The Megyn Kelly Show - Climate Truth: Climate Change Alarmism and Reality, with Michael Shellenberger and Benji Backer | Ep. 94

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Michael Shellenberger, author of "Apocalypse Never," and Benji Backer, founder of the American Conservation Coalition, to talk about climate change truth, and separate alarmism from reality. They discuss what's really happening with global warming, the rise of climate alarmism in politics and the media, what happens if the oceans rise as feared, the way being "green" has become a status symbol, the truth about recycling plastics, nuclear power vs. other forms of "green" energy, Bill Gates' idea to "dim the sun," how conservatives can take the lead on the climate, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, we are getting into climate change, global warming, and how scared do you need to be? We've got an honest broker on the program today who wrote the book, Apocalypse Never, Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. His name is Michael Schellenberger, and he is incredibly thoughtful, smart, and thankfully for us, easy to understand. He took some dense subject matter and translated it in a way that we all, my entire team and I, felt was very user friendly. We're all kind of riding high right now because he took a subject matter we all felt a little intimidated by.

I don't know if you're in that category with me and made it like understandable. So we learned a lot and you're about to learn a lot if you stay tuned and listen to Michael. And we've got a blast from the MK past Benji Backer, who is a young whippersnapper. He's a guy who's a conservative conservationist. So he's a Republican who's concerned about the environment and climate change and doesn't want to be shamed out of that position by people like AOC, who sees the mantle on this, seizes the mantle on something like this and throws out a bunch of insane ideas, making people who are being more rational about this issue feel like I don't want anything to do with her. I don't want to be associated with any of her weird policies.

But in any event, this is not an issue that the right should cede to the far left people like her. So we're going to get into all of it. I think you're going to find it illuminating for those of you who are already very well versed in climate change and fossil fuels, I apologize to you for the elementary approach, but I wanted to learn and I wanted to make this digestible for all. And I think you're going to like it. So to our guests in one minute, but first this. Michael, how are you?

Good. Nice to meet you. It's a pleasure. I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I feel like I have a lot to learn and you seem like the guy to teach me. Well, you're very sweet. I'm a huge fan of yours. I've always respected your journalism and I was really delighted to get the invitation. Oh, thank you. Well, I was surprised actually. I've been watching some of your TED Talks and some of your TV hits. I actually did not know that you used to be, you're still a nature lover, but you used to be a nature-loving Greenpeace activist who wanted renewables to fuel the world.

I was. I was anti-nuclear from a young age. I advocated for renewables for about 10 years, including to then presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign team. And he did a big investment in renewables in 2009. And it was really that experience of confronting the problems that renewables create that led me to rethink my position on nuclear. That's so evolved. It's so evolved of you to get new information and change your position. Too few of us do that. And I forgive me, but I'm going to keep asking you to define terms because I don't want to assume anybody knows anything because I will say I came to this a little uninformed and I'm just going to, for the benefit of my audience,

assume some of them are where I have been. So renewables means what? So renewables refers to what is basically a set of sources of energy, wood, water, wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal. The vast majority of that, what people think of today is solar panels and these large industrial wind turbines and so yeah i mean they it's basically renewables were how humans the main source of energy for humans for most of our recorded history so it was really in the late 1700s and the 1800s where we moved away from renewables and towards fossil fuels. And everybody agrees that it was that transition that first allowed the industrial revolution to occur. You couldn't get the industrial revolution with wood and water wheels. It just wasn't possible physically to produce enough energy. And so there's this idea that we're going to transition back to

renewables. But it's one that really very few serious energy scholars believe, in part because we just have, there's so many people and we have such a high energy civilization, we use so much energy, that the dilute nature of renewables, the fact they don't produce very much energy for the amount of land that they require and the amount of workers that are required and capital just raises a whole bunch of questions about whether going back to them is even possible. Right. It's funny when you think about somebody like AOC's Green New Deal, where we're going to have every single building, every single house in the whole world redone, gutted and redone to be more energy friendly and depend on renewables. And everyone's

going to have a car that plugs in and all of that is going to be powered by the water wheel. I'm being extreme, but to your point, right? Like how are we going to get the wind turbines to power all of the things in that wish list? All right, I'll get to that one second. I want to take you through it in a way I think will be easy to digest for the audience. So let me start with this. Let's start with a big overall question. We do in the world have a global warming problem. Yes or no? Yeah, we do. And can you describe it? Yeah, I mean, the easiest way I'd say is say climate change is real. It's an environmental problem.

I don't think it's our most serious environmental problem. I think people that look at other environmental problems beyond climate change agree with that. It's a byproduct of the use of fossil fuels and to a lesser extent, land use changes over the last couple hundred years. But, you know, most of the trends are going in the right direction. Carbon emissions peaked in most of European, most big European countries in the mid 70s. They peaked in the United States about 15 years ago. In fact, the United States has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other country in world history over the last 20 years.

We're absolutely on track to meet the promises that we made at Paris and Copenhagen climate talks by the United Nations. And on most other things, you know, deaths from natural disasters, food production, hardly anybody dies anymore of natural disasters in the United States. It was 411 people in 2019. That's like nothing when you think of car accidents killing over 50,000, drug overdoses killing over 80,000. We produce more food than we've ever produced. We have a problem with so much food. In most parts of the world, we have too much food. We produce 25% more food. And there's no scenario, no scientific scenario in any of the IPCC and our governmental panel on climate change reports or other peer-reviewed scientific literature that suggests that those trends will reverse themselves.

And that somehow something will happen that will result in the scarcity or shortages of food or of some big increase of natural disaster deaths so it's a problem you worry about some of the yeah i mean all else being equal you don't want to change the temperature because we have our societies our farming the even the natural environments that we've protected are all kind of set up around a particular set of temperatures but not all else is equal and climate change is a byproduct of all this human flourishing and prosperity we've had. And we should manage it like we do other problems, but we shouldn't think of it as the end of the world. Right. And they have all these catastrophic histrionics around it. A couple of small

questions. Are the terms climate change and global warming interchangeable? Yes, they are. They should be. Anybody trying to suggest they mean two separate things is being misleading. Okay. And the term carbon emissions, they come from fossil fuels. Can you define both of those terms? Yeah, sure. So we moved, as I mentioned, we moved from renewables to fossil fuels with the industrial revolution. So we stopped using wood and we started using more coal. So coal is a fossil fuel. There is probably not relevant to your listeners, but there is some disagreement about where oil and gas come from. The Russians are convinced that it's actually produced at the core of the earth. Most Western scientists think that it's produced by decaying

fossil plant matter. You know, so there's sort of disagreements about what it is, but basically fossil fuels refers to coal as well as to petrochemicals, which is natural gas, petroleum, and all of those byproducts. And then I'm sorry, when you burn them, they produce carbon emissions. They produce carbon dioxide as one of the many pollutants produced by fossil fuels. And the only one that it's not easy to kind of invent some sort of a scrubber or some sort of filter to prevent the carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere. Is the sole problem with those emissions, those carbon emissions going into the atmosphere,

the erosion of the ozone layer? Those are two separate issues. There are greenhouse, there are, so there's a set of gases that cause climate change. We worry more about carbon because carbon dioxide because it stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years as opposed to other ones like methane, which comes from cows. It's natural gas. It's also just the natural gas that we use for cooking and heating. When that goes into the atmosphere, uncombusted is also a potent greenhouse gas. And some of those gases, they also thin the ozone layer.

They should never have said whole. It's a thinning that we worry about. And so some of those gases do that, but those are easy to manage gases because we don't really need them. There's easy substitutes for them. They're used for industrial processes and also as refrigerants. We used to use them in various consumer products, but they were pretty easy to phase out. So the ozone is, it's not better, but it's getting better and it will get better. And that's why we don't hear as much about it anymore. And climate change, it's one that's just a long-term thing we're always going to have, we're going to have for hundreds of years. And so the main event with carbon dioxide emissions

is just to reduce the amount of them that we produce. And that means, you know, switching from coal to natural gas, and then I think eventually towards nuclear. So help me understand that, because I thought the problem was, and I'm going to show my ignorance, but I thought the problem was, all these emissions were going up, they were thinning or, you know, thinning the protection that we had between us and the sun and that the sun was heating the earth to up a degree or more degrees in a way that was potentially dangerous to us. But is that not the connection? Yeah, you're describing and totally understandable because they both kind of came about at the same time. But you're describing two separate problems. One is the thinning of the

ozone layer, which indeed has occurred, but we are doing a pretty good job of addressing. There's some problems, but it's not really worth going into. And we're doing a pretty good job of trying to restore the ozone layer through switching away from the chemicals that thinned it, because those were exposing us to really high levels of, and they do, to higher levels of sunlight than we should want. But then there's a separate issue, which is that the carbon dioxide and other gases, though, just to focus on carbon emissions, those form a heat trapping blanket that just trap more sunlight and warmth and heat on the surface of, you know, surface of the earth and

in the immediate atmosphere above, you know, above us. So that's, and that's climate change, that's global warming, two separate problems, one of which is mostly in the process of being fixed. And the other one is one that is also being addressed significantly by us reducing emissions, but is also the one that people are most apocalyptic about right now. Okay. And this is so helpful, by the way. Okay. So on that issue of global warming, the experts, the so-called experts tell me it's dire. It's dire. I mean, it is like, it's crazy, the histrionics around this, which is, it generally leads me to tune people out because I'm like, that person's clearly hysterical. You know, with all due respect to the 16-year-old activist from Sweden, Greta Thunberg, she seems hysterical.

And I don't generally get my advice from 16-year-olds, though I recognize she's had a massive impact. And, you know, on a sort of more human level, I respect the effort. But you got people like Bill Gates. I have a couple of quotes here. Bill Gates says the planet has to reduce the amount of greenhouse emissions being pumped into the atmosphere, which is currently at 51 billion tons a year. He says to zero has to get to zero by 2050 or catastrophe. That UN group you just mentioned, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the window to address the threat is closing rapidly. Farmers are not going to be able to grow enough food to support the human population. NASA says the 2020 global average temperature was 1.84 degrees in Fahrenheit warmer than the baseline 1951 to 1980 mean, which sounds kind of troubling. And then you've got the Wall Street Journal not being hysterical, but offering colorful facts that bring it home, like the melting permafrost has spit out human cadavers and a woolly mammoth that had been frozen for the past 40,000 years. Tuvalu, an island nation in the South Pacific who are jockeying right now for space as their island is going underwater. And just in case I didn't bring it totally home for you, we've put together

this butted soundbite of some of the cast of favorites. Listen. Climate change will kill five times as many people per year as the peak of the pandemic. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you? In five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer. Millennials and people and, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. Animals that can eat grass have very unusual stomachs. And so they leak natural gas both out the front and the back. Nobody knows how to get rid of that.

Nobody knows how to get cows to stop farting. Exactly. But that's another big source of greenhouse gas emissions. Okay. So we're at the beginning of a mass extinction. And the world is going to end in 12 years unless we do what AOC tells us. Your thoughts? Yeah, that's quite an amazing set of quotes you have. I mean, what's interesting is there's so much there. I mean, so just to pull some of it apart, sea levels are rising. They're estimated to rise by 0.6 meters between now and the end of the century.

That's about two feet. How terrible is that? I mean, not very. I mean, like, has anybody, it's like, I always kind of ask in the book, in Apocalypse Never, I talk about how, like, has anybody been to the Netherlands? I mean, when you go to the Netherlands, they farm seven meters below sea level. You know, it's like we have entire civilizations. And the Netherlands, by the way, is one of the richest countries in the world. It was actually the first really rich country of Europe.

They became rich through their sea faring prowess, which was also a kind of technical prowess that allowed them to live below sea level. So sea level rise should not scare anybody. The fact that there's bodies and woolly mammoths that are able to recover from the melting tundra is just cool. Anybody that says that's not cool and interesting is just lying because, of course, that's amazing. The Earth changes. So part of it is that there's just environmental change. And there was environmental change of, you know, it's just the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the is just always, it's not all equal. Like fossil fuels are how people are lifted out of poverty in everywhere in the world. And it's always been that way. And it hasn't changed. And solar panels haven't become magic to then start working at night. And wind turbines don't suddenly work when it's not windy. It's just these technologies in some fundamental senses haven't changed. So, you know, I mean, I will say Bill Gates is a little different than

Greta Thunberg in that he recognizes that you need nuclear power and you can't power the world without, you can't have, you know, reliable, cheap electricity without carbon emissions with any other source of energy than nuclear. But yeah, I mean, he is also somebody that wants to, you know, create some urgency. If I'm saying this in the most generous way possible and fear is just the most available and, you know, action-oriented emotion, you can get a lot of short-term action.

I mean, I thought Greta Thunberg sort of said it all when she said, I don't want you to have hope, I want you to panic. Well, who would want anybody to panic? I mean, panic literally means to behave in an unthinking way. That's not something I want for my worst enemies. I don't want anybody to panic. It's dangerous. So yeah, I think you've got you've sampled some of the real extreme bad stuff of the last few years. So just to just to reiterate, did you say that we're that the oceans are going to rise by two feet by the end of this century? Yes, that's the that's the median estimate. To me, that sounds like a lot like what about I've beachfront property? No, actually, we're slightly off the beach. But my point is like, what about the people who are at sea level? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I say to people, they go, people are like, I've on Twitter, people are putting these photos up of like these homes, like these homes, you know, they'll have to move. And I'm like, cry me a river. I mean,

no disrespect, but I'm kind of like, if you have like a house on the, on the, on the beach, like, sorry, but like, you may have to move indoors. Like, I mean, as compared to what problem in the world does that even rank close to? And then people go, well, people in Bangladesh. Okay. Well, people in Bangladesh are very poor. They live on the coasts, but the main factor for now and in 2100, for the people that are farmers in Bangladesh on the coast is whether or not there's jobs in the cities that they can move to and get. And that is just, you know, we're not going to, you know, so you kind of go, what are we worried about exactly?

That some people that live on the coast are going to have to move inland a little bit. And you mentioned the island of Tuvalu. I mean, I kind of laugh at these little islands. Like, first of all, let's just assume the worst is true and there's not evidence that the worst will happen and that those islands are inundated. So what? A few thousand people? Like last time, like there's eight, there's like almost eight billion people in the world. And you're worried about a couple thousand people on islands having to move, you know, inland or to some other island.

I'm just kind of like in the history of like wars and genocides and refugees and crises. That's like a that's nothing. That's a joke. You know how often the issue of Tuvalu comes up in the presidential debates. Everyone's worried about what's going to happen to the Tuvaluians. Yeah. But okay. So the, so you admit there is a problem.

There's a difference of opinion on how dire, but I think most people would say, OK, is there a way of reversing that? Can we stop it? And what's the answer to that? Because, you know, Gates is basically saying you got to you got to get rid of all greenhouse emissions by by 2050 or we're looking at catastrophe. So do you agree that we got to get rid of all greenhouse emissions and within the next, you know, let's say 50 years? Well, the way I try to answer it is with some sense of history. So I mean, we have what's occurred when I mentioned the US has reduced its carbon emissions over the last 20 years, more than any other country. We did so because of fracking for natural gas, which is a process that allows us to basically release a lot of natural gas trapped in a rock formation called shale about a mile underground. It's an incredible technological revolution.

It's everybody agrees, even radical environmentalists in our quieter moments, that natural gas is better than coal. And so we've been moving away from coal towards natural gas. It's sad for some communities, but even in places like West Virginia and Ohio, they're actually fracking for gas. So they've been able to replace some of the lost jobs. But basically everybody kind of goes, obviously burning gas is better than burning coal

and it reduces carbon emissions by half. So we've already had these energy transitions. I think that we will eventually move to nuclear after exhausting all other options because it's such a controversial technology. And in that process, we'll probably end up moving either to hydrogen powered fuel cell cars or electric cars. I don't know which, probably hydrogen fuel cell cars. And that'll happen over the next, you know, if you kind of gauge by the way that these things, the capital turns over, the equipment turns over, the power plants turn over, that's all going to occur over the next 50 to 100 years.

Bill Gates says it has to happen by 20, what did he say, 2030, 2050. You know, I mean, we may be close to peak global emissions. As I mentioned, the United States and most rich countries have been reducing their emissions for years, if not decades. It's just the poor countries that are now developing and industrializing that are seeing their emissions go up. And nobody should try to stop them from doing that since that's how they lift their people out of poverty. So, yeah, I mean, honestly, we could be at peak emissions. You know, I think it's probably more like if you made me guess, I mean, honestly, we could be at peak emissions. You know, I think it's probably more like if you made me guess, I'd say probably more like in 10 years. So I think emissions will peak in 2030. And then they'll go down gradually, they'll go down

to zero by, I don't know, 2100 2150. And that means that temperatures are going to keep going up, but probably not to really scary levels, probably, you know, I think most people think we'll go up three degrees above industrial levels. That's not like some switch is going to be flipped and then suddenly we're going to be living, you know, in the dark ages or something, or suddenly we're not able to produce food. What does that look like? If we go up three degrees and the year is 2110, let's say, what does society look like? What does the earth look like? I mean, it looks like it does now, but warmer. I mean, you know, I mean, to some extent it's happening, right?

I mean, or, you know, it may be happening. It's hard to, you know, again, if you're trying to talk about climate change, you're usually trying to talk about changes to the weather over 30 year periods. The climate just refers to the average temperature and weather of a given place or a given period of time. So it could be, you could say the climate of, you know, the last six months, but it's not particularly helpful. Most of we say by 30 years. So, but you know, let's say, so California gets drier and hotter, Canada, more of Canada and more of Russia open up to farming. And that's not terrible at all. Um, hotter parts of the world potentially get hotter. And that's not terrible at all. Hotter parts of the world potentially get hotter. And that means that they have to change how they grow food. But it's not like we suddenly stop growing food. And the main event when it comes to food, which everybody worries about because you need food, you worry that Africans can produce enough food because they're the poorest people in the world. And so, well,

what determines how much food Africans produce is whether they have fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors, like the same things that mattered for Americans. And I think it's telling and disturbing that the people that say they care the most about climate change are also trying to deprive Africans of fertilizer, irrigation, and attractors. So if they really cared about that issue, they wouldn't be trying to deprive poor countries of economic development. Coming up, we're going to get into with Michael what President Biden has been suggesting is going to happen here. Climate change is going to threaten the existence of the planet.

Run for your lives. Weirdly, there was no fact check on that by PolitiFact. But in any event, we'll ask Michael what he thinks when we come back. Don't go away. We heard from our president a very different forecast. He said climate change, quoting now, will threaten literally the existence of our planet if we don't take global action. And that is what a lot of people believe, that the planet is going away. Listen to Greta, how dare you, Turnberg. But to come from our sitting president, I mean, that's quite a charge.

Your thoughts on that one? It's ridiculous and sad. And also as a reflection on the state of the news media, there was no fact checking. There was no correction on that. There's no Washington Post story about that. There was, I'm sorry, maybe if there was, I hadn't seen it. No Snopes investigation. It just tells you the extent to which climate change has become a religion for secular, you know, Western elites. You know, in my book, I talk about there's three big factors behind this apocalyptic environmentalism. There's money, power, and religion. And I just think for a lot of people, particularly people that don't think they're religious, for people that think

they're somehow free of religious thinking, that it's become a reason, it's become something to feel morally superior about, it's become something to kind of show your status and your superiority to others. You know, it used to be that if you were rich, you would just want to be admired for being rich. Like, that's just how it was. But now you want to be admired for being rich and green. And so if you drive a Tesla, that's what you're doing. Right. And so, you know, it's become a kind of, you know, tal, the guys that make money retrofitting homes with insulation and retrofitting that make it a little bit more energy efficient, those guys all, you know, stand to make a lot of money on the stimulus and they'll donate to Republican candidates and same thing for the renewables guys. So, you know, there's a kind of, um, you know, I think it's who are always asking me, which is it? And I always point out, you know, when the conquistadores went to Mexico, they really believed in God, but they also wanted the gold. The two things are not inconsistent. And I think that'sbite there saying in five years, scientists predict

we will have, this is by the way, um, seven years ago, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer. Um, I think how many times do they have to be proven wrong before their, those in their cult start questioning them. But I do hear more credible people take things like hurricanes and say, you see, or I don't know if I'd say credible, but you know, we have like the wildfires in California, you got people like Leonardo DiCaprio going, see, and they point to any sort of natural disaster, hurricanes or fires or what have you and say, this is our future. This is Earth in the future. Unless you don't drive Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is NOAA, it is the main agency that everybody relies on. They predict that the maximum intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, which are the hurricanes we worry about the most, and tropical storms, the intensity will rise 5% this century, but their frequency will decline by 25%. So what exactly are people worried about? I mean, there has been no... So when a hurricane

hits Miami Beach today, it causes more economic damage than it did in, say, 1920, okay, 100 years ago. But the reason is because there's so much more wealth. There's so many more buildings. There's so much more infrastructure. There's the whole that's frequent and 5% more intense, they're probably going to cause less damage. So, I mean, on these, you know, here's another example. I, I, in my book, I talk about the Amazon and the alarmism around the Amazon, you know, and I, and there's, and, and it didn't even make the book, but I interview a guy, he points out, he goes, you know, the problem with a lot of this stuff is that they keep changing their mind on the Amazon. Is climate change going to cause more rain and thus more floods? Or is it going to cause less rain and thus more droughts?

Like, we're pretty good at predicting global temperatures, but we're, like, pretty terrible at predicting local impacts. I mean, I think some of it is reasonable to think, you know, California will get hotter and drier. That's pretty reasonable. But a lot of other stuff we don't know. And, you know, the, the, the, but the idea that somehow it's going to end in some Mad Max reality is like a joke. Like it's in the truth is it's not anything that anybody will actually be able to notice. It's more something that we'll be able to tell from much more subtle trends, you know, in, in data. What about, um, you're talking about the, the oceans rising. One of the things that people point to is the amount of plastic waste in the oceans, right? And that's why we're having paper straws now. We can't have the very convenient plastic bags, which I loved at the grocery store.

It is a hassle. Whoever remembers their damn bag when no one, no one. Anyway, it's a pain in the butt, but I have to do it because now it's the law and I have to drink out of the paper straw because now that's the law. And then my one comfort is like, well, maybe I'm saving a baby turtle. So am I saving a baby turtle? And, or is this literally teaspoons in the ocean that we're trying to resolve here? Yeah, well, there's a lot to unpack. I mean, the first thing is just that before we had plastics made of fossil fuels, which is made of a byproduct from the petrochemical industry. So in other words, every plastic, most of the plastics that we use today are actually

already a productive reuse of a waste byproduct. And so when you think of it that way, what plastic, what, what did we make plastics before we had, um, petrochemical plastics, we used animals. So we used the tusks from elephants to make piano keys and billiard balls. Um, and then we use the shell from sea turtles to make what was misnamed tortoise shell glasses or tortoise shell jewelry. And they would rip the shells off sea turtles in really brutal fashion. And we almost wiped out sea turtles by using their shells for plastic. So what saved sea turtles was using plastics from fossil because then we no longer needed to hunt sea turtles to extinction. So in truth, plastic has saved wildlife, not killed it, has saved more wildlife than killed it.

As for the plastic waste in the ocean, it appears that it's almost entirely a function of attempting to recycle. So we now know that over 90%... I know it's really a scandal. You can't make it up. No, it's actually much worse than anybody. No one's really properly reported on it yet. But basically 90% of the plastics that we pretend to recycle is not recycled. And most of it is shipped, has long been shipped to poor and developing

countries. China finally, a couple of years ago, said they wouldn't take it anymore. Yes. I've never seen a report on this. Yeah. So it is good to recycle your aluminum cans and your tin cans and your glass. And paper. Those are all things that are good to recycle because the process of recycling them, it's worth it to recycle. It's not worth it to recycle plastic. It's just not, it's just not, it's so light and it's not high quality enough that you just end up using more labor and energy to recycle it. We have a good solution to plastic waste and it's landfills, which we use mostly in the United States and in Europe and other countries, including Japan, they incinerate. And their incineration wasn't as good as it was today, 40 years ago. But today, in Tokyo, where people are famously paranoid of pollution,

they incinerate their plastic waste right there in the middle of the city, and it's done safely. So we have good solutions, but it was the effort to recycle that resulted in us shipping our plastic waste to poor countries, which then ended up making its way into the oceans. Wow. That's unbelievable. So let me, I mean, here in New York, if you put your plastic in your trash bag, they'll slap, the city will slap you with a fine. They, you know, they actually do go through the trash bags and figure out who's not following the rules. But and I don't know where you are, but do you do you put your plastic bottles in the trash or in the recycling bin? Well, I'm literally like like right now. I mean, so in Apocalypse Never, I have a chapter on plastics and we got very close without quite explicitly saying that the reason for all the plastic waste in the ocean was because of rich

world consumers trying to recycle their waste. But since the book came out, which was last summer, there's been more reports that have really connected the dots. So literally, I was just talking to my wife, because it doesn't feel right, even to me, I know this better than anybody, it doesn't feel right to me to even throw my plastic in the trash, but I'm doing it. I don't know if my wife has completely shifted over. I mean, I thought, I think it's such a scandal that I was even thinking like someone should do a book on it. And I'm just kind of tired of it because I wrote, I wrote a whole chapter on it already.

But I think somebody should like campaign to make them to stop recycling plastic because that's what's causing the plastic in the oceans. It's a crazy, it's just, but it's sort of also not surprising. So the paper straw bit is absurd. It's doing nothing. Totally absurd. And what's worse is that they're now trying to create these things called bioplastics where they will make like utensils and cups out of like corn. That's terrible. You don't want that because what you want is to reduce the amount of land that we use for growing grains, you know, like crops and also biofuels is the same thing. See if you're you, cause, cause the plastic, it's not like when you're using plastic that you're, it's not like you're

introducing, you know, more air pollution or something, or that you're using plastic, it's not like you're introducing more air pollution or something, or that you're even using more fossil fuels. It's all byproduct from an existing industry that is not going away, by the way. I mean, this is where a lot of it was motivated by some idea that we're going to suddenly stop using fossil fuels and petrochemicals, particularly oil and gas, since it doesn't come from coal. That we were going to somehow stop using oil and gas and fertilizer and all the other things that come out of the petrochemicals, particularly oil and gas, since it doesn't come from coal, um, you know, that we were going to somehow stop using oil and gas and fertilizer and all the other things that come out of the petrochemical industry. And that's just ridiculous. Um, and, and it ended up with this, you know, because the intentions, the intentions were not actually to deal with the plastic issue, the problems with plastic, because if they were, people would have focused on

on expanding landfills and recycling to poor countries. And that's not what their goal has been. Their goal has been to try to get us to use basically to not consume as much or consume some more primitive form of material. I am just now understanding that, like where plastic comes from, I did not know that it was a byproduct of fossil fuels, that it was a, that it was waste product from something we're already using. Yeah. I mean, it's like, um, remember when, when we were, um, I think you and I are around the same generation, um, when we were kids and we learned about the Indians and when they would eat the Buffalo, they would use all the parts of the Buffalo and how that was a good thing. And

yeah, I mean mean basically plastics are using the entire petrochemical buffalo so to speak and people you know environmentalists and progressives are like horrified when you talk about it that way because they think that oil and gas are are not natural which of course is just absurd because if you think they're fossil fuels and again the russians don't but but either way they come come from Mother Earth. And so if you're going to be using these products from Mother Earth, then you would want to use their byproducts as efficiently as well as you could. Hmm. So I take it then you're not in favor of the Green New Deal because we are told by AOC that, and just to bring people up to speed, she wants the elimination of all fossil fuel energy, including natural gas. She definitely

does not want nuclear energy. She wants to eliminate, as I mentioned, 99% of cars. She wants to gut and rebuild every building in America to be retrofitted with state-of-the-art energy efficiency. She wants to eliminate air travel, build high-speed rails. She wants a government-guaranteed job, vacations, paid leave, and other benefits for everybody, free education for life, and no more meat. Meat gets banned too. So she wants to get rid of, which we're about to get to, your favorite source of energy, which is nuclear power plants, and do of that with the wind turbines and the solar panels. Yeah.

Um, and you can kind of hear it when you describe it the way you described it. I mean, she's basically wanting to stop civilization, right? So you kind of go, she wants to us to stop using the things that made civilization possible and that make it possible.

And that's, um, having energy dense energy sources that allow for us to have cities because, you know, we had renewable powered cities for a while, horses and carriages, and there was so much manure that literally New York before the invention of the internal combustion engine was like unlivable. There was so much flies and disease and and it smelled horribly so yeah i mean um and then this thing about meat you know um as i point out in my book if you go vegetarian you reduce your personal emissions somewhere between two and four percent it's like irrelevant from a climate change perspective and what really matters is just

use is eating meat more efficiently using um you know, concentrating cattle on smaller areas of land. The Green New Deal, as you know, has evolved into Biden's Biden has broken into his infrastructure bill, giving a lot of money to guys to retrofit homes for really marginal, because our home, the truth is our homes are much more energy efficient today than they've ever been. And, you know, Obama did a bunch of money on energy efficiency as part of that legislation I helped to advocate for in 2009. And they studied it. University of Chicago, in fact, one of Obama's top economists studied the results of the program and they studied it. University of Chicago, in fact, one of Obama's top economists studied the results of the program and they discovered that it was terribly cost inefficient.

It did not pay for itself. That was the idea. And now they're basically proposing to build a lot of transmission lines through some beautiful country areas in the United States, but also through some critical habitat for endangered species, where the whipping crane is potentially threatened. They just gave a permit to wind

developers to kill the California condor, which is crazy because it was one of our most special endangered species. So it really, they just renamed it, you know, because Green New Deal was such an unpopular name and now it's just the Biden infrastructure bill and budget. So and and just to put a point on that, they can avoid they can avoid doing those things and killing the condor and all this if they if they reconsider nuclear power, which is my next point. But before we get to that, can you just tell us the promised land? Okay, we're going to reduce the emissions and we're going to go all renewable and energy efficiency only. We're going to turn down the thermostat and do all renewable energy with the wind and so on. Vermont, AOC's buddy Bernie

Sanders, Vermont tried this. Vermont said, that's us. We're green. We're a blue state with a green attitude. And what happened? Well, yeah, I mean, Vermont, I point out in the book, you know, Vermont promised to reduce its emissions 16%. They went up 24%. A big part of the reason why is that the climate activists, including one of the most famous environmentalists in the United States, Bill McKibben, advocated for the closure of the nuclear plant. It was mostly replaced by natural gas, since that's what's available, and emissions went up. So yeah, I mean, nuclear is 20% of our electricity. It's over half of all of our carbon-free electricity, and yet the people that say they care so much about climate change are the ones working to shut it down.

We're about to shut down the second of two reactors at a nuclear plant in New York called Indian Point. The California governor has personally fought to shut down our last nuclear plant, even though California has had blackouts for the last three years. We had power outages last summer because we didn't have enough power. It wasn't that complicated. And the person that was in charge of running the electricity grid said, he said, I warned against this. This is what happens when you shut down your nuclear plant and you don't um and you imagine that you can just power your country or your state on solar you know california we've done so much solar more than any other state um but it you know it turns out solar panels don't work at night and they don't work when the sun is going down which happens to be the exact same time that people are coming home

to work. And at least in our house, turning on every single light and turning on the television and the radio at the same time. So power demand goes up at the moment that the sun goes down. And at those moments, you need to have reliable sources of electricity. So there is something really about... I mean, I is, I mean, I'm writing a new book on, on the so-called homeless crisis, but there is something about progressives where in the name of progress, you know, they're often trying to undermine the sources of so much of that progress. So let's talk about nuclear power, because as you say, I think we're around the same generation. I was I was born in 1970 and growing up in the 1970s there.

This is what I remember about nuclear. There was a scare in New York where I'm from, New York State. When nearby is in Pennsylvania. But it was the same news. You know, I was subjected to the news cycle at Three Mile Island, where there was almost a there was an incident. I was like one of the nuclear reactors. It didn't melt down, but they had a problem with it. There was an incident where everybody thought they're going to get radiation. And then my old pal, Jane Fonda, who coincidentally, like I just in researching this before you came on, her movie was released

like a week before Three Mile Island happened. She has been this lifelong green activist, and she's against nuclear power. And she released this movie for which she later won an Academy Award called the China Syndrome, which is a play on words saying like if a nuclear reactor melts, it's going to go into the ground through to China. And it's a very scary, good movie, but it's not really based in reality. But you know, in the same way Jaws ruined the ocean for millions of Americans, this movie helped ruin the reputation of nukes for millions of Americans. We have a clip from it here. Listen. This is Jack Goodell. We have a serious condition.

You get everybody into safety areas and make sure that they stay there. It's a stuck valve of some sort. Wait a minute. How do you know it's a stuck valve? Because I was up there last night looking for you, and I talked to that man, Jack Adele. He told me it was a stuck valve. If that's true, then we came very close to the China syndrome. The what?

If the core is exposed, for whatever reason, the fuel heats beyond core heat tolerance in a matter of minutes. Nothing can stop it. And it melts right down through the bottom of the plant, theoretically to China. But of course, as soon as it hits groundwater, it blasts into the atmosphere and sends out clouds of radioactivity. The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind is blowing. Render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable, not to mention the cancer that would show up later.

Scary. And then, of course, you have Chernobyl, which didn't help either. So I think some of these things are why people say like, nukes. And I know you've written about how moms and women in particular, they've spent a lot of money trying to gin up our fears, those who oppose this method of energy. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so yeah, you and I are both of the same generation. And we grew this is, you know, we were really born into a period of significant fear of nuclear. And it really goes back to the bomb. I mean, it's impossible to understand people's fears outside of that. So that even when people raise concerns about nuclear energy, when you really listen to what they're saying, what they're really raising concerns about is the bomb, you know, like the stuff around the waste

or the radiation, or even the way we respond to accidents. I mean, I thought that when there was a meltdown or an accident on a nuclear plant, it was the same thing as a bomb going off. And since there's radiation involved, you know, there was no sense of that. I didn't know sense of it as a child. Um, so I think that even when you get to something like China syndrome, the Jane Fonda film in 1979, which, which came out about a week before the, the, the meltdown, a partial meltdown of one of the reactors of three mile Island nuclear plant, Pennsylvania, that already we were so freaked out and understandably about nuclear weapons. of one of the reactors of Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant, Pennsylvania, that already we

were so freaked out and understandably about nuclear weapons. Because nuclear weapons really are scary. What they can do really is scary. It really is a different, a revolutionary technology and its power that I don't think we've ever completely come to grips with psychologically or spiritually in some ways because of the power they give us. And so, you know, you get to like, I mean, when we're in the 1980s and Chernobyl happens, you know, Reagan and the Soviet Union are having a, you know, a major verbal conflict. So I think the only way to really understand the, those fears, um, you know, is around, around the weapons. And in fact, I think even when you look politically, Republicans always were more comfortable with nuclear energy, I think, because they were more

comfortable with, uh, with nuclear weapons. Um, and, and Democrats and progressives were less comfortable with nuclear power plants because they associated them more with nuclear weapons. It's complicated because Al Gore's father was a huge advocate of nuclear power. Al Gore Jr., the Al Gore we all know, turned against nuclear power. So there was also a change in the 60s that had to do with kind of a sense that like the technology, human progress had just gone too far, you know, and that really we had sort of, we needed to kind of go back to some earlier period before all this terrible industrialization, you know, somewhere before fossil fuels, even. And I think that's why you get this kind of flight

or retreat from nuclear towards not just back towards fossil fuels, but also back all the way towards renewables. So why shouldn't people worry about a Chernobyl type meltdown happening in their state if we if we decide to lean into nuclear power? Yeah, so I mean, the main reason they shouldn't is because it turns out that Chernobyl wasn't that bad. I mean, it sort of sounds funny to say it, but I mean, for me, you know, after I saw the damage that was being caused by big solar farms and wind farms, which require 300 times more land than a nuclear plant, a bunch of my friends were like, hey, you really ought to just go take a second look at nuclear because it's really not what you think.

I looked at it. The first thing I did is I read the reports on Chernobyl. And it was sort of shocking how few people died and will die from the radiation that escaped. And then you start to learn more about radiation in general. And it turns out radiation is this thing we've been studying for 120 years. You know, Marie Curie, the great Nobel Prize winning scientist and her husband, they were studying radiation in the early 1900s, like how far were they from the blast. And we have these like really precise, and now with hospital CT scans and x-rays and all these things, and then Chernobyl and Fukushima and all these accidents, you have all this data of how much radiation is dangerous. And so we know that the amounts of radiation that people are exposed

to even during really bad accidents like Chernobyl, which the likelihood of happening again are very, very low. But even if it did, it's just not that much radiation. And so, you know, I'm from Colorado. We have much higher radiation than other states, mostly because of the uranium and the granite and also being at higher altitudes means you're exposed to more atmospheric radiation. But we have significantly higher radiation levels than other states, but we have lower rates of cancer and lower rates and longer life expectancy, probably associated with the culture of exercise that exists in Colorado. But nonetheless, if radiation were this super potent toxin, you would see it in other ways where we don't. And what we see is that, in fact, people can be exposed to even pretty high levels of radiation, like the guys who helped build the bomb in 1945, which ended

World War Two, literally like had plutonium that was in their bodies and would be in their bodies until they died. Some of them died with these extremely high levels of plutonium. So it's just not the kind of there's a supernatural, I think, sense around radiation. People say things like, well, we don't really know what could happen, but that's ridiculous. Like we actually have a really, we really have very good science of what happens at different levels of radiation exposure. I mean, you go to the hospital, you have a whole class of employees that know how much radiation is safe and how much is dangerous. It's part of their jobs. So now, first of all, finding out that you're from Colorado and what you said about the mountains is the first time I'm understanding your blasé attitude toward two

feet up in the oceans. OK, now it makes more sense. There you go. On to you, Michael. OK, so that's getting over sort of the biggest fears and sort of, I don't know, concerns about radiation or the nuclear plants. Can you spend a minute talking about why you like it? Because I saw your TED Talk where you talked about you had the Rubik's Cube, and I thought that was a very powerful point. So could you just talk about why you like it, why you think it's the best source? Yeah. Well, let me – I'll give you the Rubik's cube answer. So I held up this Rubik's cube and just said, you know, this amount of uranium can provide me with all the power I need for my entire

life, including all of my ridiculous jet travel that those of us in the rich world do, which is the biggest source of our energy and carbon emissions. You know, it's a tiny amount of matter, which as an environmentalist, if you're worried about natural resources, you don't want to use a lot of natural resource. You want to use a little bit. So a tiny amount of matter can produce a huge quantity of energy. And by the way, when people worry about the waste, the waste byproduct is the exact same Rubik's Cube amount of uranium that comes out of the power plant at the end of the process. So its energy density is really the, is the keys to understanding everything

about energy and the environment. So if you, you, if you have a high energy dense or what we call power dense, electricity dense power plant, then it means it's not requiring a lot of land. It's not requiring a lot of natural resource. So the reason that nuclear plants require a quarter of 1% of the land of a wind farm or a solar farm is just because the, you know, the energy coming out of that amount of uranium when the atoms are splitting apart is so intense and so hot, as opposed to like, you know, if I go outside and stand in the sun, you know,

if I stay in the sun too long, I'll get a burn. But it's just, you can just tell it's the amount of energy coming from that source. So. Wait, let me just jump in. So one, one quarter of 1%, can you just repeat that stat? It requires, yeah, or let me say, I'll say it's slightly more, it takes 400 times more land on average to generate the same amount of electricity from a, from a, from a solar farm or a wind farm as it does from a nuclear plant. And that's a function of energy density. Why do we not want so much land being used up? Well, we may not care. I mean, some people may not care. And I certainly don't think there's any kind of rational reason. But it just means that like for endangered species, you know, the species that we all care the most about,

like the endangered mountain gorillas of Central Africa, which are my favorite endangered species, or the yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand, that really the main threat to endangered species just comes from us using more of their land, more of the land. And so if you care about biodiversity and wildlife and endangered species, then we should just in general be trying to use less land. You know, I'm in, I'm right now, I'm in, I'm in Palm Springs and there's a lot of solar and wind farms going up here. And they're basically taking up the habitat that would be used for the desert tortoise, which is an endangered reptile. And I think part of our, you know, task for, you know, I,

again, reasons I can't, I can't give you a logical reason. It's more like a spiritual or a moral reason why we should as stewards of the earth, you know, seek there to be a little bit more land for other species. Um, but I would just say one other thing, Megan, in terms of kind of why I think nuclear is special. And, and, and that's that it's this, it is an extraordinary power. And I think it's Spider-Man, they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Or maybe that's the Bible, I can never remember. I think it goes back farther than that. Might it might, you know, and so I go, there's a spiritual issue here, which is that, you know, we have this power to split the atom. And it's never, ever going to go away because it came right out of just experimenting at laboratory levels with physics. responsibility to make sure that the technology does not slip into the hands of people that would do bad things with it. And so we have this incredible system globally where the Russians

and the Chinese and the Americans, we all work together to make sure that we don't let people with nuclear technologies do dangerous things with them. We keep a very close eye on it. And in order to do that work, you have to have a community of scientists and technicians and engineers who are regularly working with it. And the main way that we do that is with our nuclear power plants. We also produce kinds of medicines with nuclear, but the main thing is nuclear power plants. And so you have, for me, something that I think tests humankind, our evolved, the evolution of our consciousness, to use a really hippie sounding word. It's sort of our ability to handle a technology that on the one hand is really life giving, really life affirming. It allows us to have abundant energy without using much of God's creation,

you know, to just slip into some religious language and to allow ourselves to be better stewards of the earth in many respects. But that either way is a responsibility that we have and that we should make the most of it. We should be responsible for it. And that means taking care of it and using it wisely and responsibly, not attempting to get rid of it in ways that we simply can't. And I think is a flight from responsibility rather than an embrace. It's fascinating. You definitely give me a lot to

think about. I wasn't anti nuclear power, but I wasn't as pro-nuclear power as I'm feeling after having read your stuff and listening to you here. And by the way, people should just go onto YouTube and listen to your TED Talks because they're really good and you're very good at explaining this stuff, which is not true of a lot of people in this field. Can I ask you though, is there something that made the news recently? And I saw you speak out about it, but so we've got a lot of, have to do a lot, we have to think about energy sources, and we have to be realistic about what our best options are. And at the same time, understand that, you know, how people live realistically. And everyone wants to reduce the carbon emissions, including, as we mentioned, Bill Gates, and he is open to nuclear technology. But he also throws some stuff out there that you're like, wait, what? And he's Bill Gates. So you give him a little like, okay, Bill Gates, and he is open to nuclear technology. But he also throws some stuff out

there that you're like, wait, what? And he's Bill Gates. So you give him a little like, okay, Bill Gates is, you know, got a lot of money, and I don't have as much money. And so I'm just gonna listen. But he said something that was so shocking. I think a lot of people in your field are like, what is he saying? And he said, perhaps, he said that we should have a study of how we might dim the sun that, that would aim to reflect the sunlight out of the earth's atmosphere, thus triggering a global cooling reaction. And I saw you responded to that by saying respectfully, that idea is, and I quote bunkkers. So why don't you think that will work? Because if we could just sort of, you know, spray, it's like that movie where they talk about how the dad always just wants to spray everything with Windex. Why can't we just use Bill Gates's

Windex on the sun idea and avoid any of these problems. Yeah. Well, this is a real, I mean, this emerges, the idea for this of cooling the planet by spraying, there's a lot of different mechanisms, but the main one they talk about is spraying some sort of material, either it's usually sulfur particles

or now they're talking about calcium carbonate, which is what, you know, shells are made of, into the atmosphere to cool the earth. And they talked about this as soon as people started worrying about climate change, this was an idea that scientists talking about. It was always more of a thought experiment,

but now Bill Gates is talking about doing it. And I have been a coauthor with one of, with the Harvard professor that wants to do this. I have had, I've argued with him privately. I was disturbed to learn that they were proceeding with what they call experiments. I think the first thing to know is that it's dishonest. These are not experiments that will tell us anything, anything important at all about whether or not to cool the earth. Okay. Because we have no idea that they can, I'm, you know, it's just,

you go back to kind of a more basic common sense. They have no idea what the effects of cooling the planet will be beyond cooling the planet. They can't predict what will happen to agriculture, to food supplies. And I find myself getting, I get, I get, well, the reason I do have some emotion on this is that it's, it's gross. Like it's a growth. There's something I just, I have to use the word. It's just something unethical and immoral about somebody deciding for millions of farmers around the world, including the poorest farmers in the world in places like Africa that literally depend on the weather in ways that American farmers don't, you know, because we have irrigation, much of our stuff. But to go decide for the world that we're going to cool the planet deliberately and the unknown impacts on agriculture, I mean, it's appalling.

And so it's not an experiment at all that will tell us anything useful about whether that's a good idea. It's actually designed as a public relations exercise to normalize and socialize something that should not be normalized there is no way that you could ever get global agreement on something like this i mean first of all you'd have to get agreement from every single country in the world and even then look our system of representative democracy isn't an exact thing, right? Like in the United States right now, like half of everybody is unhappy at any, under any president, right? Like, like, and so you're sort of like, so we're going to have all the countries of the world,

by governments that all supposedly really represent all of its citizens that are somehow going to decide on this. It's absurd. Like it's like the social scientists that have studied this at oxford and at um and you know and other in britain and in various you know you know people that study it they go there's no way that you could ever get global agreement on this so why are we even talking about this and the response has always been oh but well there's global warming and humans are causing that yeah but it's a byproduct of our success of our civilization and it doesn't threaten our civilization. So I, I find it, um, I have to say it, um, I, I, I, um, unlike I'm on,

I'm an unusual person in the sense that I was a pandemic, I am a pandemic alarmist. I think that when you, and I appreciate Gates on this is that I'm not a climate alarmist, but I'm a pandemic alarmist. I think that when you and I appreciate Gates on this is that I'm not a climate alarmist, but I'm a pandemic alarmist. And the reason is, is that I think early rapid action to stop a pandemic from spreading is a no brainer because it's a much easier problem to deal with. If you have earlier alarmism, that's not the same with climate change. It's a it's a problem that's a hundred. It's hundreds of years with pandemics. Action within minutes and hours matters. On climate change, you're talking decades and centuries. So I'm a pandemic lover. So I thought

Gates, and I appreciate his work on vaccines on the pandemics. I think he's a good person at heart. But I think that this idea of cooling the planet, it's cartoon villain type stuff, Megan. I mean, honestly, I go, this is kind of the, this is the stuff where if you did a Hollywood movie, well, they didn't worry about it, but like, you would be like, it's so outlandish. Nobody in the real world would do it. Like Hollywood wouldn't even produce a script on it because it seems so ridiculous. Um, but yet that's what they're talking about doing. Yeah. Who, who the hell knows what you're, what kind of world you're unleashing for the rest of us. I want to ask you one other thing. I know we don't have that much time left, but I want to ask you, one of the things you

said is worth worrying about is an asteroid. So that's upsetting because that's one we really don't have any control over. And you do hear reports too frequently about near misses, which is a misnomer, of course. I guess it's more accurately a near hit, a thankful miss. Because there is a scenario where you go, there might be some way that climate change would be apocalyptic that we aren't imagining. There's various scenarios, and none of them are scientific, and none of them are used by any of the major scientific bodies, but they do exist.

But then you start getting into other apocalyptic scenarios. You know, and the big ones are asteroids, super volcanoes, you know, pandemics, wars, and aliens, which is now in the news a lot. And honestly, I look at all those and I go, yeah, those all have better mechanisms for like civilization destruction than climate change. You know, um, you actually have a mechanism. There isn't one for, for climate change. So I look at all of them and I worry about them. Um, you know, I'd like to see more disclosure about these UFO sightings. Honestly, I don't think we know what, I don't think the public knows what those are. And I think they've been ridiculed for a long time, unfairly. Um, and then on asteroids, yeah, like on the one hand, we do have a program.

We do have an asteroid detection program. Most of what I talk to kind of, when you look at it, you ask people, do we put enough money in that? And you kind of go, well, maybe, but we do keep missing a bunch of them, you know, so yeah,

I think sign me up for spending more money on asteroid detection. Like I'm on board with that. Why can't Bill fund a study Yeah, I think sign me up for spending more money on asteroid detection. Like, I'm on board with that. Why can't Bill fund a study that aims to create the spray that bounces those asteroids right off the Earth's atmosphere? That would be helpful. That we could get behind.

Yeah, the funny thing is we know how to do it. I mean, they did a Hollywood movie about it. But that mechanism, I believe, is the same one they proposed, which is basically to, you would try to land something on it and move it off its orbit, you know, well before it got here. But yeah, if you can't detect them, then you're hosed. But, you know, honestly, Megan, I think the boring reality is that, you know, humans are doing pretty well, like on most measures at a global level, you know, the things I worry about in the United States, I think the bigger things to worry about than climate change, you know, are the things everybody worries about, which is that we're in the midst of an addiction crisis and untreated mental illness crisis. Our country is, I think social media is making people crazy. I think our polarization is problematic, you know, rising inequality and distancing from each other.

And I worry that we spend a lot of time. I mean, it's the number one thing for Biden. You know, it's really a big thing for them. And I kind of go, how is it that, you know, because I have a book coming out about the addiction crisis. How, why are we worried? You know, climate change, natural disasters killed 411 people in 2019, but drug overdose deaths, we think in 2020 are going to have killed somewhere around 88,000. That's sad. And yet we don't have a single, we don't have a drug czar. We don't have a plan.

There's no plan to reduce those drug overdose deaths. We have John Kerry's our climate czar and he's flying all over the world in a private jet and saying, I'm not going to be defensive of it. I need it. Somebody in my position needs it. Oh, please. This is why people hate politicians. that this, that climate alarmism is causing depression and anxiety in particular in children, because people try to loop their children into this to make them little activists. We've seen this in our own schools. Again, people have heard me talk about our schools.

We have seen our schools literally suggest to our children that this might be a cause they want to pick up and become an activist on. And, you know, I've said before on this program, if anybody in my family is going to be activated under the age of 18, they'll be activated by me and my husband, Doug, not by some school teacher who's listening to Greta Thunberg, because frankly, her activism doesn't seem to make her that happy. But it's, there are consequences to the alarmism we hear from people like Joe Biden, like John Kerry, like Bill Gates, even. And it's refreshing to hear another sound scientific point of view that's a bit calmer.

I mean, that was a big reason I wrote Apocalypse Never was my daughter's 15. She's fine. But I have interviewed her friends and they are very scared. And, you know, adolescent girls are the ones that we worry the most about because we've seen, we think there's a, you know, if you believe the psychologist Jonathan Haidt's work, we think there's a, we see rising anxiety and depression and suicide. We see it among all ages, but we certainly see it among adolescents. We know that one out of five British teenagers have nightmares. I think the numbers are probably very similar in

the United States. Half of all people surveyed globally in this huge global survey very good survey found that half of all people think that humans could go extinct because of climate change i mean the fears are so i mean there was alarmism about nuclear weapons but nuclear weapons really can cause like destruction of civilization. Climate change, there's no mechanism. I'm always like, what's the mechanism where somehow we run out of food or electricity or any of these things? They don't even have one. So the conversation has just become unhinged from reality in a fundamental way.

Well, it's quite a book. And I really enjoyed watching your media tour when it first came out. And I appreciate you writing it. And for all of your time, it's been a pleasure. Please come back. Well, thanks for having me, Megan. I'm a longtime fan and you've been very brave in your journalism. So I appreciate you taking the time to talk with me.

Coming up right after this, should conservatives be conservationists? And is that the future for the Republican Party? We'll get into that with our guest, Ben G. Backer. And then before we get to him, I want to bring you a feature we have here on the show called Asked and Answered, where we try to answer some of our listener mail. Steve Krakauer, our EP is here. Steve, what's the question today? Hey, Megan. Yeah, this one came, we made a call out on all our social media accounts, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And everyone can follow us there at Megan Kelly Show on all those platforms. This one came to us from Instagram, one of our followers there. Tiffany Olivier wants to know what your fitness routine is. Well, it looks very different now than it did a year ago, to be honest with you, Tiffany. I haven't been doing much during the pandemic, but I had for the first time in a long time gotten into exercise prior to the shutdown. I went for a long, long period without exercising at all. I used to teach aerobics, so I was super into exercise for many, many years. And then I got into law. I had a bunch of children, so many, and I was working all the time and I just

kind of, I wasn't doing it as much. I do it here or there, but it wasn't like a regular, you know, some people are totally regular about it. Anyway, after I left NBC and I finally got off the couch before I got off the couch professionally, I did start working out and I have to tell you, I loved it. So first I started doing yoga and that, that was fun, although fraught and it's kind of a story behind it. But I was, I was in my very first day of yoga. My friend, if he was like, come on, Meg, let's go. You know, it's going to feel good. You're going to try. I'd never done yoga like here or there, just like a move, but never a class. I go into the class. The lady is showing one of the moves. What is it called again? What's that move, Abby? Downward dog? No, not downward dog.

It's been a while. It's where you, oh, there's a name for it. I can't remember. You put your hands on the floor and you bend your elbows out to the side and then you put your knees on your triceps. Is that crow pose? Crow pose. Yes, crow pose. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Steve. I did some yoga. As you can see, I'm a definite yogi. Crow pose. So I'm like, I think I can do this. I had done it one time on my NBC show when there was there was an Instructor i'm like i'm gonna try it. So

I I tried to get in the position and what the instructor didn't tell me is that If you if you can't do crovos if it turns out you can't You should probably put like a mat or something under your face because that is where you land And I went down and the full force of my body Boom, and I went down and the full force of my body, boom. And I heard something crunch and it was definitely my nose. I'm like, oh my God, I think, did I break my nose? And so I stand up blood all over my face, running down my shirt. I'm like, now I wasn't, I wasn't even worried about my nose. I was humiliated. I'm like, oh my God,

it's my first damn class. I broke something. How is this possible? And I was trying to play it cool. You know, like maybe the blood will go away. I just use my little towel. Maybe nobody's going to notice. And already I didn't want to be like cold out of the crowd. In fact, when I first gotten there, the lady's like, is there anybody new today? I'm like, I guess I have to tell her. So I do the little hand raise and she's like, what's your name? You know, in front of the whole class. I'm like, I don't want to announce that either. So I'm like, um, Megan. And she's like, Megan. I'm like, yeah, yes. And I must've just signaled inadvertently, you know, not exactly right. Which I didn't mean to signal. And she was like, is that not right? Is it not Megan? Is it, is it Megan? What is it? Megan? I'm like,

oh my God, move the hell on. So she came over to anyway. So now we're in the class and I've called more attention to myself, though not on purpose. And, um, she comes right over and I'm like, oh, now everyone's looking at me. They know I don't, I broke something. And, uh, yada, yada, yada. I finished the class, the no stop bleeding. I finished the class. I'm like, I'm just going to go to the doctor, the ENT, just to make sure everything's cool. Because, you know, I have a public career and I don't really want to have a broken nose if that's what happened. You know what? It was broken. Sure enough, I broke my damn nose. It was fine. You could barely tell and it healed right up. So it wasn't a thing. But I was scared. I was like, I don't like yoga. Anyway, I did turn out

to like yoga. I kept going back, although I never did the crow pose. Now I just, I just did the tripod. That's a good alternate. And I'll just put a second piece to the story. Then I picked up on this thing in New York called the class, the class. And I think it might be the class.com, but this woman named Taryn Toomey founded it. That thing was a game changer. That totally changed my body. It got me in great shape. I loved doing it. I had to drive all over the city to get there because it wasn't like a studio nearby. They just do it at different facilities all downtown and I live uptown. And it was worth it. And the funniest thing about the class is,

sorry to the people who take it more seriously than I did, but like the women are yelling, they're screaming, some are crying. And I have to be honest, I found it like somewhat entertaining. If they do burn you, you know, they burn your butt, they burn your legs. They, they work a body part so intensely for five or six minutes that you're in cry out loud pain, though I never did. And I always considered it like a win if I was next to a screamer, you know, like they'll just let it rip like, you're like, wow, okay. And then you'd have like these instructors up there who are trying to therapize you through the session. And some of them are really good. And some of them are like 20 year old twits who have never been through anything.

I'm thinking, okay, tell me what it's like to handle adversity, sister, bring it. But anyway, I found the whole thing, even though I'm mocking it now, I loved it and it worked and it was transformative. Anyway, I tried to do it via remote, you know, video, whatever the online classes. And I have to say that's dunk. I did not enjoy that. For their own sake, I really hope they can open up again soon. It's kind of absurd that they haven't been able to. Long, long winded answer to say right now I do very little. I have a Peloton in my bedroom. It's carrying my clothes like it is for most people. I don't really like Peloton. Doug and I go out for our constitutionals around the reservoir in Central

Park. And sadly, that's been my main form of exercise. But I hope spring's eternal. I will get back to the class and start screaming and crying like the rest of them because I want it as a release, not because I've broken a bone like you can do or cartilage like you can do in yoga. All right, Tiffany, there's 10 minutes of your life you'll never get back. Thank you for asking. And we'll get back to our guest right after this. Benji, hi. Hey, Megan. It's great to chat with you. Honored to be on. Oh, it's my pleasure. So you are, you're one of the unicorns, right? A Republican conservationist. I was told it couldn't happen. I was told the Republicans

hate the earth. Well, that's what we hear all the time. And despite that, Republicans are the best conservationists in the world. And we just have simply lost our seat at the table. So I'm a I'm publicly a unicorn, but everyone that's conservative knows that that's not the truth. You know, what's funny to me is people, for some reason, I just guess, since I'm not like a hard right person, I'm certainly not a hard left person. People feel the need to come like confess their politics to me quite often, right? And because I think most people genuinely are someplace in the center. And they're kind of sick of the hard polarization. So they'll tell me, you know, like, well, I lean right on all this stuff, but not this and not that, or the opposite. And one of the things a

lot of, I think, right-leaning people will say that they're not right-leaning on, to me, is the environment. Because I think people worry. They worry about the next generation. You know, I too, I worry about the next generation, worry about my kids. I don't want to screw up the environment and environment any more than we have. But I'm also not a coal miner in West Virginia, who's got to put food on the table for his kids through, you know, using fossil fuels, right? Extracting fossil fuels. So I understand both sides of it. Anyway, how did you, how did you get to see this issue in the way that you do, right? That you actually are pro-conservation and you want to get real about climate change?

Well, speaking of that and speaking of feeling comfortable confiding in Megyn Kelly, when I was 15 years old, I joined your show and talked about some things that were happening in the classroom as a young high schooler on Fox News, and I spelled out the word SHIT on live television with you on your show when I was 15 years old, Megan. And so I confided in you, I think, by saying that on live air. And I cannot tell you how many times I have been reminded of that over the years. But regardless, now that you're 22, you can just say it shit. Yeah, well, I don't know. You know, I don't know if this is I probably would have gotten knocked right off the air. We would have. Exactly. So yes, I said shit on national television with you.

But speaking of that, I was 15 years old and I was on your show, which would probably beg the question for many people, like why was he on Megyn Kelly's show at 15 years old? I was very active in politics then as a young conservative activist. And I was speaking at CPAC and doing a bunch of big national conservative political things. And I met so many young people who lived the American dream, but were conservative and were incredibly environmentally conscious, would go hiking and would kind of be like the stereotypical liberal on the issue, but definitely cared deeply about conservative values. And then I was meeting all these young people who felt like they had to be liberal on the issue to even talk about it. And I started to become more and more frustrated by it. So then when I was a freshman in college, I decided to start what is

called the American Conservation Coalition to give conservatives a voice on the issue. Because what you're saying is true. Conservatives want to leave the next generation better than they found it. They want to protect the scarce resources that nature provides. And they have a deep connection with nature. Republicans live in rural areas. And if you look at an electoral map, where the mountains are in the beautiful areas in this country, usually are surrounded by red Republican districts and counties. And so there definitely is a stewardship. Yeah, that's a that's actually a really good point. I hadn't even considered that. And yet, you know, I think, well, you tell me, but I feel like one of the reasons the Republicans don't get out there on this issue

is because those who are out there on this issue are loathed by most people on the right, including the politicians who we would like to come out and say something like, no, I don't, I don't want to be aligned with AOC on any, I don't like AOC. And I think she's a very polarizing figure and I don't see the world in the same way she does. And I certainly don't want to be affiliated with her stupid green, new, new green deal, whatever, green deal. So like all it's, it's one of those things where all the people are speaking about it are these loathsome Hollywood celebrities with whom you really want nothing to do. Exactly. And because so many conservatives or even moderates have realized that, or they think that the Green New Deal or AOC are the only answers to environmental issues, then they run

the other way. And to your point, you have Republicans who are saying that climate change isn't real or that this issue doesn't matter. And then you look at an electoral candidacy, and the Democrat has the environment as their number one or number two issue. And oftentimes, it doesn't even make the Republicans list. And so what we're saying is, look, we care a lot about this issue as conservatives. And just because you don't like the left of center approach doesn't mean that you have to run the other way or lean in. And that's why I think, to your point, these Republican or conservatives who maybe are more far right, who, you know, say maybe the more radical things about being anti-climate change or anti-environment are super damaging because you're not only turning away an entire generation of potential conservatives, but you're also allowing one side to dominate

this issue with ideals that aren't conservative. Well, I think Republicans, you know, they are in the red states and the red states tend to be full of men and women who work in fossil fuels. And they don't want to seem like they don't care about those guys the way, you know, some of the quotes that you've got, like John Kerry saying, well, all those jobs are going to be lost in the fossil fuels industry. Well, all those people are going to they're going to become renewable fuels guys. They're going to be working in solar and wind, which is absurd and not actually going to happen. And it sounds tone deaf. And frankly, Bill Gates has said stuff along those lines, too. And these the Republicans who represent those guys

want to put a real face on the coal miners and say, you don't understand anything. I mean, Biden was saying he wants to get rid of all of it. Fracking. I mean, you name it. That's that's that's one of the more acceptable, I guess, fossil fuels extractions. But it's also controversial. And so it's gotten to be like everything else, a red blue issue where you're, it's either all or nothing. So as somebody who is more affiliated with the Republican side, who doesn't see it as all or nothing, how do you, what do you want people to do differently? And what do you think the country should do about carbon emissions? Well, look, I think that the key word is pragmatism and you're right. People like John Kerry and others on the left don't have that on this issue. And they're painting it as a black or white or red versus blue issue that really polarizes society. I mean, unlike John Kerry, I've actually visited a lot of coal communities and fossil fuel communities and actually toured those facilities and met with the staff and had an understanding of where these people are coming from. And I will continue to do that. And one of the most frustrating parts of it is that they want to be a part of this conversation and they want to be a part of the solution. But when they're told that, oh, you can just throw your life for a whirl and find a new job, that's going to make

things incredibly hard to get buy-in from a majority of Americans, not just the ones working in those industries. And then on the right, obviously, we've already talked about where the frustrations lie. So where is that kind of middle ground or how can the United States look at emissions? It really comes down to pragmatism and looking at it through a market-based, economically sound way. The United States has no bearing on fighting climate change unless it creates technology and innovation that it can export to countries like India and China, which are dramatically increasing their emissions. And so like a Green New Deal is not transferable to those countries. Even a carbon price or carbon tax is not transferable to those countries. We need

technology and innovation made here in the United States that helps us move forward as a globe, but also reduces emissions here. And I think the reality is you cannot regulate your way out of climate change. You cannot regulate your way out of the carbon emissions problem that we have as a globe. You actually have to innovate your way out of these complex situations. And that means that conservatives should absolutely get bought in because it's an economically sound approach. It's a pro-business approach. And it's an approach that the left of center isn't taking. But absolutely, we need innovation and technology, but we also need nuclear. We need natural solutions, which include

planting more trees and restoring wetlands where a lot of duck hunters and other, you know, folks in the fishing and hunting communities like to recreate, you know, we need to be able to do these kind of common sense solutions. But it doesn't always have to come from the top down. And the United States doesn't have a top down climate policy policy and yet is still reducing its emissions more than any other country across the globe. So we have more work to do and we have emitted more than any country throughout history. But we are headed in the right direction without a federal government policy, which shows how diverse the solution set should be. What do you think the, you remember Barack Obama was telling us we were going to have to get rid of our suvs and keep our thermostat on i don't know 68 or whatever he said um just just wear a

sweater wear a sweater it was like all right now at the point where my president's telling me what to wear we've crossed over into a weird kind of territory you in the tan suit remember him in the tan suit i'm not taking fashion advice from him or any other president anyway my point is so what do so what do you do? Do you like as an individual, what do you do? And what do you think people listening to this program should do? Or is it just really not an individual responsibility? It's more a policy approach? Well, I first love that you brought up Barack Obama's where I, I personally used to wear suits at 15 when I was on your show, and I've started to wear just quarter zips to meet with members of Congress or sweatshirts or whatever, because it's like, you know, this whole post-COVID casualness is hopefully going to stay, and I'm very happy

about that as someone who loves to wear outdoor clothing. But in your own personal lives, I mean, it does matter to make an impact. And I would equate it to like voting. A lot of people don't think that their vote matters as an individual. But when it collectively you're thinking your vote doesn't matter, it makes a huge difference, similar to climate change or the environment, you think that your individual action doesn't matter. But as a collective society, it does really matter what you do. But I think unlike what Barack Obama or elective center people will say oftentimes, it is up to you to decide what you can and what you should do and think about your own personal lives as a way to have a barometer. So for example, I'm in Arizona right

now. I do not need to stop wearing a sweater in Arizona ever. There's really hardly any time where a sweater would ever not need to be worn, to your example. But in the Midwest whether that's reducing single-use plastic, traveling less, traveling more efficiently, upgrading technology if we have the means to do so. But it's thinking about what you do in your day-to-day life and thinking, how can I reduce my impact from this activity? And a lot of times can save you money or save you time. But if you can't, it's not about shaming people who aren't able to make those changes. We as a society have a duty to come up with solutions that make things cheaper and easier for people to do that also protects the environment at the same time. So I guess the first suggestion would be to do things in your own personal capacity that make sense.

And then second, advocate for changes that are technological and innovation based and pushing your elected officials to do that as well. Well, how do you feel about aerosols? Because the pump hairspray does not work. And every woman out there knows I speak the truth. Well, you know, I don't know a lot about aerosols. I have to admit. Um, but you know, until they can come up with a better technology, you just gotta keep doing you. Yeah. Thank you for understanding me. By the way, I'm looking at you. I see a screen grab

of you on my show. Um, back in 2011, you have a nice suit on, you have a purple shirt, sort of a purplish bluish tie. You look very snazzy and you do look like a kid. You've done a lot for 22. Um, and you obviously you kick things off right back in, uh, 2011 with me. So I appreciate your evolution, your willingness to come on to buck trends and keep it up. Benji, what a pleasure. Well, an absolute pleasure to join you. And it feels like kind of coming full circle. I appreciate your voice more than more than you know. And I'm really hopeful that, you know, this this message of common sense environmentalism can can become the more popular sense of environmentalism going forward. So thanks for being and Benji. I love that show. I learned a lot. I hope you feel the same. And if you would like to continue learning with me and hopefully being entertained along the way, go and subscribe to the show. It really helps us.

I don't totally understand how it helps us, but everybody tells me that if you subscribe and download, it really helps us. And helping us even more would be to rate the show with five stars and to give us a nice review. All that stuff affects somehow, I guess, the Apple algorithm. I don't know. Just do it, would you? Do me a solid. I don't ask for much. Just do it and give me a nice review or any sort of a review. We're getting so many good guest suggestions from those reviews. I've read all 16 plus thousand of them. Yes, I have. Don't doubt me because eventually I'll probably read one of yours on the air.

So watch it. More importantly, listen to it. And I'll talk to you next time. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.