“The Elites Have Completely Flipped Worldviews” | Scott Tinker | EP 419

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy and I, along with an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as access all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, "We Who Wrestle with God." I'm looking forward to this! I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

In the US, only 11 States produce more energy than they consume; 39 States consume more than they produce. Jordan and buy a lot! The big ones, New York and California, they're importing their energy. Well, that's great as long as you can, but ask Germany how that went when the Russian gas stopped. It didn't go well. We have to start to conflate these things in what I lovingly call the radical middle, and that middle is between energy, the economy, and the environment.

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's good. I like the ART conference, and I appreciate the invitation. I really do! I love the diversity of the audience representing global thinkers; that was nice. And the broad depth, Jordan, of the speakers themselves and the breadth of the topics. I didn't expect some of the things, to be candid with you! We went from faith and family all the way through to education, and of course energy, the environment, poetry, and music. It was phenomenal! So, congratulations to you and the Baroness for putting together a really excellent engagement. I really enjoyed my time there, so thanks for that.

Yeah, it was fun! We figure we missed one major area that I think we’re going to rectify; we didn’t talk about virtual identity. I think we're going to add that as a category. So, that would include discussions of digital currency, for example, etc., and all the potential nightmares that come along with that. But it would also cover, more broadly, increasingly we have a virtual self, and it isn't obvious at all what rights that virtual self has or even who owns it in some fundamental sense, and that's actually a major problem. It’s going to get much worse, so we’ll rectify that with the next conferences.

So, why do you think, what is it about your speech do you think that struck a chord? Maybe you could outline first of all what you talked about, but also provide some insight into why people have really taken it to heart.

Yeah, I just have a really big family, and I made them all watch it!

You must have a very big family!

Look, I've been speaking on these topics for three decades, and it’s nice to see. I think what's happening is some of the extremes on both sides are starting to come around toward that radical middle and think about these things deeper than simply black and white or good and bad, believer or denier kinds of dialogues that we’ve been pushed on us. So, I think that’s striking a chord! Now, people that I've been hearing from all over the world on that speech, actually writing from every corner independently are saying thank you for your objectivity, your balance, for not trying to be flamboyant or shoving opinion down our throat. Thank you for the data!

I do tend to show a lot of data in my talks, but I spend time with it and I made it so you can understand what that data is saying by the end of a particular slide or theme, if you will. So, a lot of people like the data. Young people at that conference, by the way, came up to me very much and very often, and they said we so appreciate your tone, not telling us what we should think or what to do, but just offering this kind of setting, if you will, of the energy, the environment, and economy for us to think on. And that may be striking a chord now, and I know you do that too. I really appreciate your efforts and others who were at that conference to get us thinking; I think it's just time to think, so perhaps that’s why it’s striking a chord.

Well, you know, one of the things we noticed - because as I said, we've released a fairly large number of speeches, and of course the viewership follows a classic Pareto distribution, with a small percentage of the videos taking up the vast majority of the views. And one of the things that we noticed very significantly was that any speaker who politicized the issue got no views. So it was people who spoke two ways: either spoke on first principles or took a more philosophical rather than a political view, and then more educational. I think you probably tilted more towards the educational side, although there was a philosophical aspect in your insistence that there are... what we’re always attempting to do is balance tradeoffs, right?

There’s a philosophical notion there that there’s no perfect solution and that many other competing goods have to be taken into account when we’re trekking through something as complex as the relationship between the energy and the environment, which is an impossibly complex nexus. One of the things we've also learned, although we kind of knew this beforehand, but it’s really been driven home, is that when we invite speakers, even if they're political figures, we’re going to first of all focus on political speakers who can speak from first principles and do something more educational.

We’re going to inform all our speakers that that’s much more likely, it's much more in keeping with the ARC Enterprise and it's also much more likely to be successful. There’s a political figure in Canada, Pierre Poilievre, who’s now the leader of the Conservative Party in Canada and most likely to be the next Prime Minister. He's become a real expert user of social media, and he ran his leadership campaign for the Conservative Party completely outside the legacy Media, giving virtually no interviews. He created all his own ads, and he's done something very interesting in the last month; he's produced two 17-minute documentaries, one on housing and one on debt that kind of look like PBS documentaries. You know, they have that flavor that back when PBS wasn't a political enterprise, they have that flavor, and it seems to me – I've also found on my podcast that more political speakers, regardless of their fame, tend to attract disproportionately few views.

That's interesting. So, I think that people... well, I think people are really hungry for a different approach to problems and one that's in keeping with what you did, which is like a serious discussion of the facts, a dispassionate presentation of the facts at hand, understanding that they have to be viewed through the nexus of a multi-dimensional value hierarchy, trying to negotiate those, not claiming that the experts know what pathway forward is best. The problem with that view is that, well, just because you're an expert on energy, doesn't mean you know how to balance energy expenditures with education, absolutely, and much less healthcare and everything else that has to be taken into account.

Okay, so let's go to your background.

Yeah, quick comment before you before you go. I speak in Canada a lot, in fact I'll be in Toronto next week speaking to the National...

Oh, I'm there! We should have dinner!

Oh, well, I'm speaking to the National Bank of Canada at their energy conference. And we're starting to see that what you just described is this desire for more... for more depth. And I think that kind of sums it up well, particularly this younger generation of people. And I have a PBS talk show; we're in recording our fifth season. And you're right, I’m slightly politically biased, but it's still the most trusted network in the US at least in terms of an attempt to be, and we very much do that on our show as well, is look for the multiple viewpoints. And I say this very often, Jordan: one owns the truth. You know, we just seek it, particularly in science. We scientists live a tortured life of always questioning everything over and over. Skepticism is part of science, and that's where I think I might have kicked off my speech I’m recalling now.

There in London, following your lead, there was a bunch on kind of religion and faith early on, I think day one, and I talked about that a little bit. That you could define faith much better than I can, but you know, it’s a process in which maybe there's less doubt in faith, but science is filled with doubt. Without doubt, we have no science; and I think I probably said there, “You take away doubt from science, it becomes more of a religion,” and that is a very dangerous path to walk down.

I'll comment a bit about the issue of faith and science, and then we'll turn to who you are, so everybody's clued in about your expertise, and we’ll talk more about energy and environment. So, I've been thinking this through a lot.

You know, when a scientist confronts a data set, they do so or she does so with a variety of aims in mind. Now, one of the things I saw increasingly happen in the last decades that I was in academia was that science became both politicized and subject to the demands of career. Now, I'd seen this with every graduate student, for example. There’s always this terrible tension between going into the data set with an orientation towards the truth and going into the data set knowing full well that if you don't extract out from the numbers a publishable statement that all of your efforts have been in vain and your career's on the line.

You know that whenever you’re doing statistical analysis when you're conducting scientific inquiry, you're always balancing that demand to falsify your own cherished notions, even those upon which your reputation is based, and to demonstrate to yourself that your current experiment was a failure with the opportunity and requirement to follow the truth. So, what I would say constitutes the proper place of faith in science—and I actually think this is the right way to think about it metaphysically—is that you have to confront the data set with the presumption that there is nothing better that could happen to you than to find out what it actually represents, regardless of the apparent cost to short-term or even medium-term cost to your career.

And even more than that, to believe that in the long run, medium to long run, if you actually pursue the truth in your statistical analysis, even though you may pay a short-term price in disruption of your pet theories and you know the failure of the odd experiment, your career is going to be much more reliable and much broader and deeper as it iterates across time. That’s called learning; we learn from our failures, right, not from our successes.

Well, and it's also predicated on the assumption that that learning is possible, that the universe is rational, and that if you learn from your mistakes, the consequence of that will be better for everyone. Those are the axioms of faith, I think, that are part and parcel of the scientific process—not belief in the overall validity of a given set of facts, which is more like a totalitarianism.

Yeah, yeah, no that’s very interesting and I think well put. It's the challenge academics face, and I've been one for 23, 24 years now out of the industry for 17. The push, push, push, as you describe, to get your research published—journals want to publish failures, they want to publish things that move the science forward, some kind of a learning or success, if you will. And it's unfortunate because everyone would learn much more if we were to publish the experimental designs we set up and the failures in those. I think as a result of that we've stopped asking as many "why" questions.

We see a lot of "how," "what," "where," "when," which are interesting questions, but "why" is the toughest question of all—why, in life, you know, individually as well as scientifically—why? And that's really the great challenge because you can only typically prove things that don't answer "why," not things that are the answer, if you will. You knock down the possibilities that don't address the data set as you've described it, and that's very powerful as you go down that road, but it takes a long time, and I would like to see us come back to publishing more of the failed experiments, if you will. I think we would all learn greatly from that.

Yeah, well, it’s obviously time for a technical revolution in scientific publication because the whole process has become absurd. The fact that it takes two years to publish something is just, you know, it's just completely beyond comprehension. The fact that all that scientific research that’s taxpayer funded is locked behind a paywall, the fact that the publishing companies have a hammer-lock on library acquisitions and that the libraries are what would you say duty-bound to subsidize the publishers, like the whole thing is just a mess.

I can see Substack headed in a way that would allow for rigorous science to be published, and wouldn’t that be neat? I mean we talk about peer review; well, you put your science out there to the world and there's plenty of peer review. We hear back all the time. Well, we've been thinking about doing that technically too. I mean one of the things that should happen as well, you could imagine a site where you could publish your paper in the same format that they're published now, a page summary for lay audience. You can identify your four peer reviewers; they publish their reviews on the paper site, they can take authorship of that which could be another CV component, because wouldn’t it be lovely for people to get some credit, especially beginning scientists, for their peer review work which is actual real work if you do it properly?

And then that could be done with some degree of rapidity and then it’s up to the marketplace to sort the papers in terms of how much attention they attract, but that’s also how it works in the scientific publishing enterprise anyways, and that could all be open access. Absolutely! I just can’t see why that's right in front of us, and at some point, it’s going to happen, and it takes peer review out of the shadows. Yes, exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, I suspect that we’re very serious about engaging in an enterprise like that.

Excellent! You know, it depends where it is in the priority stream, but yes, that would be very nice!

So, you have to do it!

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly! Although it's so important because it really has become a problem, and that fact that we only publish successes, when that's the wrong way to describe success, like if you happen to stumble across a more profound truth because you set up your experiment properly, well, more power to you! But if you set it up extremely well and tested something of extreme interest and it doesn't work out, there's absolutely no reason people shouldn't know about that, not least so they don’t do the same thing like multiple times.

So you ask a "how" question and you have a hypothesis about that question to test. And throughout that process, whatever it may be, your hypothesis may be proven wrong, and we need to be able to show that—that’s why we do science. We’re not all perfect hypothesizers. No, no, no, not all!

We're playing fast and loose with the data.

Yeah, that’s for sure! So we shouldn't be punishing the people who follow the pathway of truth.

So tell us a little bit about your background. You've been dealing in the overlap space between energy and the environment for decades. So what are your – why are you qualified to do that? How did that interest develop?

Well, I'm actually a geologist by training and have degrees in that. My PhD is from the University of Colorado, my master's from the University of Michigan, and undergraduate degrees in business as well. So I've always been interested in that overlap space because economics drives so many things, and the environment is a natural piece for geologists to think about. I've spent many nights in a tent in many places in the world in the field. Geologists go into the field a lot, and I’ve been fortunate to visit over 60 countries, deeply inside of them—from the poorest amongst us, and I mean literally step on a human being without limbs in the dirt poor, to probably some of the wealthiest among us—and seen all of that, Jordan. I'm still only a fraction of it, but it's very powerful.

I learn by sensing things. People say, "Describe India." I said, "You can smell India, you know? You can taste India." It's... you can't... those are... you can't unsell or untaste! Being there particularly in the impoverished regions, sure, you see it and hear it; the noise is incredible! But it just wakens up all the senses.

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

So that's my background as a scientist and a business person. I happen to have built, well, not built, but over the last 24 years from 90 people to over 250 people, the largest research organization at UT Austin, other than a Navy-funded one. We do energy, environmental, and economic research all over the world, and half of our 250-person staff are international, not US-born at least. It’s very diverse and fun! Yesterday was my last day as director after 24 years; I fired myself! At 64 years old, it’s time to let other folks have that fun, and I’ve got plenty to do into the future and hopefully some things with you.

So that's kind of my background: a filmmaker, I host a PBS show, I do radio broadcasts, and lots of speaking around the world and have, through the years, got a wonderful family—a wife of 40 years now and four kids, all grown and gone, and they’re all data scientists. And they just keep teaching me how little I know! And aren't they right? So anyway, that’s a little bit of my background.

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Alright, so let me ask you, given that background, let me ask you some questions. So I've been trying to understand the energy-environment-business nexus for about three decades, I would say, and trying to use my experience in assessing scientific literature and reading scientific papers to get a sense of the situation.

So I have a provocative question maybe to begin with. So I came across the data, let me step one step back. My understanding initially was the idea that global warming, such as it is, was going to produce an expansion of the world's deserts and make our sphere more arid and uninhabitable. Instead, what I've seen since the year 2000, in particular, is the rapid greening of a very large geographical area, which I believe NASA has now estimated at twice the size of the continental US—three times the size of the Amazon jungle has greened since the year 2000.

And along with that—and the reason for that is that carbon dioxide levels have gone up. What that means is that although there's been a certain arguable degree of heating, so to speak, because of that, it’s made it easier for plants to breathe. And when they can breathe easier, their breathing pores shrink in size because they don’t have to expose themselves to so much surface area, and because of that, they can conserve water much more efficiently. Because of that, they can grow in areas that would have otherwise been too arid, and because of that, we're seeing a tremendous amount of greening—not in places where there was already plenty of water, let's say, but in semi-arid areas.

So the deserts, like the Sahara, particularly in the south, are now shrinking. And so part of me thinks, when I look at the data from a bird's eye view, let’s say, that the most striking ecological fact of the last 20 years is the radical increase in green space on the Earth's surface. Now, that also accompanies something like a 10 to 15% increase in crop productivity, which is also a major piece of data, right?

And that’s also a consequence of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then I add to that other data that I've seen that shows that by long-term historical standards—over periods of millions of years or tens of millions of years—the atmosphere of the world is actually very devoid of carbon dioxide. And so although there's more than there was 200 years ago, there have been periods of time where the planet was a lot greener and a lot lusher, where there was way more carbon dioxide in the air, and that seemed to be pretty damn good for plants. So, I look at all that, and I think, okay, so if there was no political nonsense around this, and we were just analyzing the data as of today, why wouldn't we conclude that carbon dioxide increase as a consequence of fossil fuel consumption is a net good?

Yeah, no this is an interesting dialogue. I think you laid it out well. I said in Joe Manchin's Senate hearing about two, two and a half years ago now—it was important; it was his one of his big climate hearings. Fatih Baral was there and a couple other folks, just four of us. I said it's important to be both completely factual and factually complete, and factually complete is hard, Jordan, as you know. None of us can do it; there’s just too much! Now, we can be completely factual; we can all have facts, and they're as well presented and known as we can—we're not trying to mislead necessarily. Or maybe we are, but factual completeness is difficult!

So you're what you outlined there. Let me try to address on a couple levels as succinctly as I can. One is that as a geologist, very true, there have been levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that exceed today's by 20 times! Okay? 78,000 parts per million, not 420.

Okay, when?

Well, back in what we call the Mesozoic—this is when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth—The CR, you know, the Triassic, Jurassic, and the Cretaceous periods. In that era, plants were huge—the leaves on plants were enormous, animals were large—obviously, there were dinosaurs around; there were small ones as well, but the Earth was pretty healthy; it was warmer.

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

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

So they came into a new sense and flourished, and that ended—and by the way, time is such a hard concept. Let me just give you a feeling for it this way: since we’re talking about dinosaurs, often you’ll see in a diorama in some museum a T-Rex having a battle with a Stegosaurus, right? Well, it turns out Stegosaurus had gone extinct long before T-Rex came about! In fact, there’s more time between the Stegosaurus and the T-Rex than the T-Rex and us!

So process that to give you a feel for time, okay? And a big impact event happened at the end of the Cretaceous – a big meteor impact in Chicxulub in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula, and the Alvarez father-son duo described that very well. It put out an iridium anomaly around the world that we measure at the end of the Cretaceous, and could see— I remember being in grad school at the University of Michigan at that time, in the early '80s, and they came to speak, and we were all so smart, we grad students; we had t-shirts made that showed an incoming meteor and dinosaurs looking up saying, “Oh!” You know, and we thought a meteor killed the dinosaurs, right?

Well, that was right! You know, it had the fallout from that, and we didn’t, as grad students, didn’t know much. Did we? In fact, I didn’t even learn about plate tectonics in undergraduate; that’s how far back I go! So we are always learning!

So the point here is, yes, there have been long cycles of changes in greenhouse gases, CO2 being one of those gases, methane and others as well. If you come into the more near term—not to today yet—but let’s say the last 5 million years, we’ve seen about 50 glacial-interglacial cycles, and they're pretty well documented, okay? In the last million years, 10 of those! And what I mean by that is over every 100,000 years or so ice comes down from the north; Canada is completely under ice, and parts of northern the US—Wisconsin, Michigan, parts of New York City—very well documented under ice. And I don’t mean a little ice! A thousand to 2,000 feet—up to a mile of ice for 80,000 years!

And then for about 20,000 years, it warms and the ice recedes, and we have an interglacial period like the one we're living in now. During that interglacial period, and it started about 18,000 years ago, we see the ice melt, which means sea level starts to rise. And I’m talking about rates like the movies; you know the Gulf of Mexico here in Texas was over 300 feet lower than it is today just 20,000 years ago. And it started to rise one to two centimeters a year, almost an inch a year vertical. This is a very rapid rise and flooded the coastal plain of Texas, and then about 7,000 years ago that leveled up; it’s been rising about 1 to 2 millimeters a year ever since in the last 7,000 years.

So you've studied and seen, from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Enlightenment, all the way through to what we call the industrial revolution of this past century. In that timeframe, modern humans have evolved in that last interglacial period. Yes, you are exactly right! It is one of the lowest CO2 periods in Earth history, and it’s one of the coolest periods in Earth history.

I'm not talking about the actual interglacial, because it's warmer than it was 80,290, but overall that periodicity of interglacial is one of the coolest periods in Earth history that we are enjoying today. And a guy named Milankovitch worked all this out while on house arrest for 20 years on paper—we call them Milankovitch cycles—and we understand why it’s a combination of the rotational orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and that varies, so it puts you closer and farther from the Sun, and then the tilt of our Earth’s axis and the rotation of the ice combine to form these 20, 40, and 100,000-year cycles, embedded cycles, and we see this repeated over and over—that’s driving modern climate today and it's driving historical climate in what we would consider the recent past geologically.

Now, superimpose on that. Let’s come into today. In the last 100 years, we have been burning fossil fuels—more than that, actually! We started with coal, of course, in the 1800s; it powered our ships and trains; it replaced wood and hay—the carbon-based fuels that we lived on for thousands and thousands of years to make our fires and to cook our food and to power our vehicles, oxen and horses—hay! Let's just call it hay, you know? Stuff we grew. And then along comes coal, and we discover that, hey, nature did that; it made it really compact and dense, so it’s almost pure carbon.

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

That’s the event in time that became that made us modern societies, at least, as you said, those of us who are fortunate enough to have that; many still don’t more; don’t than do, and we can talk all about that.

Made films about that! So here we are, and we’ve been burning coal, and then along comes hydrocarbons, which are complex carbon and hydrogen molecules—complex chains, long chains— and those burn even better, especially when we refine them and make them into gasoline and diesel and jet fuel. And that’s great; we can put that into a vehicle now; it's very dense. I’m happy to talk about why dense matters—but you get a lot of bang for the buck! You put 20 gallons of gasoline in a tank, and the impact of that in energetic terms is remarkable!

Okay? I can drive two, three, 400 miles on that tank of gasoline, and there’s no... nothing left except CO2 emissions, and you just fill it up in three minutes and go do it again; it’s incredible! Okay? Now, it has the CO2 emissions component to it.

Along comes methane, CH4, for hydrogen’s for every carbon. Now, methane, natural gas is what we call that, and there are other gases that are natural—propane, butane, whatever—but methane is the one we use a lot of. It’s an even more incredible... The energy density of methane is phenomenal! You’re burning the hydrogen as well as the carbon, so we get heat from that; it’s a very versatile fuel! I can make electricity by burning methane, boiling water, steam, turbine, generator; I can put it directly into vehicles in a compressed form, compressed natural gas; I can use it as a molecule to make things like plastics or ammonia for fertilizers. You mentioned agriculture, and those fertilizers again change the world.

So that all is natural gas—plastics! It’s one of the most versatile molecules we have today, and it will be around for a very long time. It produces less CO2 when you burn it than oil or coal, but it still produces CO2. Methane itself is a greenhouse gas—a pretty potent one! It doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere, but it’s pretty intense—more intense than CO2 in the atmosphere!

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

Good thing we've gone there! And then from methane we can make hydrogen—you know—and methane is the best molecule to make hydrogen. So you’ve heard about a hydrogen economy, your listeners probably have; hydrogen didn’t form naturally very much; it is in place, but you gotta make it. You gotta split molecules, either a water molecule, H2O, or methane, CH4—the two common ones. That takes energy; it’s less energy to split methane than water, so energetically, it’s and economically better to use methane as a source of hydrogen, and will be, often, the hydrogen economy at some phase.

And you can use hydrogen for fuel, and you can use it as an electricity carrier and all sorts of other things. So this has been a really nice natural transition that’s been happening, driven by efficiency in physics, and when those happen, the economics are good, and so the markets adapt them and they grow. And that's what drives progress at the end of the day.

That’s a long narrative!

But there are three themes I want to pick up on in that: one is cycles, one is time frame, and one is progress.

Sure, we can define all those! So, let me continue with my doubts, let’s say.

If we’re trying... see, the first problem I have when I look at the analysis of climate doom prediction is the problem that you alluded to with regards to time frame. It’s like, well is there too much carbon dioxide in the air and is that a danger? And the answer to that is, well, it depends on when you compare it to! And that isn’t just something you can brush off to the side, because it’s very... if the starting point you choose for your analysis of increase or decrease determines whether you see an increase or decrease. The gerund question is, well, what starting point do you pick? And if the answer is, well, if you want to demonstrate an increase for political purposes, you pick this starting point, and if you want to demonstrate a decrease for political purposes, you pick this starting point, and you don’t have a different criteria, then the question itself starts to become incomprehensible because there’s no such thing as "the question is there more carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere." There’s only the question: is there more carbon dioxide now in the atmosphere compared to then, and then is arbitrary!

So I have no idea, as a data scientist, how to solve that problem especially in the light of the other things we discussed, like you said, well, the planet is cooler than it has been according to many historical comparisons. And more people die from cold than heat by a lot!

And so if your measure for what constitutes relevance is effect on humans, cool isn't to be preferred to warm. Now, there’s obviously extremes over which that isn’t true at all, but as a rule of thumb, the mere fact that things are getting warmer isn’t in and of itself an indication of catastrophe. And let me clarify too on the cool part, just so nobody goes. It was colder in the glacial period for 80,000 years; we're in a warm now!

But in this one to five million glacial-interglacial period, the whole package, if you will, is cooler than much of Earth history in the past—in fact, most of Earth history in the past just to clarify on that.

Okay, okay.

So, let’s add another wrinkle and tell me what you think about this.

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

And so one of the things you see reliably in economic analysis is that if you can get people up above $5,000 per year in GDP production, then they start to take a medium to long-term view of environmental sustainability. And we could define sustainability perhaps as something like their concern that the planetary resources that they hypothetically enjoy now are likely to be there for their children, their grandchildren, and perhaps even their great-grandchildren.

So the time frame starts to expand. And if you are actually concerned about transforming human beings into a species that optimizes its medium to long-term commitments, it looked to me like there’s nothing you could do that would be more effective in that aim than making sure that the bottom two billion people aren’t scrabbling around in the dirt so desperately that they’re willing to burn tomorrow to ensure survival today.

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

So I'd like you to tell me if you think there’s anything wrong with that reasoning, and then maybe we could also have a discussion about progress on the energy front—what would it mean to...

Okay, so let’s do that!

Yeah!

When we made our first feature-length documentary film on energy called "Switch," we filmed that in 2009, 10, and post, and released it in 2012. We went to 11 countries and showed each form of energy where it was best in the world. So we weren't trying to make something look bad or good; we absolutely did the trade-offs of the pros and cons of each form in that film.

However, and it got picked up by academic campuses and it's still shown in around 50 countries, kind of as the first energy “transition” film. We show—we weren't really transitioning! So energy is modern life; there’s zero doubt about it! Turns out energy is all life; even the poorest among us need energy to survive!

A few years went by, and I said to our director, “Hey, we kind of left out Harry Lynch, by the way," a brilliant filmmaker. "We left out more than half the world, those who don’t have these things.” So we made a second feature-length film. We filmed in ’18 and ’19 and post released it right at the beginning of COVID in 2020, and that was on energy poverty. We went to six different countries and we looked at the circumstances in which people are living—in Ethiopia and Kenya, Nepal, Vietnam, Colombia—different continents.

And again, some of the positive stories around that, Jordan, that you are describing, but some other real challenges as well! What happens when you don’t have energy, and you can’t get above that $5,000 personal wealth? What's the name of that film?

It's called "Switch On!"

"Switch On!"

Okay!

So, there's "Switch" and "Switch On!"

Yes, yeah! And it was a very powerful film—very different style. I'm your on-screen guide, and we take you in and spend time in these different areas and what you see. And it came to light on us that you can't—aid is interesting! People take aid, and intentions are always good, and here’s some aid to go do this thing. It turns out that thing—be it a pump for water, a solar panel for a little bit of electricity, maybe a light bulb, etc.— it doesn’t work unless the community wants it! They themselves have asked for it, and they will then take it into the cultural situation in which they will benefit from it!

And we saw this over and over and over again. It becomes something that is sustainable; it survives—it becomes a virtuous cycle of growth! I'll give you some a few quick examples. You know, an induction cooktop in Nepal, selling them on the street markets—that’s now very expensive—but it changes cooking indoors with wood!

And we take you into the SEI Memorial Hospital there, and we watch kids and mothers die! You know, more die every year from breathing indoor particulates by cooking indoors, and CO killed in 2021—three million a year! It’s just—it’s nuts! And another example is hair salons in Bangladesh, where the women, when they first got electricity, they used it for hair salons!

And hair salons—who would have thought? Well, culturally, it’s a safe place for women to gather; they share stories; hair is a piece of culture! The money they get they invest back in the community at three times the men! So all of a sudden, we have a virtuous cycle! We take you to Kenya and look at pumps for water to grow agriculture—Farmer John—so his backyard is now growing crops at more than he needs so he can sell them into the marketplace. And now that creates an economy, a micro-economy, around which growth begins to happen—his choice is neat culturally, not what we go tell people to do.

And we, the rich world... why say we call it what you wish? You know, I’ve heard "Global North," not my favorite term. I’ve heard "whatever" you want to call it, but those who have—colonialists, yes, those who have more!

Okay, and so yes, energy is fundamentally vital for that, and affordable energy! And then moving into reliable energy and then eventually, I don’t like the word "clean"; it’s kind of meaningless to me. But energy that has lower environmental impacts—but you’re exactly right! I'm not going to worry about that environmental impact if I'm trying to eat or my kids aren’t in a school, etc., etc. I’m going to worry about basically, you know, go back to Maslow! You know, my hierarchy of need: I have to have these fundamental things first in order just to survive, and everything else becomes a luxury that I'm not going to indulge in.

So that’s what we see. We—the world needs to come out of energy poverty; it needs to come out of economic poverty so that we can all begin to... There will always be disparity in wealth, but we can all begin to function at basic, what we would consider basic human levels now!

And that's why we made that film, and that’s why I’m so passionate about this dialogue! I absolutely think that global leaders— all of them, every single time, Jordan—energy security trumps climate security every single time. Look at the action, not the words! Look at the action! Look what Germany has done; look what China is doing; look what we’ve done even in Canada where Mr. Trudeau has some pretty, you know, hey, words! But look what you do!

You don’t sacrifice your energy security—or at least you haven’t! Now we're starting to see... not so far!

Not so far!

And we’re seeing circumstances even in the US now in California and in New York and other places where they’re starting to get toward the edge of sacrificing energy security! Wow! Get ready as that starts to happen! We’ve already seen it happen in Western Europe! We could talk all about the countries that are doing that...

Well, let’s do that then!

That we could do two things in parallel here! So one would be—we touched on the idea of progress, and so we have a working definition of progress that’s kind of risen out of the conversation. And so one of the things we could say is that if our goal is the alleviation of misery and the sustainable alleviation of misery, then one pathway towards that is to provide low-cost energy to those in absolute privation, working on the hypothesis that, first of all, that’s obviously a good thing to do if you think that unnecessary suffering is something to be dealt with.

But also, if your fundamental concern is sustainability even over human flourishing—which I think is a mistake—but anyways, even if it is, the data that indicate that people who have a certain degree of security can take a longer-term view seems crystal clear. So to me it’s a mystery why this is actually an issue, you know? Because once you know that, you think, well obviously then you make a hierarchy of energy sources and you find out what’s inexpensive, and you calculate the trade-offs in relationship to even potentially carbon dioxide production.

But there’s sort of a pathway, and I’d like your opinion on that. So, you know, dung isn’t so good; wood is better than dung; coal is better than wood; natural gas is better than coal; you know, better! It’s denser! But you can move along that...

Okay, so how do you see progression in the marketplace with regards to the alleviation of absolute privation? What's the logical steps to undertake globally? And then how is that being violated, let’s say, in places like Germany?

Sure!

Yeah, and not to be too sanguine about it, but in the end, physics wins! Yeah, dense wins! Now, what do I mean by dense? You—the bang for the buck on a per unit weight or per unit volume, or even a per unit area—that's called surface power density!

Where do you get more energy for your buck, if you will?

And so, if I can do more—I used gasoline as an example; let me throw a curveball! My tank of gasoline will drive me 300 miles! Okay? Well, the energy equivalent of one little uranium pellet that I stuff into a fuel rod in a nuclear reactor—one pellet, centimeter high, half a centimeter wide—the energy equivalent would drive me from New York to Los Angeles and back to Dallas—one pellet! That’s dense energy compared to gasoline, which is very dense compared to lots of other things that aren’t dense—the sun, the wind, hydro, biofuels!

Things that take a lot of land to do so that it can get dense enough and abundant enough for us to use!

I go beyond that and say to get to those wind turbines, which are composites and copper and lots of other precious resources, and solar panels, which have lots of metals in them and other, you know, polysilicates—batteries to back them up—extreme amount of metals!

Just the amount of mining—and look, I’m a geologist; I don’t mind mining! It doesn’t bug me, because I know we mine everything; we don’t grow! But I can also tell you the amount of mining that it’s going to take to produce enough energy collectors in that system is incredible.

So we're talking about not just land but water, mining... I've never—I’ve asked audiences every time I speak, Jordan, I speak to about 20,000 to 30,000 people live a year—how many think mining is green? And never has a hand gone up! Never! Because it's not! You know, we can make it better, but it's not green!

So when you start to think about the Earth in that holistic sense with climate being one component of it, this is another thing we have to balance—the trade-offs between the land, the air, water in the atmosphere—and how they’re interconnected! If I start to put, for example, in place something that has no emissions but consumes a lot of the Earth’s land—solar farm? Okay, a large wind farm...

I just drove through the Texas Panhandle recently. You can’t do it without seeing wind turbines! It doesn’t consume all the land, but they’re everywhere! Low-density forms of energy use a lot of the land to collect energy so that it can get dense enough and abundant enough for us to use.

So, I go beyond that—ask another group of questions and say: Well, what about biodiversity? The environmentalists are now leaning toward other issues they never seized upon. They started focusing on climate to the exclusion of others. There are many other components of the environment, amongst the air climate is one of the... that's what we talk about!

Well, and it’s true; I've seen that same thing with regards to water pollution. You know, I think it’s crazy that the climate issue has captured the environmental discussion. For example, I know from having spent a lot of time around fishing and fishing communities that the state of the world's fisheries, oceanic management—because of all the stupid things we've done in the last 100 years—is at the top of the list of catastrophic environmental issues we could take on.

We've depleted, like, 99% of the accessible world's accessible fish stocks! And given that that's a renewable resource that can actually bounce back pretty damn quickly—given how many eggs fish lay—it can bounce back quickly if you leave it the hell alone!

So, another part of the problem with this unidirectional obsession with climate, apart from its sketchy base in five different ways, is that there are a lot of other environmental problems that we could be addressing that they just get no attention at all!

You and I grew up learning about water, land, and air—that was the environment we were protecting! Clean water and abundant water! Tough problem! Clean soils and land! Less land use is good, you know? More with less! And clean air—not talking atmosphere, air! Local air!

So the land, the air, and the water are three of the four components of the environment, and the atmosphere is a fourth! Those are not just interchangeable—they’re interconnected!

So, if I start to put in place something that has no emissions but consumes a lot of the Earth’s land, solar farm, okay, large wind farms—they just drove through the Texas Panhandle recently. You can't do it without seeing wind turbines; they're everywhere! Low-density forms of energy use a lot of the land to collect energy so that it can get dense enough and abundant enough for us to use.

So I go beyond that and say to get to those wind turbines which are composites and copper and other precious resources—moderately—and solar panels, which have lots of metals in them and, you know, polysilicates—batteries to back them up—a extreme amount of metals!

Just the amount of mining... and look, I'm a geologist; I don't mind mining! It doesn't bug me because I know we mine everything; we don't grow! But I can also tell you the amount of mining that it's going to take to produce enough energy collectors in that system is incredible.

So let's talk about social problems. We are prioritizing our children. You know, we have people screaming into a camera saying, "Oh, you can do this," and their kids are standing in the background with no shoes on! And we don’t think about this, but how do you tackle the root causes of poverty? We understand extreme poverty gives rise to so many rocket problems.

Let’s bring it back to energy. The best hope for people is for them to become wealthy. If energy is the source of wealth... it’s complex, isn’t it?

This future is possible! And if we create a more prosperous economy, we ensure energy reliability. We should be demanding government supports or access to other controls to ignite this.

So, I’m a supporter of nuclear power, and I think we should be. I had a great conversation with Robert Bryce, who talks at length about this and understands the progression! You know, America was the leader in nuclear power and nuclear technology in the 1960s, with thousands of turbine generators worldwide! And now...?

Total failure!

Let’s put this back into play. That's complex! What is the alternative?

Well, you can’t choose this game when this is all that matters. You know, I’m aware of the potential influences on progress.

And energy is a big part of that. We've all experienced struggles in our communities—Baltimore, Queen's, Detroit—all were reliant on nuclear power.

Pollution followed! We can suffer unless we look at ways to return to the resource—local energy markets that are abundant and vital!

That's interesting! That ties back into what you were talking about with regards to data.

The notion is that we’re burning time; we’re wasting time avoiding talking about progression. How do we help communicate that?

We understand that progress is something that can occur, but we need a data-driven model! And production must be at the forefront, focusing on economic and social communities!

What do you think?

Well, great conversation, and I appreciate the time! Let me bring that back!

Shall we tie it all together?

This is the time for a call to arms!

Making communities clean, understanding that downward pressure, we see!

Now we’ve returned to the zero issue, and we see through the squandered potential, they enjoy it!

So I really appreciate the commentary; it’s a complicated issue, and we want to keep layering complexity!

And we have a powerful dual challenge presented!

You know, I think you're bringing that into focus. Poorly put—the human race needs to go through the ringer of energy!

And we need funds invested! It gets nobody anywhere!

Shall we revisit? We need to redirect this play!

Back to the American situation, I call myself a coalition partner and believe renewable energy expansion gets missed!

With that said, how to uplift the energy? We combine interests—agriculture, industry, and environmental demands to deliver results!

That could allow us to overcome basic problems without sacrificing others!

Let's look at realities and design ways to transform lives!

That’s a goal worth working for!

What has changed? The carbon markets are growing rapidly.

And we’ll learn from this!

Thank you!

Thank you so much!

Thank you for your time today!

We’ll make this a series, and we’ll move ahead!

I have to give this background to help us put together a real program we can depend on, financed with things we understand!

Unbelievably good work!

I appreciate the time shared! Thank you!

And thanks to everyone for joining us today!

I’m looking forward to working together again!

Thank you!

Thank you!

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