The Poor or the Planet? | Robert Bryce | EP 375

So imagine this: 47% of the population on the planet today is living in electricity poverty. But this Biden Administration is the most anti-hydrocarbon Administration in American history, and there it seems like this climate issue is the only thing they want to talk about. Why isn't he pounding the damn podium saying we have to do something about this? Instead, he's standing up and bragging about some stupid $900 million loan to Angola, so they can build solar panels. Where are your priorities? Where is your humanism?

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Hello everyone watching and listening. Today, I'm speaking with author, podcaster, and film producer Robert Price. We discussed topics from his latest book, "A Question of Power: Electricity and The Wealth of Nations," their current audacity of those pushing the zero emissions net zero agenda, how those policies really affect the developing world and the poor in the West—hint: it's not good—the feasibility and necessity of coal, fossil fuel, and nuclear power now and into the foreseeable future, the catastrophic practical and environmental problems related to wind and solar, and a positive vision for the future we could all share voluntarily should our institutions finally drop their fear-mongering, tyranny-inducing doomsday narrative.

Let's start. Well, we can start wherever you want, but perhaps on the renewable energy front might be a good place to dive in. Sure. And, uh, so well, I'm glad to talk about all those. I mean those are all... I'm passionate about those issues; those are my purpose. And so, uh, also just point out, on my latest substack, uh, I don't know if your team sent it to you, but the title was "Let Them Eat Solar Panels," and the, uh, gist of it is that the U.S. Export-Import Bank just funded a $900 million loan for a solar project in Angola. Jordan, 60% of the people in Angola don't even have electricity. Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, are we funding a solar project? They had a natural gas-powered plant, and instead, we're funding solar. And the XM Bank's, uh, press release said to help Angola meet its climate commitment. Yeah, well, you can be absolutely certain that the primary concern of the Angolans is to meet their bloody climate commitment, right? No.

So it's so interesting watching the leftists in particular on the environmental front, um, rampage down this pathway because they're the same ideologues who constantly, um, conspire to accuse conservatives and classical liberals of being colonialists in their endeavors. I've never seen a more colonialist endeavor in my entire life than the attempt to impose climate concerns on the developing world. It is something bloody miraculous to see it, and to see the leftists sacrifice the poor to their idiot planetary concerns is an absolutely... it's an absolute bloody nightmare, as far as I'm concerned.

So, in this situation in Angola, sounds like it's tailor-made for that kind of idiocy. So how is it the case that a solar power plant can become the number one concern on the international development front for Angola?

Jordan: How did we get there?

Robert: Well, how long do we have? Jordan, it's a long history. But this has been something that's been ongoing now for years, where the World Bank and the other multilateral bilateral lending institutions are refusing to fund any hydrocarbon projects in developing countries. Um, and this latest example is the Angolan story, where President Biden bragged about it during a high-dollar fundraiser. He spoke at a high-dollar fundraiser for the League of Conservation Voters in early June, and he bragged about this, saying, “We're building a huge solar plant in Angola,” and the average—60% of the people in Angola don't have electricity at all, and you're bragging about the Export-Import Bank bragging in their press release about “We're helping Angola meet its climate commitments.” I mean, it's crazy town. And this is a country that has enormous natural gas and oil wealth. Um, should they should be allowed to burn those hydrocarbons? This is... it's green colonialism, carbon imperialism, green colonialism. Numerous leaders, numerous analysts have pointed this out, but I just find it anathema. I mean, electricity is the key to better life for everyone everywhere on the planet, and this is effectively telling the developing countries, and one of the most desperately poor countries in Africa: no, you can't burn hydrocarbons.

Jordan: Yeah, yeah, it's... I think it's actually criminal. It's criminal levels of stupidity to do this to the developing world.

Robert: And so, tell me... Let's go into your background a bit so that everybody who’s watching and listening knows a little bit about you. So why don’t you run through your biography and tell us all about how long you’ve been writing and how you’ve done your investigations?

Jordan: Sure, well first things first, I'm a proud father. Um, I'm proudly married to Lauren, my wife. We've been married for 37 years. Uh, we have three great kids. Uh, we're empty nesters, which is a beautiful thing. Uh, but we have three great kids: married, Michael and Jacob, and they're all thriving. Um, I've been a journalist my whole career. I've never had a real job. I've been a reporter my whole life. Um, I wrote my first book on Enron, which came out in, uh, 2002. Uh, it's now already 20 years ago. Um, I started my career in newspapering at the Austin Chronicle here in Austin in the late 80s. Um, one thing led to another, and that led me into the book business. My book on Enron is called "Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron." Uh, it came out now 20 and a half years ago, and I'm still writing about Enron in fact these days.

Um, so now six books later, my latest is "A Question of Power: Electricity and The Wealth of Nations." I've been very fortunate to have, uh, the same publisher, Public Affairs, the same editor, Lisa Kaufman, uh, same agent, Dan Green. All have been incredibly supportive and helpful along the way. So I consider myself incredibly fortunate, uh, Jordan, to be able to write about, think about, do a lot of public speaking on energy and power. These are the world's biggest industries, biggest and most important businesses, and particularly now where there are so many political issues around all of these things and so much focus on, uh, climate and renewables, and I think there are some positive trends and I want to talk about those, but, uh, I see a lot of bad policy happening and particularly in Europe and here in the US, where Europe has just driven itself into the ditch.

But, um, yeah, that's my brain.

Jordan: Oh yeah, and I mean the rest of the world seems, um, hell-bent on copying, let’s say, Germany, which has had the most catastrophic energy and environmental policies that you could possibly produce, short of shutting down the entire grid, not least because what their energy prices are now five times what they should be. They shut down their nuclear plants; their energy provision is now unreliable; they are dependent on Russia and other totalitarian states for their energy provision. Energy is so expensive that electric car manufacturers are moving from Germany to China. Germany is de-industrializing because the energy prices are too high, plus—and this is a kicker—they're actually polluting more per kilowatt than they were 15 years ago because since they've shut down their reasonable sources of electricity, including nuclear which they import anyways from France, they're now turning to burning lignite for God's sake, which is the dirtiest form of coal.

Isn't it insane? I mean, you couldn't make it up.

Robert: I'll give you one... I'll make you even one better. So you mentioned lignite, and the company—it’s RWE, if memory serves right—is the big utility. So they're expanding a lignite mine so they can provide more lignite, which is a low-rank coal, emits more CO2 per kilowatt hour than any other form of power generation. And to expand the lignite mine, Jordan, they took down a wind project.

Jordan: Oh yeah, yeah. The irony is just remarkable.

Robert: But to your point, yes, Germany has more than any other country in Europe driven itself into the ditch. They did it to themselves, and they're patting themselves on the back. I mean, none of it makes any sense.

Jordan: Well, it's... the response seems to be, "Well, we didn't do stupid things fast enough." I like that. So let’s hurry up; let's drive ourselves faster into the ditch.

Robert: Um, but yeah, I mean the coup de grace was them shutting down their last nuclear plants when they knew they were short natural gas. Um, they knew they were, you know, no longer going to be able to import as much gas from Russia. So what did they do? They went into the, uh, global LNG market and they've snapped up as many LNG cargoes and future contracts as they could. And in doing so, what did they do? Well, not only are they burning more lignite, more coal to your point, but they also priced out a lot of developing countries from importing liquefied natural gas, principally among them Pakistan, which is remarkable because Pakistan in February announced, "We're done with the LNG business; we're going to burn coal." And so the Pakistanis are now saying we're going to expand our coal-fired capacity.

So, um, it's not just that this is affecting Germany; it's having knock-on effects in the developing world.

Jordan: Well, you know, when the German Chancellor came over to visit our idiot country, and he asked Trudeau if there was any possibility of increasingly liquid natural gas imports from Canada, and of course, Trudeau has done everything he can for the last 10 years to absolutely devastate the Canadian oil and gas industry and to make the export of liquid natural gas impossible, and so Trudeau said, "Well, we can't make a business case for that," which is exactly the same bloody thing that he said when the Japanese leader came and asked for the same thing. And the reason that he can't make a business case for it is because his government has produced policies that have made the export of Canadian fossil fuel resources, which are among the cleanest in the world, impossible.

So I like... I really don't understand how the hell this can be happening in Germany. I mean, I'm not a cynic. Although, you know, whatever naive optimism I had about the political process has certainly been disabused. But everything that is happening in Germany is so stupid on the energy front that it's a kind of miracle, especially because, you know, you could give the damn devils their due if they were able to say, "Well, we made electricity five times as expensive but we've cut emissions by a certain proportion and here's the net environmental benefit," which all of which I think is complete BS, by the way. But if they could say that, well that would be something. But for them to also have to say, "Oh, well we’ve made electricity five times more expensive and unreliable, plus we pollute more," it's like there's zero victory. That's an F-minus, man; you guys failed on every bloody front, including the ones you set up as your own principles. And yet nothing seems to happen.

And as you said, you know, Biden can come out and flourish his agreement with Angola to produce a kind of electricity they don't need at a tremendously elevated price while engaging in this neocolonial enterprise. Like I can't believe we can be this stupid.

I can't understand how this could happen. So obviously Germany is this classic example of what not to do. What's remarkable is what's happening here in the United States where California is following this example straight into the ditch. More than any other state in the U.S., California has emulated these policies of mandating renewables, of shutting down base load power plants. They shut down the San Onofre nuclear plant, um, a few years ago. They almost succeeded in closing Diablo Canyon—that was Newsom made, you know, I think finally sobered up and said, “No, we need this plant; forget that it's nuclear; it's 9% of our electric generation.”

Uh, production in California, but look at what has happened. It's a similar story, Jordan. For all of the effort and all the money that California has spent, they've seen no reduction in their overall emissions from their electric generation sector. Further, they have seen their electric prices rise faster than any other state in the United States since 2008. And I've written about this on my substack. Um, Schwarzenegger signed a renewable energy mandate in 2008. Since then, California's electric rates have gone up at a rate three times faster than that of the average in the United States. It's unconscionable what they're doing, Jordan.

And this is in a state that is dominated by the Democratic Party, the liberals who say they care about the poor and the middle class. And yet this—and this is what, as my late brother John Bryce said, just grills my cheese. I mean, it's ruinously regressive. California has the highest poverty rate in America, Jordan, and yet they are sticking it to the poor in the middle class in a big way. And where are the peak electric rates in California? Now 40, 50 cents a kilowatt hour. I mean this is fine if you live in a nice house that's on San Francisco Bay, but the low-income people don't live there; they can't afford to live there. They live inland where they have to use air conditioning.

So all of this climate—I have to say it very clearly—nearly all of this climate policy, whether it's mandates for electric cars or the renewable mandates, rooftop solar, it's ruined, especially regressive. It screws the poor in the middle class. I've been absolutely stunned to watch the left in their rampage to sacrifice the poor, to fail to save the planet. You know, it's almost as unconscionable to me as the fact that the left, again, climbed in bed with the pharmaceutical companies so radically on the pandemic front. You know, I mean, there's lots of things to be said in relation to the so-called pandemic, which I also don't believe in, by the way, because I think it was a pandemic of totalitarian overreaction and not a pandemic of illness. But the fact that the left itself was so supportive of the pharmaceutical companies was something just absolutely staggering to see, and to see the left go after the poor so assiduously.

My understanding is this—you tell me what you think about this—it's like, if you really cared for poor people and you wanted their lives to improve, the best thing you could possibly do, as far as I can tell, is to lower—drive energy costs down to the lowest possible level and to make energy provision your number one priority everywhere, especially in the developing world, but also for the poor in the West.

And the reason for that is that there's no difference between energy and work, and there's no difference between work and productivity. Now you might say two things; you might respond, "Well, the planet has too many people on it; we can't encourage that sort of thing," and "If you make people rich, then the rich people destroy the environment faster." But both of those things are nonsense because we've seen a massive increase in population over the last 40 years and all the bloody doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich, who has more sins on his conscience than anyone else I can possibly think of, have said that by the year 2000, we were going to be out of commodities and everybody was going to be starving to death. And we're not out of commodities, and they're a lot cheaper, and we have more food, and people only starve to death for political reasons.

And as we've got more people, we've actually got richer, so that's all bloody complete backwards nonsense. And then not only that is that the data that I've looked at, and I've looked at it with Bjorn Lomborg or through his eyes, is that if you can get people in the developing world up to about $5,000 a year in gross domestic product on average, they start taking a long-term view of the future and start becoming concerned about local environmental issues and will take that burden onto themselves so that top-down, centralist, globalist utopians don't have to enforce all this idiocy on them.

So like am I missing something here? You know, have I gone down some bloody right-wing rabbit hole, or is this just the stark truth?

Robert: So I think the key for me, Jordan, in all of this discussion is electricity availability. And this is—yes, energy in general matters, but more specifically, it's electricity. And let me get on one point that I think is critical when we talk about compassion, we talk about humanism, because my favorite line these days is "energy realism is humanism."

And when we're going to be realistic about energy and we're going to be energy humanists, we have to look through the lens of energy and energy availability in particular and how it affects women and girls. Electricity frees women and girls from the pump, the stove, and the wash tub.

Uh, you remember, uh, the new dealers here in the U.S. when they wanted to bring electricity to rural areas? Many of these politicians—George Norris, Sam Rayburn, uh, George Norris from Nebraska, Sam Rayburn from Texas, Lyndon Johnson from Texas—they had seen their mothers wash clothes by hand. They wanted them to be liberated from that, from the wash tub. They'd seen this kind of back-breaking labor, and this is the key. Um, there are something like—who’s the Swedish demographer who recently died? Um, he estimated there were five billion people in the world today walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand.

Well, they've been frozen, yes. Uh, now she—what is this, like what's your first name? Uh, Hans Rosling. Forgive me. Hans Rosling, yes, brilliant. He did that amazing video. I think he gave a TED Talk where he was talking about his grandmother and his grandmother's folks had bought a washing machine. His grandmother came over when they first time they used the washing machine and she wanted to start it right because it was a miracle to her. He said that, in fact, he said the washing machine to my grandmother was a miracle.

So when we think about electricity and energy availability, this is the key for women and girls because if they don't have it, they are effectively slaves to the household chores. And so Rosling's point: five billion people in the world today are walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand. That means there are two and a half billion women and girls who are washing those clothes by hand. At every minute, every hour, every day that they're not washing clothes by hand, they're not in the library; they're not in school; they're not able to get a job outside the home. So there is this... they're also not contributing their brain power to the rest of us; you know, can you imagine?

Can you imagine the economic value of two billion brains that are occupied in menial labor that could otherwise be freed up? I mean, there's 2,000 women in that group that are one in a million, you know, and that's genius level, man. We could use those people. And the fact that we're locking up that degree of neural architecture in these menial tasks to not save the planet while we're making electricity more unreliable and more expensive, it's just... it's absolute CR. It's beyond incompetence into the realm of absolutely criminal, as far as I'm concerned.

It's just... it's an excessive focus. I think, look, here's my line: climate change is a concern; it's not our only concern. We have to balance our action on climate with our other issues.

But the overall point I think that is absolutely essential is that regardless of what we think—you and I think about CO2 emissions and how many parts per million is the perfect number—if we're facing more extreme weather, hotter, colder, more extreme longer, I mean it's been crazy hot here in Texas. Well, if that's the case, we're going to need a lot more energy, not less; we're going to need a lot more reliable energy, not less. And yet the trends are for this effort to rely more on weather-dependent renewables.

So if we're facing more extreme weather, why in the world would we make our most important energy network dependent on the weather? It's like on the face of it it makes no sense.

Jordan: I mean, I don't want to get too tanked, but it's just crazy town.

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Let’s walk through this again too, and so I’d sure like you to push back on me as much as you could. So this is what I’ve watched in the course of my lifetime. So in the 1970s, we were going to run out of fossil fuels, and that was a big bloody catastrophe for everyone for about six years after 1972 in the energy crisis. And that turned out to be complete rubbish—we're not running out of fossil fuels and we won't. Partly, I mean I think it was Exxon two weeks ago announced that they had a new fracturing technology that could double the known store of fossil fuels in the U.S., which is like—should have been front page headline news everywhere—because, oh my God, we have twice as many fossil fuels as we thought.

And so isn't that really something? And the EU—Americans have become absolute bloody magicians at extracting out fossil fuel from these, uh, huge reserves that you have, like the shale beds, and it's not going to run out. And that's partly because as the price goes up, people's incentives to extract out even more of the fossil fuel reserves we know are there increases, and the technology geniuses just get better and better at doing it. So we're not going to run out of fossil fuel; that's not going to happen; that was wrong.

Okay, next, the next thing that happened in the 1970s was global cooling, where the planet's going to freeze, and that happened for about five years, and then that turned out to be nonsense. And then the next thing that happened was global warming, and then that turned out to be not true enough to be sustainable. And somehow the narrative switched to, oh, well, it's climate change now, and that is one weasley proposition, man. It's like, oh, change—so now you have a get-out-of-jail-free card for all of your idiot policies because the climate is changing, and that means increased variability.

Now I've looked at the data on hurricane frequency, for example. There's no evidence whatsoever that hurricanes are increasing in frequency, and to the degree that they're more expensive, it's only because people are building more and more expensive properties in hurricane-prone zones. Then we also have Bjorn Lomborg's data showing that even if we accept the IPCC's climate predictions—and I don't necessarily think we should—that we will be, you know, some degree poorer than how much richer we would have been 100 years from now, right?

And so he thinks we can handle that no problem with an iota of intelligence and some... But then I'm wondering too, would you tell me what you think about this? I've been watching the greening data. Now the world has greened 15% since the year 2000, and that is a lot—it's an area of leaves twice the size of the continental U.S. That's a lot of extra leaves.

And interestingly enough, it's greened in exactly the areas that the climate catastrophists told us would be at most risk because they presumed that the semi-arid areas, the arid areas would expand out into the semi-arid areas and that the deserts would grow. Well, the desert isn't growing; the Sahara is actually shrinking, especially on the south end. And the reason it's shrinking is because more carbon dioxide has allowed plants to thrive, and when they thrive, they can close their breathing pores, which means they don't need as much water, and now they're growing in semi-arid areas all over the world.

Plus, crop yields have gone up. So, like, I'm not familiar with all the data you're throwing out there, and I know these arguments, and here's how I keep my sanity, Jordan, is that I don't get into the, you know, what is how many parts per million is the right number. I—you know, we can argue about the climate science. My approach is very simple: look, if we're going to agree that we need to do something, what's the best policy? Right?

If, as I said, climate change is a concern; it's not our only concern. So what is the way forward? What do we—if we accept that we are facing some risk, how do we deal with this risk? What is the best no-regrets policy? So I've been saying now for more than a dozen years: natural gas to nuclear; this is the way forward.

And this is the part that just, you know, as I said, grills my cheese, chaps my hide on this Angola deal, um, and it's on my substack, robertbrice.substack.com, um, "Let Them Eat Solar Panels." Right? The Export-Import Bank of the United States is not funding a natural gas-fired power plant in Angola, even though Angola has trillions of cubic feet of available natural gas; instead, we're funding a solar panel project. I mean, this makes no sense whatsoever.

So if we're serious about reducing emissions and bringing more people out of the dark and into the light—which I think is incumbent on the wealthy countries to help developing countries do that—how do we do that? Natural gas resources globally, Jordan, are just not abundant; they're super abundant; they're geographically widespread.

And there is an enormous amount of stranded gas. Look at the huge offshore fields that have been discovered off of Africa—uh, Tanzania, other countries, including Angola, enormous natural gas resources that have barely been tapped. Well, some of that gas is going to be exported into the global market, into Europe, advanced countries or developed countries. But Africa—those resources—and to prevent them from doing so, I think is, just as you say, I think it's morally wrong. I think it's anathema. I mean, it should be—people should be shouting from the rooftops saying, “No! We should be helping these countries come out of the dark.”

We should be helping them develop because that's incumbent upon us—way or at least not getting in their way. So then natural gas to nuclear, I'll just finish this other point. This is one of the things that, again, to me when I look at these big climate NGOs, I don't call them environmental groups. I don't call them green groups because I don't think they are either; they're NGOs. They're climate activist groups, and by the way, they're spending $4.5 billion a year—I’ve documented this—that's their budgets; they're just enormous. But they're almost to a purse, almost all of them are anti-nuclear. Well, if we're serious about CO2...

I mean it makes no sense. My line is: if you're anti-carbon dioxide and anti-nuclear, you are pro-blackout.

Jordan: Well, I'm anti-blackout, pro-starvation.

Robert: Well right. So we need to be helping develop this technology, and these are the things that I think are positive. Now we can focus on a lot of things that are negative, and I will grant you there are many negative things that are happening, and we can throw rocks at the NGOs and all the climate idiocy that's happening in terms of this, uh, or the policy idiocy, rather around this.

But what we're seeing in the wake of the Russia-Ukraine war that I think is really encouraging, Jordan, is a move toward nuclear. Romania—a lot of the countries—uh, France just—uh, Finland just opened Aqua just—Sweden just said we're going to—we're bagging our renewable push; we're going to build nuclear plants. Just yesterday—was June 29th—EDF Group in France said we're going to build two more nuclear reactors. The U.S.—tremendous amount of momentum and money behind new nuclear now.

There are a lot of friction points, including fuel availability, because the Russians have, uh, are producing 46%, I think, over 40% of the global uranium enrichment market. It’s in Saskatchewan; it has the biggest uranium reserves in the world and they're bloody untouched. And in our idiot country, you know we have all these fossil fuel reserves, but we have tremendous stores of nuclear fuel as well, of uranium.

And Canada actually has good nuclear technology that can do reactors. Canada is a good story, and I'm working on a new documentary that's going to be out this fall—it's called "Juice: Power, Politics, and the Grid." And one of the people we're featuring is one of your Canadian colleagues, Chris Kiefer. He's done a remarkable job in this revitalization of the Canadian nuclear sector that you're going to rebuild some of your CANDU reactors; you're building an SMR, I think, at Darlington with a BXR 300.

So I won't say it's all due to Dr. Kiefer, and he's a remarkable story by himself. He's an emergency room podcast guest.

Jordan: Oh, you should put us in touch when you touch—

Robert: Absolutely! Oh yeah, no, he's got a lot of Elvis; he’s 6 feet 9; he’s just this big presence. But he—almost single-handedly, Jordan—has ignited this new rebirth in Canadian nuclear, and it's been a marvel. So Canada has kind of jumped into the lead, but it's not—Canada, Romania, China’s building dozens of reactors, uh, the Russians are still pushing out their technology, uh, uh, Britain, France, uh, Poland, I mentioned Romania.

So there is, amidst all the crazy town that’s happening, the one I think thing that is positive that has occurred in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a recognition that if we're serious about reducing emissions or just more serious about not covering the landscape, littering the landscape with stupid wind turbines and solar panels, we're going to embrace nuclear. So I think that’s a very positive thing that is happening and one that I’m watching.

Jordan: Well, and where do you see... Where are you particularly optimistic on the nuclear technology front? Do you... What do you think of small modular reactors and the molten salt technologies and so forth that people seem to be...

Robert: My sense is that the way forward is something like standardized production of small modular nuclear reactors so that the cost per unit can be brought down and so that the systems can be distributed without having to build an immense amount of high transmission wires. So, but I don't — I'm trying to get up to speed on that, but I'm not precisely so where are you particularly optimistic on the nuclear front?

Jordan: Well, like you, I see a lot of promise with nuclear in general. So what about SMRs, which is small modular reactors? There are a lot of technologies that are being developed now and a bunch of different companies that are pushing them out. So, the GE, Hitachi, New Scale here in the U.S., X-Energy, Kairos, Oklo.

Um, it remains to be seen which one will be the one that makes it to market. Well, among the most interesting ones to me, Jordan, uh, is X-Energy—that’s a high-temperature gas reactor—and they just recently did a deal with Dow, and Dow announced, in fact, Dow I think took an equity position in X-Energy, and they are planning to deploy four of their SMRs at one of their Dow chemical plants in Seadrift, Texas, which is, uh, fairly close to Corpus Christi if memory serves.

Well, to me, what's interesting about that—one of those high-temperature gas reactors—so that's a safer design inherently than a water-based reactor. Um, second, it's that Dow is looking at this. Dow is an old-line chemical company; they're very conservative. They're looking at this and saying we think this is the right technology. And further, that they're saying we're going to use the high-temperature process heat so we can make chemicals instead of burning gas to produce high temperature.

Right?

Jordan: Oh yeah—so it has that additional advantage, right? You want to walk through—do you want to walk through that? Why that's important for people?

Robert: Well sure, so industrial process heat is needed for a lot of different things, right? Refining, mining, chemical production, so industrial consumers use a lot of electricity; they use a lot of energy in general. So if you have a source of high-temperature heat, then you could produce high-temperature steam and then use that for your processing of whatever it is that you're doing.

So for Dow to make this deal with X-Energy, I think is indicative of where the market, the industrial consumers are seeing things and how they see the market moving, right? And so that's quite intriguing. Um, I also think Rolls-Royce might be an interesting play, and you know Britain now, is their technology the right one? We don't know yet; I think we're kind of in the—I'd compare it maybe to the early days of video—is it going to be VHS or is it going to be Betamax, right?

Is it, you know, and which one will prevail? But I think your general idea that we should have one or two designs is the right one. Right? That is why France was so successful in deploying nuclear—right? They picked one nuclear reactor design, and then they just stamped them out so that any engineer from any nuclear plant in France can go work at another plant because all the instrumentation and all this equipment is the same.

Um, I didn’t know this until I went to Paris a few years ago and I was talking to a nuclear engineer in France, and he said at Three Mile Island—which, of course, is a nuclear plant where it had an accident here in the U.S.—there were two reactors, but the two reactors had two different control rooms because they were built by two different companies. Well, that makes no sense at all, right? So if we're going to see a new Renaissance of nuclear, there are a lot of friction points, and I'll talk about those in a minute, but we're going to have to speed up the regulatory regime.

And that means the Nuclear Regulatory Commission here in the U.S. We've had some U.S. companies domicile in Canada because they think it will be easier path to licensure if they start in Canada and then come back to the U.S. The Europeans are going to have a different type of licensing procedures than the U.S., but the NRC is a big roadblock. The other is the fuel part. So this is where I think the friction parts are, and I want to be very sober about this, Jordan, because I was in Japan earlier this year; I was very fortunate. I'm very lucky in my career to be able to travel and see things, and I went to Fukushima Daiichi, and it was an indelible experience for me.

I've been pro-nuclear for more than a decade, but seeing the ruined reactors at Fukushima Daiichi, hearing the people from Tokyo Electric Power Company talk about how they're taking the reactors apart slowly and the process that they're going through and what they're doing, and then seeing what is actually happening in Japan as well. Tepco is building a coal-fired power plant on Tokyo Bay, right? The Japanese are embracing energy realism. The home of the Kyoto Protocol—they're not aiming at Net Zero.

We met with top government officials; we met with top industry officials. I said so what about your carbon emissions? They said, “Yeah, we're not really going to pursue those; we're pursuing energy security first.” And I had one guy just say very clearly, “Look, we live in a bad neighborhood. We got the Russians over there; the Chinese over there; the North Koreans over there. We are going to take care of our energy security first.”

So I think Japan, more than any other country in my recent experiences, is an indicator of how energy realism and energy security is trumping concerns about climate change, and I think rightly so. The Japanese are nothing if not practical, so they're building a 1.3 gigawatt coal-fired power plant on Tokyo Bay. They're also building another 500 megawatts Ultra-Supercritical coal-fired power plant—uh, forgot where that one is—and another five gigawatts of gas-fired capacity. So they’re slowly reopening their nuclear reactors, but they’re also being very terrified.

They're also very clear-eyed about where they are going in the world, and they're saying energy security is our first concern, and we're going to take care of that because our industry demands it. And so, um, so these are positive. The Chinese are doing the same thing. I mean, the challenge—they're planning, I think, a hundred nuclear plants, something like that, over the upcoming decades. But they're also expanding their coal-fired plants like mad, which also makes an absolute bloody mockery of anything we're doing in the West on the so-called climate front. Because especially in a country like Canada, where our emissions are so trivial on the world stage that they're not—they're not even within the error margin of estimate for carbon dioxide effects.

And that's a critical point that I think that, you know, I've heard other people say this—this is not original to me—but the emissions from the West in many ways don't matter anymore because the story is in places like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, China. These are the places where emissions are growing so rapidly. In fact, I spend a lot of time—I nerd out on spreadsheets—and I—I—the statistical review of world energy just came out, so I've been studying it very closely. The country that had the biggest and absolute terms, the biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year was Indonesia, followed closely by India.

So these are countries that have enormous populations and are still desperately energy poor. Um, but let me return to—Nigeria kicks in, you know. Nigeria is going to have more people in it than China by the end of the century, eh? So and your point there—that we're seeing the huge growth in energy consumption among the countries with the largest populations—it's like, well, that's pretty bloody self-evident, isn't it? Once those countries start to pass a certain threshold of industrial development, that is where all the action is going to be on the climate-energy front.

And so we should be planning for that. And you know Vietnam is a good example of this, and I've written about Vietnam as well recently on my substack. Here's a country that is rapidly industrializing; major industrial companies are moving to Vietnam to hedge their bets about being in China. So big companies—Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Apple—to name a few—are locating in Vietnam, and suddenly Vietnam is power short. So what did Vietnam just announce? Their Vietcom Corporation, their state-owned mining company, announced they're going to expand their coal mining capacity by 15%.

This is the iron law of electricity, what I call the iron law of electricity, uh, nod to my friend Roger Pielke Jr, who coined the iron law of climate. He said when faced between his focus was faced between climate policy and economic growth, economic growth will win every time. So I borrowed Roger's idea and coined the iron law of electricity, which is people, countries, and businesses will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need. Climate change is not their first concern, and this was evident in Japan.

This was the part that really was a sobering experience in going to Japan. But I've seen it myself; I've seen people in India stealing electricity in Beirut, where I talk about that; I write about it in my book. Seeing the generator mafia—where pretty much everyone in Lebanon pays two electric bills, one to EDL, the grid operator, and the other to the generator mafia, who are the local entrepreneurs. They call them the mob; they call them the mafia, but they're providing power when the grid fails in Lebanon. The grid fails in Lebanon every day.

So this iron law of electricity I think is another example. In my view, we have to be realists—energy realism is energy humanism. People are going to do whatever they have to do because they're not going to sit in the dark; they're not going to let their, you know, the food in the fridge spoil. They're going to find a small generator; they're going to see—yeah, they're awesome, they're also not going to let Grandma freeze to death in the winter.

I mean, I looked at Doomburg's data on the consequences of lowering thermostat temperatures just a few degrees, and yeah, he estimated for example that a three—if I remember correctly and this is about right—that a three-degree decrease in thermostat temperature in the winter kills 110,000 people in Europe. That's old people, you know, because old people can't regulate their temperature very well.

And so there are two things we need to point out to everyone who's watching and listening. And the first is, is that if you raise energy costs, imagine that there's a pyramid of economic development and there's hundreds of millions or billions of people who are sitting right on the threshold of poverty. They've climbed out of absolute poverty, so now they have enough money so that they don't have to worry about where lunch is coming from. But that's just where they're at, and they're barely there. And if you increase their energy cost to any degree at all, all you do is whack them down back down into absolute abject poverty.

And then they do things like slash and burn agriculture and they burn dung and other, you know, very low energy dense, high polluting fuels. Yeah, right. And they—and then they pollute the indoor atmosphere, and that’s really really hard on their kids and their elderly people as well. And so you cannot—we got to say this over and over—you cannot raise energy prices without devastating the poor, period, the end.

And the more poor people you make, as far as I can tell, the worst things are actually for the planet rather than the better. And this brings us to another conundrum. You know, you pointed out that the green types tend not only to be anti-natural gas, which is of course completely insane, but also anti-nuclear.

And this points to the fundamental underlying motivation, as far as I'm concerned, is that this green movement isn't so much green—certainly not as a consequence of the fruits that it has borne—as it is both anti-industrial and anti-human. And those actually turn out to be the same thing.

And you can tell in these when push comes to shove cases because the bloody greens, if they were actually concerned about carbon dioxide output, which is what they say, we should only be concerned about would be jumping on board the nuclear bandwagon in a second saying, “Well, obviously we should transition to nuclear because it’s zero carbon dioxide output,” and that’s not happening.

So that means, as far as I'm concerned, that everything that their fundamental narrative is a delusional lie and it's got a malevolent twist in it too, and you can see that manifesting itself in the refusal of these Western NGOs and the World Bank and so forth to lend money to developing countries to try to raise them out of poverty, which is inexcusable. There's a certain—well, you know this field better than I, but there's a certain puritanical part of this, right?

And a certain also, I think, a religious fundamentalism. And I'm sure other people have talked about this before. I know, uh, but there is many overlaps between the Christian belief and um and these ideas around climate catastrophism, right? That we've sinned against the Earth, right? We haven't sinned against God; we sinned against the Earth. We need to repent; we need to use less—do less and go back to the Garden, right?

And even Martin Luther too, you know, keep going on this just a hair longer. He would recognize carbon credits, right? You know, like you get a carbon indulgence by buying some offset because you flew to Fiji.

But let me just build on your point about the availability of hydrocarbons and how important it is. And, uh, Kirk Smith was a professor at Cal Berkeley who died recently, and I cited him, I think, in my latest book or in my fourth book "Power Hungry," but he documented and was one of the first researchers to document the effects of indoor air pollution on women and girls.

And you know, I was interviewing a climate activist yesterday, and by the way, I don't call it green energy; I don't call them green. I call them climate activists; I don't call it green energy; I don't call it clean energy. I call it alt energy, right? Because I don't think it's green; I don't think it's clean. Covering the landscape with solar panels, destroying landscapes with wind turbines—I’m a long-time critic of the wind business, proudly so. They don’t like me; I don’t like them back, okay? Because I have documented now for more than, uh, ten years on the renewable rejection database—which is on my website, robertbrice.com—I’ve documented nearly 400 rejections of wind energy in the U.S., from Maine to Hawaii. It's happening in Canada too, by the way; in Ontario over 90 communities have declared themselves unwilling hosts to wind energy.

Now you don't read about this in the New York Times because it doesn't fit the narrative, but I digress. So back to the point about hydrocarbons and Kirk Smith. Indoor air pollution is one of the leading killers of women and girls in developing countries. Kirk Smith and the WHO, I think the World Health Organization, documented something like three or four million women a year, women and girls a year dying premature deaths because of indoor air pollution because they're cooking with dung or wheat straw in their homes.

And Kirk Smith made this point: they need LPG; they need butane; they need propane; they need clean—forget electricity for just a minute—let's replace those low-density fuels, low-density high-polluting fuels with hydrocarbons. That's a step change in their standards of living.

But I'm with you in terms of kind of your broader points here. We need more energy, not less, we choke. And I'll stop here because I could go on and pound the table here, but expensive energy is the enemy of the poor.

And I remember very vividly—I live in Austin, which is of course, you know, I used to have friends here; it's a liberal hub, right? But a friend of mine—former acquaintance—he was pounding the table, "Oh, energy is too cheap!" And I thought, okay, here you are, you vacation, and you fly around the world; you go somewhere here, there, and everywhere. You're rich, and you're telling me energy is too cheap? I don’t see it that way.

And I haven’t talked to him in a long time because of that, because I just thought you don't understand what you're talking about. Expensive energy is the enemy of the poor, and yet so many of these policies, both in the developed country and the developing countries, are aimed by these bilateral, multilateral lenders, by policymakers at the state level and federal level are creating policies that make energy more expensive. And I just think that's fundamentally wrong. Energy means life, and the absence of energy is death.

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I started to take this whole domain of trouble particularly seriously when watching what was happening in Europe and starting to understand that the West, in its delusions of repentance, would sacrifice hundreds of millions of people and literally sacrifice them on the altar of Gaia to not save the planet while virtue-signaling about how industrial enterprise was unethical despite benefiting from every single one of the gains that the industrial revolution has produced and being 100% unwilling to give up any of it at all whatsoever under any circumstances for ourselves. Like, there's no excuse for any of that.

Now my understanding is this: there's a pretty clear developmental pathway to cleaner and more reliable energy in the long run. It's something like, well, you start at the very lowest rung with dung and with wheat straw and with those things that can be burned, that's there in the local environment, and it's low energy dense, it's expensive, it runs out easily, it's unreliable, it's polluting. You move from that to coal; now you move to coal because coal is unbelievably plentiful and it's dirt cheap, and you can get a coal-fired plant up and running with relatively rudimentary technology and almost no time flat.

And its disadvantage, in particular, is particulate pollution, although it also produces a lot of carbon, which I don't really care about, but the particulate pollution is a problem. You move from that to oil or natural gas, and you move from that to nuclear. Like, do we know this, or not? Is this just—can we rest assured that this is a reasonable developmental pathway and one that we should be pursuing?

Robert: This is the way it's been happening for a long time now. I mean, that is the way the world has decarbonized over time. My friend Jesse Osbat at Rockefeller, you know, Rockefeller University has documented this and shown we are gradually decarbonizing, but that decarbonization is happening as it is underway in developed countries, and we're—there are dozens of underdeveloped countries that are just getting started, right?

They're still at the biomass stage, and there’s this claim, “Oh, well, we can leapfrog.” They can—the alt energy crowd, the climate crowd says, “Oh, well, they don’t need hydrocarbons; they’ll jump right to renewables.” No! Wrong! I mean, while that's true in some cases in rural areas where solar and batteries are going to be the solution, Africa is rapidly urbanizing.

Here's a quick, quick comparison. So you’re a Canadian: in rough terms, there are 35 million Canadians. They use, compared to 1.4 billion Africans, roughly the same amount of electricity. That's the disparity that we're talking about.

Now, the numbers aren’t exact, but in rough terms, that's a comparison. So the need for electricity is overwhelming globally, Jordan; it’s just enormous.

So how do we... You know, this is the part where we can talk climate change all day long. What's the right number, what's the wrong number, what the—you know, who's doing the right thing, who's the wrong thing, what's the best no-regret strategy as we look to the future? And I think, again, end-to-end natural gas to nuclear—these are the ways that we are—that's no regrets.

Okay, so climate—maybe we find in a few years, well, we were wrong about climate change. I don’t necessarily—I'm not making that argument, but when it comes to, why natural gas or nuclear—both are lower-carbon, the technologies are very well developed, they're available in numerous countries, and they can scale at relatively low cost.

So all of those things together to me make this a no-brainer, um, and I'm going to pound the table, continue pounding the table on that because this is the challenge of our time. I mean, when we look around the world, this is when we look around the world and we think as humanists—right? If we're going to be humanists, what do we do to help developing countries come out of the dark? To develop? How do we help countries like Vietnam? They're going to look out for Vietnam first. That is the—you know, every country is going to do what is the right pathway for them.

So how does—how could the U.S.? How could Canada? How could the European countries help those countries? Well, help them build, develop their natural gas and help them deploy nuclear energy at scale—new, next-generation, passively safe, uh, modular reactors. These are the things that are going to help us decarbonize and electrify these countries that are so desperately poor right now.

Okay, so let's turn to two things here. Alright?

Sure. I would like, first of all, I’d like to pick your brain momentarily about coal.

Yeah, there’s lots of coal, and so if we could figure out how to use that coal, that would be real good because there's lots of it and it's everywhere. And so how are we doing on the clean coal front? How good are the modern coal-fired plants?

Well, in terms of, for example, getting rid of particulate pollution, sure. Well, I'll make a joke first, which I think Clean Coal is kind of oxymoronic—oxymoronic like Military Intelligence or family vacation, right, or jumbo shrimp, right?

You can make cleaner coal, and so I mentioned Japan earlier—they're building new coal-fired power plants. What are they doing? They're using ultra-supercritical technology, which is the highest level of combustion you get—you ring more watt-hours for every kilogram of coal that you burn.

So that is the optimum—that's if we're going to burn coal, let’s use ultra-supercritical technology, but that's more expensive, and not all countries are willing to do that. Instead, they're building subcritical plants, which are the most common ones.

Well, you think that would be a place for potential subsidy then to help the countries that are building coal plants build better ones?

Absolutely! But I think it's important to put it in historical context. So I’ve written about the history—this is one of the points I make in A Question of Power—is when you look at Edison in 1882. Will he use coal on his—on the Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan? He burned coal, right? Well, we're still now—140 years, 141 years later.

Coal globally still has 35% of the global electric sector market, right? So and you mentioned China before. The Global Energy Monitor, which is clearly an anti-coal group, in February put out a report last year; China permitted two new coal plants a week. So India is building new coal plants—Bangladesh, Vietnam, numerous other countries, Indonesia.

Indonesia had, as I mentioned before, has the highest or biggest increase in CO2 emissions last year of any country in the world. Why? Because they rapidly expanded their coal fleet. So coal is here to stay for decades to come; that is a fact. These plants that are being built now are going to continue running.

So, you know, America, because, you know, cheering on the closure of our coal plants, well, I think that's probably problematic in terms of reliability, but that's a different discussion. But so, geographically widespread, it’s relatively cheap and it's super abundant.

So that is why so many countries—if we close all the bloody coal plants in the West, it also means that we won’t be able to put our technological prowess to work to make the coal plants cleaner and it also means it'll knock us out of the international market for the development of coal-fired plants, which, as you pointed out, is going to be a growth industry for into the foreseeable future. So that seems like a stupid idea to me all things considered.

Jordan: Yeah, I don’t know necessarily about that because there are a lot of companies that have that kind of technology that can deploy: the Japanese, the Malaysians, the Chinese. But I think the key here is just to think about it; you know, it's a global story, right? And if we're going to—it’s not Texas warming; it's not, is Canada warming or America warming? It's global warming; it's global climate change.

We're going to deal with this; we have to have some sensibility about the world as a collection of nations that want to try and address this. Well, what is going to be the weight of—what is the way forward then? It's going to be to make cleaner electricity cheaper, and I think that means natural gas or nuclear.

Well, we could run around panicking about the sky falling even though it isn't, and we could lie constantly about Net Zero and make everyone poor and we could hurt the hell out of the third world while not doing anything on the climate front instead—which seems to be what we're doing. You know, these Net Zero advocates—first of all, that entire terminology just grates on me.

It’s like there is like... Net Zero is a cliché, not a policy, and zero anything is impossible because we're not going to get to zero carbon output, obviously ever, and we shouldn't even aim at that because it's stupid. You know, even if we could reduce it 80%, that would be fine.

But I think that narrative is running out, though. I think, you know, if you look at what's happening in Europe, I think the politicians particularly in Germany—we talked about Germany earlier—too, the UK as well. They're looking forward and saying, you know, we're not going to make net zero, right? This is—we're going to have to throttle this back. The German Green Party has been—has lost some remarkable recent elections, got shellacked.

The German voters are looking around at this and saying, “Wait a minute, this is terrible for us.” So I think some of this... another positive sign, in addition to the expansion of nuclear, I think we're seeing more energy realism, and thank the Lord for that. I mean, it's taken a while.

Yep, all right. So let's talk about... let's take another attack on the environmental front now. You've rather extensively about the dangers, the environmental dangers of wind power, and you're also, well, you made a crack earlier about let them eat solar panels, and so you obviously have some misgivings on the solar front.

So let's start with on the wind front. So, my understanding—I'm going to lay out a few things and tell me if I'm right or wrong. So first of all, Siemens last week—two weeks ago—announced that they were having catastrophic—and I think the CEO said something like, “I can't believe how catastrophic our problems are” with our wind turbines. That's not a good thing for a CEO to say.

The wind turbines—they're unreliable. They obviously don't work when the wind isn't blowing, which is quite a lot of the time, and that's really a problem at night when the solar panels also don't work. They don't have a proven track record; they only seem to last about 17 years; God knows nobody knows what to do with them when they're decommissioned, and they're very expensive to decommission. They're killing whales like mad, hypothetically; they seem to be really hard on birds, and so this just isn't working out very well.

And so now am I missing something on the wind front? And then we could turn...

Robert: No, I think you hit pretty well all of the issues here. Uh, let's set whales aside; let's set the wildlife issues aside. I'm an avid bird watcher and have been for more than 30 years. In 1990, I can pull the story up. In fact, I wrote a piece for the Christian Science Monitor back then about bird kills and open oil pits in West Texas and in New Mexico for violations of the migratory bird treaty act.

And at that time, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that the oil and gas industry, through their own negligence, was killing about 600,000 migratory birds a year. The Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Justice brought something like 200 cases against the oil and gas industry, prosecuted them rightly so, and the oil and gas industry, to their credit, cleaned it up. They put nets over their pits; they closed their pits.

Today, the wind industry is killing at least that many birds, probably more; we don't know, and there is no accountability because they're not required to report these deaths. They have been prosecuted in very rare occasions, but it's this—oh, and the justification is, well, oh well, these birds are going to get hurt by climate change sometime in the future.

Oh, yeah, yeah, you're killing them now because you think it might help in the future. Well, that's just crazy policy; that makes no sense whatsoever.

Yeah, and you don't do that with people either. You don't get—I mean, this is—and yet there's a free—this is a free pass. I mean, we haven't talked about the whales; we can talk about that as well. But this idea that, oh, we're going to kill them because we might have some climate change in the future.

And I'll return to it; I'll return to NextEra just one quick point. Last year, thankfully, they got prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Why? Because in Wyoming, NextEra had been warned by the Fish and Wildlife Service three times not to build a wind project in known golden eagle habitat. They did it anyway. And so they were prosecuted, and I was glad to see it under the migratory bird treaty act.

They should have been criminally prosecuted under the Endangered Species Act, uh, bald and golden eagle protection act, and the migratory bird treaty act, that said they paid a fine. But the fine they paid was less than the amount that they're going to earn from the tax credits for building the wind farm in the first place.

So there are perverse incentives at hand here, and, um, I—I—I—I—words fail me, because I—I do—I care about wildlife, but I think this is the death of environmentalism. Climatism has replaced care for the environment, and this idea, oh, we'll just pave this rural countryside with wind turbines and solar panels in the name of climate change? Are you out of your mind, man?

We need to—yeah, we need small—well, we need small footprints.

It's also the case, too, that this unidimensional mania in relationship to carbon dioxide is stopping us from solving environmental problems that could, at least in principle, be addressed. Like, I looked into the environmental literature in detail about 15 years ago, and my conclusion, for better or worse, was that one of the stupidest things we were doing was continually overfishing the coastal shells in the ocean.

And we do that, like—it's—to call it devastating is to barely even scratch the surface. I think we've eradicated something like 95% of the ocean life on the coastal shelves, and that's about where the life is because you need sunlight for life, and you need the shelves, so it's a bloody catastrophe.

And it's impossible even to get people's attention focused on that because everybody who hypothetically has an environmental concern is leaping up and down about carbon dioxide, and that means that every other problem—and there are plenty of them, and they are serious problems and some of them are remediable—are just ignored completely.

So you get a—you get a get-out-of-jail pass for any form of industrial development that claims carbon dioxide remediation as its goal, and you get a moral pass if you jump up and down about carbon dioxide hard enough because you're saving the planet, even if you're not doing any of the difficult work that would be necessary to actually do something useful on the environmental front.

Plus, you're sacrificing the poor—not to help, not to do anything but make them poorer and more likely to pollute. So this looks like a three-way catastrophe to me.

Robert: Well, and this is obvious in the development of offshore wind on the U.S. East Coast, where these NGOs—these climate NGOs—that in the past, Audubon Society, Sierra Club, etc.—would have been jumping up and down to protect the North Atlantic right whale from the encroachment of offshore wind development. I mean, imagine if it was the offshore of the oil and gas industry was trying to develop and put hundreds—because that's the goal—hundreds of offshore platforms in the middle of known North Atlantic right whale habitat, a critically endangered species, less than 350 or so specimens left on the planet.

Imagine if this was the oil and gas industry doing that; these groups would be raising hell. I mean, I mean they would be laying down; they would be blocking the trucks. And instead, because it's the wind industry—and largely being developed by foreign companies, not even American companies—it's what Michael Schellenberger calls the environmental betrayal, and I think that’s the exact right word.

I'm old enough to remember, you know, save the whales, and that, you know, was kind of parodied, like, you know, save the gay baby whales for Jesus, right? You know, this was kind of like this was kind of a joke, right? But that environmentalism, right, did—and I call it that—I’m working on an essay on the death of environmentalism because I think that's what we're seeing. That this idea of protecting landscapes or protecting wildlife has been forsaken for climatism.

We've—and what I call climatism and renewable energy fetishism. So instead of a focus on preserving landscapes, preserving wildlife, and that real deep green ethic has been replaced by this idea that any wind turbine is a good wind turbine, any solar panel is a good solar panel.

And it is most obvious, I think, in this—well, not just in the onshore wind issue which I've documented and the rejections of solar, by the way on the—uh, the solar rejections on the renewable rejection database, I think we're at 130 or more rejections or restrictions. But this climatism, this new renewable fetishism, I think is most obvious when it comes to the North Atlantic right whales and the development of offshore wind on the east coast of the United States.

Jordan: Sad to see.

Robert: So, the way it looks to me like this is that people's reputations are extremely important to them because they signal their position in the hierarchy. And the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more stable your nervous system is and the more positive emotion you experience, and so—and plus, all sorts of other benefits accrue to you because people if you have a good reputation, people flock to you.

So reputation really matters. So that means there's an avenue open constantly for false avenues to reputation enhancement, and that's what psychopaths and narcissists do. But it's also what ideologues offer because they tell people, “Look, if you're a good person, you stand up against problems. Here's the problem, which in this case would be carbon dioxide. Thus, you could be a good person, all things considered, and have your reputation enhanced merely by standing up against carbon dioxide.

Takes absolutely no work on your part whatsoever; you just have to protest and complain, and now you're a good person.” And now that's a pre-packaged solution, especially for young people who are looking for moral virtue.

Say, “Well, all you have to do is be anti-industrial and anti-carbon dioxide, and now your reputation is significantly enhanced, and anyone who stands in your way is like a devil,” and, and evil.

And so that's the—that's the—that's the religious nexus that we're dealing with here. And the problem with that is, as you're pointing out, is that, well first of all, it's really hard on the poor, and second, it sacrifices all the real problems to this pseudo problem solution or pseudo problem pseudo-solutions.

And, and so now, and so now this is destructive. And so now the solution is to go throw some soup on some paintings in the museum.

Jordan: Yeah, right.

Robert: And, right, we're just like, “Oh, I'm going to protest by being a vandal.” I mean, and so that's right.

Yeah, exactly! Well, that and that signals that opposition to the, you know, colonial industrial enterprise or whatever the hell it is. But there's a certain—but there's a certain pathetic aspect to that. I mean, these kids—I call them—I’m going to be 63 here pretty soon, and I look at them, and I think, what are you doing? I mean, what is your hope for the future?

Have you no idea how privileged you are living where you live? Have you no sense of yourself in the world relative to the rest of the planet? Because we mentioned, I think before we started recording, but I'm happy, I'm working on a piece for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, which you're helping found, and I've written a long paper on electricity availability in the developing world, and I've documented—I went through using data, the latest data from our world and in data.

There are 3.7 billion people in the world today, almost half of the world population right now, uh, that live in places where electricity consumption is 1,200 kilowatt hours or less per capita per year. That's about the same 1,200 per hour, kilowatt hours, about the same amount of electricity as consumed by a large kitchen refrigerator in the United States.

So imagine this: 47% of the population on the planet today is living in electricity poverty, and we're—and we're complaining because our electricity isn't, you know, from alt energy or something. I mean, there is a certain—I think Michael Schellenberger calls it this kind of nihilistic narcissism or so I'm not sure exactly how he describes it, but there's something about this only presentism, right?

That we only have right now and none of him—there's no history, there's no future. And but there's no sense of how we in the West are—I mean, I sometimes pinch myself. I mean, just how lucky I am, and not just in my career—in my family, you know? Married to a wonderful woman, got great kids, but in terms of energy and energy availability. And then yet all we—you know, what we're hearing and is what is dominating this administration.

And I say this is not a partisan—I’m not a Democrat; I’m not a Republican. I am disgusted. But this Biden administration is the most anti-hydrocarbon administration in American history. And all it seems like this climate issue is the only thing they want to talk about when, you know, an existential threat—and I’m thinking existential threat? A hundred thousand Americans died last year of opioid overdoses. My son, Jacob, is 23. Within the last two months, two people that he knew—two kids, two boys that he knows—I say young men died of opioid overdoses here in Austin.

That's a— that's a public health crisis. And yet where has the Biden administration been on fentanyl? Where are they on opioids? Why isn’t he pounding the damn podium saying we have to do something about this? Instead, he's standing up and bragging about some stupid $900 million loan to Angola so they can build solar panels. Where are your priorities? Where is your humanism?

I mean I get worked up. This is part of the reason—well, this is part... okay so on the ARC front, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship—I mean, we're trying to do a couple of things. First of all, we are working diligently with Bjorn Lomborg, who's on board with the project because I think of all the people that I've met, his ability to prioritize is unparalleled.

And he's done very careful empirical work showing what our priority should be. Now it turns out to be complicated, and it's not—you get to be a good person if you shake your protest sign up and down. It's a lot more complicated than that.

But we’re also concerned— you know, you said there’s something pathetic about watching these young people, for example, glue themselves to paintings. And I think that's where pathetic degenerates into outright criminal, by the way. But I take your—I take your point with regards to pathetic. I mean, part of the problem with classic liberals and the conservative types is that we—they haven't been able to put forward a narrative that's compelling on the genuine moral advance front, right?

And that's what we're trying to do with the ARC, is we'd like to say, “Well, you know, why don't we envision a future that we could all get on board with voluntarily without fear, without compulsion, and without tyranny?” And that would be something like, well, what would it look like? Well, how about we get—how about we take those 47% of people that you just described who are barely bloody well scraping by and get energy to them so that they can stop scrabbling around in the dirt and can start contributing their brain power to the collective human enterprise?

How about we make that a bloody priority? And remember, other than that, while we're doing that, we could we make some real advances on the environment front. Because as soon as they're rich enough to care, they'll start caring.

And that's—I mean, even China is greener than it was 20 years ago, you know that? And it's partly because as China has gotten rich, people have started to care a little bit about their local environment, and we can really—you know, places like India are almost at that threshold now where they're going to start to really care.

And so, and the story could be instead of “Oh my God, it's an apocalyptic nightmare and everyone's going to die and we should only have 500 million people on the planet.” I don't know how the hell we're going to get rid of the other 7.5 billion, but we’ll figure out some way!

We could say, “No! You know, more people, like Musk has been saying: more people, the better. Because we can convert—we can convert all that to brain power!” And if we were ethical and we had a clue, we could have a future that everybody could be proud of where no one is starving, where there's a world of abundance, where everybody has opportunity, and that would be a lot better than this bloody apocalyptic nightmare that justifies increasing top-down, tyrannical pressure.

It's not a good idea, and the energy has to be one of those most fundamental building blocks. And I’m completely on board with that because, as I say, energy realism is humanism. We have to be realistic about the limits of these renewables, right?

And, um, my friend Jesse Osbelle, I mentioned before, he said, um, just because he says wind and solar may be renewable, they are not green. And I think that's just a great— a great way to think about them.

Yes, they're renewable, but just because they’re renewable doesn’t mean they’re green. What an example! I—you know, I could pound the table on this one, Jordan, because it does just get me riled up!

Please do!

I was in Wisconsin; I had an event at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh a few weeks ago, and I flew into Milwaukee. And I’ve been contacted—people from rural America contact me all the time and ask me to help them find a lawyer, help them, you know, publicize their fight against their renewable project.

Well, John—uh, John Barnes is a resident of Christiana, Wisconsin, a little town of 1,800. It's about an hour west of Milwaukee. So I got the rental car; I drove straight