dying, when in fact it is not. And people don't remember, because they didn't live here then, that 20,000 years ago, the sea was 400 feet lower than it is today. because the ice was on the land. All the water had gone into glaciers.

So 400 feet lower, making miles of ice over Canada. New York had a mile of ice over it then. So since that time, the coral reefs had to grow up 400 feet continuously. And at first it happened relatively quickly in geological terms.

But about 7,000 years ago, all the big mid-latitude, low-elevation glaciers had melted and it leveled off about 7,000 years ago and it's just gone up and down in a little blips and we're in a little up blip now but there's been down blips along the way as well it's pretty steady for the last 7,000 years about during the Roman warm period 2,000 years ago the sea was 1 to 2 meters higher than it is today but that's just you know that's a few feet but it's not like you're going to drown the whole city or whatever that the way they're talking well doesn't

Doesn't the sea level over the course of time, I mean, human beings build along waterfronts, right? Yeah. Isn't that the story of Atlantis, essentially? I mean, not exact. We don't know where, but. Yes, but if the sea, the sea was 400 feet lower 20,000 years ago, maybe someone built a city 10,000 years ago, that got flooded. Well, it only makes sense, though, doesn't it?

Yes, except they didn't have to run. Right. It happened slowly. Like, not overnight, as they sort of are suggesting my 10 feet by the year 2100. No, that's not going to happen. Unless a cataclysmic event happens like a meteor hitting the earth or what happened. Yeah, if a meteor hits the earth, I guess you should probably pray very hard. You know, I'm curious your thoughts.

A big one that is. Coming from Greenpeace, which is now, you know, became a worldwide organization. What are your thoughts on the world economic form, Patrick? You know, a lot of talk around there, a lot of different views on supporting net zero. I mean, that they've infiltrated all the different governments, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we've all heard the different talking points. You've been on a stage that was big with Greenpeace. What is your thoughts on, and I don't mean to make the comparison of Greenpeace to world economic form,

just in the sense that world economic form has become a main stage player with some very, very influential people who are part of it? Yeah. I don't understand how supposedly intelligent people could think that it would. be a good thing to end the use of fossil fuels in a short period of time, while at the same time requiring all cars to be electric, which would double the amount of electricity required. Right. Now that, never mind the fine points, just those two big points. All cars are now electric, so we need twice as much electricity as we had before. Now we have an electricity system that It only works one third of the time at best.

And where are the batteries, please? And just to hop in on Patrick's point, here for Canadians, moving forward, the strategy is 100% sales of target zero emission passenger vehicles by 2040. They moved it from 2040 to 2035. So in essentially 12 years, we're supposed to have 100% sales. You will not be allowed to buy a gas powered vehicle. Essentially is what they're trying to aim for. And what you're saying is, well, sure, okay, we all go to electric vehicles, but where does the power for electricity come from to power set vehicles for our population to move around one of the coldest spots on the planet? Well, you don't have to be in Einstein to just do a little digging and go, well, it's going to have to come from fossil fuels if that's going to come from anywhere.

Because you can't have an intermittent power source. How is everybody going to charge us a car at night with no sun? And I mean And we can't build nuclear plants Fast enough to do this Seven, seven eight years is what Brian Get said the average Nuclear power plant

In saying that The small, I don't know, is it modular? Is that the word I'm looking for? Those can be put up in roughly a year. So let's just say we adopted said plan of small nuclear You could start hammering a whole bunch of them out But if the entire Canadian population

all provinces adopted that. I don't think they'll be popping up in a year that quick because of, you know, supply chain and everything else. It will take time. Well, we're really lucky in British Columbia and Quebec and Manitoba to a certain extent. We have 95% hydroelectric in BC. BC, Canada as a whole is, I believe, just a minute, is it 60% hydroelectric for the whole country? I mean, even Ontario has close to 50% hydroelectric. Quebec has well up into the 80s or something, 90s, I'm not sure.

BC's 95. Manitoba must be 50. So we are one of the most hydroelectriced countries in the world. Norway gets 80 to 90% of its electricity because it's just one long band of coastal mountains going to the sea. and Brazil is about 80% hydroelectric. So where hydroelectric is abundant, it's really lucky for people that are there, because we're not going to have to worry about net zero for our electricity. But then there's the whole transport system.

That's actually the most difficult one. Trying to get rid of fossil fuels in mobile things. Now, little cars, passenger cars, okay, it can be done. but what about the semis? You know, what, and all the trains going back and forth across Canada are diesel powered, diesel electric, but they're using diesel fuel as their primary energy source. You know, this thing about hydrogen, this is where energy illiteracy just comes right to the fore. They're saying we should use hydrogen.

Hydrogen, there's no hydrogen mines. Hydrogen is not a primary fuel. You have to manufacture it. You have to produce it. And that takes energy. And so there's this thing called rate of return. So when you make an energy infrastructure, you have to take into account the amount of energy it takes to build it.

That's why I've said all along, because I believe wind and solar, if they're analyzed correctly, will be seen as a parasite on the larger economy. In other words, they are net negative. And that's because I say all the wind and solar infrastructure should have to be built with wind and solar energy to prove that they are actually producing net energy from all the mining that has to be done. And then when you take the batteries, I mean, the batteries are going to cost way more than the wind and solar infrastructure.

But it's just not going to happen. It's a pie in the sky. But they're moving ahead as if it's going to happen. The Manhattan Contrarian has almost twice weekly. blog out of New York. He's a brilliant executive in a high-rise office downtown Manhattan, and he writes on this subject a lot. And he has shown very clearly how this simply is technically impossible and it's financially ruinous. There's no doubt about that. I mean, Germany's price of electricity has gone up by three times since they started their

energy, energy vende, they call it. new new energy or alternative energy and it it it is people who do not understand energy that are making this happen and that's the world economic forum I don't know what job those people have or if they ever did have a job or ever had to work in a practical sense because the things they are are completely irrational and impossible. We cannot end the use of fossil fuels by 2050. It's simply not possible without there being mass starvation and death. That's what's keeping us alive.

That's what's making us go. And what's the alternative is wind and solar? Oh, great. Now, if the alternative was nuclear, we could reduce our fossil fuel consumption by 50% over the next 60 or 80 years if we went full bore into replacing electricity production with nuclear instead of fossil fuels because everything stationary can be run with electricity. It can make energy for powering motors.

It can make light. It can make heat. It can make cold. It can do all those things. The reason it's hard to use nuclear energy for big mobile machinery is you have to have a wire plugged into it. that's that's why you can't project the energy through the air to a car so you have to have a or you have to have a battery but you're not going to have a great big excavator running on

batteries or an or a truck in a huge mine running on batteries that is not going to happen because they just don't have those kind of batteries there isn't such a thing is there anything in the future that gives you some hope some some positive vibes that you look at and you're like, this is what could come or maybe this is coming or you see this happening. Is there anything that, you know, you look at Patrick with a sense of optimism? Yeah, I have a sense of optimism in that it might, but it might take a disaster to bring it about. I don't know if we keep on the path we're on now, apparently we're on this path. There will be serious problems emerge. I've never been a survivalist that people who hoard food.

And I'm thinking maybe I should think about that at this point. If they're going to stop fertilizer and stop fossil fuels, they are going to stop food production. to a considerable extent. There's no other way. They can't keep making food at the level they're doing now if they don't have fossil fuels or fertilizer. You know, the greenhouse movement is a fantastic movement.

Not only does it allow you to increase the CO2 content inside there, you fly over South Korea. Many of the valleys look like they're covered in glass because they are. and their topography is much like British Columbia, basically mountains. There's not a lot of fertile area, but they're learning to grow food in greenhouses with increased CO2 and more nutrients balanced nutrition, not just in the dirt that's there, although dirt farmers also can make the soil much more fertile if they have the right fertilizers.

but it does come down to food and energy. Those are the two things that make the whole thing work. Our food and the food for our machines. And the food for our machines can be with nuclear. It can be with fossil fuels. It can be with hydroelectric. But wind and solar are a dead end. I say they should rust in place, as in rest in peace.

Well, before I let you get out of here, because I'm closing in on time, and I want to make sure you have a few moments before your next obligation. Let's slide into the Crude Master final question. Shout up to Heath and Tracy McDonald for supporting the podcast since the very beginning. And I appreciate Patrick.

You've given me some time this morning. But here's your final one. It's He's words. If you're going to stand behind something, then stand behind it. Or if you're going to stand behind a cause, stand behind it. What is one thing that you stand behind, Patrick?

In life. Yeah. What's one thing you stand behind? I guess I stand behind balance in nature, which is an important concept, and that humans have to try to balance their survival with the survival of all the other species in the earth. I don't think we're doing such a bad job of that, to tell you the truth. If we could end wars and if we could get smart about our use, smarter in our use of technology, which we are all the time.

If we could educate ourselves better about the realities of the situation, and please, this book is on Amazon all over the world. It has 2,500 reviews, 95% 4 and 5 star. It's an easy book to read, even though it's about some complicated subjects like nuclear energy and climate change, but anybody with a grade 9 education or up can read this easily. And if your parents, please give it to your teenage children so that they can understand a lot of issues in here.

If you're listening to the podcast, I'll put a link in the show notes. That way, if you want to go directly to Patrick's book, you can. You can just click in the show notes and boom, it'll take you right there. And that way, Patrick, they know exactly where to go for your book. And it's super easy. and I can just literally open their phone and click through the show notes and I'll be sitting there. That's great, Sean. Thank you very much for having me on.

I do have to get off here so I can go to my next interview. Well, I appreciate you giving me some time this morning. I know when you said, I got all the time in the world. I'm like, oh, boy. Well, we'll see on that because I've certainly enjoyed listening to talk and some of the different thoughts you've had. Once again, thanks for hopping on, Patrick. Thanks, Sean. See you again.