The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 419. A Realistic Conversation About Energy and the Planet | Scott Tinker

Episode Date: February 1, 2024

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson speaks with geologist, educator, energy expert, and documentary filmmaker Scott Tinker. They discuss the ARC conference, the glacial periods throughout Earth's geological history, where we are now in the cycle, the gross fallacy of the Net Zero movement, the harsh realities of energy in the developing world, and the necessary balancing we can do right now in order to uplift all people, in all places. Dr. Scott Tinker is an American geologist, educator, energy expert, and documentary filmmaker. Tinker has appeared in more than 20 documentary films with the intent to communicate scientific ideas to the general public. The 2012 film “Switch” presents a scientifically based look at the global energy transition. It's been screened in over 600 colleges and has gained a following for the Switch Energy Alliance, which brings in young people to learn about the processes of sustainable energy firsthand, while broadening discussion on the matter in an open format setting. Tinkers’ PBS show “Energy Switch” is a point counterpoint talk show that features energy communicators, experts, authors, and pundits.  - Links - 2024 tour details can be found here https://jordanbpeterson.com/events   Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/  For Scott Tinker: Switch On (Film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk75bD-C3H4 Switch Energy Alliance https://switchon.org/about/leadership/ Watch Energy Switch (Show) https://www.pbs.org/show/energy-switch/ 

Hello everyone. I'm talking today with Dr. Scott Tinker. I met Scott at the Art Conference Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London at the end of October, where he gave a very well-received talk on the nexus between energy and the environment. It's been the most popular talk on the ARC website on YouTube, racking up about 1.2 million views as of today. And so I felt for a variety of reasons that it would be worth delving into Scott's thought and his background in more detail. I've had a number of people on the podcast

who've talked about the energy environment relationship, particularly as it pertains to climate, which is obviously a determining element when you're plotting forward an energy strategy. We talk a lot about the relationship between energy and the rectification of absolute privation. There's a lot of people in the world are still living hand-to-mouth, you might say, and a huge part of the reason for that is that they don't have access to clean, reliable, plentiful, inexpensive energy in whatever form and are reduced to doing

things like burning dung or wood if they're fortunate. The problem with that is that poor people, there's many problems with that. But one of the problems is that poor people living hand to mouth don't take a long-term view of such niceties, let's say, as environmental sustainability, which doesn't occupy the forefront of your thinking if you're trying to figure out how to scrounge around in the dirt so your children don't starve like today. And so there is evidence that working to eradicate absolute And so there is evidence that working to eradicate absolute privation around the world with the provision of more inexpensive energy, for example, would simultaneously be the best possible pathway to genuine environmental sustainability, as when people become more wealthy or even a little bit wealthy. They start thinking over a long term and are more concerned with the viability of the environment,

for example, or even able to conceptualize such a thing. So we delve into that in great length, trying to flesh out what a more multi-dimensional view of human flourishing and environmental sustainability might be. So Scott, the last time we saw each other was in London at the end of October, and you did a speech there which has been extraordinarily well received. On the ARC website, Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, your speech on energy in the environment is the most popular speech. I think Constantine Kissen probably has you in total views because his speech has been distributed in other locales and has kind of gone viral in multiple places. But it was very interesting to me to see this happen because, well, that sort of thing isn't predictable.

I think there's probably 30 speeches up now. And it wasn't obvious that it would be a talk on energy and environmental policy that would take the spotlight. Obviously, you did something right. I mean, it's a very well done talk technically. You know, it's very accessible and you're very engaging. And so that certainly didn't hurt. But why do you think, first of all, what did you think of the art conference? And also, why do you think that your speech struck a chord? It's got about 1.2 million views as of today. Yeah.

Yeah, that's good. I like the art conference and I appreciate the invitation there really do. I love the diversity of the audience, representing global thinkers, that was nice. And the broad depth, Jordan, of the speakers themselves and the breadth of the topics,

I didn't expect some of the things to be candid with you. We went from faith and family all the way through to education and of course, energy, the environment and poetry and music, it was phenomenal. So congratulations to you and the Baroness for putting together a really excellent, excellent engagement.

I really enjoyed my time there. So thanks for that. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it was fun. We figure we missed one major area that I think we're gonna rectify. We didn't talk about virtual identity. And I think we're going to add that as a category.

So that would include discussions of digital currency, for example, et cetera, and all the potential nightmares that come along with that. But it would also cover more broadly, increasingly we have a virtual self, and it isn't obvious at all what rights that virtual self has,

or even who owns it in some fundamental sense. And that's actually a major problem. And it's going to get much worse. So, well, we'll rectify that with the next conferences. So why do you think, what is it about your speech? Do you think that struck a chord? Maybe you could outline, first of all, what you talked about,

but also provide some insight into why, you know, people have really taken it to heart. Yeah, I just have a really big family and I made them all watch it. Yeah, you must have a very big family. Look, I've been speaking on these topics for three decades and it's nice to see I think what's happening is some of the extremes on both sides

are starting to come around toward that, what I call the radical middle, and think about these things deeper than simply black and white or good and bad, believer, denier kinds of dialogues that we have been pushed on us. So I think that's striking a chord now. People that I've been hearing from all over the world

on that speech, actually actually writing from every corner independently are saying thank you for your objectivity, your balance, for not trying to be flamboyant or shove an opinion down our throat. Thank you for the data. And I do tend to show a lot of data in my talks, but I spend time with and animate it so you can understand what that data is saying by the end of a particular slide or theme, if you will.

So a lot of people like the data. Young people at that conference, by the way, came up to me very much and very often, and they said, we so appreciate your tone, not telling us what we should think or what to do, but just offering this kind of setting, if you will, of the energy, the environment, and the economy for us to think on. And that may be striking chord now. And I know you do that too.

I really appreciate your efforts and others who were at that conference to get us thinking. And I think it's just time to think. So perhaps that's why it's striking chord. Well, you know, one of the things we noticed Because as I said, we've released a fairly large number of speeches and of course the viewership follows a classic pre-do distribution with a small percentage of the videos taking up the vast majority of the views and one of the things that we noticed very Significantly was that any speaker who politicized the issue got no views. Right, so it was people who spoke in two ways.

They either spoke on first principles, so they took a more philosophical rather than a political view and then more educational. And so I think you probably tilted more towards the educational side, although there was a philosophical aspect in your insistence that what we're always attempting to do is balance trade-offs. Right? And there's a philosophical notion there that there's no perfect solution and that many other competing goods have to be taken into account when we're trekking

through something as complex as the relationship between the energy and the environment, which is an impossibly complex nexus. So one of the things we've also learned, although we kind of knew this beforehand, but it's really been driven home, is that when we invite speakers, even if they're political figures, we're going to, first of all, focus on political speakers who can speak from first principles and do something more educational. And we're going to inform all our speakers that that's much more likely. It's much more in keeping with the ARC enterprise,

and it's also much more likely to be successful. There's a political figure in Canada, Pierre Poliev, who's now the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada, and most likely to be the next Prime Minister. He's become a real expert user of social media, and so he ran his leadership campaign for the Conservative Party completely outside the legacy media, giving virtually no interviews. He created all his own ads, and he's done something very interesting in the last month. He's produced two 17-minute documentaries, one on housing and one on debt, that they kind of look like PBS documentaries. They have that that back when PBS wasn't a political enterprise. They have that flavor.

And it seems to me, I've also found on my podcast that more political speakers, regardless of their fame, tend to attract disproportionately few views. That's interesting. So I think that people, well, I think people are really hungry for a different approach to problems and one that's in keeping with what you did, which is like a serious discussion of the facts, dispassionate presentation of the facts at hand, understanding they have to be viewed through the nexus of like a multi-dimensional value hierarchy, trying to negotiate those,

not claiming that the experts know what pathway forward is best. And the problem with that view is that, well, just because you're an expert on energy doesn't mean you know how to balance energy expenditures with education. Absolutely. And much less healthcare and everything else

that has to be taken into account. So okay, so let's go to your, let's go to your background. Yeah. Quick comment before you, before you go. I speak in Canada a lot. In fact, I'll be in Toronto next week, speaking to the national. Oh, I'm there. We should, we should have dinner.

Oh, well, I'm speaking to the national, national bank of Canada at their energy conference. And we're starting to see that. What you just described is this desire for more, for more depth. And I think that kind of sums it up well, particularly this younger generation of people. And I have a PBS talk show, we're recording our fifth season, and you're right, it's a little bit politically biased,

but it's still the most trusted network in the US, at least in terms of an attempt to be. And we very much do that on our show as well, is look for the multiple viewpoints. And I say this very often, Jordan, no one owns the truth. You know, we just seek it, particularly in science. We scientists live a tortured life of always questioning everything over and over.

Skepticism is part of science. And that's where I think I might have kicked off my speech. I'm recalling now there in London. Following your lead, there was a bunch on religion and faith early on, I think day one. And I talked about that a little bit, you could define faith much better than I can. But you know, it's a process in which maybe there's less doubt in faith. But science is filled with doubt. Without doubt, we have no science. And I think I probably said there, you take away doubt from science,

it becomes more of a religion. And that is a very dangerous path to walk down. I'll comment a bit about the issue of faith in science and then we'll turn to who you are. So everybody's clued in about your expertise and we'll talk more about energy and environment. So I've been thinking this through a lot. You know, when a scientist confronts a data set,

he does so or she does so with a variety of aims in mind. Now, one of the things I saw increasingly happen in the last decades that I was in academia was that science became both politicized and subject to the demands of career. Now I'd seen this with every graduate student, for example, there's always this terrible tension between going into the data set with an orientation towards the truth and going into the data set knowing full well that if you don't extract out from the numbers a publishable statement

that all of your efforts have been in vain and your career's on the line. And you know that whenever you're doing statistical analysis, when you're ever conducting scientific inquiry, you're always balancing that demand to falsify your own cherished notions, even those upon which your reputation are based, and to demonstrate to yourself that your current experiment was a failure with the opportunity and requirement to follow the truth.

And so what I would say constitutes the proper place of faith in science, and I actually think this is the right way to think about it metaphysically, is that you have to confront the data set with the presumption that there is nothing better that could happen to you than to find out what it actually represents, regardless of the apparent cost to short term or even medium term cost to your career. And even more than that, to believe that in the long run, medium to long run, if you actually pursue the truth in your statistical analysis, even though you may pay a short term price in disruption of your pet theories and the failure of the odd experiment, your career is going to be much more reliable

and much broader and deeper as it iterates across time. That's called learning. We learn from our failures, right? Not from our successes. Well, it's also predicated on the assumption that learning is possible, that the universe is rational, and that if you learn from your mistakes, that the consequence of that will be better for everyone. And those are the axioms of faith, I think, that are part and parcel of the scientific process,

not belief in the overall validity of a given set of facts, which is more like a totalitarianism. Yeah, no, that's very interesting and I think well put. The challenge academics face, and I have been one for 23, 24 years now, out of the industry for 17, is the push, push, push as you describe to get your research published. And journals are want to publish failures. They want to publish things that move the science forward, some kind of a learning or success, if you will. And it's unfortunate because everyone would learn much more if we were to publish the experimental designs we set up and the failures and those.

And I think as a result of that, we've stopped asking as many why questions. We see a lot of how, what, where, when, which is interesting, they're interesting questions, but why is the toughest question of all? Why? In life, you know, individual as well as scientific why? And that's really the great challenge

because you can only typically prove things that don't answer why, not things that are the answer, if you will. You knock down the possibilities that don't address the data set as you've described it. And that's very powerful as you go down that road, but it takes a long time. And I would like to see us come back to publishing more of the failed experiments, if you will. I think we would all learn greatly from that. Yeah, well, it's obviously time for a technical revolution in scientific publication because the whole process has become, it's absurd. The fact that it takes two years to publish something, it's just completely, it's given how easy it is to publish. It's just beyond comprehension.

The fact that all that scientific research that's taxpayer funded is locked behind a paywall. The fact that the publishing companies have a hammer lock on library acquisitions and that the libraries are, what would you say, duty bound to subsidize the publishers. Like the whole thing is just a mess. I can see sub-stack headed in a way that would allow for rigorous science to be published.

And wouldn't that be neat? I mean, we talk about peer review, well, you put your science out there to the world and there's plenty of peer review. We hear back all the time. Well, you know, we've been thinking about doing that technically too. I mean, one of the things that should happen as well, you could imagine a site where you could

publish your paper in the same format that they're published now. A page summary for a lay audience. You can identify your four peer reviewers. They publish their reviews on the paper site. They can take authorship of that, which could be another CV component, because wouldn't it be lovely for people to get some credit, especially beginning scientists, for their peer review work, which is actual real work if you do it properly. That could be done with some degree of rapidity.

It's up to the marketplace to sort the papers in terms of how much attention they attract. But that's also how it works in the scientific publishing enterprise anyways. And that could all be open access. Absolutely. I just can't see why that's right in front of us. And at some point it's going to happen.

And it takes peer review out of the shadows. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I suspect that we're very much, we're very serious about engaging in an enterprise like that. Excellent. You know, it depends where it is in the priority stream, but yes, that would be very nice.

So, so let's talk about- That's not the only thing you have to do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right, right, exactly. Although it's so important because it really, it really, it really, it really has become a problem. And that fact that we've, we only publish successes, when that's the wrong way to describe success, like if you happen to stumble across a more profound truth because

you set up your experiment properly, well, more power to you. But if you set it up extremely well and tested something of extreme interest and it doesn't work out, there's absolutely no reason people shouldn't know about that, not least so they don't do the same thing, like multiple times. Right. So yeah.

You ask a Hawaii question and you have a hypothesis about that question to test. And throughout that process, whatever it may be, your hypothesis may be proven wrong. And we need to be able to show that. That's why we do science. We're not all perfect hypothesizers. No, no, not unless we're playing fast and loose

with the data. Yeah, that's for sure. So we shouldn't be punishing the people who follow the pathway of truth. So tell everybody a little bit about your background. You've been dealing in the over-life space between energy and the environment for decades. So why are you qualified to do that?

How did that interest develop? Well, I'm actually a geologist by training and have degrees in that. My PhD from the University of Colorado, a master from the University of Michigan in undergrad, and degrees in business as well. So I've always been interested in that overlap space because economics drives so many things. And the environment is a natural piece for geologists to think about.

I've spent many nights in a tent in many places in the world in the field. We geologists go into the field a lot. And been fortunate to visit over 60 countries, deeply inside of them from the poorest amongst us. And I mean, literally, a step on a human being without limbs and the dirt poor, to probably some of the wealthiest among us and seen all of that, Jordan.

And I'm still only a fraction of it, but it's very powerful. I learned by that, by sensing things, people say, describe India, I said, you can smell India. You can taste India. You can't unsmell or untaste India after you've been there, particularly in the impoverished regions. And sure, you see it and hear it. The noise is incredible, but it just awakens up all the senses. So that's, as a geologist, we are problem solvers.

We deal with lots of imperfect data and incomplete data. I particularly study that have studied the subsurface, which means you only get very small samples of things. And you have to do interpolation and extrapolation and modeling and data analysis. And knowing that your answer isn't right, you're just trying to constrain it around what the data tell you and then adapt and change as you go.

So that's my background as a scientist and then business person. I happened to have built and, well, not built, but over the last 24 years from 90 people to over 250 people, the largest research organization at UT Austin, other than a Navy funded one. And we do energy environmental and economic research all over the world. And half of our 250 person staff is our international, not U.S. born at least. And so very diverse and fun.

Yesterday was my last day as director after 24 years. I fired myself. So, you know, at 64 years old, it's time to let other folks have that fun. And I've got plenty to do into the future and hopefully some things with you. So that's kind of my background filmmaker. I host a PBS show, I do radio broadcasts

and lots of speaking around the world and have through the years. I've got a wonderful family, a wife of 40 years now and four kids all grown and gone and they're all data scientists. And so they just keep teaching me how little I know and aren't they right? So anyway, that's a little bit of my background. All right, so let me ask you, given that background, let me ask you some questions. And aren't they right? So anyway, that's a little bit of my background. All right, so let me ask you, given that background, let me ask you some questions.

So I've been trying to understand the energy environment business nexus for about three decades, I would say, and trying to use my experience in assessing scientific literature and reading scientific papers to get a sense of the situation. And so I have a provocative question maybe to begin with. So I came across the data, let me step one step back.

My understanding initially was the idea that global warming, such as it is, was going to produce an expansion of the world's deserts and make our sphere more arid and uninhabitable. Instead, what I've seen since the year 2000 in particular is the rapid greening of a very large geographical area, which I believe NASA has now estimated at twice the size of the continental US, three times the size of the Amazon jungle, has greened since the year 2000. Along with, and the reason for that is that carbon dioxide levels have gone up.

What that means is that although there's been a certain arguable degree of heating, so to speak, because of that, it's made it easier for plants to breathe. And when they can breathe easier, their breathing pores shrink in size because they don't have to expose themselves to so much surface area. And because of that, they can conserve water much more efficiently.

And because of that, they can grow in areas that would have otherwise be too arid. And because of that, they can grow in areas that would have otherwise be too arid. And because of that, we're seeing a tremendous amount of greening, not in places where there was already plenty of water, let's say, but in semi-arid areas, so that the deserts like the Sahara, particularly in the south, are now shrinking. And so part of me thinks, when I look at the data from a bird's eye view, let's say that the most striking ecological fact of the last 20 years is the radical increase in green space on the earth's surface. Now that also accompanies something like a 10 to 15% increase in crop

productivity, which is also a major piece of data, right? And that that's also a consequence of carbon dioxide, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then I add to that other data that I've seen that shows that by long-term historical standards, so over periods of millions of years or tens of millions of years, the atmosphere of the world is actually very much devoid of carbon dioxide.

And so although there's more than there was 200 years ago, there have been periods of time where the planet was a lot greener and a lot lusher, where there was way more carbon dioxide in the air, and that seemed to be pretty damn good for plants. So I look at all that and I think, okay, so if there was no political nonsense around this and we were just analyzing the data as of today, why wouldn't we conclude that carbon dioxide increase as a consequence of fossil fuel consumption is a net good? Yeah, no, this is an interesting dialogue.

I think you laid it out well. I said in Joe Manchin's Senate hearing about two and a half years ago now, it's important, it was just one of his big climate hearings. Fatih Biral was there and a couple other folks, just four of us. And I said, it's important to be both completely factual and factually complete.

And factually complete is hard, Jordan, as you know. None of us can do it. It's just there's too much. Now, we can be completely factual, we can all have facts and there is well presented and known as we can. We're not trying to mislead necessarily, or maybe we are, but factual completeness is difficult. So what you outlined there,

let me try to address on a couple levels as succinctly as I can. One is a geologist. Very true. There have been levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that exceed today's by 20 times. 7,000, 8,000 parts per million, not 420. 7,000, 8,000 parts per million, not 420. Okay. When? Well, back in what we call the Mesozoic. This is when the dinosaurs roamed the earth,

the Triassic Jurassic and the Cretaceous periods in that era. Plants were huge. Leaves on plants were enormous. Animals were large, obviously. There were dinosaurs around. There were small ones as well. The earth was pretty healthy. It was warmer. Okay, it was really truly what's called the greenhouse time.

And I'm not talking about, we could talk about these if you wish, you know, the glacial, interglacial cycles that are about 100,000 years long that we deal with now, and Malankovic described very well. I'm talking about tens to hundreds of millions of year cycles, greenhouse, ice house, greenhouse times when the Earth has been devoid of ice, for the most part, and covered in ice as a snowball.

So the Mesozoic was one of those times when it was high CO2, very warm and very healthy. Now those creatures, plants and animals, had had time to adapt to that. They had come out of one of the largest extinctions on Earth at the end of the Paleozoic, at the end of the Permian time, 70% of species or more went extinct. So this was a... And we defined the time by that extinction, actually the biology, the paleontology defines that, not the other way around.

So they came into a new sense and flourished, and that ended, and by the way, time is such a hard concept. Let me just give you a feeling for it this way, since we're talking about dinosaurs. Often you'll see in a diorama in some museum, a T-Rex having a battle with a Stegosaurus, right? Well, it turns out Stegosaurus had gone extinct long before T-Rex came about.

In fact, there's more time between the Stegosaurus and the T-Rex than the T-Rex and us. So process that to give you a feel for time, okay? And so now a big impact event happened at the end of the Cretaceous, a big meteor impact in Chixalub in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula. And the Alvarez father-son duo described that very well and put out an iridium anomaly around the world that we measure at the end of the Cretaceous and could see. I remember being in grad school at University of Michigan at that time, early 80s, and they came to speak. We were all so smart, we grad students. We had t-shirts made that showed an incoming meteor and dinosaurs looking up saying, oh, shit. We thought, a meteor killed

the dinosaurs, right. Well, that was right. You know, it had the fallout from that. And we didn't, as grad students, we didn't know much, did we? In fact, I didn't even learn about plate tectonics and undergraduate, that's how far back I go. So we are always learning. So the point here is, yes, there have been long cycles of changes in greenhouse gases, CO2 being one of those gases,

methane and others as well. If you come into the more nearer term, not to today yet, but let's say the last five million years, we've seen about 50 glacial interglacial cycles and they're pretty well documented. In the last million years, 10 of those. And what I mean by that is over every 100,000 years or so, ice comes down from the north. Canada is completely under ice and parts of the northern U.S., Wisconsin, Michigan, parts of New York City, very well documented. Under ice, and I don't mean a little ice, 1,000 to to two thousand feet up to a mile of ice for 80,000 years. And then for about 20,000 years, it warms and the ice recedes and we have an interglacial

period like the one we're living in now. And so during that interglacial period, and it started about 18,000 years ago, we see the ice melt, which means sea level starts to rise. And I'm talking about rates like the movies. The Gulf of Mexico here in Texas was over 300 feet lower than it is today, just 20,000 years ago. And it started to rise one to two centimeters a year, almost an inch a year vertical. This is a very rapid rise and flooded the coastal plain of Texas.

And then about 7,000 years ago, that level of, and it's been rising about one to two millimeters a year ever since in the last 7,000 years. So you've studied and seen from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to Enlightenment, all the way through to what we call the Industrial Revolution of this past century. In that timeframe, humans, modern humans,

have evolved in that last interglacial period. And yes, you're exactly right. It is one of the lowest CO2 periods in Earth history. And it's one of the coolest periods in Earth history. I'm not talking about the actual interglacial because it's warmer than it was 80,000, 20, 80,000, 20, but overall that periodicity of interglacial is one of the coolest periods in Earth history that we are enjoying today. And a guy named Milankovitch worked all this out while on house arrest for 20 years on paper. We call him Milankovitch cycles, and we understand why. It's a combination of the rotational orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and that varies, so it puts you closer and farther from the Sun, and then the

tilt of our Earth's axis and the rotation of the axis combined to form these 20, 40, and 100,000 year cycles, embedded cycles. And we see this repeated over and over. That's driving modern climate today. And it's driving historical climate in what we would consider the recent past geologically. Now superimpose on that, let's come into the today. In the last 100 years, we have been burning

fossil fuels more than that. Actually, we started with coal, of course, in the 1800s. It powered our ships and trains. It replaced wood and, hey, the carbon-based fuels that we lived on for thousands and thousands of years to make our fires and to cook our food and to power our vehicles, oxen and horses. Hey, let's just call it hey, you know, stuff we grew. And then along comes coal and we discover that, hey, nature did that, it made it really compact and dense. So it's almost pure carbon.

Now there are a lot of things in it that aren't good when you burn it for the air, the actual pollutants if you will, socks, knocks, mercury, particulate matter, etc. that come when you burn coal. So, but that was a great fuel. It allowed us to do things we've never done before, including boil water, make steam, turn a turbine and run a generator and make electricity,

and that changed the world. That's the event in time that made us modern societies, at least as you said, those of us who are fortunate enough to have that, many still don't, more don't than do. And we can talk all about that, made films about that. So here we are, and we've been burning coal, and then along, so that's carbon and then a long come hydrocarbons,

which are complex carbon and hydrogen molecules, complex chains, long chains, and those burn even better, especially when we refine them and make them into gasoline and diesel and jet fuel. And that's great. We can put that into a vehicle now. It's very dense.

I'm happy to talk about why dense matters, but you get a lot of bang for the buck. You put 20 gallons of gasoline in a tank, and the impact of that in energetic terms is remarkable. Okay, I can drive two, three, 400 miles on that tank of gasoline, and there's no nothing left except CO2 emissions, and you just fill it up in three minutes and go do it again.

It's incredible. Okay. Now it has the CO2 emissions component to it. Along comes methane, CH4, for hydrogens for every carbon. Now methane, natural gas is what we call that, and there are other gases that are natural propane, bupane, pentane, whatever. But methane is the one we use a lot of. It's even more incredible the energy density of methane

is phenomenal. You're burning the hydrogen as well as the carbon. So we get heat from that. It's a very versatile fuel. I can make electricity by burning methane, boiling water, steam, turbine generator. I can put it directly into vehicles in a compressed form, compressed natural gas.

I can use it as a molecule to make things like plastics or ammonia for fertilizers, you mentioned agriculture. And those fertilizers again changed the world. So that all is natural gas, plastics. It's one of the most versatile molecules we have today. And it will be around a very long time. Produces less CO2 when you burn it than oil or coal, but it still produces CO2. And methane itself is a greenhouse gas, pretty potent one. Doesn't last as long in the atmosphere, but it's pretty intense, more intense than CO2 in the atmosphere.

So these, as you said, are very complicated. But we've moved out of this carbon economy into a hydrocarbon economy, and now we're truly coming into a methane economy. And that economy, it won't be a few more years before we are using actually burning more methane than coal in the world globally, not just modern societies, but as a world. And that's the methane economy. It will have arrived. And good thing, because it does so many positive things for humanity and human flourishing and also less in terms of its environmental impact. It doesn't have the sulfur and the nitrogen and the particulars. Good thing we've gone there.

And then from methane, we can make hydrogen, you know? And methane is the best molecule to make hydrogen. So you've heard about a hydrogen economy. Your listeners probably have. Hydrogen didn't form naturally very much. It is in places, but you gotta make it. You gotta split molecules, either water molecule, H2O or methane CH4,

the two common ones. That takes energy. Less energy to split methane than water. So energetically, and economically, it's better to use methane as a source of hydrogen. And we'll be off in the hydrogen economy in some phase. And you can use hydrogen for a fuel, and you can use it as an electricity carrier and all sorts of other things. So this has been a really nice natural transition that's been happening driven by efficiency and physics. And when those happen, the economics are good. And so the markets adapt them and they grow. And that's what drives progress at the end of the day.

That's a long narrative, but. Well, there's three things I wanna pick up on in that. One is cycles, one is timeframe, and one is progress. We can define all those. So let me continue with my doubts, let's say. So if we're trying to see the first problem I have when I look at the analysis of climate doom prediction is the problem that you alluded to with regards to time frame. It's like, well, is there too much carbon dioxide in the air?

And is that a danger? And the answer to that is, well, it depends on when you compare it to. And that isn't just something you can brush off to the side, because it's very, if the starting point you choose for your analysis of increase or decrease determines whether you see an increase or decrease, the germane question is, well, what starting point do you pick? And if the answer is, well, if you want to demonstrate an increase for political purposes, you pick this starting point.

And if you want to demonstrate a decrease for political purposes, you pick this starting point and you don't have a different criteria, then the question itself starts to become incomprehensible. Because there's no such thing as the question, is there more carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere? There's only the question, is there more carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere compared to then? And then is arbitrary.

So I have no idea as a data scientist how to solve that problem Especially in the light of the other things we discussed like you said well the planet is cooler than it has been according to many historical comparisons and more people die from cold than heat by a lot and so if you're Measure for what constitutes relevance is effect on humans, cool isn't to be preferred to warm. Now, there's obviously extremes over which that isn't true at all. But as a rule of thumb, the mere fact that things are getting warmer isn't in and of itself an indication of catastrophe. And

neither is the fact that there's no... And then they clarify too on the cooler part, just so nobody goes, oh, it was colder in the glacial period for 80,000 years. We're in a warm now. But in this one to five million glacial interglacial, the whole package, if you will, is cooler than much of Earth history in the past. In fact, most of Earth history in the past,

just to clarify on that. Okay, okay. So let me add another wrinkle and tell me what you think about this. So when I first started to study the sorts of things that we're describing now, I was also curious about the relationship between economic development and environmental consciousness, let's say, that would be attitudes and actions that are associated with some concern about the medium to long-term viability of the environment. And one of the things I discovered very quickly, which I think is just an economic truism as far as I can tell, is that if you're so damn poverty stricken that your fundamental concern is whether or not you're going to have lunch for your children, then the probability that you're going to spend a second thinking about

the medium to long-term viability of the general environment is zero. And so one of the things you see reliably in economic analysis is that if you can get people up above $5,000 per year in GDP production, then they start to take a medium to long-term view of environmental sustainability. We could define sustainability perhaps as something like their concern that the planetary resources that they hypothetically enjoy now are likely to be there for their children and their grandchildren and perhaps even their great-grandchildren. So the time frame starts to expand. And so the rule is something like with increased luxury, let's say, or even enough food, which

isn't exactly a luxury, your time frame of analysis expands. And if you were actually concerned about transforming human beings into a species that optimized its medium to long-term commitments, it looked to me like there's nothing you could do that would be more effective in that aim than making sure that the bottom two billion people aren't scrabbling around in the dirt so desperately that they're willing to burn

tomorrow to ensure survival today. Then there's a corollary to that which is okay. That means that absolute privation is perhaps the fundamental environmental concern if this psychology of long-term view is correct. And the fastest way to make poor people rich or to get the hell out of their way while they're trying to do it themselves is to provide inexpensive energy, which, because there's no, in my sense of the world, there's no difference between energy cost and wealth. Since energy is work, and work does everything that's productive by definition, if you lower

the cost of energy, you lower the cost of work, and that makes people rich. So I would like you to tell me if you think there's anything wrong with that reasoning and then maybe we could also have a discussion about progress on the energy front. What would it mean to, okay, so let's do that. Yeah, when we made our first feature-linked documentary film on energy called Switch, we filmed that in 2009, 10 and post in 11, released it in 2012. And we went to 11 countries and showed you each form of energy where it was best in the world So we weren't trying to make something look bad or good

We absolutely did the trade-offs of the pros and cons of each form in that film However, and it got picked up by academic campuses and it's still shown around 50 countries kind of as the first energy quote transition film we show we weren't really transitioning. So energy is modern life. There's zero doubt about it. It turns out energy is all life. Even the poorest among us need energy to survive. A few years went by and I said to our director, hey, we kind of left out Harry Lynch, by the way, brilliant filmmaker. We left out more than half the world,

those who don't have these things. So we made a second feature length film. We filmed in 18 and 19 and post-released it right at the beginning of COVID in 20, and that was on energy poverty. We went to six different countries. And we looked at the circumstances in which people are living in Ethiopia and Kenya and Nepal and Vietnam and Columbia, different

continents and again, some of the positive stories around that Jordan that you are describing, but some of the real challenges as well. What happens when you don't have energy and you can't get above that $5,000 personal wealth level. What's the name of that film? It's called Switch On. Switch On. Okay, so there's Switch and Switch On. Yes, yeah, and it was a very powerful film,

a very different style. I'm your on-screen guide and we take you in and spend time in these different areas. And what you see and it came to light on us is you can't, aid is interesting, people take aid and intentions are always good. And here, here's some aid to go do this thing. It turns out that thing, be it a pump for water or a solar panel for a little bit of electricity,

maybe a light bulb, et cetera. It doesn't work unless the community wants it. They themselves have asked for it, and they will then take it into the cultural situation in which they will benefit from it. And we saw this over and over and over again. It becomes something that is sustainable, it survives, it becomes a virtuous cycle of growth.

I'll give you a few quick examples. You know, an induction cooktop in Nepal, selling them on the street markets now, they're very expensive, but it changes cooking indoors with wood. And we take you into the study Memorial Hospital there and we watch kids and mothers die. More die every year from breathing indoor particulates

by cooking indoors than COVID killed in 2021. 3 million a year. It's nuts. Another example is hair salons in Bangladesh where the women, when they first got electricity, they used it for hair salons. And you have hair salons, Bangladesh where the women, when they first got electricity, they used it for hair salons, and you have hair salons, who would have thought? Well, culturally, it's a safe place for women to gather.

They share stories. Harris is a piece of culture. The money they get, they invest back in the community at three times the men. And so all of a sudden we have a virtuous cycle. We take you to Kenyan, look at pumps for water to grow agriculture, farm or john. So his backyard is now growing crops that more than he needs

so he can sell them into the marketplace. And now that creates an economy, a micro economy around which growth begins to happen. His choice, his need culturally, not what we go tell people to do. We the rich world. Why say we, call it what you wish. I've heard global north, not my favorite term.

I've heard whatever you want to call it, but those who have more. The neocolonialists. Yes, those who have more. And so yes, energy is fundamentally vital for that and affordable energy, and then moving into reliable energy. And then eventually, I don't like the word clean.

It's kind of meaningless to me, but energy that has lower environmental impacts, but you're exactly right. I'm not gonna worry about that environmental impact if I'm trying to eat or my kids aren't in a school, etc., etc. I'm going to worry about basically, you know, go back to Maslow, you know, my hierarchy of need.

I have to have these fundamental things first in order just to survive, and everything else becomes a luxury that I'm not going to indulge in. So that's what we see. We, the world needs to come out of energy poverty, it needs to come out of economic poverty so that we can all begin to, there will always be disparity and wealth, but we can all begin to function at basic,

we would consider basic human levels now. And that's why we made that film and that's why I'm so passionate about this dialogue. I absolutely think that global leaders, all of them, every single time, Jordan, energy security, Trump's climate security, every single time. Look at the action, not the words.

Look at the action, look what Germany has done. Look what China is doing. Look what we've done. Even in Canada, where Mr. Trudeau has some pretty, you know, heady words, but look what you do. You don't sacrifice your energy security, or at least you haven't. Now we're starting to see-

Not so far. Not so far. And we're seeing circumstances even in the US now in California and in New York and other places where they're starting to get toward the edge of sacrificing energy security and wow get ready as that starts to happen. We've already seen it happen in Western Europe. We could talk all about the countries that are doing that.

Well, let's talk. Well, let's do that. So we could do two things in parallel here. So one would be we touched on the idea of progress. And so we have a working definition of progress that's kind of erode, risen out of the conversation. And so one of the things we could say is that if our goal is the alleviation of misery

and the sustainable alleviation of misery, then one pathway towards that is to provide low-cost energy to those in absolute privation, working on the hypothesis that first of all, that's obviously a good thing to do if you think that unnecessary suffering is something to be dealt with. But also, if your fundamental concern is sustainability,

even over human flourishing, which I think is a mistake, but anyways, even if it is, the data that indicate that people who have a certain degree of security can take a longer term view seems crystal clear. So to me, it's a mystery why this is actually an issue, because once you know issue, you know, because once you know that, you think, well, obviously then you make a hierarchy of energy sources and you

find out what's inexpensive and you calculate the trade-offs in relationship to even potentially carbon dioxide production, but they're sort of a pathway. And I'd like your opinion on that. So, you know, dung isn't so good. Wood is better than dung. Cold is better than wood. Natural gas is better than coal. You know, better. It's denser. But you can move along that. Yeah, okay. It's denser. So how do you see progression in the marketplace with regards to the alleviation

of absolute privation? What's the logical steps to undertake globally? And then how is that being violated, let's say in places like Germany? Sure, yeah. And not to be too sanguine about it, but in the end, physics wins. Yeah. Dense wins.

Now, what do I mean by dense? The bang for the buck on a per unit weight or per unit volume, or even a per unit area, that's called surface power density. Where do you get more energy for your buck, if you will? And so if I can do more, I used gasoline as an example of dense, but let me throw a curveball. My tank of gasoline will drive me 300 miles. Okay, well, the energy equivalent of one little uranium pellet that I stuff into a fuel rod

and a nuclear reactor, one pellet, centimeter high, half a centimeter wide, the energy equivalent would drive me from New York to Los Angeles and back to Dallas. One pellet. That's dense energy compared to gasoline, which is very dense compared to lots of other things that aren't dense. The sun, the wind, hydro, biofuels, things that take a lot of land to do. So physics wins in the end, and we need to allow physics to win. I am not a person who thinks that it's either the economy or the environment, Jordan. I just don't believe that.

I don't think that the data lead is there. I think we in this sense can have both, but we can't have all of both. Okay. There's the trade-off space. If I want a 100 percent zero CO2 emissions, well, I don't get energy security and I don't get economic security. I get very little of that, okay? I gotta bring that.

Why would you want? Well, why would you want a hundred percent? This is the thing I don't quite get. I mean, let's assume that there are people who are willing to make that trade off. Their goal is like net zero carbon dioxide emission or even reversing it. It's like, okay Your point is we're gonna pay a major price for that and the we isn't gonna be you and me

The we is gonna be the world's poor wherever they happen to be and they're gonna get walloped like Devastated by it. What's the old line when they work it when the when the When the aristocrats catch a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia. Well, it's always the case if 5% of the world's population is barely hovering on the edge of viability and you double their energy costs, they all die. Yeah. It turns out- So this is not good. So-

It turns out 60% of us live in some level of energy poverty today. I'm going to say that again. 60%, 5 billion out of 8.2. And I say some level, they're not in abjects, energy poverty and economic poverty, not the bottom billion. That's come up after COVID, unfortunately, we were doing great, but it's that next level where energy is not secure to them. It comes and goes.

Unpredictably, the electricity is maybe on an hour or two a day. My fuel price is volatile and I don't have it sometimes. We don't understand these things. These are so-called electrified energized economies, but it's not, well, you and I have. Nothing close. Right. Okay, so this is- Which is something that works all the time.

All the time affordably. Yes, yes, and that's very hard to achieve, but the 99% is what we strive for. So I think you've kind of brought us back around to the question I never answered about greening, so I'll just chime in on that. Yes, the earth is greening, you can see it from space. CO2 is a food, you described it well.

We have to be a little cautious there. Some of that growth is not plants that are the kind that we would expect in those environments, and they're not very diverse. So you get a lot of aggressive growth, sometimes of exotics, things that have come in, including in the reefs. The Great Barrier Reef has growth,

but it's a few species, not the healthy diversity of species that we see. So we got to be a little cautious. This is back to the completely factual and factually complete on describing what that looks like and whether it's kind of a healthy growth, if you will. A very important point. But nonetheless, yes, the world isn't baking in the Sierra. The Sahara Desert hasn't gone crazy in that sense either. But I come back to that trajectory of energy then. Fortunately, we can address the emissions with dense energy.

Okay. Maybe we're lucky, maybe it's not a coincidence, but methane, CH4, hydrogen, nuclear, uranium and thorium being used as a heat source to boil water, make steam, turn a turbine, run a generator. That's fission. The fusion side of the equation, which is getting closer, I used to smile, but it's getting closer and I'm not a nuclear physicist, those are things that have zero to no emissions and they're very dense and the technologies are ever better. And so there's a solution staring us in the face here. It's not necessarily the one that climate scientists

and climate, well, just the climate impassioned. Not because a lot of climate scientists are wonderfully deep thinkers and great scientists. They leave the realm a little bit as they start to talk about energy. Just like I leave my realm if I get into deep climate modeling. So we have to allow the scientific space for those who have the most expertise to help us move forward in energetic terms to address emissions and human flourishing. And it can be done. Well, we should make a stronger statement than that.

There is no bloody way we're gonna move to environmental sustainability on the backs of the poor because they won't have it. If we produce enough economic havoc, which we could easily do, then we'll produce a deterioration back to very short-term thinking and we'll produce an environmental nightmare. So it isn't can we have human flourishing or zero impact on the planet.

It's that if we put the poor under too much stress, which is first of all, is an absolutely unconscionable thing for rich people to be doing. But if it does, there's gonna be a kickback, the likes of which we can hardly imagine. Yeah, yeah, let them eat cake. Well, guess who ate cake? Yeah, right, right, or zoo animals, right.

Right, because if you take a given country and you destroy the economy, you're gonna destroy all the animals. Because as soon as people get hungry enough, they're going to eat everything. So we have to manage human beings, so to speak. We, we have to allow human beings to step up the energy density ladder,

so that they can address their absolute privation, so they can take a longer term view. And there's no environmental solution absent of that as far as I can tell. Right. There's an interesting, we've talked about energy, the economy, and the environment. There's another E that's really important here,

one of efficiency. And let me just briefly describe that and how I think about efficiency. In the United States, we use about a hundred quadrillion BTUs of energy every year, a hundred quads. What does that mean to anybody? Nothing.

That's interestingly enough, it's about a quadrillion BTUs about the same as an exodule, a term physicists love. That means nothing. It's about the same as a trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Maybe we're getting a little closer into this space, people start to understand. It's a lot of energy, a hundred quads. Primary energy comes into our system. We use it for residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation reasons.

That's how we use energy. Heat and cool things and move ourselves around, okay? A hundred quads comes in, Jordan, guess what? Only one third of that does useful work. Two thirds of that is wasted. Most of it is heat and other things. It doesn't do anything useful. So we have a lot of low-hanging fruit in that space.

Even if we could go to 50% does useful work, think of that. That adds another 17 quads of energy without adding any more primary in. So there's an incredible opportunity here as the world begins to lift itself from poverty, and the modern world continues to stay healthy to do more with less. I'm not changing my lifestyle, and those who need to change your lifestyle can, but we can all do more with less. I'm not changing my lifestyle and those who need to change your lifestyle can, but we can all do more with less. We can become a lot more efficient and how we use energy. And that's how we ended our very first film. When you end a film, it's with the last thing you

want them to remember was on just personal efficiency things. It's not rocket science. These are simple things we can all do. And I'm not saying, you know, go to austerity measures and turn off your heating in the wintertime, not at all. Quite the opposite, just simple things we can all do. And so that's a very important piece of this overall equation. And I think the opportunity to waste less as the world begins to modernize is there. It's ripe for the taking.

That's one of the taking. That's one of the things we, the modern societies, can transport to evolving, developing and developed, and emerging economies is efficiency as they gain energy. Yeah, well, it makes sense to me that as the developing countries develop, they're going to start with technologies that to some degree we have superseded. So you see this, for example, with China's hyper reliance on cheap coal, and some of which is provided by the Australia that won't burn coal themselves.

Now I know coal produces a fair bit of particulate matter, but it doesn't really matter where the carbon dioxide is produced because it turns out that we all share the same atmosphere. So the Chinese and the Indians in particular, and those are the most populous countries, and the same thing is going to happen in Nigeria at some point because it's going to be the world's most populous country by the year 2100. They're going to step up the energy density ladder, and it would make a certain amount of sense that that developed countries, China can obviously do this to some degree by themselves, are going to turn increasingly

to sources of extremely high density, like nuclear sources. But then I see these weird inversions where countries like Germany and states like California have decided, well, the next right thing to do in the progression towards a sustainable economy is to shut down the nuclear reactors. And so, and then in, well, in Germany, they burn, they burn late night coal, which is high particulate, high carbon dioxide, as a consequence, at least a partial consequence, of shutting down the nuclear reactors. And so when I see that, I think, well, what the hell is going on? Like, there is no standpoint from which that makes sense. So what are the impediments? What do you think? Like, what's the proper pathway forward in your estimation? And what are the

impediments to that at the moment? Boy, there's a lot here to unpack. I'll try to be brief. We have Lignite in Texas. We call it black dirt. You know, it's hardly coal. It's not anthracite by any means or other forms of coal. So Germany has that. They increased their coal production 13% when they sat down their nuclear reactors, and climate sciences were aghast, and they should be. That was crazy. Okay.

There's a cultural component to Germany's fear or aversion to nuclear power. I don't fully understand it. France, on the other hand, about the same size, etc., has a nuclear fleet. They needed it, so they didn't have options, so they built their nuclear fleet. It doesn't make sense. You can't make logical sense of that. That's a cultural human thing in Germany and other parts of the world.

They're going to change. You're starting to see it. Maybe they'll evolve it with small modular reactors, which they'll think is different. But it's not. It's the same technology. It's fission. Whether they're, you know, light water reactors or sodium cool, whatever. Pick your favorite. It's still fission. But that's fine. You know, if that's what it takes to help mitigate some of that fear, great. You see China and Russia are building 75 percent of the world's nuclear reactors today,

just those two countries, and they have a lot more on the books. China gets it. Now, they're also growing everything else rapidly, and this is where that completely factual, factually complete comes back in. You will hear, completely factual. China is the leader in solar and wind in the world. They have more than any other country. True. You scale it all down and it's still a trivial part of their total energy consumption. It's just a few percent of the power alone,

electricity alone and electricity is only 20 to 25% of total energy. So this is the scale challenge, Jordan. China has to have it all, and they are going toward dense. China's energy alone, China's annual energy consumption alone, just that country, is more than all the electricity consumed in the world combined. All the electricity in the world. Okay, so that's a scale challenge. in the world combined. All the electricity in the world. OK, so that's a scale challenge.

We just have to start to understand the scale. You said it very well. India and China combined are one out of every three people on the planet today, one out of three. Now, get in a little population demography, China's birth rates or some fertility rates are some of the lowest in the world at 1.2. India is now at 2.1, which is the replacement rate.

India has come down to 2.1. Who knew? I didn't. There's a great demographer. Right. Shock, a shock. Yes. And a UT Austin guy, and what's been happening since the last 30 years, it picture this graph. I'm a data guy. You know, the bottom is GDP per capita. And this axis is fertility rates.

Right. Yeah. So looking at those the other day, it's incredible. Every large country in the world over a million people, since in the last 30 years, the fertility rates are just plummeting, all of them, and they're moving toward wealth. They're not wealthy, they're moving toward wealth. And so this is a remarkable trend underpinned by energy. Now there are a lot of people very concerned about this, including China. This gets philosophical.

We define growth as good. If you're not growing, you're dying. What's China's not growing in population anymore and they don't bring people in like we do in our countries. So they're seeing their population do this and how are they going to continue to grow? And how's the world gonna grow? What we see in those studies is around 2080,

that's not very far away. The world peaks at 10 billion people from our 8.2 today, and it doesn't plateau, it plummets back down. It plummets. Well, so you've added another interesting and counterproductive observation. So even if you were concerned about human impact, let's say, if that was your primary concern was human impact on the biosphere, no matter how that was measured, your logical steps forward would be to make the poor rich as fast as possible,

not least because that is by far the most effective method of population control we've ever invented. As you pointed out, it's absolutely staggering. Step one. In some countries. Yes, well, and so now I would say, as you've already intimated, that the fact that fertility rates have declined so precipitously is going to become a problem in and of itself. But we can leave that aside.

We can especially leave that aside if we're concerned about human impact on the planet because we would recognize that as a net good. So even if you're one of these people who derive from the clob of Rome, think there are far too many people on the planet, the obvious cure for that is to make everybody rich because they stop having babies. So it's another reason that I can't understand the pervasive nature of the insistence, for example, that we have to deindustrialize to serve the planet's interests most appropriately. And then we can look at practical examples like Germany, where this is starting to be implemented, and all the consequences appear to be negative, including the fact

so Germany, and I think I have these figures about, right, energy is now five times as expensive in Germany as it needs to be. But it's also far dirtier. It's more unreliable and it's more dependent on dictators to provide. Like, in whose interest even hypothetical is any of that? It isn't serving the green agenda in the least, quite the contrary. So- Well, maybe it's in the interest of you use

the word dictator, autocrats. Yeah. Well, a short term. Okay. It keeps me elected. Yeah, well, it seems to, it seems to be keeping people elected and people like places like Germany. Of course, all the farmers are having a short circuit in Germany at the moment. And that didn't go so well for the Dutch authorities. That's right. Yellow vests in France, you had the truckers in Canada. I mean, the people are starting to speak and they're starting

to speak wisely. People, I think you and I both believe that the markets are very wise and very smart. You know, they get it. People, we understand the markets understand these things. It may not be quite as quick as some would like, but your fundamental question or and I think you're not confused because I don't think you're confused about too much personally, but your fundamental question is a very real one. How can we make energy more expensive? We're starting to deindustrialize. We're seeing companies and industries leave. We're increasing the cost and the burden on the poorest amongst us, that's regressive in economic terms. It doesn't help the environment because the rich can actually afford to buy these things from other

places, import energy. And again, another quick fact in the US, only 11 states produce more energy than they consume. 39 states consume more than they produce Jordan and buy a lot. And the big ones, New York and California, they're importing their energy. Well, that's great as long as you can, but ask Germany how that went when the Russian gas stopped. It didn't go well. And so we have to start to conflate these things

in what I lovingly call the radical middle and have for a couple of decades, we gotta put these in there and there's nothing glamorous about the radical middle. It's brutal. There's data and there's compromise and I'm not always right, but it's where the big challenges lie. And that middle is between energy, the economy, and the environment. How do those play together so that we can solve these things for real, let our young people have the complexity of these. They're very smart. But if we keep telling it's binary, clean and dirty, good, bad,

believer, denier, they're not gonna have the tools. They're just gonna think they're evil and they're good. It's a kind of a bizarre story. And most of the people, and I speak to a lot of people, when they hear these things, they come strongly saying, I want to be in there. I didn't get it, hadn't learned all that, hadn't heard it. I want to be part of that complex equation and help to address these things for real. So what you're doing matters a lot, communicating.

Well, some of what's happening with, well, so imagine the attraction of that binary system is twofold. Okay, so the first is that it's something, it's very straightforward and simple. Industrialization has environmental costs, therefore industrialization is the problem. Okay, so once you've identified that, you don't have to think anymore,

you just have to be against industrialization. So that solves a lot of technical problems. And that reduces entropy. It reduces complexity, at least in the short term. But then there's an additional psychological component that's unbelievably powerful. And I think the radicals, particularly on the environmental left, have been very good at falling prey and capitalizing, falling prey to and capitalizing on this. So the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out that in a fairly large subset of adolescents, those who are maybe higher, further along the cognitive distribution,

so a little bit of intellectual horsepower to spare, they go through what he described as a messianic phase in late adolescence. And what that would mean anthropologically is that there's going to be a subset of bright kids who they've removed themselves from dependency on their parents. They've socialized themselves into the peer group, but now they're looking to take their place in the broader world, conceptually and practically. And there's a philosophical element to that, and the philosophical element, and this is the messianic part, is that they want to do, they want to act ethically and do well at the highest level of

striving. And so what we're offering them in our culture is the chance to play hero on the environmental preservation front. And so that satisfies that need, which is a real need, but it also does it in a very false way because it, and this is one of its attractions. Just like you can oversimplify the industrialization issue, industrialization is bad, and all human impact on the planet is to be issued. You can simplify the moral issue, which is now if you're on the side of the planet, you're good and your moral duty has been done. Now that's absurd, but the thing is,

is that people, let's say like you, who are promoting the radical middle, haven't elucidated a vision that's as compelling on the psychological side with regards to the fulfillment of that deep metaphysical need as the environmentalists who offer young people the opportunity to be planetary saviors just by waving around a placard. And this is a real problem. And it speaks to problems like the attitude in Germany that's anti-nuclear.

Your sense is, well, that's irrational. Look at France, from whom the Germans import energy, by the way, who've managed a nuclear transition brilliantly and have energy to spare at a low cost. There's no logical reason there, but these so-called illogical reasons, they're real reasons and they're real impediments. And, you know, one of the things I do believe that people found attractive about your talk and about the sort of things that St. Bjorn Lomborg are doing is that a new sort of standard is being waived, which is something like, well, here's a better moral vision. How about we make everybody who's dirt poor rich as fast as we possibly can, and then we can

have our cake and eat it too. We can serve the poor, which is like a classic left-wing orientation. And I've been shocked, literally, I've been shocked to the degree that the radical leftists will sacrifice the poor to the planet. Because I wondered when push came to shove, because there's two competing tendencies there, right? There's the green environmental tendency, fair enough. But there's the, well, everything should be done in service of the poor tendency. And what we've seen time and again in the UK, in Germany, in Canada,

well, and around the world, is that if we had to choose between hypothetically serving the planet and helping the poor, we'll pick serving the planet in the nanosecond and to hell with the poor and that's That's not a vision that a lot of people find particularly attractive. I think you are offering an alternative to that Yeah, yeah, and I'll be extreme in this statement, but almost the elites have flipped What used to be the Republicans in the US used to be sort of Elite if you will and now they're working, I think, more with that next class than the Democrats are, the elite. It's almost flipped in a strange way.

Again, that's an extreme characterization. Within those bodies, we have everyone. Okay, the whole spectrum. But I think you can have your cake and eat it too, as long as you don't try to eat the whole cake. Right, right, well that's the net zero problem. Yes. So like no, zero, like no, net zero,

that's the wrong measure. Like you can put that in your mind and you can remember it in a second. It's a nice cliche, but zero. It's like, you're not thinking when it's zero. Right. But you know, it turns out when that report came out of the IEA a couple summers ago,

I speak to a lot of boards and sit on several. I got a call from a CEO and he said, you got to come talk to my board this week. And so I did. I read it and it was incredible. The assumptions that went into that, this was pre-Glasco, okay? COP, I think it was 26 in Glasgow.

They set up a framework in which there were a lot of crazy assumptions, but the craziest amongst them, Jordan, was this. That the energy consumption in the world would start to go down two years later, which is today, down, aggregate energy consumption in the world down in order to achieve that net zero. And there are a lot of other things.

And I looked at that, I made the figures and I showed this wedge between GDP and human population before we peak in 2080, etc. That's literally impossible. It won't go down. Now we can help lower the per capita consumption and therefore start to help things. Nobody challenged it. It became a roadmap for COP26 and I was with Dan Juergen. He was on our PBS show and he said, Scott, you have to write this up.

So I put out a little piece called The Road to Glasgow's Pave with Bad Assumptions. It was, but we used it as a roadmap. I think this is one of the single more destructive almost, too strong of a word, but destructive constructs that we're dealing with now is this concept of net zero. Now, admittedly, net means if you can capture some out of the air and atmosphere, that's part of net.

So I could still emit as long as I'm offsetting by some level of capture, net zero, not absolute zero. Important distinction, but we're not. Net zero is this weird target that I think a lot of people have rallied around. We've got to begin to think beyond that and recognize using analogy. I want to run a marathon. I'm 64 years old, I want to run it in four hours,

which I will never do, but that's my goal. Let's say I run it in four and a half hours, but I finish it. I achieved something big. You know, it wasn't four hours, it was four and a half hours. Maybe net 40 is okay, or net 50, or net 30. You know, we've brought down, but we haven't imploded the economic health

and wellbeing of not just the poorest among us, but the whole global economy, which is starting to happen. Because if we do that, the environment's gonna get crushed. You know, you start- It's gonna be irrelevant so fast that- Look what Germany did. You can't even imagine right. It's going to be irrelevant so fast that...

Look what Germany did. You can't even imagine it. It's not hypothetical anymore. Germany consumed more coal. They burned more coal when they needed to. And other economies will do the same thing when push comes to shove. Global leaders, say it again, prioritize energy security over climate security every time. So we've got to... So, young people, you ask the good question,

how do you get them away from just that? We have to begin to think away from A, B. Okay? It's not an A, B linear like that. It's actually A, B, C. You can't jump from A to C just to the environment. There's energy, there's the economy, and there's the environment, and it flows that way. Healthy energy underpins healthy economies,

healthy economies invest in the environment. So the more we can accelerate that, the better and young people working in there, if you could have two goals, lift the world up from poverty, isn't that amazing, and begin to clean up the environment. Not perfectly, but begin to clean up the environment.

But intelligently. Intelligently. Well, and well, the other thing too on the environment front, like it's also not obvious to me at all that the most compelling environmental problem is associated with carbon dioxide. It's not. It's not. Well, so for example, one of my bugbearers for a few decades has been the state of the

world's fisheries, the oceanic management, because of all the stupid things we've done in the last 100 years, and we've done many things that weren't stupid, but of all the stupid things we've done, decimating the ocean's fisheries has to rank up there very highly. And like the estimates that I've read that I believe to be reasonable, and I'm certainly no extremist in this matter, is that we've depleted like 99%

of the world's accessible fish stocks. And given that that's a renewable resource that can actually bounce back pretty damn quickly, given how many eggs fish lay. It can bounce back quickly if you leave it the hell alone. It's like another part of the problem with this unidirectional obsession with climate, apart from its sketchy base in five different ways, is that there are a lot of other environmental

problems that we could be addressing that they just get no attention at all. You and I grew up learning about water and land and air. That was the environment we were protecting. Clean water and abundant water, tough problem. Clean soils and land, less land use is good, more with less and clean air, not talking atmosphere, air, local air.

So the land, the air and the water are three of the four components of the environment and the atmosphere is a fourth. Those are not just interchangeable, they're interconnected. So if I start to put, for example, in place something that has no emissions but consumes a lot of the Earth's land, solar farm, okay, a large wind farm. I just drove through the Texas Panhandle recently.

You can't do it without seeing wind turbines. It doesn't consume all the land, but they're everywhere. Low density forms of energy use a lot of land to collect energy so that it can get it dense enough and abundant enough for us to use. I go beyond that and say to get to those wind turbines, which are composites and copper and lots of other precious resources and solar panels, which have lots of metals in them and other polysilicates, batteries to back them up, extreme amount of metals,

just the amount of mining. And look, I'm a geologist. I don't mind mining. Doesn't bug me, because I know we mine everything we don't grow. But I can also tell you the amount of mining that it's going to take to produce enough energy collectors in that system is incredible. So we're talking about not just land but water, mining.

I've asked audiences every time I speak, Jordan, I speak to about 20,000, 30,000 people live a year. How many think mining is green and never has a hand gone up. Never. Because it's not. You know, we can make it better, but it's not green. So when you start to think about the earth in that holistic sense, with climate being one component of it, this is another thing we have to balance the trade-offs between the land, the air, the water and the atmosphere.

And it's messy. It's not perfect. We have to get away from this idea of nirvana perfection if we could just get rid of CO2 in the atmosphere. No, it won't go that way. So one of the reasons that we... So at this art conference, we had a lot of music. And there was a reason for that. I mean, we wanted to make the conference beautiful, and we wanted to give people a breather from purely semantic discussion. But there's another reason that's deeper than that, and it has to do with the meaning of music per se.

You talk about trade-offs, but there's actually a positive way ofcribing what you're getting at with regard to trade-offs. So what you see in music is a harmony between competing forces and The the beauty of music is the balance of that Cooperation and competition across some span of time, right? It's it's a melody of interweaving patterns. And you know that if you're somewhere where things are going well, that there are many competing forces that are harmoniously balanced, and there's an intrinsic beauty to that. And when you talk about trade-offs, it's a pest... There's an implicit pessimism in it that, you know, there's going to be costs.

But there's another view that we tried to put forward in our conference, which is that if we get the balance between the multiple requirements for life optimized, that there's an intrinsic beauty in that, and that's the right target. And so it's not exactly trade-off. It's not trade-off. It's multi-dimensional optimization. Now, it's more complex, as you said, because it's multi-dimensional. You can't say that if we get to 100% on axis A, we've now established the kingdom of God. It's like, well, it's 70% on axis A and 65% on axis B. But there is a genuine harmony and goal there. Yes.

And that's a, see that's the kind of higher order goal that positively, positive could be attractive to the young people, for example. Absolutely. Who become hyper concerned morally about the planet. Absolutely. Right, and so I know you're being hard headed when you talk about trade-offs, but,

but like if you have a family, you're not trading off exactly between the kids. Yeah, well, I definitely love one of my four kids better than the other three. I just don't tell them which one. Well, right, right, right, exactly. But I use a turnery diagram for this concept. And in a triangle diagram, everything has to sum.

It's 100% on one corner. As I move away from that corner, I'm picking up components of the other thing. But everything sums to 100% somewhere in there. And the reality is in the middle somewhere, that radical middle is a balance between the things we're trying to do. So let's not call it a trade-off.

We're not giving up one, we're balancing them, good word that you use there at very powerful. Yeah, harmonizing, yeah. So your wavelength, okay, so I'm gonna take your music, I got musicians for kids, but those are just wavelengths in science. So those are wavelengths of different amplitudes and different wavelengths.

And so the big bass wave comes in and the treble wave and a loud and a soft, but they can sound beautiful together when that music is made in that way. We've talked about the wavelengths of CO2 coming and going, of ice coming and going. Nature produces a lot of things that have those embedded cycles or waves, Jordan. That's how science of the earth works. And we can study and measure it just like music. And so finding that beautiful harmony,

and by the way, the music was beautiful. I stayed on the brakes and filmed those musicians. They were just phenomenal, is the goal. Otherwise you end up with a cacophony of sounds that are just, they're an irritant to hear, right? When you truly don't get things right or something is just out of tune and you can hear that pitch difference, you know,

it's like, oh, oh, you know. Well, we have an instinct, we have an instinct for that balance, right? That harmonious balance. And it's also a good place maybe, and this is a good place to close this part of the discussion. This is also why it's so important to rely on bottom-up information propagation of the sorts that can be provided by markets. It's like, so our hypothesis

is, well, what we're aiming at now is a target that has to be specified multi-dimensionally. It can't be reduced to any given dimension. It has to be specified multi-dimensionally. It can't be reduced to any given dimension. It has to be specified multi-dimensionally. Now that makes it complex. So where is that target? The first answer is, well, we don't exactly know. And the second answer is, well, we can take hints from bottom-up markets because they're the most intelligent computational devices we have.

They're closest to the reality of the environment because they're made of millions of people going about their business in direct contact with their local environments. And we can allow those signals to propagate. And in that is some indication about what the appropriate harmony might be. So we see that disturbed, for example, in Germany because the farmers have decided that the dimensionality of the solution is inappropriate in relationship to what they need,

and they're throwing a spanner into the works. And that's inevitable. And so, well, partly what we've been trying to do with the ARC is to specify a little bit more explicitly what that multi-dimensional landscape might be, right? And then to set that as a target that people could strive towards morally. Now, it's complicated, so it's difficult to package as a story, but it does seem to me that,

and there isn't anything you said today, I think that contradicts this, is there's no reason to assume that we couldn't collectively set our minds to the amelioration of absolute privation through appropriate energy provision in a manner that would radically increase medium to long-term sustainability of the whole project. Right. I agree with that. That's not a pie in the sky notion.

No. No, I published a piece earlier this year, which I titled Net Zero Poverty. Right, right, right. And the editor changed the title as they do, but that's the concept is to drive without that nothing else will work, Jordan. Nothing else works. Nothing else will work, Jordan. Nothing else works. Nothing else works. We have to strive for that. We, the collective, have to strive for that. And the most important dimension, and we geoscientist geologists deal with this all the time, not

that I can truly understand it, but probably have studied it more, let's just say that, is the dimension of time. And so we plot all these things, but that time dimension is so vital because if I'm struggling to feed my family, I don't have 20 years. I don't have a year. I have now. And yes, I can think in longer terms because I'm wealthy, but it doesn't mean I'm gonna act in longer terms. And we see this propagated over and over. It's not intentional hypocrisy, but it's apparent hypocrisy and what our leaders are saying and what they themselves are doing

in their own personal lives. And people pick up on this. They say, look, you don't tell me what to do if you're not willing to do it in your own life. And so how do we get the market, the whole market engage? And I have to believe that the Greta Thunbergs of the world and she's in her powerful voice, could help carry this story. I used her as a metaphor, similarly, for the young people,

could carry this story of poverty and environment together. Okay? The dual challenge, if you will. So I gave a TED Talk a couple years ago on this, the dual challenge, if you will. So I gave a TED Talk a couple of years ago on this, the dual challenge, and talked a lot about how do we carry that? And so I said to them somewhere in the middle of that talk, and this was the shocker moment, as we were looking at solar panels when turbines and batteries,

1,100 students in a room, and I said, I explained where those come from. And I said, there's no renewable energy. Don't hate me, but there's no renewable energy. There's nothing renewable about mining, manufacturing, collecting, wearing out and dumping and doing that over and over again. That's not a renewable process.

And that they digested and a lot of long line afterwards. But this is this complexity a little bit that they're ready to go for. My kids range from 33 to 23, they're ready, they're brilliant. They're ready to tackle this challenge. I know the young people in the world are as well if they can get structured around this. So at Switch, the not-for-profit I started many years ago,

we do something called a case competition. It's universities around the world, teams before competing on a case competition on energy poverty. They're multi-disciplinary teams, and they have three weeks to try to lift real countries out of energy poverty. This year, we gave them a pair of countries to compare and contrast. And it's hard.

They keep wanting their each one has a volunteer mentor, very powerful, and they present in real there's cash prizes, you know, online presentations and they're so empowered. But it's so hard and they're like, there's no answer. Correct. There's a suite of possibilities as you move out into that time future, that time dimension, but you can constrain that in real ways

that don't fly off into sort of physics never, never land, if you will. And they come away empowered. I would love, we've done this four years in a row, several thousand students, let's energize them to build these core, C-O-R-P-S core of young people, and your network is incredible, to begin to take that and run with it,

and let old guys like us just invest in them and say, run, run, run, go, go, go, how can we help you to address these two issues? That would be powerful. Well, that's an excellent place to stop and pretty much dead on time. I think I'll probably name this net zero poverty and we'll do energy and environment, the dual challenge. That seems like a good, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, well, thank you very much for talking to me today and for, and for to everyone who's listening and watching and for walking through these problems. It's so interesting, eh? Because to me, when I started to study these problems more deeply, all that it did was make me much more radically optimistic. Because what I discovered was, oh, I see. So the solution to energy and environmental sustainability is the eradication of absolute poverty.

Well, that's a good deal. Like, why would we be upset about that? That's such... You couldn't possibly imagine a more positive solution to that suite of problems. No more heart-rending privation. no more heart-rending privation and the propagation of a much more long-term view of sustainability around the world. Well, that's a damn good deal. So, well, so I think your talk at ARC went some ways and all the work you've done has gone some ways

to making that a more real possibility. And we'll hope that that's the direction that prevails as we move forward in this new year. Hmm. Jordan, it's been a privilege to be on with you. And thanks for the invitation and thanks for all the work you do. Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure.

So thank you to everybody watching and listening. And this is the first podcast I've done in the new year. So happy new year to all of you. And thank you to the Daily Wire Plus crew for making this possible. I'm going to continue this conversation on the Daily Wire Plus side. I'm going to talk a little bit about the origin of these ideas. I think that's what we'll delve into. And also where you see them going in the future practically

and how that might be facilitated by this ARC enterprise. And so, for those of you who are inclined, join us on the Daily Wearer Plus side. And otherwise, thank you very much for your time and attention today. And thanks again, sir. Very interesting. Thanks.