The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Origins Podcast with Michael Shellenberger: From Apocalypse Never to Running for Governor

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

I was very happy to have the chance to speak to Michael Shellenberger some time ago, after his book Apocalypse Never appeared. Having written my book, The Physics of Climate Change, I was intrigued by his take on the fact that climate change is not an existential threat. Once I read his book, I realized we agreed on many things, with perhaps the differences being on emphasize rather than substance. Nevertheless, we did have some disagreements, and we had a very spirited, and I hope respectful, discussion about climate change and its implications, but also on the other issues that need to be addressed and which climate change activists may be exacerbating because of their unique focus on this issue. The need to address important infrastructure issues in Africa and elsewhere in order to bring people up from poverty and also to help insulate them, or at least allow them to adapt to climate change is of great importance. Also, one of his central issues, the need for Nuclear Power, is an important issue, and I agree completely with Michael that we should not be closing down nuclear power plants, nor interfering with the construction of new plants. I don’t see Nuclear Power alone as a panacea, however. While perhaps largely due to the current burden of regulation, nuclear power plants are expensive and time consuming to build, and I think that they are just one component of what needs to be a many-pronged effort to address climate change and other global challenges. Michael is incredibly passionate about his view of the crucial pressing challenges we face, and any categorization of him as liberal, conservative, libertarian, or climate denier, is false. He is a thoughtful humanist, and I found the discussion with him to be enlightening, as well as provocative, and I learned a lot in the process. That is the best kind of discussion, after all. After doing 2.5 hours together a year or so we sat together again (on zoom) for another discussion in the midst of his current run for California Governor. This gave us a chance to reconnect, and also talk about a different, new set of issues more relevant to that race, and to current problems facing the country. I hope you enjoy this two pronged episode. If you want to watch the episode Ad-Free, please purchase a paid subscription to Critical Mass. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, I'm Lawrence Krauss and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm very happy that we're finally able to release our podcast with Michael Shelmanberger. Michael and I had our dialogue well over a year ago when his book, Apocalypse Never first appeared. And after my book, The Physics of Climate Change appeared. I want to discuss these climate change issues with him. And it may sound from the titles of the book that were poles apart, but we weren't. And I think it's a matter of emphasis and priorities. And I think it was a very interesting give-and-take discussion.

I think the important point that he makes in particular that third world countries really need energy and water infrastructures. And that's more important in the near term than getting them to sustainable carbon-free energy production mechanisms is worth discussing. And I think it's incredibly important that we realize that they really need that urgently. We also discuss nuclear power, which we both agree is an important component of any carbon-free future. may be different emphasis on it, but I certainly applaud the work and effort he's put into trying to make it clear that we should not be closing down safe nuclear power plants. We were ready to release the podcast, and then I discovered that Michael was running for Governor of California, and I thought, well, it's really appropriate to update our discussion.

So I managed to meet up with him on Zoom, and we had a discussion about the issues that are important to him, and important to. California for this coming election and potentially for the world as well. So I was happy to be able to update our earlier discussion with that. So I hope you enjoy our Double Decker podcast with Michael Schellenberger. You can watch it in many different ways if you want to watch the ad-free version. I hope you'll go to our substack site, Critical Mass. And if you sign up as a subscriber, you can watch the ad-free video. Or you can watch the video on our YouTube channel,

the Origins Project Foundation YouTube channel. or of course you can listen to the podcast on either of those, either our web page or the substack page or any of the standard podcast listening sites. So one way or another, I hope you'll enjoy this discussion with Michael Schoenberger. Thanks. Well, Michael, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the podcast.

I've wanted to talk to you for some time. And it's going to be, I think, an interesting podcast, because there's so many interesting things that you say, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. So it'll be, it'll be... If you don't agree with, it will be more interesting. Yeah, maybe. But I want to be, since this is an origins podcast,

I want to begin, as I often do with your own origins, which I find really quite fascinating. So before we get on to other things, I wanted to talk about your background. You sort of began as an activist, but not really an environmental activist. You were, you were, I guess, interested in sort of justice struggles in South America, as far as I can see.

How did that come about? What got you interested in that? Yeah, so let's see. My both sides of my family, my mothers and fathers, I both come from Mennonites. And Mennonites are confused with the Amish, but the Mennonites embrace some amount of modern technology, but are pretty against the government. They're anti-statist. they tend to be pacifist and conscientious objectors. They tend to the folks that went and worked in the mental hospitals during World War II. And we're very active in the pacifist movements of the 20th century. So I grew up very, and I was very politically interested from a very young age.

I became very, my mother was a pretty moderate Democrat, I would say. My father was more left, more part of the new left. He's not a baby boomer. He's just a few years older. He was a community college professor in Knox College near Chicago in the late 60s. You know, he's known John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager since he was, you know, in his 20s. I became very upset about, well, there's two things going on. I mean, when I was the first political act I did was raise money for Rainforest Action Network.

So to some extent, it was my first. But you're right. When I was 17, I went to Nicaragua. I learned Spanish. I wanted to support the San Anista Revolution pretty naively, but nonetheless, earnest and young socialist traveled around Central America, got very excited about the Workers Party in Brazil, which is a radical, I mean, it's moderated, but it was part of the radical left and part of the left.

And I was very interested in small farmer movements. Just your average socialist. Liberation theology probably represented by ideology. Well, I was going to ask about that when you talk about, I'm glad you said that, liberation theology, which has been important in Brazil and a bunch of other places. But the connection to the Mennonites interested me, did you have a religious interest in that?

Were you religious? Are you religious? Did that? Yeah, so why don't you expand upon that a little? Yeah, it's such a difficult and challenging set of questions, But sure, I'll start by saying, my mother had me confirmed as a congregationalist Christian. I was 15. I argued with the minister who's a very nice person, but just on the basic questions of what is God, what is heaven? Is there a hell?

Well, no, not really, but then why is there a heaven? How do we know any of this? At 15, I was left very cold. So I was not a Christian, at least not by doctrine. If maybe by culture, I think you could probably say I was, and maybe even by politics, in the sense of a preferential option for the poor, which is something that has stayed with me. And I think in Apocalypse never.

So that part stayed. In my father was ordained, not ordained, my father has a degree in theology as well as a PhD in philosophy, So we spend a lot of time talking about philosophy. I would say my father and I and now my son were in what I would call the existentialist tradition. We think Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard are the kind of three of the most important thinkers of all time.

I've been a huge lay reader of Nietzsche, have read most of his major works multiple times. And for Apocalypse Never, I did come back to, I think, a kind of faith, it had to do with me trying to write chapter 12 and wanting to not become, you know, he who fights with monsters, he gazes into the abyss, right? So Nietzsche says, you have to be careful here, right, that you don't get angry and that your anger doesn't become a kind of central motivation and that it be an emotion that you experience, but not the underlying driver of your politics. So obviously I was kind of like, where do I go with all this? I was struggling that last chapter. And, you know, I was actually came back to my father because so often, as where a lot of

our spirituality comes from, and he was, he at the end of his, not the end, but he basically, when he kind of got done with Christianity in the ways that the Mennonites would have taught it, he basically arrived at these historical studies of what Jesus actually said and did. And he did. And he basically arrived at these historical studies of what Jesus actually said and did. And they're controversial. So I'm not going to defend them in any kind of historical or theological sense. But I went and read them. And I, and, you know, like, the stuff that they think is the most authentic is the most mystical parts. And for me, I read through these, you know, just the stuff that they think he said. And I was like clearly the most profound and challenging thing that Jesus ever said was to love thy enemies. And it's so difficult.

And it's almost like I realized at that moment that that wasn't something that because I can't do it all the time. Yeah. That that's not like you haven't failed. You just need to keep doing that. And so there's sort of like, you need to love thy enemies. Like it is something that you need to actually try to do. And I thought it was such a profound, powerful, it really moved to me, you know, in the ways that I think Christian scripture at their best are supposed to do. You really touched me. So I think that's where I ended up, which is sort of like, if Christianity means that we all, if everybody that's Christian is a Christian because they believe that God is love and that they should love thy enemy, then sign me up. You know what I mean?

So you're kind of a philosophical, you're kind of a philosophical Christian. And rather than believing in a deity itself, the philosophy of the, if you want to call it the founder of that church, is what attracted you more than more. Yeah. And then I'm agnostic on much of the rest. In other words, I am not saying at all that I'm saying, is there a God? I don't know. Anybody who claims to know, I think, is not somebody I don't trust, you know. But no one's reported back from the dead and told us that there's an afterlife. So you know, you don't have that and we need that. On the other hand, you know, I also think that people need a kind of faith, that you have to believe that something that we're doing here on Earth matters. Otherwise, why write a book? Why talk on a podcast? Why do these things if you don't think it matters to some extent?

And so I became very attracted, as you know, to the ideas of a very important anthropologist who wrote a book called The Denial of Death and about how much, much of what we do is a kind of repression and sublimation of anxiety about death. And he even argues, I think if you go further, that most fears are fears of death. And so for me, the response to that was sublimate well. Was you interested in Latin America because you want to learn Spanish or just because of what you read about social justice what was going on there? I was particularly concerned with two countries, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

I thought the United States government was engaging in policies with these countries that was not constructive. I still believe that. I've kept most of my anti-imperialist commitments, not all, but most. And I think I don't have the naivete that I had back then about the left or the Latin American left. A lot of it, I think, was a kind of shakedown, kind of a new mafia, all the traditional criticisms by people like Orwell of the left, I think hold. Nonetheless, I'm not, I don't think America has much to be proud of in Central America, and I was upset about it. Sure. That's with the reason. And I was probably looking, and I was probably looking for a way

to make myself give my life meaning. Yeah, sure. Exactly. There we go. And you don't really wrong with that. Yeah, we have a long tradition in the podcast. One of the, actually, one of the first podcast we did was with my friend, Noam Chomsky, who also holds that view very strongly about Latin America and the U.S., among other things. Very influenced by Chomsky, I read it on Tombs. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he brought for many Americans the realization of what was U.S. foreign policy was doing in Latin America and South America. You went to Erlham College, which is a Quaker college.

What did you study there? I studied peace and global studies. Oh, interesting. This is, you know, our mutual friend, Claire Lehman at Quillette would no doubt have a critique of it, I might totally, and I increasingly share, which is that, you know, it was, it's a completely woke curriculum before woke was a word, or was a word used in the way it is. The gods were gone, I mean, you know, and to some extent, of course, I saw Gandhi, Martin Luther King, it was anti-progress. It was a fall from a kind of Russoian, romantic harmony with nature,

through modern capitalist society. I had some very, very good, but nonetheless, Marxist professors who were serious thinkers. So we were also reading Foucault. We were reading Derry Dahl. We were reading all the French thinkers. Getting all ready for the woke explosion of the point. Yeah. So much of what's been happening for me never felt new.

There's a sense of newness to it, but it never felt that way for me. Okay. And then and so Paysson Global Study, and then you did a master's in cultural anthropology at another kind of woke campus, UCSC. And does, so there's a lot of your discussion about local, about poverty and, and sort of understanding cultural issues when you, when you, in particular in Apocalypse Never, which we'll get to, where you basically say environmentalists aren't realizing what's good for the local population. Is it, do you think that that your background is a, as a, in cultural anthropology, the master's into there is sort of,

influenced your, the view that you eventually came to about the potential tensions between environmentalism and, and the needs of local populations? Yeah. I mean, these are, these are human beings who live in the ways that our grandparents and great-grandparents lived. And they're basically being actively denied the same power plants, coal power plants, hydroelectric dams, natural gas power plants, nuclear power plants, and they're insisting that they use unreliable and expensive wind and solar, you know, future garbage energy technologies imported from abroad to basically create a non-functioning, expensive electrical grid. I just got an email today from a guy I've known for a long time. Rachel, we used to write for the Wall Street Journal talking about how now is the time for us

to prevent those countries with Biden's climate agenda, to prevent those countries from making the mistakes we did with things like roads and power plants. I think I find it sinister. I know those people want roads. I've never interviewed somebody who was like, I don't want a road. Yeah, it's hard to imagine. Don't hate road. Yeah. You know, I find it offensive. It really bothers me. It was a simple motivation for writing the book. Yeah, we'll get to the motivation. And I found it interesting that that, that I'll be up front now. What, you said about Nietzsche and controlling your anger was interesting me because it's it seems it seems pretty clear to me and you say it up front that in some sense you write this book you can't i think one can't help

say out of anger i mean in a sense of being you're angry at what certain people are doing demanding promoting and it and it influenced strongly why he wrote the book is that fair to say yeah it's i would say it like this um i love humanity i really love humankind. And I, and not, not in the same ways I love my enemies. I love humanity. I love what we do. I love who we are. And I love the natural world. I really love rainforest. I love forests. I really love endangered species. I really want to save them. And it makes me sad and it makes me feel sad and angry when I see people like me in similar class positions with similar amounts of power, politically, culturally, economically, try to keep people poorer than me down. It really does bother me.

And I think it should bother everybody. Yeah, okay. I agree. That's different, I think, though, than saying, I think it's different than the hatred of civilization, which I see behind a lot of apocalyptic environmentalism. In fact, that's a great, that's sort of, that's a sense. the beginning of your book in some sense of the, get you, but before we get, and I don't want to spend the whole time on you, but I do, I think it's fascinating from me because I find you, again, I'll be up front, quite fascinating. The, the juxtaposition of views, the background, interests,

and I want to, so I want to parse that and a little more carefully before we get to the views themselves. I think it's worth doing. You moved by the 2000s to a book on the death of environmentalism, and we'll talk about some of the verbiage you used there. It came called an eco-modernist. And you actually talked about running for the governors of California. Did you ever do it?

I did. Yeah, okay. I didn't know if you did or not. I did. Yeah, I lost. Yeah, well, that's, yeah, that happens. But I will say, there have been times in my life, I'm very political. And when I first moved to Arizona, I thought of running.

I actually thought of running, I don't think I've ever told me this publicly, but against John McCain at some point because there was no Democrat that wanted to run against them. And I thought, great, I can lose. Yeah. But it would be a high profile campaign. Oh, yeah. And but I didn't. And one of the reasons that was that I discovered, when I seriously,

he thought about politics. I realized that for me, personally, politics is too much of a compromise. I could not say what I believed or what I really thought and be elected, I think. And so for me, and then the question was, where could I have a bigger impact back as a popular critic or with somewhat of a soapbox or a politician? Did those issues come in your mind? Oh, yeah. I mean, I still think about it a lot. I mean, you know, I mean, so first of all, my motivation is that California is in very, very serious trouble. I mean, I don't think most people don't know this. I am happy to say that I am working on my new book, which is about the ostensibly about the homelessness crisis in San Francisco, but more broadly is about this really what I see as a kind of a tax.

on civilization. And it's coming from the radical left and it's been tolerated by the moderate left. And the right has been completely incapable of dealing with it in many cities and certainly in California. And I don't think that the response to it should be a right-wing response.

And this is why I think we're both friends with Claire and we like Quillette. I don't see Quillette as a conservative magazine. Yeah. I don't think Claire is a conservative person. I'm not a concern. There are things about conservative political philosophy that I do share. I think there's an important emphasis on discipline and hard work that I believe in.

But I am, I still consider myself a liberal. I would have called myself a progressive until probably I understood that people were using it so differently than what I mean. I had to stop using it. But yeah, I mean, I think the main work, my life's main work for sure is changing and evolving consciousness to use a very California your word. The governor of the state has the power to fix the state and he's not doing it. So if nobody is going to actually articulate a new agenda for California and offer a chance to voters to vote on that, then I will. And I've never hesitated to say that. If somebody else is going to offer the change that we need in our society, then I'm not interested in running. I have no,

I would much rather stay with my two dogs and wife in the Berkeley Hills and write books and and and and right. I've got another book I wanted to do after this. The one I'm working on now. I mean, I've very happy life. I don't, there's a, it's a pain in the ass. And I wouldn't do it if I had to, I wouldn't do it if it meant not saying what I believed. I mean, that's just a, but this is fundamental. I'm not going to pander to the people of California, the voters are responsible for the nightmare on the street. I mean, we have our, our drug over. deaths in the United States went from 17,000 in the year 2000 to 72,000 last year. And people are dying by like two a day, our dying of drug overdose is in San Francisco

because we're so completely incapable of getting our heads around actually stepping in to prevent people from killing themselves on the streets with fentanyl and meth. I find it unconscionable. But I wouldn't, yeah. So, I mean, if I can help change the situation by just writing a book. That's, I'll, I'll stop with that. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's, that's the reason I wrote the, my new book, the physics of climate change is mostly because the people are going to have to make a decision what policies are, are going to be carried out.

And, and, and so I want to provide them the tools to at least be able to make informed decisions. And I think that's, in any case. One last, but one last thing. want to jump in. I'm intrigued by the Breakthrough Institute, which you, and we don't have to, and by the way, you know, we can cut out any of the stuff that we don't want to talk about, but I'm intrigued that you created the Institute and then left, and I wanted to know what the purpose of that Institute was, and was there a reason why you left? And that'll become relevant to some of our other discussions, if you want to talk about it, but if you don't, it's fine too. I mean,

I don't want to belabor. I'll always say it this way. Anybody who reads what I, if you read Apocalypse Never, those are my views. Yeah. If you go read the stuff that comes out of the Apocat

a breakthrough institute, those are their views. The specifics of why I left, I can't imagine, is important to anybody, other than, was it philosophical? Or I guess that's what I was at wondering,

whether you're, your march from, you know, the death environmentalism to apocalypse, never, the evolution of your views, which have changed somewhat over, it seems to me, whether that, whether you found yourself drifting away from the breakthrough incident or not. I would say about half of it is a change, is a difference of opinion on nuclear power in

particular. And we can talk about it, but. Well, we'll talk about nuclear power. Yeah, we are having a public disagreement right now for anybody who wants to read in my columns of the book about nuclear power. And I will talk, I will talk very openly about what my views are of nuclear power and why I disagree with many other views on nuclear power. Well, we'll get there. Because I agree with you. I disagree with you. So that's in one of those areas where there's a lot of sense to what you say and then some things I'm concerned about. So, so, and, you know, and although the beginning part of this was more of a sort of question and answer, I'm hoping we,

what I like to have these things as is discussions. So you can bring up questions too. And because it's really a discussion between people who. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, like, I, you know, I'll just be frank. I don't think the problem is that people don't understand global warming. I don't think that's a problem at all. And I actually think the idea that it's a problem, I don't know.

I just kind of question it because you have to remember the public has been told about global warming for like 30 years. I just don't think. Yeah. And I don't think. and I don't think the handful of people who think that climate change is due to sunspots and water vapor are a significant obstacle. I guess. Yeah, I guess. So I'm happy to have the conversation. I just, but I don't agree with it. In fact, the funny thing is I don't even write about it anymore because I think it's so irrelevant. I spent a bunch of time in the 2000s writing about this issue. Like my book doesn't talk about Kyoto is never mentioned. You don't talk much about climate that will get there. It's intriguing to me because you and you're you're anticipating me in about five minutes. I want to get to this question of, of because it you, you, you will. Before you wrote that article, apologizing for the climate scare, and Apocalypse Never is sort of an extension of that or whatever. But you really don't, in the context, you talk about

the problems, but you really don't talk about climate change as an issue. And I want, so I do want to cover that at the very beginning. But in that regard, I really was just trying to get the sort of intellectual framework of what led you to an interested in nuclear power ultimately. I fell in love with renewables in a dumb way like everybody did. And I even helped to advocate for a big wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod. That was ultimately killed. And when it came to my home state of California, they wanted me to help advocate for solar farms in California. And it became clear that it would kill a lot of desert tortoises and that the local conservationists were against it.

And at that moment, Stuart Brand gave a very good TED talk. He wrote a very good book. And I had a number of other people who said, Schellenberger, you've got to take a second look at nuclear. I did. I changed my mind. I've given four TED talks on why I changed my mind and why I've been campaigning for nuclear power plants.

Centurally, as a concern around climate, though not entirely. And in fact, my motivations have changed. I now think nuclear is as important for preventing renewables as I do for reducing climate change. because I think that I think renewables are that terrible. And, you know, I mean, it's complicated in some ways. I mean, palm oil saved the whales.

Yeah, you've got that. Yeah, Palm oil saved the whales. But if you can use petroleum rather than palm oil, I think you should. And I think petroleum is better than palm oil. So, you know, it's a, so when you kind of go, my view, I wrote Apocalypse Never, because I wanted people to understand my basic view, which is that we want to move everybody up the energy ladder. We want to go from energy dilute fuels like wood and coal towards more energy-dense fuels like natural gas and nuclear. We want to have more energy consumption paradoxically and less material throughput.

And the two things go together in a way that's very interesting in terms of the physics of it, as well as frankly the culture and the politics of it. So I wrote Apocalypse Never to really lay out a very, I think a deep view of energy transitions, which I think is the right way to think about this, to think about power densities. I wanted to make power density, which is a very simple concept. It's just land divided by power output. I wanted to make it accessible to kids in high school. I wanted to tea.

I want this book to, I joke, it's an environmental studies textbook, you know, wrapped in a bunch of stories of my travels around the world and a bunch of case studies. One quarter of the book is footnotes. You know, I wanted this book to be a serious, I wanted to be a serious contribution on the, on a kind of physical, environmental, economic, the whole thing. Okay. My motivations, the core motivations are nature and prosperity for all. I mean, that's just, that's always been there. Yeah, in fact, well, that's the last, basically one of the last things you say. and I want to, when we come back to the end, I want to talk about nature and prosperity for all,

because that's clearly, I think we both share that. And the question is, is there a dichotomy? But you led perfectly to what I want to get to, which is you speak about why you wrote Apocalypse Never. And as I say, you wrote an accompanying, I don't, I think it probably, I'm not sure with, it may have come out before the book came out around the, that article where you apologize for the climate scare, which is June 2020,

and I forget when Apocalypse Never came out, but probably around the same time. And you say I wrote what you say very early in the preface is I wrote Apocalypse Never because the conversation about climate change and the environment has in the last few years spiraled out of control, not unlike Extinction Rebellions, beat juice, firehose. And it's clear that you are, there's just like I pushed a button a second ago, where you thought I was about to attack you a nuclear. It's clear that there's a- On my standing, on my academic credence.

Oh, yeah, and I didn't mean that. Okay, so just so we're clear about that. I just wonder what your motivation was to get to nuclear this. But there's another button that clearly has been pushed. When you see people like extension rebellion interfering with people's lives and claiming they're going to die. And when you talk about, of course, Alexandria, Accio-Cortez saying,

the world is going to end in 12 years if we do nothing, that clearly pushes your buttons. And that's clearly, as clear as the other aspects of what you just described, of why you wrote the book, it seems to me, throughout the book, one gets the feeling that what you're doing is not just apologizing,

But those, you're attacking that apocalyptic view that does get you angry. Yeah, to be fair, neither of those things triggered me. What really bothered me was when Greta Tunberg said, I don't want you to have hope. I want you to panic. That I don't want my worst enemies to panic. That's dangerous. And it is linked directly to the behaviors that we saw in the London Underground, where I saw two young men, very much like myself at the age of 17, by the way. I freely admit I identified

with them. I identified them with my children that could have been kicked and beaten to death in the London Underground. And it's only because of the civility of the Brits that they kept the crowd from just ripping those guys apart because they were upset. I was scared. I watched that and it frightened me. And I listened to Greta Thumburg and it frightened me. So it's actually came from a certain amount of fear. Alexandria Kassar Kortez, she's never upset me. I've never had my buttons pushed by her in the slightest. Well, I mean, the question, yeah, okay, and I agree too.

It's in a sense because some people just spout a lot of nonsense, and at some point you just sort of, you know, that's just it. But the worry that I have, and this may push a button. Push them. It's a fine. Well, I thought I pushed your buttons later. I didn't think I'd push them so early, but I didn't, as I said, here's where I may mean to push a button. are you worried when I read this I'm worried that people will lose the forest for the trees

namely throughout the book I found my own as and I'm sympathetic to many of the things in the book but I found that in some sense sometimes I felt like we're attacking a straw man by attacking the by by sometimes focusing on people who are making ridiculous claims or fear mongering or etc whether that gets in the way of really arguing towards the what you're trying to, the intellectual argument you're trying to make about, so, you know, sort of condemning the people or their views is different than, than arguing in favor of higher power densities, for example. I don't condemn any people. I criticize specific things that public figures have said, just to be clear. I mean, I'm kind of like,

Do you really think $150 million of contribution from natural gas magnets to organizations trying to shut down nuclear plants that will benefit directly from shutting down a nuclear plants is not relevant? Well, I guess it's relevant. I mean, there is a huge effort, but it's shell. It's, we now see BP working with Greenpeace in Europe to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with gas. How can that not be important part of the story?

I guess it is important. I guess what I'm thinking, though, is when you do that, the attention, you know, especially when I think about talking to journalists, you ask, what are they going to really pick up on? And so if there's a scandal, if these, if, if, let's just take that one. If you take the fact that that, that people are trying to basically fossil fuels or working with renewable people to try and shut down nuclear power, if that becomes the message, Do you are you worried about losing are you worried about losing let me just finish are you worried about losing the message of why you think nuclear power is so important I mean that's what I'm wondering whether whether people focus on that controversy rather than focus on the on the underlying

scientific issues that you're trying to promote and I just ask you're on the contrary and let me explain why I lay out the case of why nuclear power is the best way to make electricity from every environmental, social, and governance perspective, I go through in great detail. Yeah, you do. Then the question is, why, if it's so great, don't we have it? Now, the answer from the so-called nuclear industry and pro-nuclear community has been, oh, well, we did it wrong. We used water as a coolant when we should have used a chemical coolant or a metal coolant, and it's all total bullshit.

The water-cooled nuclear plants we have are actually the best. They've tried all the other kinds. They sucked. They were uneconomical, complicated. The Brits did a pretty good job with carbon dioxide as the cooling gas, and their reactors are only going to last for 40, 50, maybe 60 years. Ours can go for 80 years, maybe 100 years. It's all just displaced anxiety from fear of the bomb, like almost 100% of it.

And also the Motivate, the Malthusian motivation. Yeah. Then you go, so then what's really going on, guys? what's really going on? I go, well, it's fear of the bomb, and it's the radical left, which married Marxism to Malthusianism and in a nasty stew of negativity and of anti-humanism. And so I say there's three things. There's Malthusianism and a kind of will to status power. There's money, and then there's religious motivations. And they each get their own chapter, because what I'm saying is that they're all three important.

People kind of go, well, what are you saying? Are you saying that Tom Steyer doesn't care about the climate? No. Not that. He's, it's like saying, what are you saying? The conquistadores weren't Catholic? The conquistadores, they believed in God more than anybody. But they also wanted the gold.

They wanted gold. Give me the gold. So are those, am I drawing? Are you, are you? No, you don't, you have to get a complete picture of the conquistadores, you have to describe their piety. You also have to describe how much they love for the gold and how much they wanted to get knighted and all that bullshit, right? All the status stuff. All three things are important.

They each got there in chapter. Now, I will say in the final chapter, I kind of say softly, I don't want to make it a hard. It's not going to be a super important, strong argument. I think the spiritual motivation drives the other one. In other words, I think that Tom Steyer is more concerned about his legacy than his money. I think that Mike Bloomberg is more concerned about the status and I'm a hero saving the planet. I think that is more important to them than the money. And I say so.

But I also think they want to get paid. Let me ask actually, it's not that the matters, it's sort of contrast between people. But you do at some level, at somewhere, compare almost Bloomberg to the Koch brothers. Do you think that the Koch brothers are also doing it? I'm, I kind of feel like they're doing it for the money, but I don't know what your view on that. But the Koch brothers are kind of these famous libertarians. Yeah, and they give a lot of money to various causes, but a lot of the work. I mean, look, Lawrence, like, no, let's just agree, nobody wakes up in the morning with malevolent intentions.

Okay. Right. No, I agree. Nobody does that. Yeah, they all convince themselves. We're all rational. Reason is enslaved in fashion. And we all rationalize what we're doing and we think we're doing.

I mean, I think, first of all, I don't compare them exactly. What I do is I say there's this grotesque hypocrisy of the criticisms of Exxonic Cook Brothers, even though they've given just a tiny fraction of the amount of money that Bloomberg and Steyer and these other guys have given. I was intrigued by that. I've always gotten the sense that the Koch brothers spent a lot more money in maybe not directly, but in influencing policymaking. Yeah, because they do those, because Greenpeace does the propaganda

where they go the cocktipus and the Coke. And then you see this, but how much money is it? Well, we went and totaled up the money. I mean, the amount of money that Exxon gave was like nothing compared to them. You got to remember, like, I mean, Bezos himself just gave like a billion dollars to these groups. I mean, these are groups that each of them

has an annual revenues of around $100 million to start. And that's just so you have a class. climate apocalyptic propaganda machine that has a budget of around what, one or two billion dollars a year. And then we kind of go, oh, yeah, it's that dude in Cleveland who thinks it sunspots who's preventing us from saving the world. Give me a break. I mean, give me a break. I've been doing this for 20, over 20 years now. I was one of the first obnoxious assholes to suggest that we should marginalize, you know, these climate skeptics, that they were the main reason. We know 2009 climate legislation failed because we couldn't get Sharon Brown in Ohio, a Democrat, to vote to make electricity expensive. That's why climate legislation didn't work.

The public doesn't like these Malthusian solutions. They don't like the Puguvian taxes, you know, and the idea that it's somehow that we're to blame some conspiracy of the Koch brothers and Exxon, it's just like intellectually offensive, I find. And it's dishonest and it's lazy because no one ever looked at the money. You look at the money and the differences are shocking. Okay, absolutely. And now let's talk about, and that's a very important fact that I found it very interesting and surprising in some sense. I hadn't totaled up the money. And it leads me, you know, I was going to begin, maybe it's now 50 minutes late, but with an apology at some level because I was going to apologize to you because in some sense you've been an environmental activist your whole life.

or not your whole professional life. I'm a particle physicist and because I'm a scientist and, you know, I'm interested in science and also rationality and public understanding using reason and empirical evidence. And I've become, you know, I've been interested in climate change evolving over time as I talk about in my new book because because I was on the chairman of the board of the Boltony, Atomic Scientist, Board of sponsors and that became an issue in a way which I'm sure actually you probably disagree with, but at least it allowed me to get educated. But I'm in some sense a neophyte when it comes to these issues.

And you're, so I'm coming into this and you've been spending your whole life. And I sort of feel apologetic in the sense that, yeah, I've done a lot of research on the science of climate change, but it's pretty new compared to where you're coming from. But nevertheless, climate change is on my mind and for obvious reasons. and by the way, since you brought it up earlier, it's not that people, it's not that I think that people deny global warming is happening. One of the reasons I want to write the book was just,

yeah, obviously some do. I mean, yes, they're very senators, and there's a lot of the Republican Party do, but, but, and I fought against that and spoken out against that for years. But it's the issue of, if, of trying to understand, what are the definitive predictions, what are the speculative predictions, what, what can you

trust what you can't? And that's, I think, really important because if you don't know how, if you don't know where you're at it's on the spectrum, then you don't know what to believe. And if and then you sometimes don't believe any of it. So I think that was as much motivation for me to write a book. We say, hey, this is this is sound science. This is more speculative. And you should know, you should know what's going to happen. I think that's important. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, I think it has to go, I think it has to go to other things, though, in the sense that, let me give you one example, one of the most controversial parts of my book and the apology. Natural disasters have declined, deaths from natural disasters have declined 90% over 100 years. There is no IPC scenario for that trend to reverse itself.

I don't think people know that. I testified in front of Congress, and I could see on the faces because it was on Zoom, it was really cool. Yeah. The Democrats, I could tell by their faces, they never heard me say before that the predictions of increased infectious disease from climate change are increases above what you would have if you didn't have climate change. They're not increases from today. In other words, it's all else being equal. And of course, not all else is equal. But they did not understand that.

So in terms of public understanding, I think people should understand that carbon dioxide is a heat drive and molecule. and that water vapor plays a role in that warming and that there's these albedo effects and that we worry about tipping points. I love it. And I think that I think that children should know that there is no scenario in the IPCC for deaths from natural disasters, that trend to reverse itself and start going up, nor do I think that kids should be, anything should be suggested to them, that we won't have food. Okay. They can't have kids without mass starvation because that is bonkers and wrong and pseudoscience that we can object to for non-moral reasons just as a completely enlightenment scientific brains. We can just go, that's wrong. You know what I mean? So I don't think

it's just about the mechanism of climate change. I think it's also our ability to adapt to it. Our ability to adapt. Well, but you've got to know what to adapt to. I think my bottom line is, you know, it's like I've had this argument about you can't get, you know, off from his. And my, I think you can go along. If you don't know what is, you can't, then ought doesn't matter. First, you got to know what is before you can decide what odd is. And so it seems to me before one talks about adaptation or one needs to know what, what the,

what the realistic possibilities are before. And that's, and I think that's. It's one to your too, right? Because the is in this case is the future and there is no future. There are only multiple futures. And so you do naturally have a lot of it's. Well, there are futures.

No, no, but part of the process of science, this is a fun discussion. Because there's one of my chapters, and I don't want to deal with my book really here, but where I talk about, you know, I used to love my mother would sing, you know, K-ser-rah, sarah, whatever will be with me. You know, the future is not ours to see. But I'm a scientist and we predict the future. That's part of what science is. And there are future.

And as I point out, there's futures that might be, but there's futures that are going to be. There are things that, there are things that have already put in. The heat that's been put in the oceans is in the oceans and there's, and that's the future. And so, you know, and so one, and so one needs to know that there's something you're just not going to affect that there's, there's some things that are going to happen. Yeah. And then you have to do the other side too. And that's what doesn't get done. In other words, it goes, humans are going to adapt.

That will happen. You could say it won't be good or it will be terrible or whatever, but, but you can't. So this picture, that. gets presented. I mean, in terms of big, pray, little prey, I interviewed, by the way, all the main guy, I interviewed Michael Oppenheimer, who is the lead author of the IPCC chapter on sea level rise, whatever, and I was like, what do you mean by unmanageable, which is the, it sounds in the context of this Atlantic piece, sounded pretty apocalyptic, and he described Katrina. And I'm like, Katrina was obviously

terrible, and we're all, we think you should check the levees and rebuild them. But that's not like mad max that's not don't have kids yeah exactly and so this picture that gets painted of future humans as these helpless children i do find it kind of connected to some of that coddling you know the jonathan height stuff you know the kind of what is it yeah yeah yeah it's got a bunch of safetyism in it and i think a lot of the reaction from conservatives and republicans who i have gotten to know much much better now yeah over the last i mean last six months in particular that's of i think some of it, they just object to that part of it. That coddling, that that victimization, the motion that everyone's a victim, which, I mean,

that's where we're in a complete agreement with. And in some sense, that's why I, you know, it's interesting. I, I'm saddened that we're both liberal, our backgrounds and our politics is similar. I'm saddened that issues like combating the notion that everyone's a victim, being in favor of free speech, that it seems to be the right that has, is co-opting those, or at least promoting those issues. Defending them. Yeah, you're defending them. And that's saddened me.

But let's go back now to the, I think you've prepared us for, prepared me for where I was going to sort of, in some sense, start this discussion with, I've got to, you, you've helped preface a number of the, number of the points very well.

But really, one of the things I want to ask you at the very beginning, because because you're talking about, about what climate change isn't in some sense, I want to address what climate change is in some sense. You begin, at the very beginning of your book, you say, but what then did they mean when they said climate change is an enormous crisis? If climate change isn't an existential crisis,

meaning a threat to human existence, or at least a civilization, then what kind of crisis is it? You ask that question, but you don't answer it. So I want to ask you that question. Yes, I don't find you answer it. Maybe, okay, I missed it. I find what you're, that there's a lot of emphasis on on sort of attacking the alarmism.

But what kind of, how, well, I want to say is ask you is how big a crisis, how big an issue is climate change? And what are your concerns? That's really maybe a less provocative way of asking the question that I was going to ask. Okay. Yeah, I mean, let me see if I can, you know, because it's a funny, you know, when you sort of say, I mean, I don't mean this disrespectfully at all, but a question like how big of a crisis is climate change is not a scientific question. I mean, I don't mean, I'm not saying that in a mean way.

No, sure. It's just a kind of, it's a totally almost subjective. It's almost a political question in some way. Yeah. So let me say, let me try to do this. This is where I'm comfortable being. I think climate change is real. I think it's a problem. All else being equal, we would want no temperature change at all, at all, cool or warm. We would want complete temperature stasis. I think there are other environmental problems that are more important. You say that. It's not the most serious environmental crisis. So I guess I wanted to, what is the, so I was leading you to that. If you wanted to list environmental crises, you don't have to.

And I don't tend to not, I'm, I'm, people often ask me listings. I never think hierarchically. People say, what's the worst? What's your favorite this? And I tend to say, well, there are a lot of issues. And maybe you're the same. So, but if you wanted to list them. No, I think some ranking is important.

So can you get me a ranking? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I think that the biggest environmental problem, and I'm going to describe what is often described as multiple problems, but I want to not pull them apart. I don't think I'm conflating them, but this is the problem. It is the continued, it is the lack of industrial prospects, particularly for sub-Saharan Africa, but for the, for, for other tropical places around the world to urbanize and industrialize so they can take the pressure off of forests,

usually in the form of small scale agriculture. I think that's, I think I was, I thought this was the biggest environmental problem before the book came out, I'm sorry, before the pandemic, I now think it's an even bigger problem because unless the conspiracy theorists are right and the coronavirus was invented in Chinese lab,

it almost certainly is a zoonotic virus that's spilled over from animal populations in South China or Southeast Asia. And those interactions are due to small-scale agriculture on the forest frontier. I would also throw into that the use of wood as fuel. It's not the easiest things to pull apart because if you're using wood as fuel, as I point out, if you're Bernadette in the Congo and you're using this fuel, then you're also engaged in small-scale agriculture that's eating wild animals, which is the biggest driver still of declines of animal populations. You could say extinction threats, though, I think

there's too much focus on that. Yeah. So that big cluster, and I kind of view, there's a funny part of this book, you know, you might remember where I kind of go and interview this former World Bank economist, and it's like, how do you get factories in the Congo? How do you get urbanization in the Congo? For me, that's a big problem. We need Bernadette to have a job in the city so she can leave, which she wants to do, by the way, and raise her kids in the city like Suparti is. But how do you do that if there's no factories in the city? So my view is conservationists should be advocates of industrialization and urbanization. So that is the biggest environmental problem, I think, in the world.

You know, does climate come in second, third, you know, around, you know, there's all sorts of other kinds of habitat loss. But, you know, I mean, it's a significant problem. It's just not the end of the world and it's not the most important environmental problem. Well, okay, that's interesting. You know, I'm amazed because you keep sort of anticipating. I was going to talk about Bernadette. There are various statements and claims in the book that are,

were fascinating for me because they're the, obviously the opposite of what you might think of as people often claim as conventional wisdom, but they're provocative and they get you thinking about things. And I find that for me, so for me, that's very useful. And as I say, sometimes in the end of thinking, I didn't always agree with everything he said. But it got me thinking about things I hadn't thought about otherwise, which is the purpose of this, right? Thank you very much. And so, yeah, so basically you say somewhere, you know, more or less that, well, I don't know which one of these statements I want to start. I want to give a bunch of your statements that I think will shock some listeners and allow you to elaborate on them.

I would say you would say more factories, not fewer. For people who don't want to, we're worrying about buying clothes that are made in sweatshops, in some sense you're saying more sweatshops, not fewer sweatshops. So maybe elaborate on that a little bit. You already touched on it, but why do you continue? Well, sure. So in some senses, the most important thing in this book is just to teach people that progress, that economic and environmental progress have a pattern.

And the pattern is that we all start out as small farmers who use wood and dung as our primary energy. And the way that we become affluent is by moving to the city, having fewer kids, spoiling them, using natural gas to cook with rather than wood or dung. And that the way that that happens, the reason people go to cities is, is because they industrialize. And that that industrialization consists really of two fundamental primary drivers. The first is the intensification of agriculture, fertilizer irrigation, roads,

and then the second is factories. So just a slight amendment to what you said, I would say that poor countries need more factories. I think that what happens is that everybody, everybody industrialize the same way by way. You know, they all start with, with t-shirts and easy to sew textiles. And then the middle ranking was like electronics.

And then the highest ranking is you're making Boeing jets, right? So I think that you move up that. I don't think it's deterministic. I think you can de-industrialize. I think it requires policy. I don't think the markets alone can do it. I think that a lot of poor countries need

World Bank funding. But that, you know, the physics of this, the physics of prosperity, is flood control, roads, electrical systems. And there's no like alternative path where you don't have those things. That's called keeping people poor. Well, it's also, it's also in my mind,

it's the physics of not only does that, is that the physics prosperity? But if I'm trying to think about how eventually you're going to ameliorate or at least address the problems that climate change are going to bring about, those factors are going to allow people to address them. And I'm more worried maybe than you that they won't be able to address those aspects of climate change

because those precursors won't have been implemented. So they won't have the prosperity. They won't have the roads. They won't have the clean water, the flood control that is necessary to address it. But I think you're right. I mean, I tend to think that that's not just useful because it brings people up to the standard living, which we all want to have, but it's also a precursor to dealing with the problems that climate change may bring about. Would you agree with that? I mean, I agree with you analytically,

but the former is a categorical imperative. And the latter is sort of instrumental. And so I'm not totally psyched about the way that you framed that. For me, I'm not making the case for Bernadette to have modern life so that she can care about climate change. No, no. In fact, you have a great sentence. You say, as such, it's misleading for a environmental activist to invoke people like Bernadette and the risk she faces from climate change without acknowledging that economic development is overwhelmingly what will determine her standard of living and the future of her children and grandchildren, not how much the climate changes. It's sort of a, I wonder, you know, I thought you were leading. You put it very well in the book, so I thought I'd read it there. And so the point is that,

that in fact it leads to a really interesting quote from carry Emanuel who another person you interviewed in the book which is which is fascinating word the book and criticize the apology yeah yeah yeah no no in fact I want to I want to get to both so you're you know you're okay I bring these things up for a reason he blurb the book he's a climate scientist but he said something which which is as seemingly paradoxical as many of the things that you say in the book because they point out faulty thinking. Okay. And he says, understanding this, the process leads to an apparently counterintuitive conclusion, quote, from Kerry Emanuel. If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today, said MIT climate science is Kerry Manuel.

And he goes on. It doesn't sound like it makes sense. coal is terrible for carbon. But it's by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier. And by making themselves wealthier, they have less children. The population doesn't grow and you don't have as many people burning carbon.

And of course, you also have, you might be better off in 2070. And I add to that, it's not just that you don't have as many children, but you have a sense of, you have the luxury of thinking about global issues and how to affect them instead of trying to make your,

trying to survive each day. So that's, go on. No, no. I mean, I, yeah. I mean, I have the same reaction of that quote, which is I put it in there because I think he's pointing to, he's explaining in a really good way some mechanisms of prosperity and the environment. And what I'm just saying is I, what I'm also trying to argue in the book is that we should not view lifting people

to poverty as instrumental. We should view it as an end and up. And then itself. Okay. But now since you mentioned, I want to, when you were talking earlier about the fact that there's no IPCC scenario that that anticipates or that includes that that it anticipates the turnover back to more deaths happening. Yeah. I want to read what he said and give you a chance to respond to it. I know you've already done probably this many times. But no, I'm happy to it. Okay. So Kerry Manuel wrote. And it's a fairly long quote. with his blurb of the book first. I don't have it with me right now. You want to read it? That's fine with me. Carry a manual. Okay.

In this engaging and well-rearched research treatise, Michael Schellenberger exposes the environmental movement's hypocrisy in painting climate change in apocalyptic terms while steadfastly working against nuclear power, the one green energy source whose implementation could feasibly avoid the worst climate risks. Okay, good. Okay, great.

Now you can read the, now you can read the, the mean one. Yeah, I don't know what it's mean, but I think the point is, well, you can, we'll discuss what it's mean. Let's assume, so let's assume he's talking about the issue of, of the fact that you claim that climate change is not making natural disasters worse and point out that a lot of, you know, basically, that technology and awareness is, is, is saving people a lot more effectively. And okay, so he said, let's assume that Schellenberger is defining natural disasters as deaths from events that could conceivably have a climate connection, such as floods, droughts, hurricanes. In the period between 19-100 and 2020, global deaths from these disasters have declined steeply. There's little question about why this has happened.

It is immensely gratifying effects of greatly improved warnings, evacuations, and resilience. For example, in Bangladesh, where a single storm killed as many as 500,000 people in 1970, the government and non-governmental organizations have built many emergency evacuation shelters that have saved arguably millions of people in subsequent cyclones that have been meteorologically as bad or worse. So, I mean, so that's more or less.

We're all one now. We're at this point. We're all one. Yeah, okay, exactly. If, okay, if there is a climate change signal, it would appear as a lessening of this happy trend for decreased fatalities. But it would be very difficult,

if not impossible to extract such a signal. We don't not know from this data whether climate change is decreasing the rate of decline of deaths from natural disasters or not. If, on the other hand, we look at economic damage, normalized by world domestic product, the signal is equally clear, but in the other direction, damages from weather-related natural disasters

have been increasing greatly. He points out one could plausibly argue that this is because of a global migration towards risky coastal regions, So it's not unequivocal that this increases owing climate change. But its point is that one, we don't have the data to say that climate change is not, is decreasing or not decreasing the rate of the climate of deaths. And the final thing he says is the cleanest way to look at climate effects on natural phenomena

is to look at the phenomena of themselves. Here there's strong and mounting evidence that climate change is increasing, precipitation extremes, floods and droughts, conditions for wildfires, and the incidents of strong hurricanes. So the point he's saying is, yeah, you're right. Technology and awareness are saving people, and that's good. But you can't use that, but you can't extract positively or negatively a signal of climate change from that.

And that there are other signals of climate change that do appear to be getting worse. So I'll throw out all of that and give you the answer. Let's unpack that. All right. Yeah, let's unpack it. Yeah, I mean, the first thing is he noticed he does not say he does not predict that climate change is going to reverse the longstanding trend of declining deaths from natural disaster. No, absolutely. Second thing is he is saying the same thing that I mentioned before about infectious diseases, which he's saying, we don't know.

It may be that all else being equal, more people are dying from extreme weather events than would be done. had there been no climate change. That's what he's saying. Yeah. So the point is, okay, so sure, but it's been massively outweighed by the massive decline. So you kind of go, who cares?

I mean, honestly, it's like an irrelevant point. It's like a non sequitur. All else being equal, I don't want any temperature change, but all else is not equal. Well, okay, that's a good point. That's a good point. but the questions are you conflating past and future here? So you're right up to now.

I think it's fair to say that obviously it's clear what the trend is, that lives are being saved rather than destroyed. But we don't know. And what we do know is that unambiguously, the effects of climate change are going to get worse than they have been so far. I mean, that there will be manifested. And so therefore, we don't know.

I think we both agree. Saying we don't know, it's fine, but saying that it's been massively outweighed in the past does not imply it's going to be massively outweighed in the future. At least it's not applied. So that's the, yeah. I am as confident about that as I am about any predictions of carbon dioxide's role and causing warming. I'll put it that way. I, in other words, I live in Berkeley, California.

I live in the hills. Yes. The water management from rainfall is intense. Yeah. There is no scenario where I'm going to lose my flood management system because of a few more inches of rainfall a year. And it is a few more inches, by the way. But let's say it's like several feet.

We're still going to build. I mean, they live underwater in the Netherlands, right? They live under seal. In Berkeley in the Netherlands, we'll get to, I'm not as optimistic as you are. And in Bernadette's case in sub-Saharan Africa, what matters is that she have a flood control system. Yeah, absolutely.

Then. But then I think there is some, there is some other things that Carrie says that I don't think are as accurate or as helpful as they could be. And what I mean is he switches from natural disasters to extreme weather events. And let me point to some pretty bad behavior around my book. People would say Schellenberger is wrong when he says that natural disasters are. getting worse, these extreme weather events, we can find more extreme weather events. Oh, very clever. Most people, they think that the claim about extreme weather events and claims about natural disasters are the same. And then when I pointed out that natural disasters has a definition by the IPCC, I was accused repeatedly of being some kind of a troll, like of being like using some technicality. No, the IPCC defines. disasters in two ways. Deaths, property damage. The record is clear. Deaths have gone down. They're continuing to go down. This is a record low year for deaths. And property damage. And this is the other

part. I don't think Kerry represented the science particularly well in those sentences. The IPCC in its extreme, its report on extreme weather events. And in many peer review, it is entirely explained by more wealth and harm's way. This idea where you kind of go, well, it may have been that there's some more coastal development that could explain the higher cost of hurricanes. May have been. We're talking dozens of studies reviewed by the IPCC. It's because there is more wealth and harms way. Now, look, in the future, I'm actually 100% on board with the extreme, I mean, the extreme weather stuff. I mean, there's some science that's, you know, challenging, but it seems like they're doing pretty good. I don't have any reason to think it's bad. So I kind of go, if what, if we're,

if the disagreement at the end of the day, I don't really think it is one. But I think what's really happening is, well, let me get it to before I wait this happening is. I, climate change is probably going to make extreme weather events more extreme. 100%. It's probably going to make ice sight, though. Hurricanes might become more severe, but according to the U.S. government, they'll also probably become less frequent.

That's the current science. But that, like, it's just so outweighed by all the things that determine whether people die and whether property gets damaged. Yeah, but I can't blame it. Good. This is great. I'm enjoying this discussion. So, I hope you are. But here's my problem with this in some sense.

And I'm jumping all over from where I would. No, no, it's okay. I did want to have a trajectory where we're heading it. But my concern is, is Bernard. And just like you're concerned about Bernard and having flood control. Yes, we can manage the more wealth in harm's way. We can manage Berkeley. we can

Holland can manage but but but we are unambiguously going to have problems and I am and I do want to get to see level rise in a way

because as you can if you looked at my book you can see I was sort of motivated by South Vietnam and in the Macon Delta but but so we can handle the

we can ameliorate that we can moderate that but but much of the world which is poor cannot right now because they're poor Exactly. Hold on. Let me finish. It's because they're poor, but it's not clear to me that realistically, in a time frame before there may be severe problems.

There's severe problems now. They have severe problems now. Bernadette floods now. I know. She floods now. But there are going to be, you know, as I just point out from a new study of a global topography, a reanalysis of satellite maps, much more of the world is less. than one meter above sea level now than it was before. And you're talking up to, depending upon the climate scenarios and how much the carbon emissions are, you're talking up to 600 million people who will be below sea level by either high tide by 2050 or 2100. If they stay where they are. What? If they stay where they are.

Exactly. If they stay where they are. The history of the last 120 years has been of migration away from those vulnerable areas. Okay, that's right. That's right. But there's a difference of migration for 600 million people versus migration of several hundred thousand or several million. For example, take South Vietnam, which I've studied a great death now, and the fact that

almost all of South Vietnam is less than one meter above sea level, the Macong Delta, which is the richest rice producing region in the world, right now holds back the China Sea over it because there's a large diurnal tide because of its strength and because of its height. And if that area becomes brackish, that rice producing area goes, the area, the river which has the most freshwater

fish in the world, more than all the freshwater fish caught in the United States, is potentially subject to a problem if there's one meter of sea level rise, which is the moderate prediction by 2100. And so

the question is, will we have the capability of bringing out of poverty and enough economic prosperity to have the people in South Vietnam or the people in Bangladesh feel the same way in 2100 that you feel now in Berkeley saying, I know we're going to be able to deal with it? Well, I mean, the obstacle to that is industrialization and urbanization in Vietnam. those people can move from the coasts over time. There's no coast.

It's a whole country. There's no coast. It's okay. Yeah, okay. We'll move inland. Well, no, they moved to North Vietnam. What was, that had to be.

North Vietnam. I mean, by the way, the median estimate is 0.6 meters, just so we're all clear. I know. 0.6 meters is the mean estimate. And, look, I mean,

I kind of go, what do you want me to say? All else being equal, I don't want the seas to rise. I don't know that. That's why I campaign for nuclear. But I also kind of go, this picture of the

Vietnamese as kind of helpless. Oh my God. No, no, they're not helpless. But but but the point is that it's easy to say that it's hard that between 14 million and 16 million people can just move. Um, but I guess what I'm concerned about is this, what I'm trying to say is that the the same problems that have been addressed in the developed world by and and or by technology that have largely reduced deaths and reduced property damage in certain places. We require, you're requiring, the part of the problem of climate change is that it's going to disproportionately affect people in the world in places which are right now the least capable of addressing,

of dealing with the problem. You know, climate change, the worst heat level, the worst is going to be in the middle tropical latitudes and the equatorial regions where largely the poorest countries are, where largely the people are most dependent on agriculture, which is going to be more impacted in those regions than it, in negatively, than it will in Canada, where they may have a bigger rice bowl or a bigger wheat, wheat growing area. So it's going to disproportionately affect those places that are least able to deal with it. And so if I had to suggest, I would suggest the curve is likely to turn over.

And that's part of my problems with part of my concern about climate change in the long run. Yeah. So, I mean, okay, so the first thing is when you kind of go, the poor will be most impacted by environmental change. Well, you can say it about all kinds of change. Yeah, absolutely. And I also think we should stop thinking of change as bad in every instance. I agree. Yeah, I mean, so most of the African Americans in the San Francisco Bay area, so if I'm right about over now,

They came, they were, their parents and grandparents, not their parents, sorry, their grandparents or great-grandparents were sharecroppers. Well, I could see environmentalists today, if that was still a situation being like, well, we couldn't possibly displace those sharecroppers. Climate change is going to negatively affect their crops. No, the problem is that they're sharecroppers and they don't want to be, I mean, this idea we want to keep them sharecroppers or keep them in agriculture. Progress is all about not being a farmer anymore.

There's 1% of the workforce in the United States are farmers. So the biggest problem in Vietnam is there's too many farmers. And going back to the areas, I mean, Guatemala, we've already have climate. And this is part of the problem. We have climate refugees already from Guatemala, right? I mean, there are people who cannot, their small subsistence farms are no longer providing them subsistence. Okay. So they're doing what people do.

They migrate to cities or they try and migrate north. And then you have this, this quote unquote problem of immigration. and you have all of these tensions that come from it. And you have, so you have sociopolitical tensions that arise. I know that part of the world, and I'm sorry, but the impact of cheap corn dumped on those countries by overproductive agriculture and rich countries is such a bigger factor for displacing people from their land.

That's my first reaction. And my second reaction is, I don't cry for small farmers. My family farm, my mom cried. She did. My mom cried when the family lasts the farm. And I was kind of like, I don't know, mom. I mean, I loved going there. It's very romantic.

I love the food and whatever. But I kind of go, you want me to cry about poor farmers who have to go to the city? The problem is that they don't have good jobs in the city. Exactly. I mean, the point is I cry. I don't cry for it. I'm not sure I cry for anyone. But I'm concerned.

This is people having to change their life, have their whole lifestyle, their whole health, health, welfare, their family depends on them being. able to successfully move and find a productive environment. And so I worry about that. That's how it's been for 250 years. And you're going to go, climate's going to make 600 people people mute. Modern industrial capitalism made billions of people move over the last 250 years. So the selective concern about environmental change, I find very suspicious. The biggest dynamics are the displacement of small, the biggest, arguably, the most important thing that's ever occurred is that we went from 100% farming, I'm exaggerating, 90% farmers to 1% farmers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Every single one of those people that lost their farming jobs somehow ended up richer and freer. And I would argue more self-fulfilled. I think Suparti, the Indonesian factory work on the book, is in a better situation than Bernadette. That's not because we dealt with climate change. It's because Suparti left the farm. And so stop, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm going to say this nicely. please, if you're going to be concerned about climate change, do so in that context.

Exactly. Recognition that displacement and dislocation and moving is what we've been doing for 250 years. Yeah, but let me, okay, I'm going to keep pushing back here. I'm going to, my role to some extent is as devil's advocate because I want you to elaborate. It's great. Okay, good. As long as you're having fun, I am. Okay.

Yes, capitalism has maybe, I don't know, the numbers. So I'm willing to accept that billions of people, yeah, billions of people have moved to cities over the last 500, 400 years because of the, of capitalism and technology. But the difference is they've moved to cities because, I mean, in some sense, it's been a positive driver, the opportunities, the wealth, all of that is there. And I guess I see a somewhat a difference because now it's a negative driver. It's not that there's more opportunities.

hold on let me finish what I was going to say it's and I'm always accused of interrupting so but anyway it's not that there are suddenly going to become necessarily more opportunities for them elsewhere unless we do something in advance unless fortune favors the prepared mind which i'm all in favor of but unless we do something for them in advance there aren't going to be those opportunities they're going to be driven away from where they can't be but it's not clear they're going to be easy places for where they can be so i think it's a fundamental difference One was a positive driver of capitalism, and I come in a view climate change and associate environmental impacts as kind of being a negative driver. People being pushed out.

So first of all, I have two objections. Okay. My first objection is philosophical. Who cares if it was a negative driver? Who cares if Suparti had to leave the farm because she's poor? Who cares? Nobody cares. What matters is that Suparti have a better future.

Yeah. So we got to provide. Yeah, but that's what matters, not whether the driver is positive or negative. No, but hold, but look at, but there's, you can't decouple it. The point is, hold on. I make my second point because you let you talk and then you said, I said I had two points. I made the first one, it's full soft. The second one is your history is terrible.

Do you know the history of industrial capitalism? Marx writes about the enclosures of Britain where they actually kicked the poor people off the land. I lived in Brazil and the Amazon where that was all I studied, kicking people off land. It was all totally negative. What about environment? Is it just climate? The dust bowl, this is a result of bad farming technologies. We have all sorts of horribly negative things.

What about like the persecution of the Jews in Europe? I mean, I don't think, I think that I think the Jews who escaped Europe before the, before the Holocaust would say that the negative driver of anti-Semitism is something they're grateful for because it got them the hell out of Europe. I'm alive now because of it. Yeah. Yeah. So this idea, first of all, this idea that we can kind of go back and decide.

decide what kind of, that some dislocation is good and some is bad because of something, something. It doesn't make any sense. What I'm arguing is that with the industrial revolution, there was an industrial revolution going on. There was a, and whether people were, there's zero doubt that people, that the history that you're talking about is true, that people were, were removed from where they were going to be and they were put in places they didn't want to be and all of that, that's true. That's human history. I guess I guess we're

qualitatively or maybe quantitatively we may disagree is my concern that just like we are in complete agreement that what's important

is not the oppression of the past or the problems of the present but the opportunities of the future that we provide people. I think we're completely in agreement there I'm more concerned than you are perhaps that climate change, the pace of climate change in poor areas of the world will be such that people will not have the opportunities to find a factory job as the person in your book or to find that there will be much more violent displacement without opportunity as a result of climate change than maybe you are concerned.

I'm saying, I'm going to respond. I have two things to say. My first is I am deeply suspicious of your fear. And the reason I'm deeply suspicious of it is because it is so selective. Why are you more concerned about climate change's impact on Bernadette than you are about all the other things that are keeping her in poverty? And that includes the lack of good industrial jobs in the city, which is my second point here, which is sort of like, if climate change ends up displacing Bernadette, she's got a good job. the city, then who cares? You shouldn't care. According to your own criteria, you just said you wouldn't. So part of me goes, the main event is getting Bernadette, the infrastructure, the irrigation, and her husband and the family, the communities, fertilizer, the roads, all that. And the people who are denying her that is the World Bank, which is funded with our money and which is using climate change to deny Bernadette the things that you recognize. She needs to be safe from climate change. I find that sinister. I find it completely sinister.

And that is, you got it. That is a big reason I wrote this book. I find the selective concern for climate refugees. I'm sorry. The words piss me off. Why are you only concerned about climate refugees? What about all the other refugees? You know, are we only getting, oh, but you're a climate refugee?

And so what? They have a sort of spiritual essence to them. Oh, I mean, come on. I mean, I just have to go, hold on, Michael. There's so much going on in Guatemala right now, Lawrence. There's warlords that control it. Those wars never went away in some ways. You're dealing with just heinous, heinous situations.

Of course. I'm worried about climate change on those people. Listen to my discussion, Domchomsky, where we talk about those other heinous things that are going on. They're all going on. But the point, I guess the point is, if you're going to talk about climate change, you're going to talk about climate refugees. I'm not going to talk about U.S. foreign policy in Guatemala or Haiti or Brazil or, you know, so I mean, there are lots of problems in the world. You're absolutely right. But if one's going to talk about climate change, one might as well talk about the impacts of climate change. That's not how I, that's not how I have, that's not how I am trying to be a climate activist. I'm trying to be a climate activist in a different way. Yeah, sure. And I think it's more scientifically accurate and is more ethical than the way. in which this concerns have been expressed in a highly selective way and then used to deprive

people of the very foundations that they need of economic development. That's why I realize that. And your argument is essentially that, as you say, and something I was going to talk about earlier, when I talk about the, when I, when I, when I, early in your in your history and your discussions, you say environmentalism cannot deal with climate change. You should be allowed to die. we should abandon focus on nature protection and more on technological innovation. Again, I'm not sure they're mutual. In fact, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think you can do both at the same time, which is very important.

I think that technology is an opportunity to address the problems of the poor, as well as the problems of the environment, including climate change, and that you can do them together. So there's not this false dichotomy. you don't have to. I'm the last person that creates a false dichotomy about those things.

My book goes into great detail about why I know, but I'm saying so what you're saying is that we should remove the focus on nature protection and instead focus on technological innovation

because it's going to allow Bernadette and others. But that's not from Apocalypse Never what you just read. Yeah, that isn't. That isn't. I know it's from something else.

I mean Apocalypse Never, my focus has shifted from what I think was an earlier image and naive fetishization of innovation and is focused to energy transitions and power density as a much deeper physical, essential nature of environmental change and progress. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that was early on. But one area where you haven't changed a lot, I think, is you argue against what is called sustainable development. Instead, you want to,

instead you say you want to, let me finish, you want to shrink the human footprint and economic development is necessary to preserve the environment. So you want to, instead of considering what people call sustainable development, you want to have more with less in some sense. You want to go elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, sure. So we don't want to use whales sustainably. We want to stop using whales. How do we do that? Well, we did it twice. The first time we replaced whale oil with petroleum, the second time we replaced it with palm oil, mostly from the Congo. Substitution is the main event. Over time, you're looking at dematerialization using less natural resource, less material throughput. That actually requires more energy and more technology, more know-how and more progress.

So sustainable development is basically a propaganda word. It was invented by Malthusian anti-human development activists in the 1990s. It's a very clear trajectory starting, you know, from late Can I just parse? I mean, you say it a lot and I just want to, there's a, there's an emotionally charged language that at least it's worth unpacking. Malthusian and anti-humanist, you equate. Yes. And it grates on me a little bit to have people being called anti-humanist. So, so at least I want you, can you elaborate on why you put those two words together? Sure. So we're talking about a British economist named Thomas Malthus, who in the late 18th century became absolutely enraged at the idea promoted by Enlightenment humanists, namely Condorcet and Godwin, that all humans could achieve

prosperity. This totally, this drove Malthus crazy. He hated the idea that everybody would be prosperous. And he spent his entire life creating an ideology to explain why that that couldn't and be the case and why we shouldn't try. And, and, and, and I kind of describe how that's continued over the last couple hundred years. It's anti-humanist in that what I'm saying by humanists is what the, the enlightenment thinkers meant, which is that, um, humans contain the potential for universal emancipation and freedom. And that really is a consequence of technology and prosperity and that everybody gets it. There's no racism. There's no nationalism. Everybody gets it. And the people who countered it had an anti-humanistic view, which is that some people were doomed

to starve to death. And some people were doomed to die young and die poor. Okay. But that was Malthus's view. Well, again, but I'm worried about attacking this strong man. So you're attacking Malthus. but I think it's unfair to argue that people who would suggest there are physical limitations on the human condition to argue that they would not also want everyone to be prosperous. I mean, there you go, you say it's a straw man, and then you just go and suggest that there's some group of people who have been denying physical limits. No, no, no, yeah, but I mean, look, there are. Everybody recognizes physical limits.

we all had to eat. So there's a, so I'm in a sense, I guess I might, I'm sensitive to the Malthusian argument about population, that it will be very different, it'll be much more difficult to have a world in which everyone has the, the standard of living that you and I do with a much larger population. Now, of course, technology,

the old limits to growth argument, which I read and influenced me when I was a kid, I'll admit, strongly influenced me at the time, sure, it didn't take into account the very fact that technology can change. So what was a limit before is not a limit now because technology can do a lot more with a lot less. And you talk about in your book and it's absolutely true. And it's one of the reasons I like being a scientist is finding ways to do to improve the human condition. But nevertheless, it will be one of the reasons I am in favor of population management is that it will be difficult,

especially in poorer regions, to try and it'll be progressively more difficult to achieve the goal of nature and prosperity with a much larger population. Would you agree? In some ways, it can make it easier, depending on the population isn't what you do. I mean, so let's just back up again. So Malthus, Godwin and Condorcet say technology is going to allow everybody to be free because we can all get rich through technology. Malthus says absolutely not. And the reason is we're going to have too many kids, more kids than we can feed. And God went in Congress, it said, that's silly, we'll just use birth control.

And Malthus's response was not that we won't use birth control and he wasn't concerned trolling about how it might not work to have birth control. He was saying we should not use birth control because that would violate God's will. Okay, so watch the move that gets made. You go into the after World War II period and, the Malthusians say, we should not let poor countries develop because they'll, they'll, you know, we shouldn't let them get rich. They're going to have too many kids. We should deprive them of the technologies we need. They succeeded with the World Bank, as we've described.

And then everybody would say, well, why can't we just help them flood control hydroelectric dams and roads and fertilizer? Like, why I want that work? And they said, because that would be, that would violate nature's will. That would violate the natural systems and the natural, orders and they constructed an entire science called Earth systems. And they basically constructed a whole ideology designed to show why poor countries couldn't do what rich countries did to get rich. And then they said, we've determined scientifically that if you try to get rich like we got rich, some kind of cataclysm will happen. And there will be some mass. Actually, the way you avoid starvation is with irrigation, fertilizer, tractors, and rose. So why would you suggest that those

things would actually make more starvation. You got to remember, they said, they said, they said, the metaphor that they used was of a lifeboat and of them on the inside and poor people on the outside. And the metaphor was not to reach over the lifeboat to pull them in. It was to kick them out, keep them out of the lifeboat.

So my objection, just so we're, my ethical commitment, do whatever the fuck you got to do to get everybody in the lifeboat. That's it. It starts from that. And if you're going, no, no, as a scientist, I'm going to calculate whether our boat can hold all those people and you're not offering to get the fuck out of the boat, then I actually, it does piss me off. I think it's an abuse of scientific power. Yeah, but I think it's an abuse of scientific power, a huge abuse for rich people in the world to suggest that they've done science showing that poor people can't develop.

I find it a complete stain on the national. physical sciences over the last 50 years. The biggest journal, the biggest scientific journal in United States is a Malthusian journal. Our biggest newspaper is a Malthusian newspaper. It's deep. I think it's very dark. And it's very, as the kids would say these days, it's very problematic, you know. Okay. Look, I guess, yeah, everything you said, your concern and your anger and your moral objection is something, how could one disagree with? On the other hand, it seems to me, that this is an example of a painting everyone with the same brush. In some sense, hold on, it's some sense that once again,

I kind of think of it as like looking at a straw man. Absolutely. If people make that philosophical jump that people and, you know, that people should be kept out of the lifeboat, absolutely, but you don't have to make that jump. And yet you can still, let's take the Kerry Emmanuel quote again. It's a perfect example. Here's someone who's saying, you know, you could say burn more coal in India is a way to reduce carbon, okay?

Because what you're doing ultimately is you're increasing the quality of life, education, etc., of those people. And it's well known, and I've once in an article, Educate Women Save the World, it's well known that if people are wealthier and more educated women in particular, will have fewer children, which will put less pressure on them. and their families. So here's an example of saying, look, there are, there are resource limits within a certain location. And one of the ways, one of the ways to improve, to bring people into the lifeboat is to help ensure that they eventually have a lifestyle in which they will not have as many children. So, you know, you don't have to. Let me, two objections. First, I remain, I, that's I remain uncomfortable with the instrumental way in which we're framing that issue of prosperity. For me, it's fundamental human right.

It's a fundamental human right that people have, and I'm uncomfortable describing it in a strictly instrumental way. The second part is that this dynamic of wealth creation has been understood since Adam Smith. And this dynamic of agricultural intensification and industrialization had been understood for over 150 years, 175 years, by the time the Malthusians post-World War II constructed what we call environmentalism as this elaborate effort now to basically control energy and food policies in poor countries. And so it's not, it's an active denial of the basis of how we all got wealthy. They're actively denying the role of energy, actively denying the role of energy, actively denying the role of, you know, and so, and where is it, you kind of go, you're uncomfortable with me challenging the

motivations, but you have to ask, what is the motivation of a person in the rich world seeking to deny the central role of these basic primary drivers of modernization? Why are they doing that? What is going on? Well, it's, it's absolutely, look, I agree with you there completely. I, this argument that somehow, hey, look, we've put all this carbon in the atmosphere. But if you want the developer, if you want China and India to do it, it's going to get much worse so we can't let them do it. Okay? This argument that's, and as I say in my book, you know, my parents had a little store when I was a kid. And there was a sign up there that used to sell little chotchkes.

And it said, if you broke it, if you break it, it's yours. And we broke it. So we have no right in some sense to say, we have to take ownership of the problem. And if that means, hold on, hold on. That means, well, it's, we've created, the industrialized world has helped create what is now the human induced climate change. That is going to impact people in different ways, in a thousand different ways in a thousand different places. But it's going to what we need to do in some sense to me, in my view, we have the ethical and moral obligation, if you want to use both those terms, to say, we. we are responsible for the situation that's going to potentially exacerbate the problems of people

who are poor in poor countries. And therefore, we have a moral and ethical obligation to do what we can to bring them out of poverty so that they're less susceptible to the problems of climate change. Yeah, I mean, we're all agreed that human rights, that humans have a dignity and everyone should have the ability to have a life of human dignity. Okay, you and I agree with that. That's humanism, right? I guess. Yes. Yes, that is what I mean by humanism. Okay, so what I guess I'm saying, as I said before, is that part of the issue of climate change is recognizing that there are, that what we need to do, climate change can help achieve what you are discussing climate change,

can help achieve a goal that we both have, but one that you're espousing extremely vocally, which is the need to bring people out of poverty. The need to develop the undeveloped world. The need to develop, yeah, I guess I'd say developed the undeveloped world. But Lawrence, it seems like you keep wanting, in other words, you keep wanting to make it instrumental, and I don't understand.

I don't understand why, because the categorical imperative is much in terms of persuasion, if you're just simply trying to persuade people, it's much more persuasive to convince people that we just have a moral obligation for everybody to achieve prosperity. But I guess my point is there are going to be problems that wouldn't be present that are going to make it much worse. And we therefore have a, yes, and therefore we have an obligation to deal with those problems. That's my point. It's the fact that climate change is creating those problems that wouldn't be there otherwise. For, you know, by the way, are you okay to go two and a half hours? Are you, yeah, if I could get a glass of water right now. Sure, you want to take a break?

Why don't you take it? Yeah. All right, man. Thank you. Okay, thank you. This is fun, Lawrence. I'm glad that you're comfortable with a good argument. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Don't know, absolutely. And I think, yeah. And the argument is met because I think we're coming from more or less the same place, which is even better. And I'm glad you are. We totally agreed there wouldn't be anything to talk about it. Yeah, and I'm glad you agree. I didn't want you to feel I brought you on to sort of, you know,

ambush you or in any way, because I certainly didn't. I want to allow this discussion take place because it's really important for people to hear here, I think. Anyway, and just so you're aware where I want to go, I mean, I had a narrative, but we're going all over the place, which is fine. There are two really interesting things you bring up that I want to talk about, specifics that are kind of take us away from where we were before. And then I think, given the time, what I'd like to do is I want to talk about, I want to focus on nuclear power

because I think it would be a disservice not to do that. And then I want to end talking a little bit more about climate change considerations from where I're coming from, okay? And then end on sort of nature and prosperity for all, just so you're aware. We can get there. Okay.

Before we go elsewhere, I want to make a small digression because there's some things that I, again, surprised me, and I always love being surprised. I love being wrong, even though it happens so rarely. Do you know? No, I do as a scientist. No, as a scientist, I love finding my conventional wisdom is wrong,

that my common sense is wrong, and my presumption of something is wrong. I think it's... Right away, right away, or does it take you a little while? It depends what it is. I mean, obviously, it depends how emotionally involved I am, I guess. But I think it's the reason I like being a scientist because it's taught me to enjoy being wrong.

it's one of the values of science and it's probably one of the greatest values of science is that is it not knowing is important and being wrong and being willing to be wrong is vitally important and I think those are the two greatest misconceptions and greatest utilities that science one of the reasons I popularize science is because I want to try and help people recognize

those two facts that's all so I would say for me for me I the experience of being wrong is always totally unpleasant and I don't like it. And being wrong and figuring out how I was wrong and actually speaking about how I was wrong has been maybe the most important part of some one of the most important parts of my own intellectual life on that. But I would say it differently. It's like it's like emotional pain. At the time you don't want it, it's terrible. But over time, you're like, I'm really glad she broke up with me. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm really, I'm so glad I was fired. I'm so glad I was fired. Yeah, I've had to deal with, yeah, and those human

emotional things being wrong or having, and I've had to deal with that a lot, I guess, you know, well, that's, for me, what's, what's been so great about being a scientist is 99% of what I do is wrong, or what I've done in my career is wrong, not in the sense that the mathematics is wrong. Just nature wasn't smart enough to take, to adopt what I thought, you know, what I thought would be a solution of a problem. and so that becomes kind of challenge because you're used to saying, okay, well, this is wrong. Anyway, and so when experiments are done in science,

one of the biggest problems as a particle physicist is that we've been right for the last 50 years, is that we have the standard model that's impenetrable, and we want it to be wrong, and we want the experiment to show us what we're thinking is wrong, because only then we'll know where to go. But in a personal sense, absolutely, absolutely. In politics, you know, when you have your scientific brain on, I find you can be like,

if you can, you can be like, I hypothesize and then, oh my gosh, I was wrong about that. That's one thing. But I think when it's like my identity and my core paradigm of saving nature or whatever it is was wrong, or I was wrong about, I don't know, like helping the poor. Yeah, yeah. You know, like I'm discovering, it turns out there's, you know, unintended consequences of helping the poor. Yeah, sure. It's unintended.

I want to talk about one unintended consequence here right now. But I've said this, and my wife disagreesing with you about what I said. I've said that my hope for a college education, and I don't think everyone should go to that. It's another thing. I think most kids go to college without having any idea what they want to do. And it's just four years of country club. But what I hope is that at some point in their education, they'll have some idea that's at the core of their being, something that's so fundamental to how they've used. themselves as their very existence, that to be proved wrong, because that's liberating.

If you haven't had that experience, then you can't, you know, then it's really hard to change your mind about deep things. And that's one of the purposes of education. It seems to me is to give you that experience. And it's one of the problems about that coddling that you're talking about is that we kids don't want to be presented with any ideas that make them feel uncomfortable. And if you're not uncomfortable, I've said, you're not learning. Yeah, you're not learning. The purpose of science and the person of education. to make you uncomfortable. Yes.

Okay. Here's something that I learned. More unsafe spaces. Yeah, here's an unintended consequence that I learned from you. And, oh, it's number E, not number F. Where's E? And it has to do, oh, here it is. Like, how have you done this?

I have so many notes on your thing. You don't want to see what I have here. I like to do my homework. That makes me, that makes me very happy. Good. And well, I think if I'm going to wait, if I'm going to spend two hours of someone's time, and I'm hoping the public will listen, I owe it to them and the public to do my homework. So that's... Well, I really appreciate that one. Okay. Okay, good. Well, one of the things that surprised me was this. In California, banning plastic bags resulted in more paper bags and other thicker bags being used, which increased carbon emissions due to the greater amount of energy needed to produce them. Paper bags would need to be reused 43 times to have a smaller impact on the environment. And plastic bags can constitute just 0.8% of plastic waste in the oceans. Glass bottles can be more pleasant to drink out of, but they also require more energy that I knew to manufacture and recycle. So, but what you talk about would surprise

me, you know, there's this big thing about plastic. And I, you can't go to a restaurant and get a plastic straw anymore. And you point out that maybe that's misplaced. So maybe could you elaborate on it a little bit because i think it's a it's fascinating personally well thank you lawrence and and by the way this is one of these things so i had two things i had never researched at all for this book meat and plastics and the feedback meat is what i want to talk about next so they're perfect okay and the feedback i've got people love those two chapters and i think it's because i did bring i had some beginner mind you know yeah yeah you know so i'm like i'm going to start with the straw up the turtle's nose you know that's like what everybody knows yeah yeah um you know and but i will say i didn't quite get to the bottom of

it until after the book was out and I only recently got to the bottom of it. So let me cut to the chase, which is that if you don't know that your plastic is being recycled locally, you don't know that for sure. You should throw it in the trash 100%. And by the way, I do buy my milk out of bottle because I think it tastes better and if your energy, whatever, it doesn't matter, but like plastic waste. Yeah, sure. Okay, so here's what I want to say.

Plastic waste in the ocean is not something that we should want because it does kill sea life. It's not the biggest threat to sea life. That's overfishing and by catch and other things, but we should still care about it. Almost all of it, not all of it, but almost all of it comes from poor countries that don't have landfills and incinerators and that we have this incredible solution to our consumer waste, which is landfills and incinerators. Everyone kind of has these, there's been so much concern trolling on this. The new incinerators break up the dachshund molecules because they burn so hot. That was the initial concern. We have them now in downtown Tokyo. Incinerators are wonderful. It's an incredible achievement.

Landfills are also great. They've gotten better. They line them. They capture the methane gas. They burn the gas for electricity. They've gotten amazing. There's no risk of running out of space in the United States. If you don't have enough space like in Japan or the Netherlands, you incinerate. So that's the full basic story of it. But yeah, I mean, I have to say, the thing I didn't quite get to the bottom of until recently, and I still haven't made a big enough, I can't, I figure I don't know how to make a big enough deal of it, is that it appears as though much of the plastic waste, not all, but a lot of it that's going into the ocean from poor countries that don't have waste management systems is coming from us. I mentioned in there how China refused to take our

plastic waste that we were recycling. So it's going to these other poor countries that don't have the facilities. And yet it's, it's a complete abrogation. Is that the right word of responsibility. By everybody in this process, I think there's actually corruption that goes on, not like, I don't want to mean like kind of illegal, but it's a corrupt process to tell people that they are preventing their plastic from going into the ocean by recycling it and then potentially going into the ocean. It's crazy. So I think it's bonkers. And I have to say the big consumer products companies that determine all this stuff, they have completely allowed themselves to get in this situation of a green with green piece,

that plastic waste, that there's no, that recycling of plastic is a good solution. First of all, we don't even need, we shouldn't even do it. I mean, there's some thicker plastics that you should do, but we should really just be throwing it in the landfills, containing it in the landfills or incinerating it.

I mean, that, I just think it's incredible. I prefer the landfill part because it's sequestered. The carbon is sequestered if it's in the land. But, you know, there's not that much carbon that comes out. no, there's not that, but in fact, I was going to, this may be of interest. In fact, I've done a podcast that did with my friend George Church.

I don't know if you know, George. He's a well-known genetic. He's brilliant in many, many ways at synthetic biology. But what he wanted to do in terms of genetic manipulation, we talked about it, he wants to to engineer microbes that will basically make plastic, not gas, but plastic. And then he wants to use that to sequester carbon. wants to build like a bridge across the Pacific with plastic. And, you know, I mean, some of this may be very well, but he said, or build structures,

build high-rise buildings with new kinds of plastics. And so his argument is, is let's, let's, more plastic, not less plastic, because it sequesters carbon. Yeah, but I mean, the only thing I will say is that, you know, we make the current fossil plastic out of the by, out of a byproduct from a gas. So it's a little like in all of the buffalo right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, you know, there's people, there's nuclear advocates who, who describe how in the future when we're 100% nuclear, we'll have to use some fossil fuels to make plastics.

I think that's kind of interesting. But anyway. Okay, anyway, I couldn't resist bringing up. It's sort of peripheral. And the other, but the other thing I'm bringing up partly because this January 1st will be my one year sort of not being as being a vegetarian, but a pescatarian. When I went to the Macong, we decided to do a vegetarian diet. And for a variety of reasons, I've decided not, I've spent time with my friend Peter Singer and other people as well.

And so, yeah, I've moved away from eating any kind of meat. For ethical reasons or for? Well, that's an interesting question. You know, it's hard to know in the end, I think. There are ethical issues. Sure, I feel better looking at cow in the face when I see one. but also environmental reasons. And you and one of the chapters of your book is about,

you know, as far as I can understand, you were somebody who became a vegetarian, partly for environmental reasons, then discovered those environmental reasons were wrong and stopping a vegetarian. Is that correct? Is that? No, no, no.

Heaven's no, no. I mean, it's, and by the way, the ethical reason, you could look a cow in the face, but that's only because someone else can eat the cow. Yeah. If everybody can eat cows, there wouldn't be a cow looking at the face. I know, no, I often tell when I had my Indian friends, I would often say, you know, if we didn't eat cows, there wouldn't be cows.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the good of a cow? It's only round because people, so, yeah, anyway. But I can still feel better. And the punchline for listeners is just that that chapter ends in a very, it's probably my least, it's a soft chapter in the sense that I sort of don't feel, I think we should not be. too judgmental of people's choices on this and I'm sure not and no I mean literally I think one of the most interesting things I think what you said is right it's like why are you vegetarian well you kind of

give a reason but then maybe there were these other things going on and we know from psychological research that there are deeper psychological motives for vegetarianism that vegetarianism is an ideology more than it is a practice in that most vegetarians eat meat um and but the other thing I want to say about it Meat production is our biggest land impact. So we use about half of the ice-free surface of the earth. About half of that half is just for pasture for meat. It's been one of the biggest drivers in threatening species that we all care about. Yeah, that was all in my mind. Yeah. Yeah, gorillas, penguins. You go to New Zealand and people see these bucolic scenes of the, of low-density farming of sheep and whatever, but it's bad because it's, or it's bad. It's, it just takes away

habitat. Yeah, yeah. So the good news is it appears that the amount of, we know pretty well now, that the amount of land we use for pasture has declined by an area 80% the size of Alaska since the year 2000. This is a massive environmental event, totally underpublicized. Yeah, and you stress it a lot. I mean, you stress it a lot. And I was happy to see the people who disagree with your book, all agree with that fact, even the people who are critical in one way or another. The fact that we can do more with less, which is one of the points you're making by either farming better or meat production. If you, and, but it is, but I'm glad you agree, it is a fact that we used so much land and so many resources for meat. And I guess the other, and maybe now you're going to, and when I drive across the country and I see all those cornfields, and I know the corn has been used to produce.

to feed meat, it's sort of still, you know, that does bug me a little bit. But here's the thing I wanted to get to, which, which bothered me. So I bought what you said, but the one thing that bothered me about it is that, so you point out that vegetarianism, even if it is not going to, from a carbon, from our climate change point of view and carbon emission, is not going to change the world a lot, give it in part because of the improvements in meat and production and other things. So you say it might just produce a 10% reduction in carbon dioxide emission. My question you is, well, if we look at what we need to do,

and I do believe we need to reduce carbon emission because of the potential serious problems, if we don't, 10% is a good thing. What's wrong with that? That's what you said. Well, you say if you, I mean, you say it could be 10%. Two to four percent is the right number. And that's a number that is consistent among different studies in different countries by different scientists and researchers.

So two to four percent. So let's say it's four percent. What's wrong with that? All else being equal. Yes. Yeah, four percent is four percent less fossil fuel, four percent. I mean, they're talking about nuclear, which we're about to do. Four percent, there's a lot of countries don't have.

it on one jet you'll blow it on one jet on one jet travel yeah you'll blow it you'll blow it I mean so I'm not going to do that I'm not going to be vegetarian for for a variety of reasons and I'm sorry I think I mentioned by way I stopped being vegetarian for instinctual selfish unconscious reasons when my wife my ex-wife had a baby or sorry she's pregnant and she came out and she's making filet mignon and I was just like what is that you know it'd been like 10 years, you know, and I was like, I'm going to eat that. And there was no, just sort of, we're not rational, right? We're mostly animals. You know, Benjamin Franklin has a great story when the guy cuts open the fish and all the fish come out. He was like, well, that fish ate all those fish, so I should be able to eat those fish, you know. But I think, you know, yeah, I mean, look, like I said,

I, I, I, fine, take credit for the two to four percent, but, but I just kind of go, I'm going to take credit for flying less. Yeah, but I mean, I think we have, and this is a perfect segue. And it's the first, perhaps the first perfect segue in this discussion. Because I wanted to get to nuclear power in a little more detail, partly because it's a, it's a passion of yours, and it's a lot of discussion in the book. And partly because I agree with many things and I disagree with other things. So I think it's a good chance for us to have a discussion. And here's the point. It's fair to say you are, let's go nuclear, 100% nuclear. Nuclear is the only solution in the long run. And I've spent a lot of time in various groups, including with the American Physical

Society and other groups. First of all, you make the point. And again, I think it, in my own mind, personally, it detracts from the strength of the argument for nuclear to argue that about the people that the people who are trying to suppress nuclear are fossil fuels and renewables. That should be irrelevant. It seems to me nuclear is got to stand on its own own feet. Sure, those things happen. And you're right. We need to know about them. Maybe from a political perspective, we need to know about them. But, but yeah, there's no one, the point. I agree. Yeah. Okay. So the, no one I know who's serious about energy is anti-nuclear. Let's so let's just make that clear. There's no one I know who seriously thought about energy that thinks we should not have nuclear at some level.

The difference is that all the people I know and the studies have been involved and say, you know, you can't get to where we're going to go. We need to go at a time frame in which we need to do it by any one solution. That's dumb. That's just dumb and wrong. Just let me finish first. And then you can explain why it's dumb and wrong. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Okay. There are lots of things we can do like we can. If you have that four, not that I think everyone should be vegetarian, but let's just take it. If you have that 4%, then that's 4% less, you have to worry about building nuclear plants right away. And it challenges that. If you travel by jets less, then, then, and if you use natural gas instead of coal, instead of coal, for example.

So there's, there's a, what was that? Which I defend in the book. Yeah, I know exactly. So what I'm saying is everyone I know who's thought about this in detail, and I've spent a lot of time with Steve Chu and Ernie Monez and other people who thought a lot about energy. And in my own time, being on various committees of physics committees, think about it, suggests that one needs to, that there's a whole bunch of things we can do with nuclear as a component to get to where we need to go on a time frame that we need to do it in.

Yeah. Okay. So what's wrong with that argument? Okay. Well, I'm not sure that there is anything wrong with it, depending on how it plays out. So my view is that the main event is transitioning from coal to natural gas to nuclear. I would like to see that as fast as possible and no faster to maintain safety, you know, good economics, blah, blah, blah. I don't think we need geoengineering. I'm against it. I don't think we need carbon capture and storage.

I'm against it. I don't think we need solar panels and wind turbines. I've got some in my backyard, but I'm against them at an industrial scale. Okay? That's my view. That's my whole view. Exactly.

And I'm glad I may be changing. But here's what's going on with Ernie Monies and Chu and those guys. And you just called the Bill Gates view, which is they go, well, no, no, we need a mix. We need a mix, guys. we need a mix. It's going to be some gas and some carbon capture and storage and solar panels and wind turbines and blah, first of all analytically, it's not true. You can just do what France did. We know, we have real, world proof. You can just do nuclear. I'm not saying you should in every

situation. No, no, no. But you can just do that and then you replace over time, heat, cooking, transport, all from nuclear. So that's not like there's like there's not there's any physical obstacles to that. It's not physical. It's social and political. Yes. Okay. But you can't deny that those factors exist. Yes. Of course I don't. So you can't go to nuclear.

The point is it physically, realistically, you can't do, the United States can't do what Francis is right now because it's just politically and socially impossible. I don't agree. I mean, first of all, would you say this? Why wouldn't you just say the same thing about climate change? In other words, you go, it's not possible. How are you making, you're making the judge? I mean, that's not a scientific statement.

No, no. Well, you're right. I said it's a political one. The point is part of the issue. Okay, okay. So let's argue about politics. Yeah, yeah, I'm not saying scientifically. Of course, scientifically, zero doubt. Okay.

What can we do in a realistic time frame? And that's what I mean, Mike. That's part of my concern about climate change. You're absolutely right. We can we can bring the Bernadette's and other people the world up above, but can we do it practically in a time frame that will happen? And that's my concern. Let's talk about that. So let's talk about politics. Well, no, no, I mean, I just want to raise the political.

I want to get back to the science first before we get to the politics. And I want to get to back one bit of science, which I agree 1,000% with you on. And I've tried to publicize it. I want to use this as more of an example to publicize it, is that nuclear power is not unsafe. In fact, it is incredibly safe. And I want to go more strongly than you did talking about Fukushima. Okay. You talk about, and you give a great example how after Fukushima, Japan ultimately took enacted,

and I have it somewhere here, enacted measures that, of course, were much worse for the climate, much worse for the environment, et cetera. But Fukushima is an example of how safe nuclear power is, because you could not pick a stupider place to put a nuclear power plant, nor do that. design it more stupidly than that power plant was designed and it's a perfect storm for disaster. If you wanted to pick the worst possible design and the worst possible location, that would be it. And even then when you look at what happened, the death toll, that is less than from coal in any given year. So let's make it.

There is no death toll. exactly there is no death toll but what I'm saying I mean even if you know you cannot people might argue one way or another but but so few people have died directly and even and so that's the first thing the second thing is part of the problem and you know this is where I as a physicist have become sort of evangelicalness regard because radioactivity as is this word that scares people it's a terrifying word radioactivity because of nuclear weapons and and you know we've all seen the movies of you know radioactivity of you know radioactivity and you know going to kill us after a nuclear war and even if it's nothing. And the thing is, it's so much easier to monitor radioactivity than it is from pollution from coal, for example. There's nothing easier to measure than radioactivity if you're talking about a pollutant. So let me, so I want to make those two science statements. We're in complete agreement, but I'm saying it with the premature least of a physicist, okay? So. This has always been good on nuclear, almost always been good on nuclear, but some of the worst,

anti-nuclear people have been physicists too. Yeah, yeah, sure, absolutely. But now let's go to the areas that are maybe a little more contentious about why I think, why I'm not so as, why I'm much more, say, in favor of solar than you might be, or at least as being a component, and why I have some problems with nuclear. And it is really economics. It's not the other aspects. I mean, there's zero doubt that nuclear in it, all the things being equal is, is just,

just a perfect way of generating power. Do you think that, if, do you think it's a perfect way to generate power in Saudi Arabia and Iran? In the long term. But I mean,

in the words, you said it's totally safe, but is it safe in Iran and Saudi Arabia right now? Okay, well, and this is the, this is the one of the questions. There's three questions that you,

and you're pretty, when it comes to nuclear weapons, you have a sort of pro-nuclear weapon view, which I also disagree with, but you think nuclear weapons have kept the peace and stopped wars. And I think if you've read Command and Control, you see it's just there but for the grace of God. There's been so many cases where we've come so close.

The more nuclear weapons you have, the more likely you are to have a tragedy. And while India and Pakistan may have stopped, while the fact that they possess nuclear weapons may have stopped aggression at some level, the fact that they have them is such terrifying. is terrifying. I agree. That's why they work so well. But they're terrifying for the rest of the world too, you know. I know.

I mean, this is really important. Is that a local nuclear war between Pakistan and India will kill a billion people worldwide? Because, and this physicists have shown this. And this is a lot of debate about that. No, no, it's not the nuclear winter of Carl Sagan. It's the more recent work that's been pretty, that at least I found convincing about where in the atmosphere things get sent and what it might

do to climate. There's a big debate, and Kerry Emanuel paradoxically has been on a more skeptical side of that threat. But I don't think you need nuclear winner to be terrified of nuclear weapons. No, but I'm saying is that the more you have, the more likely it is, you're going to have a problem. So anyway. I think there's an underlying.

But that's one of the problems, but that's one of the problems that people do. The reason I'm interrupting you is I want to get back to nuclear power. The concerns, let me just lay them out and then you can explain why everything I'm saying is wrong, okay, in your view. Okay, first of all, well, there is a concern about a potential correlation between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. So there's a proliferation issue that doesn't exist with hydroelectricity, say, or solar, okay? So that's one concern. That is a real concern, I think, in my opinion. But more important than that is the fact that economically,

if we, there's social and economic issues. One of them is mildly scientific. And that is that with, and in fact, I was just looking at a study from the world in data, which is one of my favorite places to go to. I love looking at the graphs from there. And one of the graphs is they just produced a thing. Why did renewables become so cheap so fast? It's interesting for you to look at it if you haven't looked at.

Of course I've seen it all. And I write about it in my book. Okay, yeah. But so the question is, so solar is going down. Solar is a learning. The cost of solar panels. Yes. And the cost of electricity from solar panels when the sun is shining is going down.

the cost of grids that use a lot of unreliable solar and wind is going up. Okay. And there is a reason for that. And it's because unreliability externalizes huge, huge costs. And the low power densities of solar and wind farms, which require three to 400 times more land than a natural gas or nuclear plant, create huge, huge costs. We've had massive grid reliability problems in California, big problems in Britain,

big problems in Australia. Those are expensive problems to solve. They require keeping more gas power plants up online. They require more transmission. So solar and wind make electricity expensive, even those solar panels and wind turbines, when they're generating electricity, generate that electricity cheaper than they have.

Okay. That's what I would say. Yes, but one could use the same thing against nuclear power plants, saying that, yes, they're more expensive than they need to have been. for a variety of reasons. But they don't have to be in the future. That's called learning. Yeah, but this is different.

This is different than that. This is an inherent, you add large quantities of unreliable electricity to electricity grids. Costs are going to go up for reasons that have been well documented. When you add large amounts of nuclear power plant to your grid, you have to do very little of that.

That's why, you don't need to have a bunch of big transmission. You don't need to buy a bunch of land. So, you know, I mean, I kind of go. Well, okay, but yeah. Go on. Go on. Sorry. No, no, I was just, I mean, I think you kind of combine the high, the high economic cost of unreliable solar and wind and the high environmental cost.

And you realize that it's driven by power density and the intermittency. These are not solvable problems. Those are inherent to the solar and wind flows. They're not solvable. Okay. Okay. Let me, let me give you my two other or few other concerns. One of the arguments I've had about nuclear is economic, namely, their big capital investments. They take a long time on average to build and operate. And therefore,

and therefore there are economic issues that always rise during a, you know, over a 20 year period. It's the same reason it's hard to build an accelerator. Over a 20 year period, there's recessions and, and periods of growth. And so because there's such large capital investments, and they take so much time to really build. I don't see one concern is I don't see them as something that can help in the interim period to particularly address global energy issues.

I go, I go, it's nonsense. I mean, look, the Koreans are building nuclear, before the anti-nuclear government came in power, the Koreans were building nuclear power plants faster than coal plants. That was one of my discoveries by going there and talking to people. you build the same reactor over and over again with public money at low interest. Build the same reactor. That's the key point. You go the same reactor and then the cost per reactor.

Yeah. And my disagreement with the rest of the with the rest of the pro-nuclear movement and the nuclear industries, they want to keep changing the design. No, no, no, no. That's we agree completely. What you want to do is you want to get something that works. And I would argue that what you want is the smallest possible size nuclear reactor. No, gosh, no, Lawrence. No, oh boy. No, this is basic physics. You have to have, you don't get to reduce the size of the labor force at the same scale that you reduce the size. So the Koreans went from 1,000 megawatts to 1,400 megawatts per reactor. Oh my gosh, they got 40% more electricity without having to add hardly any more people. So no, you're totally wrong about the size. No, no, no, there's a reason for it. Okay. The reason I'm going to argue is that first of all, I mean, you can build very, very, very, you can build very, very, you know, very,

manageable reactors that are small, but more importantly, one of my concerns about nuclear as centralized power, which is, I mean, you're in favor of centralized power because of power density. But part of the problem of energy is not just generation, but transmission. We have this, and I'm thinking about North America now, not so much, okay? Nuclear power plants are expensive here and time consuming and much more so than Korea for the same reason that China can build skyscrapers much more quickly than the United States. We've got regulatory systems that are in place that make it, that make from a realistic perspective, make it expensive and time-consuming.

And that isn't going to change in the near term. Oh, sure, it could. We have 62, around 60 power plant sites. You can add reactors to them. You don't need to break any new green ground to make any new nuclear in the United States. Look, I mean, if the United States gets, if the United States doesn't get back into making heavy metal, heavy industry, nuclear power, I mean, what, can you imagine solar in the United States is just unboxing crappy Chinese solar panels? We're going to send all of our wealth to China when we could be producing it here. It makes zero sense.

The world is reverting back to national interest away from this, this pretty, this globalization, which went too far. So this assumptions that you make that somehow we can't do it in the United States, it's just, it's too linear. I'm not saying it can't. I'm just saying realistically, if you look at the- I don't think it's realistic. I think what's real, I think what's unrealistic is the idea that Americans are going to keep spending money unboxing crappy Chinese solar panels and that communities are going to continue to be quiet about it. We're organizing much of the world. Yeah, but hold on a second. If you can build nuclear power plant, why can't you build a solar panels? I mean, it requires three to 400 times more land. No, no, I'm not talking about land.

I'm talking about unboxing. The box that you have to unbox doesn't have to be made in China. All of it is. I know, but you just. And no one's even- Hold on, hold on, hold on. You see the problem here. You're telling me France has nuclear power and Korea has nuclear power so we can have it.

And now you're telling me China makes solar panels button. We can't. Of course we could. Yeah, of course we could. Of course. It doesn't have to be. cheap anymore. Well, they would eventually, right? Yeah, right? I mean, eventually. It would get cheaper. I don't know if you get to the China price, honestly. I don't know. I just don't know. I can't say,

I can't say either way. And by the way, by the way, but in terms of political realism, there is nobody. There's literally nobody. So, well, so I mean, I can't, on the one hand, it keeps me of being politically unrealistic on nuclear and then say I'm being, I'm being unrealistic. I'm both ways too. You can say the same thing about me. But for me, aren't you just anti, but aren't you really underlying saying that you're worried about nuclear weapons? Oh, that's one. But I'm also, but my other problem with, and maybe, and you're going to tell me I'm to influence by Mary Loven's, who I've been a long time with many years ago.

But part of one of the things, one of the advantages I see. So there's lots of problems about solar that you've pointed out. Okay. Well, one of the advantages that I see is also what you see as one of the disadvantages. Namely, it's distributed. Namely, so I can have solar panels on my house and I can take care of my own, to large extent, my own power needs. I can, and one of the problems of energy is not just production, but distribution.

And we have this power grid that's quite problematic in this country. And nuclear by definition, because it's centralized and high density, requires a grid, maybe requires storage elsewhere, and where solar panels, solar, for example, can be done locally. Every house, there's a lot of land use, but if every house had solar panels on them, yeah, pollution-wise, it might be a big problem, 25 years down the road, and that's an issue we need to worry about. but it allows me and it may allow some and again I haven't studied this but but my my my suspicion is it may allow some poorer countries where it's difficult to have the infrastructure to build a large central power plant for people to have power their own computers or whatever with solar panels so the distributed aspect of solar panels is something to for me even though it's lower power density, I see is kind of an advantage. I know. I think that I think the reason

you see it for that is for non-scientific reasons. Could be. Why? Okay. The process of creating prosperity is about centralizing energy and food production. So what you're what amory is suggesting, but he's more, he's more clear that what he wants is degrowth. Yeah. What you would be suggesting in going backwards on if you're going from des. from centralized food and energy production to decentralized food and energy production, you are proposing making food and energy more expensive because that is what will happen. We do not, most people do not want food and energy production happening near them. We don't like it.

It's industrial. We want to put it somewhere far away. I don't. I don't think you do either. So this idea of distributing the, you know, especially solar and wind, which have these massive environmental impacts. Why would we want to distribute that? Why would that be viewed as realistic? It's highly unrealistic. We're in the midst right now. Right now is happening a protest in Britain against a massive proposed solar farm that even Greenpeace is against. So it's the

decentralization of renewable energy production that makes it unpopular. Well, yeah, but that's an industrial scale. I agree with you. No one wants a factor. Just like no other way, no one wants nuclear waste. That's a problem, even though they shouldn't worry about it. even though they show me do you know why we decent you know why we you know why we you know why they concentrate solar panels can you guess uh because it's more efficient i assume it makes it about half as expensive because you because think about the labor yeah yeah one roof one roof versus just a bunch of dudes unboxing crappy solar panels from china and spreading them over landscapes pretty easy work you know you know from a global perspective it's more efficient but for me as an

individual or for me is in a country where if I want to have some if if I want to in some sense have more control over my energy environment putting solar panels on my house is a good thing no it's a good fantasy let me tell you why we had a blackout in California the sun was shining and people with solar panels on the roofs couldn't get electricity from it they're hooked up to the grid because that's what they're for is to get grid electricity we we taxed poor people with more expensive energy to subsidize my rich neighbors in the Berkeley Hills to get subsidized solar panels and subsidize Teslas. So there's an equity problem. There's a cost problem. Of course, it's a fantasy of independence. I did a focus group once with just young guys here. And once I

introduced the idea of being free from the grid with solar panels and batteries, they were so in love with this idea that nothing we could say to them would change their mind. So I would just, I would suggest that this, that this, it's a powerful, it's a fantasy that's so American in some ways. I'm going to produce all my own. We sit in Berkeley, right? I'm going to make all my own food and energy. That's the whole Michael Paul and whatever.

It's total bullshit. Like, we have a very large garden in my backyard. My wife loves to go. I love the food for the garden. If we dependent on that, we would die. Like, we depend on consuming large amounts of food and energy produced at scale efficiently, far from us, and that's the way it's always going to be. Yeah, okay.

We can talk about this at length. I'm not unpacking things enough, but let me just, I'm just trying to point out things that one might be concerned about. By the way, I think you'll agree with me that you're right. A lot of this is just subsidized, the subsidized Tesla is a subset.

But the subsidies for that are far less than the subsidies for oil and gas. No. Yes. No, they're not. They're just not, Lawrence. I mean, they're in the, you look in the book.

Federal, what is it? How many billion dollars? The way that Amory plays that game with numbers, I can tell you in great detail, the games he plays. What he does is, they count well depreciation as a subsidy, which is absolutely just. I was talking about R&D. I'm not talking about. I was lead author on the biggest study that's been done, the first big study done on the fracking revolution in the United States. And it was trivial what the taxpayers spent to get the fracking revolution.

Absolutely trivial. So I'm wrong. so that you're telling me, if you consider the whole spectrum of oil and gas exploration, that the R&D subsidy is smaller than that that's used for solar. Oh, by a lot. I mean, if you really want to criticize somebody. I'm willing to be wrong on that. I just don't know the numbers.

Yeah, I mean, it's the production tax credits for solar. But let me, let me, I want to just, we don't have enough time, unfortunately, do this with justice. But let me just say, if I'm Bernadette, or maybe not Bernardad, but if I'm, what, the advantage it seems to me of solar is that if I want to bring myself up to a point where I can have lights at you know where I can have where I can power some aspect of my small place where I live right now just to bring me up so that I can have a computer or something that that somehow allows me to create a micro bank or what you know that allows me to drag myself up what's what's the problem of solar panels for that look if you want to go give Bernadette a solar panel I'll tell

you where to send it. I want to have a solar panel fine, but that's not what's being proposed. Okay. The World Bank is taking, no, let me just, this is really important. Okay. The World Bank is taking money from what would be for gas plants, which are reliable, hydroelectric dams. Okay. And and then subsidizing that, so Saharan African governments to buy crappy solar panels from China. And then, and then what do you get from them? You don't get any electricity at night. Yeah. You're left with a huge amount of electronic waste. And the bigger point, this is the most important thing. The way that Bernadette will get modern energy is by moving to the city. She's not doing anything that right now, she's growing, you know, yeah. But for the near term, she's not in the city.

You're right. I mean, if you're saying, is it okay as a charitable exercise to give Bernadda a solar panel? Come on. But that's not what's, that's not what's going on. This is part of my problem, is that, yeah, in the long run, maybe moving the city is good. But people have lives, they have farms, have kids, it's difficult for them to make that long-term economic, unless they're forced to by circumstances. It's difficult. No, look, if the World Bank helped to build the Inga Dam, then H&M and the other fast fashion sweatshop operators would potentially locate in GOMA. I mean, that's a tricky city because it's a little far away from port, but just to go with me, You know, they would locate there because they have cheap electricity, a huge amount of cheap labor.

Bernard's labor right now is basically free. And they can, and they would be able to, and Bernadette would love to get that job. Are you kidding me? When you interviewed women, poor, farmer women, they would love to have that job. If you create the opportunities, if you build it, they will come. Okay, that's absolutely. That's right. But if the opportunities don't exist.

But they don't exist because the Malthusians to go over the World Bank. Okay, okay. Right? I mean, I mean, you're kind of, you've got to, you've got to. back to full circle from, from, you know, I mean, you kind of, I just think this, I worry about the kind of, you kind of go, well, but right now it's faster to have a solar panel. Well, yeah, I mean, I put a solar panel on my roof. I have solar electricity during the sunlight hours, but building, and building a nuclear plant takes 10 years. Yeah, but after the nuclear plant's built, it's enough power

for three million people. Yeah. So nuclear bands should be built. I agree, but I just don't see them. I just don't see them as a, uh, uh, at the pasty that you don't see them. Are you kind of don't want them. Oh no, I don't have any problem with nuclear, but I just think given the realities, especially in North America, that for the first, you talk about 200 years from now, the only nuclear power plants, maybe. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we're in the near-term future. I don't, I don't see it as politically and socially realistic. But let me ask you another question. This is, you know, I did a TV show once and, and I was had a solar plant in the back they drove me up somewhere in California.

And it was solar thermal, namely, it struck me as much more useful than solar electric in the sense that, so all these mirrors were pointed on this salt, which would heat up and stay hot all night. So what's wrong with that? Well, I write about it in the book. That's the farm they built that requires 400 times more land than a nuclear plant. In order to build it,

they had to pull our endangered desert, tortoises out of their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, where many of them were penned and died. The project is widely viewed as an economic boondogle and disaster in California. They didn't realize it at the time. One of the towers caught on fire, and they kill at least 6,000 birds a year, which are attracted to the light. Solar thermal is considered basically a dead technology at this point, been completely eclipsed by solar photovoltaics. So what's wrong with it is low power densities. It's low power densities, but you would agree at least it resolves the problem of power at night. No, it actually doesn't. It's actually not sufficient for the idea

is you get some of it sufficient for peak hours, but you got to remember about storage. The most important is just physics. Yeah. Every new energy conversion, electricity to chemical, electricity to salt, which is what that is. And back to electricity, you're paying an energy penalty somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. So you don't want to add energy conversions to the greatest electricity. Yeah, you don't. But I mean, every time you do that, there's tradeoffs. You know, you don't want to, but if you want to be able to store energy, then you inevitably have a tradeoff, right? So if you want to be able to store energy, if you could generate energy in one place and you need it somewhere else at a different time, you need to store it or a different

And so anytime we do that, there's. Yeah, so they built Diablo Canyon, our last nuclear plant, California. They built a pumped storage facility along with it. Yeah. And it allows for that. But the difference. And there's a conversion factor that you lose something when you do that. Yeah.

But the difference. But you live with it. Well, but the difference, but it's not just all else is equal. The difference is that the nuclear plant is 90% capacity factors. And the solar plan is something like 30 or maybe 40 at best. Okay. And those differences are very, very big. Especially when it, especially when aggregated.

onto the grid. Okay. By the way, one thing that I meant to ask you is, be because I grew up in Canada and where there's a lot of hydroelectric power, I always think of hydroelectricity as renewable. And yet you talk about, you're a fan of hydroelectricity, but not a fan of renewable. So is there am I wrong? Hydro electricity is renewable. Yeah. I mean, I kind of go, I've tried to figure out how to talk about it. But basically, my view is, you know, wood to coal, to gas, to nuclear. And then you go, where do hydroelectric dams fit in? And I go, hydroelectric dams are the highest form of renewables. So, I mean, it's not like, I mean, I'm not even like against, I mean, I defend burning,

I defend burning coal, right? Yeah, I know. Yeah. And so I kind of go, so Bernadette, it's, I mean, so for me, it's not like, which technologies do I like. It's like in Congo, it's obvious to everybody that they, it's the grandinga. In Mozambique, it's obvious that it's gas. In some places like Zambia, they may need to use coal.

Okay, well, I'm in that way too, and that's why I think about the multi-tiered approach to try and resolve climate change problems. Nuclear is an important component, but many other tiers can be useful, especially since, especially, and now let's get, I don't want to go too much longer. I want to deal with climate change, particularly at least climate issues in the last 10 minutes. And this has been fascinating in learning for me and maybe. for people. And maybe for you, who knows. But anyway, um,

um, um, uh, no, I've been loved, but I'm sorry. I, yes,

I have enjoyed this. I like the differences of opinion. I don't have any problem with the discussion or disagreement. I love it. Okay, me too. Anyway, but,

um, we, you were just leading me somewhere where I forgot, but, um, where I was going to go about climate. But, um,

um, I thought you were going to talk. I thought we were going to talk about, I thought we were going to talk about the bomb. I thought that... No, no, no, no. Okay. But, yeah, the many-tier approach.

Okay, here's the, and here's my point, that, you know, I do, the ski slope curve does matter to me. The fact that I do think, the fact that carbon remains in the atmosphere for 600 to 1,000 years means that you can't just wait for a sufficiently long time to do anything. There is a time urgency to at least begin the process. You agree with me there. Well, not only that, but I point out, as nobody does, we're reducing emissions. Well, but wait a second, because I think that people kind of leave this part out. We have to do something. We have to do something, right?

Well, okay, but let's maybe start by recognizing that we've been doing something. Carbon emissions have peaked in Germany and France. In a number of places, but not globally. Let me finish. peaked in the United States, they peaked in Canada, they're peaking in most developed economies, and they're mostly, that's mostly, I think people disagree with you about whether they peaked in the United States. I mean, that pandemic has helped a little bit. It did peak in the United States.

My understanding is it 25% larger than it was in 2007 now? No. That's the data that I've seen. But okay, well, we can check that. But anyway, the bottom line is a globally, certainly. And that certain rich, I mean, that's one of the complaints that some people have had about what you say is that certain rich country, Germany, England, and as if France have indeed peaked, but other, but if you look at the developed world, it hasn't peaked. If you take the wealthy, if you take the conglomeration of wealthy countries, it hasn't peaked. Do you agree with that?

Let me just, in Europe, emissions in 2018, were 23% below 1990 levels. In the U.S. emissions fell 15% from 2005 to 2016. That was the latest data available. They've declined more since then. When you look at carbon emissions from electricity, which is the first energy, which is the first form that will decarbonize fastest, they've declined by 25% in the United States and 63% in the UK between 2007 and 2018. I am a follower of positive psychology. Positive psychology teaches us that we do better when we build on our strength.

rather than this kind of catastrophist. We have to start reducing our emissions right away. We're doing it. Let's do more of it. Okay, but you also realize that it's partly a nuclear plant. But it's partly a false statement. We've been partly it's reduced it. You will agree by importing from China where they're producing it.

So if you have to include the whole footprint, I don't think it's fair. And I think it's. And I go through those numbers and it's true. that importing these products from Coleman and China do, but that's not enough to, no, but I mean, I think, I think so, I think, yeah, but the numbers, it's not one to one. Okay, but you can't just quote, we can't,

it's not as good as you say it is because we're, we're passing the buck. I mean, you're right. Sure, but it's also better than the way I'm saying it. And the wealthy country. It's also better than the way I'm saying it because, because it's like China is going to do the same thing. China will eventually.

Yeah. So in other words, like, of course we peaked for, And of course, Britain peaked. Britain was the first country to industrialize. So, of course, they peak first. And so, look, I mean, I've had. Anyway. Yeah.

I mean, so, let's not, let's not argue about this particular point. Okay. But the point is we need globally to peak. Yes. That we agree. And we, and it's, and it's time sensitive. It's not as if peaking in 2040 is the same as peaking in 2020, right? Because we have 20 years of 10.

Of about 10 gig, you know, 10 gigatons of carbon per year. So we have 30, you know, 20 years of that. That's 200 gigatons of carbon, which is one third of the amount of carbon that was in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution. So all else being equal, we don't want any carbon emissions. Yeah. All else being equal, we don't want any climate change. So let's get the left to stop trying to shut down nuclear plants. I agree with you.

Shutting down nuclear pensions. And I've argued, and by the way, I've lobbied against it too. and spoken out against it. And it's the stupidest thing in the world. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And, you know, and- They're trying to break it. Yeah, I know, they're trying to break it.

And you're right. And I think, and I learn, and, you know, I, of course, I'm always skeptical. I've read your, so I don't, this, the political arguments you give for why it's trying to be broken are interesting to me. I'm always skeptical, because I've, you know, I've only learned them from you. So I have to, I'm skeptical.

But it's important to know that there are social and economic, pressures that are working against nuclear that I didn't know about. So that's that's interesting. But anyway, so we need to we need to we need to turn the ski slope downward. And every year we wait, it becomes harder and economically more difficult to do what we need to do. Not waiting, nobody's waiting. Nobody's waiting. There's no waiting going on. In fact, the transition from coal to gas continued under Trump. Well, of course, because, yeah, I know. It doesn't matter what he said.

Cole's dead regardless. That's true. Because he has to feed. Yeah, but, okay. But globally, we are not turning it over. Okay. So it's true that no one's, that in various wealthy countries, efforts are made, are just the people are voting with their feet.

Cole's dying because it's not economically viable. It's not that people care about the climate. It says it's dying for many other reasons. Does it bother you? Does that bother you? No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I'm happy. And not only that, as someone pointed out a long time ago to me,

which was the first time I learned it, you close every coal plant in the country and the number of workers that are out of work is so minuscule compared to almost anything else that it's not going to have an economic problem. You know, when you worry about coal miners, but as an economic problem, it's not a problem globally. I mean, cold closing, you can compensate for that by opening factories and other, by retraining workers so easily.

So, okay, so that's not a problem. But anyway, globally, we need to address this problem. And one of the things that you don't, so there's four items that I would say, and mostly, mostly from my own, to some extent, from my own book or my own thinking about climate change, that I would sort of slightly take issue with. First of all, I'm much more concerned about sea level rise than you are. I'm much more concerned about it because it's built in, first of all. We did see level rise, right? Yeah, I know, but it's built in. Yeah, but we didn't.

But I mean, it's built in. And you argue, well, the Dutch are already talking to people in Bangladesh about it. But I don't see, I don't see, I see it as a cause of concern that will produce socioeconomic problems that we need to be much more serious about. And so I therefore take sea level rise as a climate change problem that is, that is, that is severe in this century and cannot be addressed easily by much of the world in the way it will be in the developed world. So maybe we disagree, but I think it's, I think we already talked about it, man. I mean, yeah, no, but were you aware of the, of the, of the fact that places are, you know, are much, much lower, that there's much more sensitivity. to sea level rise at the level of one meter than we ever imagined three years ago, five years ago.

I honestly, I mean, I'm kind of like I feel like I'm having to repeat myself. Okay, okay, okay. Let's forget that then. Let's talk about, one of the things you talk about is the Amazon. Sure, it's not the lungs of the world. But here's a problem that as far as I can see is a real problem from the point of view of at least carbon. And the point of view of, so part of deforestation of the Amazon and part of the effects of climate change, are to make it drier. And in fact, the Amazon creates much of its own humidity, as you know.

And so eventually there's a potential for it to become drier and turn more savanna-like, rather than rainforest-like. And I know you're a big fan of rainforest. That will turn it into a carbon source instead of a carbon sink, because all of that material that dies off will become a carbon source. Are you concerned about that? Because some people have argued that we're, that that transition from rainforest to Savannah can begin to happen if 20 to 25% of the, of Amazon is deforested. Whereas now 17 is. All those being equal, I don't want to see any forest cut down.

So all else isn't equal. That's the problem. Right. And so all those being equal, I don't really want any environmental change. Okay. but I think that that's a potentially serious problem with the Amazon is the is not just not forest cut down for the sake of forest, but the fact that you eventually, if you change a topography, you eventually produce a huge, that is a huge carbon source rather than a sink.

And I view that as a big problem. We don't want more warming. Okay. Let's, let's, for the point of view of time, let's skip to, to, I guess my, maybe my biggest problem has to do with uncertainties. The reason I became serious, more serious about worrying

about climate change was seeing the uncertainties. So risk assessment is likelihood times devastation, right? And I know you bring up, you know, asteroid impacts and stuff like that. But I don't see it as the likelihood of many of these things

is the same as asteroid impacts. So I see the fact that the fact that we are uncertain, and uncertainty is a good thing in science, it's not a bad thing. Because it now know, because it tells us what's possible. But it also tells us what's impossible, okay, because the range of allowed things are possible. Take, say Greenland, for example, just one example. The data tells us that, okay, with six or seven degrees of global warming,

the Greenland, the Green Lai shelf will disappear for sure. Okay. And it has disappeared if you look at paleo climate studies numerous times in the past. Okay. What period of time? Now exactly, over millennia. Centuries are millennia. That's the, that's a time frame.

Centuries are one or to one to two millennia. Okay. And that's great. But. And that's seven meters of, of, sea level rise, okay? And that's happened before and it can happen again. The uncertainties, however,

that in order to destabilize the ice shelf in Greenland, six or seven degrees will definitely do it, but two degrees might because of nonlinear feedback effects that were already seen in 2019. You know, the reason there was so much ice mass lost in Greenland in 2019

wasn't just temperature. It was the fact that because of probably because of ocean currents, because of the fresh water being done there. There were high pressure areas over Greenland that weren't there before, which meant there was more sunlight, which went there was more welting. And so you've got all these nonlinear feedbacks, which are really hard to calculate. And that's why there's uncertainties,

because nonlinear physics is really hard to calculate and really hard to simulate. And so you've got this possibility that you could have seven meters of sea level rise, and it could be destabilized and happen because of temperature rise, that is more or less guaranteed in this century. And that's a reason to be really concerned about letting it. That's why climate change is more of a problem than it might be otherwise. It's not just the temperature rise. It's these possible non-linear effects.

And I know you poo-poo tipping points, but there's a lot of evidence that, you know, you could just give examples of how one non-linear impact can have an impact on another, I was going to give you a reading from a nature article recently. It doesn't really matter how changing ocean currents will dry out there, Savannah. And look, here, how I resolve it. I go, all else being equal, we want less emissions, less warming. So that's all else being equal, we want that. No, no, but. And then you kind of go, so then in terms of like uncertainties and real outlier, real black swan events, you know, these kinds of things, you do have to think about, by the way,

And you cannot dismiss asteroids, supervolcano. Of course. Yeah. Pandemics. But I don't think, but I think it's unfair to call a super volcano or asteroid at the same level as the possible severe impacts that are still speculative, but are much more plausible and more likely than, I mean, if I had to give a probability of being destroyed by an asteroid versus not being destroyed, but severe. sea level rise, I would say sea level is much more likely, much more likely. But that's not a scientific statement. That's just your kind of intuition. No, no, it's looking at the, it's looking at the, it's looking at the probabilities.

No, it's, I'm sorry, but it's, look, the best, look, if you really want to get into this, read Voslov's book, yeah, where he goes through all of these outlier risks. And actually, like, that's not where he comes out in terms of either severity or probability. Um, Look, I mean, yes, climate change is happening. And the way that we mostly, the way the IPCC and others mostly calculate the risk is in an incremental way, which I think is the right way to do it. Yes, there's some possibilities of unknown, unquantifiable tipping points. Yes. And we can say the same thing about other risks.

That's the point. And I think any effort to go beyond that is to just false precision around either the probability or the severity. or the severity. So to single out, so you kind of go, are you worried about black swans? Yeah, I am. But here's my point.

It's this, and to come back to, it maybe brings us together and to end this. It's my last epilogue is called fortune favors the prepared mind in mind of it. And I think it's true

in all aspects, okay? And when it comes to the severity, I wouldn't call them black swan events, but let's just take, I just took it as one example, the uncertainty of the Greenland. I could have gone a lot of other things,

but certainly the Greenland, ice sheet. What you can say is because we don't know what temperature increase will destabilize that and guarantee that it will disappear and guarantee seven meters, we can moderate the time frame over which that's going to happen. So it may be inevitable at some level that Greenland Ice Sheet is going to, but what we can do is if we think about it, is we can say, okay, but we can push that off into a future where maybe we can use technology in other ways to ameliorate the situation. And so we need to see those outliers as a way for us to say, yes, but what can we do to push that off? So what fortune favors paramount by understanding and accepting those

possibilities, it's not just, it's not just flying the sky stuff. It's saying we recognize that it further motivates us to prepare ourselves and prepare our technology, our economics, our innovation now. And I think the same thing is true for exactly what you're saying, that because of the problems of poverty and not having clean water and looking at what happens to people, It motivates us to be prepared to do the rational things now.

Build dams in the Congo, provide economic opportunities in factories for people in cities. It's exactly the same. And I think that's where I would sort of say we come together, nature and prosperity. We come together by saying, but by not forgetting those horrific potentials of climate change and saying, look, that's just, that's just wild speculation. but recognizing that the fact that those possibilities exist further motivate us now to act rationally to reduce the risks. Yeah. You'd agree with that.

But I also want to apply it to asteroids. I don't want to poo asteroids either. I'm all in favor of search. I mean, I've been a big argument and it's cost almost nothing to be able to find every object that's one to 10 kilometers. I mean, that's one of the best things we can do for plan. And it's not even unrealistic to move them. You know, in 10 years, you could easily move an asteroid. So, yeah, fortune favors the prepared mind.

And I agree with you there. And I think I would just, the only I would add is that, you know, I mean, I think there's a kind of, you know, there's sort of, I think the tipping point stuff gets abused in a particular way, I think, which is to sort of go, given the, the size of the damages being, you know, basically civilizational catastrophic, then therefore anything. I demand politically should be acceptable. And that's what I'm opposed to. And I know you prioritize, but that is how it is used. And because you can do the same thing with anything. You can kind of go look at an asteroid hits. It's nuclear winter. And therefore, we should put all of our money into that. And you go, well, wait a second. But then, you know, first of all, we're all going to become poor to defending us asteroids. There's a kind of, there's more reasonableness in there. Yeah, yeah, I agree with you completely. I guess I just think of

that there is some global imperative to act rashly now. And I actually see the things come together that fighting climate change may be instrumental in your language. But it also achieves the goals that you want, too, I guess. And I think you can do both. As an environmental activist, my experience is that saving gorillas is about showing the gorilla, saving the nuclear plant. I don't need Greenland ice sheets to save nuclear plants. I've never mentioned.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saved them and I kind of go, look, it's a, you know, it's a great plant. Let me tell you why it's so safe. Let me tell you why the community likes it. By the way, did you know it doesn't produce any air pollution or any water pollution? I don't need Greenland ice sheets or tipping points for that. Okay. And that's why, you know, I wrote my book too in the sense that to get people to think about the real situation.

I say, hey, look, here's what's going to happen. Here's what we know is going to happen. And here's our ways we might be. And here are issues we might need to deal with and we should start thinking about them now. I mean, here are the funny thing is that the funny thing is it doesn't persuade the people that are trying to step down in nuclear plants. Well, you know, I guess, yeah, look, I agree. I think you're right. Probably, I guess from my point of view is I can think of what I can do.

And I can tell, and I can show people, what I can show people is that the wild speculations and the firm speculation and the firm predictions are different. different and here's why and here's why you should live in the real world and and and deal with the realities of the real world and and yeah and I can't show a picture of gorilla but I can show I can show the realities of the thermal expansion of water and what's going to happen we're got whatever we do anyway look it's been up intentions are pure and and that you and that you're doing it for the right reasons well and in any case whatever well you know and there may be reasons that you know as we all know unintended consequences. But, but, but I, I just, you know, there's an old saying, and I've said it before many times, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,

and I'm an educator. And so it seems to me, ultimately, I have this somehow, even though it doesn't work that well, ultimately, if you provide people with information, I somehow think it can't hurt. But anyway, I always, I personally, the people that are showing down nuclear plants either. Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And so I hope. hope that we both, I hope somewhere in the three hours that you've kindly and generously devoted and, and, and I've enjoyed that somehow people may find some useful information. And I hope you find that there's an opportunity to be able to give them, give it. And pleasure to meet, Lawrence, and I appreciate the back and forth and the good spirit and the, um, the dialogue very

much. Yeah, good. I'm glad you were. I, I, I, yeah. And that may end our podcast, but if, but just tell you now that, yeah, I was, thinking about this and hoping that you would take this in the spirit I intended, which was a dialogue between, because if I didn't think it was worth talking about the things he talked about, I wouldn't have bothered to have you on in the first plane. Absolutely. Yeah, no, this is great, and I really appreciate it.

And as my friend, Steve Weinberg, would say, who's an atheist as much as I am, you're doing God's work. Oh, thank you. We define God as love especially. Okay, you take care. Well, Michael, it's great to have you back. We had a long and interesting conversation almost two years ago, I think, about climate change when your book came out. And because of various issues associated with the pandemic and otherwise, we hadn't been able to broadcast it yet.

And we were planning to, in fact, just get it out this month. And then, of course, I discovered you were running for the governor of California. And in the interim between the time of the climate change book, you wrote another book called San Francisco. San Francisco, San Francisco. I've got to get that right. And therefore, it kind of gave me an idea of some of the issues that probably were driving you to think about problems in California. And I thought it's a great time to just update a number of things and in particular talk about, you know, why you're doing what you're doing and the issues that you think are important. So I thought we'd have a chance over the next few minutes to do both.

So welcome and it's nice to see you again. You too. Thanks, Lawrence. Appreciate coming back on. Yeah. Well, let's so, so I'm assuming that San Francisco, San Francisco, I'm going to say it again, San Francisco, um, help motivate what you're doing now. But why don't you give me a little preface to why, why you're doing what you're doing and how it relates to the some of the issues in that book.

Sure. Well, so there's a lot of, I have a lot of, um, I've been concerned about this issue of homelessness for a long time. I actually, also, it's a book really about homelessness crime and drugs. I had worked on drug decriminalization in the late 1990s, including for George Soros' foundation. I helped to decriminalize marijuana. I worked on needle exchange with Maxine Waters. And really felt like what we were trying to do was to get more rehab instead of prison for people committed of drug crimes. Sure. I never worked as much on homelessness, but it never struck me as a problem exactly of poverty. There was an open drug scene of most. heroin users across the street from where I worked in San Francisco in the late night.

And they're actually the early to mid-90s. My aunt had schizophrenia. My parents are psychologists. I've always understood what mental illness was and is. But like a lot of people, just the word homelessness shaped my thinking around this being a housing problem. So as late as 2019, I wrote a column for Forbes saying we needed to build more houses to solve homelessness. Some friends of mine were like, you know, this is a drug and mental illness problem.

And I was like, oh, right. And so I wrote a second column pointing that out. At that point, my Forbes editors said, you know, you're an energy columnist. You can't write these articles. And so that's usually, that's one sign that you need to write a book, especially on a topic that is complex that is about it does have a housing element too but it's sort of housing mental illness drugs crime apocalypse never became a bestseller that meant that i was able to you know or at least in this case i was able to write another book because there was some sense in which it might sell well as well i knew i wanted it to be on this topic and the pandemic was a great time to do it because i had to be at home um and it required and this is

where the topic is. I live in Berkeley, so this is where the, really the main event was taking place. And yeah, I mean, I'm heartbroken by the situation on the streets. I think it's a humanitarian disaster. I'm angry at the politicians that have made it worse. It doesn't need to be like this. I'm inspired by what they've done in Europe in terms of dealing both with drugs and crime and mental illness. And I think that California is a place that should be pursuing those kinds of, well, I guess you might call them progressive policies, more humanitarian policies rather than the kind of radical left victimology policies that I think are behind the crisis. Well, you know, let's pick up there. It's a good segue then because homocystice is obviously an important

issue and it's great that that's what drove you into into this particular race. But you ended by saying sort of the radical left is basically has displaced woke policies. It's not just with homelessness. And I'm wondering, you know, Sanford Sicko is a lot of people say it's sick for other reasons, woke reasons and, you know, renaming schools and other things. And California is a, is a center for a lot of that. And I'm wondering how you sort of view that in the context of your current race as well. Yeah. Well, yeah. So, you know, just to skip to the punchline of the book because the book works through a set of debunking of what this problem is and what it's not. And so just sort of like the climate change book

in that regard, I guess. Yeah, it is similar. So in this sense, it kind of is the people on the street that live in the open drug markets, which the Europeans call open drug scenes, open drug scenes being places where buyers and sellers meet, but the buyers are in such late stage addiction that they end up just living in the open-air drug market. So your intuition that the people in open in so-called homeless encampments are actually late-stage drug addicts is correct. You're not wrong about that. Most people sense that. The proverbial mother escaping an abusive husband who's homeless for a night or the person who lost her job and can't find somewhere to stay. As a society, we do a pretty good job of taking care of

those folks. Those folks tend to go stay with friends and family. They join millions of other Californians. They move out of state. The strictly poverty-driven homelessness are not folks that go and live in open drug scenes. Open drug scenes are dangerous. They're dirty. They're violent. The women are sexually assaulted. The dealers enforce their trade with machetes. People are murder. it's you know this is real terrible stuff so why do we allow that and why do we allow it in the name of compassion and so I get to the bottom of it and basically there's a fairly small group of people that call themselves homeless advocates and it's a trick on your brain these are not people that are advocates for the people there in my view they're actually anarchists and I'm not like

I'm not using it as a disparaging term that is is what they are and often self-identify as. They hate society. They hate capitalist, democratic, liberal society. They think it is evil and produces inequality. So they're sort of creating this outcome from a system that they hate. They justify it as saying, well, you can't get people off the street. So if you really push them on it, they acknowledge that everyone's on drugs and addicted.

But they say, well, you can't mandate. rehab and you shouldn't criminalize addiction and homelessness. And I actually agree, but I do think you also have to enforce laws against public camping, public defecation, public drug use because those are the laws that maintain a society and a civilization. And they actually happen to be the ways that you get people that are really sick with mental illness or addiction and the help that they need. And so my view is where I come to is that, you know, I'm liberal in my concern for the poor. I'm libertarian in my passion for freedom,

but I'm conservative in my recognition that you need civilization for compassion and freedom. And so the folks that are defending the people on the street are quite radical. They defend it basically by saying these people are victims. They, as victims, everything should be given, nothing required. Basically, a different set of rules should apply to people that we've designated.

designated as victims. And that goes for people that are designated victims, whether from experience like trauma or abuse or because of skin color, thus it's a racist ideology. It's just that all black people are victims, which is outrageous. But it is what it is. It's a woke ideology that you're very familiar with and that most people are familiar with. Yeah, well, you know, I lived before I moved, before I escape to where I live now, which is pleasant, I lived in Portland and or near Portland and I watched the same, what appeared to be initially well-meaning ideas, destroy a lot of that city and make it unlivable in many ways.

And it's unfortunate. And so yeah, I think we, you know, this is an area where again, I think we have come together in that way. I'm concerned about what sounds. well-meaning but is really but really is destructive and and and and obviously my interest you know comment give my background more in education and some of the concerns that I have in in California in particular about the educational system in in universities but in public schools and and some of the ridiculous proposals about mathematics for example the teaching of math you may be aware of

of in California where we're getting the right answer is is viewed in in this document as in some sense white supremacy and that that that's that that's just that's just nonsense and it needs to be addressed and very very concerning um yeah i mean it's uh there's been this conversation occurring with douglas murray and others which is sort of like how far does this wokeism stuff go well it'll stop at stem was the idea that it's not going to go into stem because that would then mean that the bridges are going to fall down. And that's what's happening. There it is.

Yeah. What's that? And that's what's happened. Exactly. That's what's happening. And it's not just on the radical fringe. I mean, you have governor of California, Gavin News, his own people are proposing that we stop teaching algebra before high school.

Why? Because there's racial disparities in math. Well, the solution of racial disparities is obviously to improve the performance of black students. Yeah. Not to hurt the performance of white students. which is already bad enough. Yeah. We have a 10% black math proficiency on average in the high schools.

It's a total scandal. But so the woke left says they say, well, that's entirely because of historical racism. Could be no other reason. And therefore, they couldn't entertain the fact that, I don't know, maybe you need a longer school day or maybe you need a longer school year or maybe the students ought to be studying math more. Yeah. Radical idea. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Or he may, you know, and that you get rid of programs. gifted students because somehow that you know again increases disparities it's just it's just it's unfortunate for everyone and including including minorities because it it makes the assumption it makes the assumption that you have to dumb down things rather than the assumption that you want to bring everyone up which is really what we should be trying to do that's well look i don't want the whole thing to be about woke wokenism but it's but it's certainly an issue in california but there are you know i figured we taught to ask you about other issues some of which you know if you were governor you'd

have to deal with more generally than just the issues in San Francisco or or or or this this new wokeism which California is sort of a in some sense a center of but I mean this week you know there's guns I mean that's you know look this week we had a tragic episode of 19 kids you know as I've in full disclosure I've left the United States there are many reasons for that but but but but it just seems there's so many it true issues that are that are that seem impossible to address effectively by government. And I don't know what one would do. Any thoughts?

Well, yeah. I mean, I spent much of last night and this morning thinking a lot about the mass shooting. And of course, if I were governor and you have a mass shooting on your soil, people look to you to say something. I mean, it's almost. And, you know, they look to you. You know, I'm struck by, you know, I tweeted something that was not about the shooting last night after the shooting. had occurred and I was sort of reprimanded by not by a mob or anything but just by one person who was like you know read the room man you know and I remember my first reaction was defensive and I was like

you know well there's other issues than the school shooting and then I was like you know the school shootings have become religious they've become a kind of I mean it's sad you know but they've become a kind of holy event in a I think in a really twisted way I mean I guess there's other ways in which you would say, well, 9-11, we treat it as a kind of spiritual events when we remember it. There's a loss of life. I also worry about it, though, because I think that that sort of attitude suggests a resignation to them occurring, and that's totally understandable. And to some extent, I think it's just crazy to imagine that there's something you could do in terms of policy to get rid of them. I do support gun safety laws, what we used to call

gun control until the gun control advocates figured out that the word gun control was triggering. Yeah. Yeah. It's gun safety. So fine. Gun safety. Obviously, we have a second amendment. You know, it's pretty darn clear amendment. You know, it does have this part that says it needs to be a well regulated militia. I think about that a lot. You know, the intention is clearly well regulated. well, it's not well regulated if mentally ill people are getting super powerful guns. So I don't think we're going to be able to fully, you know, we should have gun safety laws and push them as far as we can under the Constitution. But people that really want to get guns are going to be able to get them. You know, there's new 3D guns or the 3D printing guns and the ability to make guns means it's even harder.

And then you're, so then you're doing with this other issue, which is mental illness. just for me, by definition, if you're going to go kill a bunch of school children, you're mentally ill. Yeah, yeah. I mean, arguably, if you kill anybody, you're mentally ill outside of war. Yeah. So then you're dealing with a mental illness problem. And I think what's interesting and I don't want to say inspiring, but I think what is brewing is that there is some recognition in the society that we are in a mental health crisis. And the evidence is everywhere.

I mean, on the drug issue, deaths from overdose and poisonings rose from 17,000 in the year 2000 to 105,000 this year, Lawrence. I mean, it's a shocking increase. That's almost a, that's a nine, what is that? I'll let you do the math. That's an eightfold increase. So I, as a cosmologist, I'd say it's an order of magnitude increase. Order of magnitude increase. Yeah.

And so that's one indication. We know there's a lot of anxiety disorders among teenagers. They were there before COVID. They were there. They got worse during COVID. We see the school shootings. I don't know if they're, you know, I think one issue is, are they going up? Are they down?

Who knows? But I think there's plenty of evidence that we're in a mental health crisis. And so a big part of my campaign has been to promote a, or is to advocate for a universal psychiatry, that universal mental health. I'm calling it Cal Psych and that it argues that it needs to be at the statewide level as opposed to the county level and that everyone should have access to it. Like everyone should have access, very easy access to a psychiatrist or a therapist. There's been some debate about which psychotherapies are really effective, but it seems there's pretty strong agreement. At least that cognitive behavioral therapy is effective.

Cognitive behavioral therapy for people that are not mentally ill is called stoicism. Yeah. And I'm a practitioner. And I have a strong believer in it. And so I think, you know, if I become governor or even if I just make it past the primaries, but certainly in any case, I want to keep talking about the need for universal mental health care, better mental health care delivery to get people the care they need, but also to be able to identify people at risk of violence, like the shooter in Texas. Well, I mean, it's laudable. There was a sobering piece I read actually

Barry Weiss in her subjecting this morning about the shootings, which was arguing mental health, but in some sense, it's almost more severe. It's really depressing. And it relates to some extent to what's going on in the cities, the sense that there seems to be this emerging hatred of government, of society, that's that you're seeing in in in the anarchism in cities and and and and in the in the

dysfunctional nature of government uh and and that kind of the look basically i guess one could describe it almost as the eroding of the social contract the the the the the the the the the sense that the wild west sense is that's coming out that that that there's every every person from himself and no no one for anyone else and And I, that did her remarks resonate with me in the sense that it's certain, there certainly seem to be deep problems. You know, I've looked at gun control, gun issues for a long time and written about them. And but they're, you know, they're. And sure, yeah, the fact the United States has 10 times or 100 times more guns than any other country is a problem.

But, but there are deeper issues, as you say. Why are these crimes being committed? Why are people so willing to, to, to, uh, even. argue that we shouldn't have police. You know, this, their homicides are way up, not just, you know, in the last year or two, higher than anywhere else. Well, isn't it also surprising that we're also encouraging police forces to stand down in many cities?

I mean, it's hard to imagine there isn't some correlation. Absolutely. No, it's a big, big argument I make in San Francisco as well, you know, that really the radical left has been trying to get rid of institutions and they've succeeded to some extent. And then they kind of drag liberals into it with them. So, you know, it sort of starts with psychiatric hospitals. I mean, I started noticing because I work on nuclear power and this hatred of nuclear power plants, the demand that we shut them down no matter what by climate activists and replace them with fossil fuels. They claim renewables, but they don't care if it's a replacement. So there's this

mania shut down the psychiatric hospitals, you know, starting in the really after World War II, but accelerating the 60s. And then people say, well, what are we going to replace them with? Well, we just got to shut them down. You know, what about the nuclear power plants? Got to shut them down. And then you get to prisons, jails, police stations. I mean, at a certain point, you're like, so we're just getting rid of the institutions that allow for civilization to exist. This is not a small matter. This is, this is, this is. This is the difference between barbarism and civilization. And so what's going on here?

You know, liberals who then kind of go, oh, I didn't, you know, we didn't, I mean, this is what I find with my, my Democrat, my Democratic friends and my liberal, we didn't mean, you know, you know, to shut down the police stations. Well, that's what defunding the police means. Yeah, exactly. And it goes beyond that. You're almost seeing politicians saying, we don't want to govern. I mean, we, government is dysfunctional.

We want to get in the way of someone else. governing and and it's so it we we basically want to destroy the institution of in the federally in the congress or or locally in in in in in house of representatives and in states that even the politicians are somehow saying we don't have faith in government and government as an institution if they don't it's hard to imagine that anyone else can that's right that's right yeah you worry about it you worry about it coming on both sides where on the one hand the radical left is against these institutions And traditionally, conservatives have been, you know, anti-government, you know, the anti-government libertarianism. So you have a strain of libertarianism on the left and the right that's very, very

dangerous for a society like ours. I mean, where San Francisco concludes is that we're a country founded on freedom. It's a very strange thing. Never happened before. European countries, of course, were founded on order. And then the freedom was gradually granted. Now, to some extent, freedom was gradually granted here too, so it's not totally different in that sense. But there is a way in which America is a kind of Peter Pan nation. It's a country that's struggled to fully grow up. We have a statute of liberty on the East Coast. I argue we need a statute of responsibility on the West Coast. Oh, interesting. I think that we're young. I mean, you realize when you go to the Netherlands or you go to France and Europe, you know, that these countries are so old. They predate their liberal

democracies and that when you get underneath that liberal democracy you do get to some kind of social order that was the king and the the older state and we didn't have that and i think we are create so and that's okay i think we're creating it but i do think that all these things are signs that we need to come together around some kind of social order and some kind of taking of responsibility and that includes institutions that work for the people yeah i agree i couldn't agree more in that sense i mean and in full disclosure, and I've noted this before in podcasts and everywhere else. I grew up in Canada, and I grew up under a parliamentary system, which is based, I mean, the American system is based on a distrusted government. That's why it's got these competing forces that one, you know, can't

overrun the other. And whereas a parliamentary system is based in principle on trusted government. And so, you know, I grew up with that. And so I always had, when I moved to the United States over 50 years ago, it was always difficult for me to understand that distrust of government. And it still is. But clearly, at least it's appeared to function before and now there are problems. Well, look, let's go to a few more general issues and I want to let you go. I mean, there are issues and obviously the state, a governor can't control all these things. But I want to ask you about them.

Sure. You know, right now, inflation is a huge issue. It's affecting people. It's certainly probably affecting people in San Francisco if nowhere else. I mean, where things are so expensive. And in Los Angeles and elsewhere. we just got the federal government just spent $40 billion on Ukraine, which I can't understand. And maybe we could talk about that.

And then the last thing, maybe, you know, ending up with, you know, we talked about nuclear power and how important it is to maintain it. California has done a good job of trying to get rid of its nuclear power. How is governor, would you affect that? So those, let's talk about those three things, inflation, Ukraine, and nuclear power. Yeah. Well, let's, let me start. Okay, I'll start with the harder ones. I mean, Ukraine, all I can say about Ukraine, I wrote a long essay for Barry Weiss, who I've written now two essays for, and I absolutely adore as an editor and as a person. She just added me a few years ago and years ago. I haven't been in contact with it, but years ago in the Wall Street Journal. But anyway, go on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So she, so I did a piece for her that just pointed out what I think is obvious. And I was the first to write about it. but it's now been now the times has sort of said the same thing, which is that the West made Ukraine vulnerable by becoming overly dependent on Russian energy.

And though Europe could have relied much more on its own domestic energy reserves, nuclear power being the most important by far. But certainly on oil and gas or oil and gas from the United States and said it became hugely dependent on Russia. I, among others, literally went to Europe and told them this, argued with them about this, argued with the Germans about this. I received the exact same patronizing response from the Germans that President Trump received, who, for whatever our disagreements with Trump, he was spot on about that issue and was literally ridiculed by the Germans for raising this issue of over dependence on Russian energy. I pointed out that, you know, that Europe was not going to be able to suddenly cut off Russian energy. energy because energy, I mean, it's just these are, I think there's been, I think people get into this, people don't understand. It's like energy is the lifeblood of the entire civilization and the economy. It's not like, well, I'm going to go without, you know, pistachios this week or something.

It's, this is everything. And so, so then the Russian, you know, people say, well, all the Europeans are going to move away. Well, I mean, it's going to take years to move away from Russian oil. And by that point, Russian oil, coal and gas, by that point, you know, it's. It's clear that Russia will have buyers in India and China who just don't care as much about the human rights situation in Ukraine as the West does. So for me, the energy independence is absolutely essential Ukraine. I don't know about the supporting of the Ukrainians fighting the war. I mean, of course I sympathize with the Ukrainians. Do I want to send them $40 billion in military aid to fight the Russians?

I don't know. I just honestly, I'm not even, that's not even a political answer. I just don't know. Well, it's great to it's great to know, but it's nice to have a real answer, not a political one. I think I've offered my new book is called the known unknowns, but it's saying I don't know is a really good thing and we should all say it because it means there's something to learn. One thing I would recommend, by the way, it's self-serving, but it's true is I just had a Jeffrey Sachs on my critical mass substack site and also earlier a discussion with Dom Chomskyan these issues. Both of whom argue that our policy towards Ukraine is basically to make that war. continue and and and and and and and our effort to try and encourage them to go into

NATO was a provocative and you should but Jeffrey Sachs as an economist it's worth it's worth I thought his he thought his discussion was very interesting so I'd yeah yeah but let's see and you know a lot part of that is inflation of course is being related to that and yeah and and you know it's not an issue that a governor can control or maybe even a president but I don't know if you have any thoughts on it at all well only on the energy side which is that you know there were in a you know we're in a you know we're in an energy shortage and the energy started before the Ukraine invasion. And it became when we got obsessed with climate alarmism and we

shut down our oil and gas production and we shut down our nuclear plants. And that was bonkers. You know, you need abundant energy. We needed those nuclear plants. We should have been producing more oil and gas domestically. It was this whole ESG movement. I'm not saying it was the entire thing. It was part of it. Obviously, some of it was COVID and then some of it later was Russian Ukraine. now experiencing fertilizer shortages. And fertilizers are shortages means there's food shortages, and that means that people are going to go hungry. And that's obviously a bad thing inherently, but it also leads to massive social unrest. So I would just observe that the people who were so alarmist about climate change that they said, we have to stop using fossil fuels or we're going

to have famines are now quiet as mice about the fact that the shortage of fossil fuels is resulting in the shortage of fertilizer and famine reinforces the point that I made an apocalypse, never that their real concern was not climate change. It's actually modernity, its development, its growth, and it's, I think it comes from that same hatred of society and civilization that we were describing earlier. Not all climate alarmists, I'm saying, but certainly the really nihilistic reticone bird types. There's certainly a fringe of everything.

Obviously, I have a great concern, as you know, great. concerns about climate change in a number of ways from a scientific perspective. But I think the notion that what's clear and something we agreed on earlier in our discussion, which is going to air at the same time as this, is that we if we're really concerned about the long term future, we have to make sure that especially poor countries have an infrastructure now that allows them to deal with their problems. And those are in those are energy problems to large. They stand at water and and we need to have that if we're going to be prepared for a world

and where we can move to to other, you know, to more. complex and other maybe self-sufficient energy, non-fossil-producing energy sources. And so I think we really have to look at what the issues are now. And of course, the Ukraine, speaking of famine, I was just reading something like 28% of the wheat used around the world comes from that region. And that's now going to be a problem. I mean, that alone, besides the fertilizer shortage is going to cause a huge issue. And so there are all these, I mean, these are complex issues with feedback.

And as you say, and I've argued in even in the climate. change book climate change itself may not affect if if if if if if the sea levels rise in vietnam it's not going to affect us directly or banglash but there's sociopolitical problems that are going to result if you know that can that are those are probably more severe than the physical problems if you people are displaced and and and so it's a complex world but let's end on on nuclear power which is one thing i know i know you're going to you have good things to say about it because you've thought about it and it's one area where California in particular can address that and it's one area where we both agree that we need again I think where we disagreed the last time is I think one has to

take a many pronged approach and nuclear is not a magic bullet I think but but but it's important it's an important component so well no we're look we're coming off a huge victory I mean the governor has now said that he is reconsidering the closure of Diablo Canyon This is a huge victory. You know, this is a plant that when I started working on it was viewed as just on the verge of collapsing into the ocean and causing a meltdown and killing everybody. I mean, the hysteria in California on Diablo Canyon was like just as recently as six years ago was very intense. I'm very proud of that work in terms of standing up for it because it required a lot of courage and standing up against some really hysterical demonizing people. took a lot of flack for that, but now there's a plurality of support for saving Diablo.

The governor who led the charge to close it is saying that you may keep it open. Now, to be fair, it helps that we're in the worst energy crisis in 50 years and that we're headed for the fourth year of blackouts. And the governor wants to win re-election against me. So all those things have contributed, but it's nice to get some recognition from the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post about our efforts to save it. it. The truth is he's going to have to save it. If he's even, I mean, I'm saying if he's reelected, if I'm reelected, definitely, if I'm going to say, I was going to be a platform commitment right now. If you're elected, it gets saved. No, I mean, I mean, absolutely. But I would, if he gets elected, it would be saved too, because he just can't close it for inherently physical reasons. You would cause blackouts.

There just aren't enough power plants on the grid. And there may be blackouts with it operating. So you need more power. And not only do you need more power for more electricity to support the growth of California, you also need it for desalination and for water recycling. So we're in the worst drought. We're in a terrible drought. It might be a megadrout.

We are in, we're going to be in mandatory water conservation mode very soon. If not, I think he just declared some measures already. you know, the level of ignorance on water is amazing to me. It's that on Twitter people will say to me, as I say, we need abundant energy and water. And people say, oh, well, what are you going to make it rain? And I'm like, no, I'm going to do what the Israelis have done, which is the Israelis have improved desalination so well. So it made it so much more efficient. You know, they just pull the water through these membranes.

Yeah. And people say, and they desalinate and people say, oh, you're going to create these big salt blooms. Now you just capture the salt. You know, it's like all these processes that people catastrophize about. So we have desalination technology. The Israelis are actually refilling the Sea of Galilee. They're exporting freshwater to their neighbors. It's not going to solve all the problems in the Middle East, but it's going to help quite a bit.

So that's one of the things we want to do is build these desalination plants along the coast. I mean, this was the original ecological vision is you'd have nuclear power plants on the coast that produced electricity, the freshwater hydrogen gas for future vehicles and then potentially fertilizer, you know, that that was these kind of concentrated energy production sites that then really provide the natural resources for your civilization. Well, it would be nice. Given the issues that we've talked about, I sometimes wonder why anyone would want to enter in the political arena right now.

I applaud you for wanting to do it, but at least to raise these issues. And I thought, to be frank, when I live in Arizona, I thought of running with never the intention to win, but at least John McCain didn't have a, didn't have a, there were no one wanted to run against him. And I thought of doing it just to be able to raise issues. But, but, but, you know, these are important issues. And indeed, the water issue to raise is very important. And it comes back to climate change.

Again, I want of things, as someone living in the southwest, it always amazes me that how cavalier people are about the potential predictions for precipitation and water in that part of the world. It doesn't look good, and it's an issue that a lot of people are just putting aside. And I think it's so when I think about climate change impacts, that's certainly, and locally in the states, as opposed to the

rest of the world, water is a huge one that we need to concern ourselves with. Absolutely. And you're right. And I think in a number of these issues, when one talks about desalimization and other areas, the problem is are not technological ones. They're political ones. Yeah, absolutely. That's all it is. They claim it's a technological problem or an environmental problem, the desalination, but they just don't want the deep, they don't want, they don't want, they don't want more fresh water or more energy because they don't want more people in California. I mean, that's the bottom line. That's why they won't do it. Well, I, you know, it's hard for me to

to judge what the motivations are, but it's nice to at least talk about the problems and, and at least think about them because otherwise no solutions will come out and it's important to have them vocalize and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have a chance to chat with you because I think these are important issues that need to be discussed and I know you're thinking about some of them so it's nice to have a chance to discuss them yeah same here Lawrence good to see you again I hope you enjoyed today's conversation this podcast is produced by the origins project foundation a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century

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