TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #350: There is no climate emergency with Dr. William Happer

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with Dr. William Happer to discuss if we are in a climate crisis, whether the planet can sustain human growth and why the push away from hydro carbons. Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what is up freaks it's your boy marty bent here to introduce rip 350 350 nice even number i sat down with professor emeritus at princeton university dr william happer who's had a long career in government and in physics combating the climate hysteria that exists in our world. Very interesting conversation filled with a lot of wisdom. I feel honored to have been able to sit down with Dr. Happer and have this particular conversation. I think you freaks are going to really like it. It could push a lot of buttons, especially if you are one of those individuals who's fallen prey to the climate hysteria and thinks that the world is going to end if we don't make drastic changes in regards to our consumption of fossil fuels.

And Dr. Happer makes the case that CO2 is good. It's good for the planet. It's good for plants. It's good for humanity in the long run. So if you are a bit skeptical of that, I highly encourage you not to tune out and to listen to what Dr. Happer had to say during our conversation. This rip was brought to you by our good friends at Unchained Capital. I usually say they're right down the hall from me here at the Bitcoin Commons in Austin, Texas, but I'm not in the Commons in Austin, Texas. I'm in New Jersey.

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uh i i have one of their 50 kilowatt hash shots it's running up in tennessee off a natural gas stranded well it's been running flawlessly since i plugged it in uh no downtime outside of oil changes to the generator uh and it is exemplary of the quality product that upstream is putting out there and they have products for everybody in the mining spectrum whether you're an at-home miner who's using your uh electricity that's coming through your house to mine bitcoin they have the black box for you it allows you to put a couple miners in uh and it controls sound and heat the sound if you've mined before can be a bit loud and can put a strain on relationships marriages so upstream has come in swooped in to save your marriage save your relationship with the black box

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oil and gas producer that's using a lot of gas upstream to mine Bitcoin, Upstream Data is here for you. They'll get you the huts, they'll get you the generators, they'll get you the miners. go to UpstreamData.ca. If you're in the oil industry, sitting on some fat profits, ASIC prices are pretty low. Could be a good time to diversify into mining. Enjoy this rep freaks. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.

In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Dr. Happer, thank you for joining me today. We're both in the great state of New Jersey. Well, thanks very much, Marty. It's a pleasure to chat with you. Well, I'm very excited to be speaking with you because I'm not sure if you're aware, but I operate within the Bitcoin space and more particularly Bitcoin mining. And Bitcoin mining has been demonized throughout the years for using too much energy and contributing to what many would deem to be a climate crisis. and I was introduced to you by somebody that we both know

who said, hey, Marty, you need to talk to Dr. Happer about the quote-unquote climate crisis because he's been educating the world to the best of his abilities for quite some time now that this may be more of a hysteria instead of a crisis. So I'm extremely happy that you agreed to join me here today to go over this subject because it's been a big one in the space that I operate within

And here at TFTC, we look to combat a lot of these bad narratives that exist out there. So I guess we can just open up the conversation with, is the world currently in a climate crisis? No, Marty, of course, it's not in a climate crisis. It's very similar to the witch crisis in the 1690s in Salem. You know, it's a mass hysteria and they're true believers, you know, decent people who've been misled and then they're opportunists. That's always in the mix of something like this. But there is no crisis. The climate is doing what it has always done. The climate is always changing. Sometimes it warms a little. Sometimes it cools.

fuels. It's true that carbon dioxide, which is emitted by burning fossil fuels, and also we breathe it out, it's true that that is a greenhouse gas and will cause some warming. But it's a quantitative question. The warming will be trivial. It won't matter. And so it will cause very tiny warming. If you double CO2, 100 percent increase, you only decrease the thermal radiation to space

by one percent. And so the Earth knows how to compensate for that. It doesn't have to warm very much to bring solar heating and thermal cooling back into balance. A degree or less is probably all that will happen, which you will hardly notice. You know, my air conditioner cycles up and down every two degrees in my home. I don't notice it. And so we're certainly not going to notice one degree of warming.

And the only thing it's likely to do is make the world a better place than it is today because the warming will be mostly at higher latitudes, you know, nearer to the poles. There will be hardly any warming in equatorial regions. So they'll stay about the same temperature they already are. And Canada, Siberia will get a little bit warmer. Patagonia will get a little bit warmer. What's wrong with that? Well, we're led to believe that that's going to lead to the seawaters rising and all the coastal cities are going to flood out.

Is this true? No, of course not. I mean, first of all, sea level will not rise if there's small warming. You know, the scare stories about sea level rise are based on these completely unrealistic models that have already failed. They're predicting much more warming factors of two or three or even four, more than we're observing. And so if the warming is what we're observing, sea level rise is not going to change much.

Sea level has been rising since about 1800 at about the same rate. And most of that is due to the recovery from the Little Ice Age that extended for several centuries from, say, 1400 to 1800. And it has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels. And it's not very much. It's about two or three millimeters a year, depending on where you are, you know, where you are on the Jersey Shore, I would guess it's probably about two and a half millimeters a year.

You know, multiply that by 100 years, what do you get? 25 centimeters, it's less than a foot. So, you know, the tide where you are is quite a bit more than one foot, you know, between high tide and low tide. And, you know, if that is going to bother you, you know, you've really been conned into buying, you know, underwater property. Yeah, no, I've been coming to this island for 31 years old every year of my life. And just observationally, I haven't noticed anything too jarring. Well, you shouldn't because the effects are so small. They're not changing.

There is no real acceleration. See, the level of rise speeds up and slows down a little bit from time to time, decade to decade. And no one quite knows what causes that, but it is completely normal. It has nothing to do with mankind. Well, you mentioned well-intentioned people who have been misled and opportunists who are taking advantage of these well-intentioned people. What are the tactics that are used to mislead? I mean, it seems like most of the world now, if you pay attention to mainstream media and discourse amongst many of my peers, people do honestly believe that we're in a climate crisis and we need to act accordingly. aggressively and as quickly as possible to reduce our hydrocarbon usage to save the planet. What are the tactics used by the opportunists to lead so many people astray? Well, of course, the most effective tactic is repetition and repetition and repetition.

That was something that, you know, all totalitarian states understand very well. Goebbels used it in Nazi Germany. You know, the Soviets used it in the Soviet Union. Our media uses it in our country, you know, to push, you know, this meme or that, you know, that is convenient, you know, for their masters. Yeah, I'm sorry to be so crude, but in fact, that's the way it's going. Yeah, I mean, it's... training in physics. I mean, even the average scientist doesn't know anything about climate. They don't know any more than you do about climate. You know, it's quite complicated. You know, the CO2 is spread between the ground and, you know, 40,000, 50,000 feet and higher. And

the temperature varies all over the place between the ground and these altitudes. And And so figuring out what doubling CO2 will do is not straightforward. The average person can't do that. So they have to take the word of some so-called expert. But I'm an expert, and I can tell you it doesn't do very much. It's not a big deal. Well, doing research for this interview, I was looking up the stories about yourself and watching many presentations you've given throughout the past

and looking on Twitter, what people have said about you, you've been pretty villainized in the whole conversation around climate change. So what has your journey been like specifically? How did you come to focus on this problem and combating the misinformation out there? And what's it been like having to put up with everybody who is calling you, for lack of a better term a quack that is misleading people yourself well actually i got to know a little bit about climate when i headed the office of energy research in the early 90s i was brought in to direct that office and department of energy by bush senior and so i had a big basic

research budget, which included a lot of money for climate, but it was also money for high-energy physics, money for controlled fusion, for plasma physics, for material science, even for the human genome. And so I wanted to be sure that I understood at least a little bit about all these fields. I hadn't paid much attention to climate before then. And I had people that we supported come in once a week on some field or another and brief me and my associate directors at the Department of Energy on the research they were doing that we were paying for. And most of the invitees were absolutely thrilled that some Washington bureaucrat cared what they were doing. You know, they spend most of their time worrying about next year's budget, and here's somebody who hands out the money who would like to hear from them.

And so that was fun. They came in, and almost all of them gave very good presentations. It was informal. It was question and answer, so they were frequently interrupted, and they liked that and liked to get into the details. But there was one exception, and the exception was the climate community. and the first thing that would happen is when they would get this invitation to come in, I remember one of them told my chief of staff, well, we work for Senator Gore, you know, you'll have to ask him.

I said, well, you better check your contract, you know, for the money. You know, I signed it, not Senator Gore, and if you want to get put in an application to the senator, that's fine, But if you want to get if you want to continue getting money from DOE, you're going to have to come in and brief us like everybody else. So I realized then there was something not right about climate science, so-called science. And then these people would come and they would brief me and my co-directors and the briefings would always be very tense. And if you would ask a question like, you know, how did you calibrate this instrument, which you ask everybody, you know, in the scientific field, how do you measure something? How do you know that it's the instrument is working right?

They would get very defensive. Well, the answer would be, why do you want to know? Don't you trust us? I said, oh, no, I ask everybody, you know, how do you calibrate your instruments? instruments. So there was this secretive, defensive attitude. And so naturally you begin to think, well, what are they hiding? And well, you know, as soon as the next presidential election came and Clinton and Gore were elected, the first thing Gore did was have me fired, which was okay with me. I was eager to come back to Princeton and he did me a favor. So I'm grateful to Senator Gore for that. But my new boss, Hazel O'Leary, was surprised she wanted me to stay because I really didn't meddle in the politics. You know, that was her job. That was Gore's job. But I

didn't like people meddling in my science either. So I guess that's how I got started. And so So when I came back, we were busy with many other things in my laboratory and I didn't have a lot of time for a few years. But as I got older and closer to retirement, I had a little bit more time and I started looking more carefully into what was going on with climate. And I didn't like what I saw. I saw lots of hype. I saw lots of, you know, twisting of data, twisting of facts. And it's only gotten worse, you know, as the years have gone by. Yeah. No, I've had Professor Steve Coonan on the show before, and he dove into the IPCC data and basically explained that people are taking that IPCC data and completely misrepresenting a lot of the conclusions that are in there. and just going to the media and going to the public and saying, oh, my gosh, there's this crisis.

But if anybody took the time to actually dive into the actual research and conclusions, it doesn't really compute with what's being spun out in terms of a narrative in the mainstream media. Well, yeah, Steve Koonin's book, Unsettled, is a very good book, and I highly recommend it if any of your listeners have not read it. get a copy, you know, you will be surprised at how unsettled climate science really is. And one thing that's very clear from the book is there's certainly not a climate emergency, and there's unlikely ever to be a climate emergency. In fact, the only clear effect

you can see from more CO2 is increases in agricultural production, wheat, corn, soybean production is going up and a very major part of that is coming from more co2 co2 is plant food it's really true and forestry is the same way forests are growing faster than they used to grow and again because with more co2 you can take out factors like fertilizer or rainfall and stuff like that and there's still this increase of productivity of the synthetic life on earth which is starved for co2 it needs even more co2 than we have now a big good thing if we doubled or tripled or quadrupled co2 now it would be no harm to anybody and it'd be an enormous

benefit to agriculture and forestry yeah i want to see uh a world of megafauna again and uh we need We need more CO2 to make that possible. The megafauna seem to be a feature of cold climates of ice ages, and they don't do nearly as well in interglacials like ours today when things are warmer. So we lost most of the North American megafauna and much of megafauna in Asia, too, after the end of the last ice age. yeah i think i confused fauna for flora there i think i was thinking flora right more co2 well you'll definitely see more flora especially in arid regions because uh perhaps the most important uh benefit of co2 to land plants is that it makes them more drought

resistant because plants have to breathe in co2 from the air through little holes in their leaves And while CO2 is diffusing in through those holes for the plant to use, water vapor is diffusing out at a much higher rate. So plants typically need 100 grams of water to make a gram of carbohydrate, you know, because of these losses through the leaf, transpirational losses. And those are greatly reduced as you increase CO2 because plants are not stupid. they've been around for millions of years and they know that when there's more CO2 you simply grow leaves with less holes in them and then you'll be more resistant to drought because you don't lose as much water. And fewer holes works fine if there's more CO2 because you don't need as many little mouths to suck the CO2 in if there's more of it on the outside.

So it's not very complicated and it's very easily observed. You look at the greening of the earth now which you can see from satellites much of it is in semi-arid regions you know the sahel western united states western australia yeah but again they would make you think uh that the earth isn't creating they say we're having desert desertification of of the world play out we're having a great barrier reef uh die out uh but then when it starts to grow back like it has in the the last four years and you have a professor in australia point that out he immediately gets fired from his university you're talking about peter ridd who is a real hero like me he's a physicist by training but he has done a lot of work on the barrier reef

because he's got a good quantitative bent he knows how to measure things and knows how to do statistics right and I just saw an op-ed that he will publish soon I hope that this year the coral on the Great Barrier Reef is record high it's never been higher since records have been kept they haven't been kept that long you know so presumably if we had even longer records we would have seen higher levels in the past but since 1984 it's the highest it's ever been yeah which again is just very perplexing why this narrative is being drilled into people's heads and i mean we're seeing the products of the narrative take hold and actually become implemented in policy particularly around the extraction and use of hydrocarbons i think

a lot of what we're seeing in western europe with germany's problems uh they're fading nuclear generation for less reliable wind and solar, and they're depending on natural gas from Russia, which is becoming strained because of the war in Ukraine and the posturing of the West versus Russia. And on top of that, Sri Lanka decided to change up the way that they use hydrocarbon-based fertilizers with their crops, and they're going through a terrible collapse in their crop production. And then here in the U.S., we have many people in our government beating the drum of the Green New Deal and trying to move the American economy away from hydrocarbons by the end of the decade, which just seems completely asinine. So as a physicist, to help

educate anybody listening to this, how important are hydrocarbons to our modern lifestyle? Why is there this push to to move us from reliable sources of fuel like hydrocarbons or uranium to less reliable less more importantly less dense sources like wind and solar well it's ideology again uh i mean we've had this kind of fanaticism in human history many times the iconoclasts in Byzantium were sort of like that, you know. In my own ancestral country of Scotland, we had the, you know, the One League and Covenant, which was, you know, sort of over-the-top Puritans and caused a lot of damage. There was a similar movement in England. And so Well, these movements get started, they're quasi-religious, and the current one we're in, you know, the climate one, it has to have enemies, and so the enemy is fossil fuels.

But in fact, fossil fuels have let you and me and the average person in the world live a better life than the kings in the past could live. You know, our lifespans are tremendously longer, infant mortality has dropped to practically nothing. None of that was true before we started using hydrocarbons extensively. So the world runs on energy, and no one has found a better source of energy than oil and coal and natural gas. Perhaps we will find a better source, but it won't be the current generation of wind and solar power, which are not a good solution.

You can already see that in Germany. You can see that Texas nearly lost its grid the last big ice storm. I think of Texas as a pretty sober state, but they've overbuilt with wind and solar. And so over much of the world, the energy supplies are getting less and less stable because of this jihad against fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are, you know, they're really fossil sunlight. They were made by photosynthesis many millions of years ago. In the case of coal, it can be 300, 400 million years ago, really a long time ago.

but made by sunlight and water and CO2. So we're simply returning to the air some of the CO2 that was stripped out of it millions of years ago, and it therefore made it harder for plants to grow now than it used to be for plants. And so, you know, if you were a photosynthesizing plant, you'd get down on your knees every day and and thank the lord for fossil fuels or for the burning of fossil fuels they don't do you much good if they're in the ground but if people burn them then it's good for you you you can grow better you don't need as much water everything about it is good from the point of view of a plant

yeah yeah it's it's utter insanity and it's scary as somebody i'm 31 i've got two young sons And watching all this unfold right in front of me as you have Joe Biden telling the oil and gas industry that they need to spin up refineries that are going to be shut down within a decade, it's completely perplexing that we have people in power who are so either detached from the reality of the situation and the physics of what affords us our modern life or the nefarious push. behind it. Because if you control energy, food, and mediums of communication, you can control humans pretty, pretty granularly. And the conspiracy theorist in me sometimes wanders into the realm of are these people actively trying to enslave humanity by making us desperate because we don't have the lower substrates of Maslow's hierarchy of needs taken care of because they've been stripped away from us? Well, I think very few of them are evil.

You know, there are always a few evil people around. But I think most of the climate warriors are not evil people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied this a lot. You know, he was one of the few courageous clergymen in Nazi Germany to resist the Germans. and he was eventually executed by the Nazis just before the Americans liberated the camp where he was hung. But he concluded that, at least in Germany, it wasn't that lots of Germans were evil. You know, they were ordinary people, not so different from me and you, but that they were

stupid. And so the root cause was stupidity, that people would not or could not think for themselves. And so they get fed every day this propaganda and are unable to realize that it's simply propaganda. And Bonhoeffer, he may have been onto something. I think another problem is It's the easy life that we live. If you look around, farmers, truck drivers, fishermen are typically not very worried about changing climate. They live in the climate all the time. They see the weather.

They've seen it since they were children. And they don't notice anything changing. And so most of the worry is from the upper class, the upper middle class, the elites who've never been on a trawler or never hoed a row of corn or plowed a row of corn. So all they know about nature is what they see on their computer screens. They've got a nice big screen, maybe they've got a wall screen, plasma display, and all these beautiful models of what the world is like. But they're just models. The world isn't like that. It's not true. But they can't tell the difference. And so people sometimes ask me about

Mao's Great Leap Forward, which had some similarities to what we're doing with climate. Of course, it was a disaster. You know, they built backyard steel mills so that, you know, they would have, you know, they could defeat capitalism in the West. It was complete nonsense. You know, what they should have done is invested in, you know, state-of-the-art centralized steel mills, which was the way to produce steel. And that's what they eventually did. They simply wasted time. But one thing that was not a waste of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, was that they sent urban elites out to the farm to live like peasants for a year or two.

And that was very salutary. That part of the Cultural Revolution, I think, was worthwhile because many of these elites learned a good lesson. It wasn't like Cambodia where they were executed. They eventually all came home. But our own elites have become detached from reality. I don't know how to fix that, actually. But that's a big part of the problem is that they live in this artificial world that isn't true. It's a world that doesn't exist except on the computer screen. yeah well a little dismayed that you just said that because i was just about to ask you how do we it's it's fascinating that we sit here today in 2022 we have access to more information than any other society that's ever existed on this planet and more particularly access to history books where we can see that humanity has learned these lessons time and time again throughout many centuries, millennia, since we've been around. And it's just frightening to sit here today with

all this access to information. And we can point, look at the Great Leap Forward, look at what happened in Nazi Germany, look at what happened in the Weimar Republic, look what happened with the Bolsheviks. And we seem to just be repeating the same exact mistakes today when we have the knowledge at our fingertips to understand that this does not end well if you continue down this path. Well, of course, you're right about that. But I'm optimistic, you know, I grew up in Western North Carolina. When I go back there, I meet ordinary people and they're very sensible people.

And I think there are people like that all over America who've got common sense and can see that at some point this has got to stop. And I believe that there are enough of them that we will not descend into the sort of craziness that occurred in Sri Lanka or that's happening in Holland today or Ireland. After all, America was settled by people who wanted freedom and wanted to get away from heavy-handed governments. That's why we're here in many cases. So we have a tradition that I think will help us.

I don't think I'm being too optimistic. I think it really will help us. I can't see us ever becoming like Western Europe. I was a schoolboy in Scotland and the happiest day in my life was when I set foot in America when I was in the fifth grade and there was this wonderful land of freedom and equality. You know, I, you know, my Scottish family was okay. They were middle class. But they always knew that they were not nobility, you know.

I remember a poem I used to recite, oh, let us love our occupations, live upon our daily rations, bless the squire and his relations, and always know our proper stations. So that was the way the old world was and still is. And that's the way America has never been and I hope never will be. Well, hopefully it's conversations like this that wake people up to it because I'm happy that you're optimistic. I tend to be optimistic, too, but it does trouble me a bit when you see the propaganda affecting so many people so effectively. and i didn't realize that you moved over from scotland uh to the u.s in fifth grade what tell us a little bit more about that why did you decide to come stateside and you mentioned the stark

difference yeah my father was uh scottish he had been a british army doctor in india and my mother had been a medical missionary in India, and so they met there and married, and so I was born in India. And so that was just before World War II, and when the war broke out, the Brits were afraid that the Japanese would soon invade India. They had already taken over Singapore, Burma, and, you know, they were poised to move into India and my father was sent to the front and he sent me and my mom home for to America my American mother for the duration of the war and then we went back to India after the war was over

and after Indian independence uh went to my father's home in Scotland lived with my grandmother in Edinburgh and uh but it was still all bombed out this was you know 48 49 and uh You couldn't get a job, it was very depressed, and so my mother didn't like it very much. So we finally decided to move to America, and so as I say, that was the happiest day of my life. I was very happy to come to America. Did you go straight to North Carolina? North Carolina.

My mom was from North Carolina. family's been there for before the revolution so on and on one hand i am an american there the other hand i'm an immigrant you know that's fascinating story yeah i've got i've got roots in south carolina as well well not not as well but um in the carolinas and uh carolinas were always a uh a place for the common man you know they they uh uh were less snooty than some of the other colonies oh yes certainly that's uh and that's and yeah so i was born in philadelphia i lived in chicago i've lived in new york i lived in charleston now i live in texas even though I'm in New Jersey right now.

Yeah, it's just having lived in these metropolitan areas all throughout my life, it is fascinating to observe after having moved to more rural areas as well how the stark difference between the people who are living in the cities and perceive themselves to be elite and the common man. And that's one thing I'm actually very hopeful for, speaking of optimism, is the reinvigoration of the common man. You mentioned truckers, farmers, ranchers, oil and gas operators.

I can really feel a tide beginning to turn in terms of the sentiment of the common man that people are actually toiling and building the modern world that we have today, beginning to say, hey, enough is enough. We're not going to let you take our farms. We're not going to let you force us to shut down our oil and gas operations. We're going to stand up and do what's right, which is continue doing what we have been doing for a couple centuries now and live free.

It seems like we've reached a far end of the spectrum and the pendulum's about to swing back because if we're being completely honest, it probably needs to at some point this decade. Yeah, I think the pendulum will swing back. I hope it'll be substantial before I die. I'd like to see it swing back. I feel better about my children and grandchildren if that happened. Yeah. I'm not sure. How familiar are you with Bitcoin? Are you interested? Well, I vaguely know about Bitcoin, and it's not something that I would have time to look into very deeply, so I haven't taken the time to look at it. But I guess it's basically an electronic ledger that can't be pulsified, and it's distributed, so it's pretty well immune to being destroyed. So I'm interested in it, but really that's all that it goes. You know, I just don't have time to pay any more attention to it. Maybe I've described it incorrectly, but I think that's roughly right.

No, it was a very astute explanation of what it is. And that's what I fell into the Bitcoin rabbit hole almost 10 years ago now. And it's the driving force behind my optimism for the future, because that's one thing I think we need to fix is the money. We need to get money out of the hands of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury and back into the free market. And then you can allocate capital efficiently. And on top of that, Bitcoin mining is very energy intensive. I actually think it's a good tool to fight back against a lot of this hysteria because Bitcoin miners like myself, what we have to do is drive our all-in price of electricity down as low as possible. And what we found and are continuing to find is that a lot of those opportunities that will afford you very low electricity costs are stranded energy plays.

So one of the things I've been doing is going up and buying stranded natural gas wells that are abandoned and we're leaking methane into the atmosphere. And so we're able to go up, purchase the well, plug in a generator, combust that methane into CO2 and produce Bitcoin on the back end. So we're able to clean up those stranded wells, reduce methane leak, which the hysterics don't like, and then produce sound distributed money on the back end to create like a free market money monetary solution to get away from the ills of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, which have undue influence over the monetary system. And when you have control over the money, how it's created and how it's distributed, you can really force a lot of these idiotic policies on the public. Well, good for you. I like the sound of that. Where do you buy these whales? Is it in Texas or where? All over. People are doing it all over the country. Me particularly, I like Appalachia up in northern Tennessee, southern Kentucky. There's a lot of these wells. Everybody's going to Texas, and I'm deciding to go everywhere but Texas, even though I live there.

Well, methane, of course, is interesting. It's demonized just like CO2, but as a greenhouse gas. and supposedly it's a super greenhouse gas because per added methane molecule you get about 30 times more forcing than you do per added CO2 molecule. But what the alarmists never tell you is that CO2 molecules are increasing

300 times faster than methane. And so the net effect is that methane is about 10% of CO2's forcing which is also not very large, as we've discussed earlier. It won't make much difference, and methane will make about 10 times less difference than that. But I hate to see anything go to waste, so I'm glad you're using the methane from these wells to do something useful. Yeah. I've been led to believe that methane is the worst problem than CO2. I didn't know that while it is.

It's about 10% of CO2. Yeah. In your experience, what is the best strategy to get through to the innocent, quote unquote, stupid people who've been duped by the opportunist? I'm sure in your time spent dedicated to this subject, you've had some success at turning people's minds and having them realize that this isn't the disaster and emergency that many are purporting it to be? Well, I hate to say it, but I think what's going to be needed is some disastrous consequences from following all of the policies of the eco-fanatics.

So Sri Lanka gave us a little bit of a lesson, but Sri Lanka is a long way from America. And the people there don't look very much like Americans. So it will not have as much influence as it should. But, for example, the problems in Holland now are very serious. The Dutch government is fanatical over climate. They're driving farmers out of business. they're confiscating their land, you know, the plain English word for that is they're stealing their land, and farmers don't like it.

And so at some point, there will be, you know, the country will become ungovernable, there'll be enough unhappy people that they will either have to start killing people or they'll have to give up on this craziness and I think you know given what I know of the Dutch they'll simply give up on the craziness I can't see them acting like the Bolsheviks or the Nazis at least I hope they won't and it says so I think that as bad as it is I hope I wish the Dutch government well I hope they do every crazy thing that they have said they're going to do, and that the Dutch people have the reaction that I think they will have. The Dutch are kind of the closest thing to us in terms of loving freedom, you know. They have had a long history of fighting for their

independence against the Spanish Empire, against the Habsburg, against the French, You know, you name it. So I think, I'm hopeful that the Dutch people will set this right. Same thing is happening in Ireland. The Irish are not reacting as strongly yet as the Dutch are, but I hope that they'll be brought around. You know, the Irish, too, have a long history of exploitation by one, you know, myth after another. And let's hope that they recognize that this current myth of climate emergency isn't any more true than the myth of English superiority, you know, that burdened them for so long. uh so you know this the solution to this really is going to depend on the innate common sense of people let's hope that it's there that i think it's there but i think it has an easier time in some countries like our country than it does in others where uh there's a long history of suppression and uh obedience to authority

Yeah. It's even moving to Canada. Canada, Justin Trudeau's government just passed, I don't know if it was a law or a mandate to do exactly what they're doing in Holland, reduce nitrogen emissions by 30% by confiscating farmland and preventing farmers from toiling on that land. Well, again, it's crazy because the issue here is is partly methane, which we already talked about, and partly nitrous oxide, which is released by farming, you know, cultivation of fields, cattle, anything that has nitrogenous material.

And nitrous oxide is about like methane, it's about 10% of CO2, so it's really not an issue. CO2 itself is not an issue. And if you've got something like nitrous oxide, which is 10 times less effect. You know, why are we destroying the lives of farmers? Why are we jeopardizing food security for the world by these crazy actions?

I mean, I have many good friends in Canada that I respect, most of them recent immigrants, but I will point out that Canada got its start as the refuge of the loyalists to the king after the American Revolution, if you had supported the king in the Carolinas, for example, it really wasn't a good idea to remain after the revolution, so you went to Canada. These are people who've always, at least initially, been willing to accept authority from above rather than manage their own lives the way most Americans who were on the winning side

of the American Revolution thought. Very few Canadians are left from that contention, so most are recent immigrants. Like me, I'm a half immigrant. So they're not guilty of that, but some of them would have been hanged if they hadn't going to canada i think uh yeah there's some people here in the green movement that need to be shipped up to canada all this insanity on the world and i mean you mentioned models earlier too and that's one thing again i come from an economics background sort of got dragged into this energy climate debate and that's one thing in the economic round particularly

If you look at Federal Reserve policy, a lot of what they predict or how they justify their monetary policy is based on forward projecting models that if you actually listen to what they said 10 years ago and the models they put out then and then cross-reference it with reality, it's way off basis in terms of inflation rates being one of the easiest ones to point out right now. unemployment, whatever it may be. But that is the most potent tool of the climate hysterics too, are these models. Everybody says, look at the models. We're going to be underwater in 20 years and the earth's going to be so hot that humans are going to burn up. And it's just, I want to live in a world where we don't really depend on models as heavily as we do now. And particularly when it comes to the climate hysteria. It's always about models. And you mentioned Al Gore at the beginning of this discussion,

and he's been pushing the models. I became cognizant of him and his pushing of the models around 2000, 2001, when he was running for president. How bad are these models, in your opinion? Well, we talked about them very briefly. You know, the main thing a model is supposed to do for you is project future temperatures that are caused by increasing amounts of CO2, methane, nitrous oxide. And so they've had some 20 years to show their stuff. People started making serious models in the early 90s.

So that's 20, actually 30 years now that they've been trying to predict. And they've all been running much too hot. They're predicting, you know, 0.3, 0.4 degrees centigrade warming per decade. The observed warming has been about 0.1. You know, so a factor of three, less than most models predict. There have been nice studies of that by John Christie at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. If you don't know about his work, I recommend that you look at some of his writings on this. But by any criterion that works for normal science, the models would have been junk a long time ago because they don't work.

They're predicting far too much warming. You know, if you look at the warming we're seeing, a tenth of a degree per decade, you know, that means by the end of this century, another eight decades, we will have warmed by 0.8 degrees centigrade, which isn't very much. You know, and so there's clearly no emergency. You can tell that by just looking at the facts. But nevertheless, when policies for CO2 are discussed, nobody ever looks at the facts. They look at the models. So they say, look, it's warming at 0.3 degrees, 0.4 degrees per decade, when it's actually not.

It's only warming 0.1 degree per decade. And nobody's quite sure how reliable that is, because it's very, very hard to measure temperatures for the whole Earth. are temperature anomalies they're not actually the temperature so they're very complicated averages that are subject to lots of mischief almost all of it is designed to try and make the warming look faster than it is so but the fact even with all of that folded in there there's nothing alarming in what we're observing in sea level rise there's nothing unusual it's about the same as it's always been the warming now is not much different from the warming from the year 1900 to the year

1940 there was a warming similar to this one then um you know glaciers if people talk about receding glaciers started to melt around 1800 you know that uh is very clear in alaska if you get a chance go visit alaska you'll learn a lot about glacial melting but most of the glaciers in Alaska were melted before 1870, you know, so long before there was much CO2 in the atmosphere. And so whatever was causing them to melt, it's very interesting, but it had nothing to do with CO2 because there wasn't any CO2 added to speak of at that time. So there's been a whole myth built up. I mean, we've done this before, for example, there was this craze over eugenics in the

late 1800s and early 1900s in America and Britain, you know, that the good old Anglo-Saxon race was being destroyed by all of these low IQ Italians and East European Jews and Chinese, All Indians, they're clearly low IQ, and you can prove that because you give them an English test and they don't score very well, and of course they can't read English. So it was complete nonsense. It was all fabricated. But they had scientific journals that looked very scientific. All of the university presidents were behind at Princeton, Harvard, Stanford.

Alexander Graham Bell was a big eugenicist. It's sort of shameful that the elite in America, and in Britain too, it was as bad or maybe worse than Britain, jumped aboard this complete nonsense. It was all a lie. And it caused great harm. My mother's state, my adopted state of North Carolina, we were still sterilizing poor women. Typically, they were black or poor whites, you know, who couldn't defend themselves as supposedly mentally inferior as late as the 1970s. You know, it was crime. It was a crime. And yet all the best people were for it.

The elite were for it. So much for the elite. Yeah, I mean, again, all this stuff echoes. Today we have the concept of useless eaters that many of the elites of the Davos class are describing most of the people in this world, calling them useless eaters. And yeah, I mean, you talk about like Ted Turner, like in more modern times, like Ted Turner, pretty sure Bill Gates's dad, a bunch of these people were eugenicists who believed heavily in the Malthusian view that we need to decrease the rate of population growth and even lower the population on the planet, which is completely insane. And I guess as we have five minutes to wrap up, just to end on an optimistic note, like how versatile and abundant is our planet? Can it support humanity continuing to grow moving forward? Well, I don't think the planet has any problem with the current population of the Earth. were around 8 billion. And the growth is slowing down as the third world is becoming more prosperous. If you want to control the Earth's population, the best thing you can do is make

fossil fuels available to India and China, South America and Africa, so people become prosperous and live fulfilling lives of abundance the way we do in America and Western Europe. When that happens, the result is always the same, that the birth rate goes down to replacement or less. And so if the elite want to control the population of the world, there's one tried and true way to do that. That's to make people prosperous. And women don't like to be bothered with so many children.

And the population stabilizes. It can be a problem. You know, it's a problem in Japan now, it's a problem in Italy. It would be a problem in America, but for immigration, we'd be losing people if we didn't have immigration. So I mean, I think that's a problem we can handle, but it depends on prosperity. If you want to control populations, you have to make people prosperous. Yeah, hydrocarbons have certainly made our civilization prosperous.

It's crazy. I'm speaking through a mic made of petroleum oil, looking at you on a computer that was made of hydrocarbons to think that there's a class of people out there that want to completely rip any fossil fuel production out of the hands of humanity is utter insanity we would not be able to be doing what we're doing right now you know it is so crazy because you and i are mostly made of carbon you know our you know our flesh you know our bones uh our carbon and uh the uh And we store our extra energy as hydrocarbons, your fat is a hydrocarbon, it's not very different from a diesel hydrocarbon, CH2, one carbon, two hydrogen, so a polymer of that.

And so nature has never discovered a better energy storage material than hydrocarbons. And sooner or later, we may run out of hydrocarbons. I think we will. It will be a long time, certainly not for a century or more. But when that happens, I'm confident to predict that if humans are still around, they will make synthetic hydrocarbons because it's such a wonderful energy storage medium. It's much, much better than batteries. And so if you had the same cheap energy that you use for your Bitcoin mining available

inexpensively, you could make synthetic gasoline, you could make synthetic natural gas from simply limestone and water. The world has plenty of both. And I am sure in a few hundred years, that's what will happen, that there will be a huge synthetic hydrocarbon industry and we'll use them the same way we use them today for internal combustion engines that's fascinating i never really dove into the concept of synthetic hydrocarbons what are um before we wrap up here what are your thoughts on nuclear energy is that something you're excited about is it worthwhile i think fission energy clearly works

And, you know, if you really want to avoid CO2 emissions, which I don't, I think CO2 emissions are good, but it has no CO2 emissions. But on top of that, it's, you know, there are real pollutants from burning coal and natural gas. you can control them but you know coal typically has a fair amount of sulfur which you don't want spewing into the air it has heavy metals uh it usually has a little bit of mercury for example and so you need to get rid of all of those things which you can do and that is done in modern coal plants but nuclear power emits essentially none of those because it's so carefully controlled the entire fuel cycle, that it's probably the least polluting of any source of energy on Earth today. You know, the only thing that comes out of a nuclear plant is waste heat from the cooling

water. You still have to run a heat engine. And so that means you waste a fair amount of heat. One problem with nuclear power is it's, you know, not as hot as you would like. And new generations of nuclear reactors may be able to get around that so we can convert more of the heat into useful electrical energy but i'm pro-nuclear you know i i think it has a future and it will come back yeah i agree i think germany is learning uh the hard lesson of decommissioning nuclear power plants in favor of wind as we speak well we're at the top of the hour here, Dr. Happer. I really appreciate your time and the work that you've done throughout the many decades that you've been focused on this issue. And thank you for joining

us and opening up about your personal story and your thoughts on all of this. I think what you're doing is extremely important. And hopefully this message gets out to some of the innocent people who have been duped by the opportunists out there. Thanks very much. It was lots of fun talking to you. Good luck to you and all your friends. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Hope you have a great rest of your day. That's all we got today, freaks. Peace and love. Okay. Bye-bye.