Unsettled: Climate and Science | Dr. Steven Koonin | EP 323

[Music] I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80 percent of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing! Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the press of Johan Gutenberg.

Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now, the book is available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all history, and hopefully, people can walk away with at least a sense of that. Some of the scientists, the media, the politicians, and the NGOs have quite unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat. Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects; they can't be distilled down into sound bites. What we do involves trade-offs, and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough about those trade-offs to make a decision. It really is, in part, a problem of complexity, right? I mean, because you can imagine that there's an attraction to relatively simple hypotheses, and maybe that's a good one—that's Occam's razor, in some sense—although you don't want your explanations to be any simpler than they need to be.

And so we have—well, it's reasonable to be concerned about the environment. Part of the environment is climate; part of climate is carbon dioxide. Maybe we should just focus on carbon dioxide, and then we're doing the right thing. And that's where people get led down the garden path, because you don't get to be a planetary savior by jumping up and down and saying carbon dioxide is bad. Like, it—that's too oversimplified.

[Music] Hello everyone, I'm continuing my investigation today into the, well, I'd say energy and environment nexus, investigating the apocalyptic nightmare that's our hypothetical future. And I've been talking to a lot of people recently about that, and today I get to talk to Dr. Stephen Coonan, who's extremely well qualified to be discussing both issues: energy and environment. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a university professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics.

Dr. Coonan's current research focuses on climate science and energy technologies. Through a series of articles and lectures that began in 2014, Coonan has advocated for a more accurate, complete, and transparent public representation of climate and energy matters. He wrote a best-selling book, "Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters," which was published in 2021. Coonan has a multi-dimensional career. He served as undersecretary for science in the U.S. Department of Energy from ’09 to ’11, where he led the inaugural quadrennial technology review. Before joining the government, he spent five years as chief scientist for British Petroleum, helping them think through the development of alternatives to fossil fuels. For almost 30 years, he was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, and he also served there for nine years as vice president and provost, facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers and catalyzing multiple research initiatives.

In addition to the National Academy of Sciences, Coonan's memberships included the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Jason group of scientists who solve technical problems for the U.S. government. He's been a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analysis since 2014 and is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served similarly for Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Labs. He has a BS in physics from Caltech and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT. He's the author of the classic 1985 textbook "Computational Physics" and has published 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics, astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science. Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Coonan today.

Okay, so the first thing that we need to point out to everyone is that Dr. Coonan is, by any standard, an outstanding scientist. 200 publications would put him in, at minimum, the top one percent of published research scientists. So, Caltech's a deadly institution—or at least it was, up there with MIT, and one of the jewels in the University of California system.

And then, not only—no, no, no, no, no, it's a private university; it's not one of the universities. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's Caltech! Caltech, yeah, yeah, that's my mistake, my mistake! But yeah, a small West Coast technical school, as we used to describe. Right, right, right, right, right. So, do you think that there's an engine—do you think that there's a STEM school in the U.S. that has a better reputation than Caltech other than MIT?

Well, uh, you know, I used to like to say, when I know both institutions very well, I used to like to say Caltech was like the best fifth of MIT. It's about one-fifth of size, right? But in terms of—and again, it depends on which discipline you're looking at—but overall you can't really distinguish between Caltech and MIT, and in some domains Stanford. These are all really good schools, right? Right, and the best of science and engineering, not only the education, but for this discussion, more importantly, the research.

Okay, so now you also—another thing for everyone to consider here is that Dr. Coonan has also not only worked as a researcher and a lecturer, etc., but he also worked as a scientific administrator. I think that's probably the right phraseology within the university system, so he was able to evaluate and track and learn about a variety of different scientific disciplines, but then also worked in the private sector for BP. We should address that right off the bat, and then in government.

So you really have a broad, very, very broad background professionally. Now, I suppose the thing, the appointment in principle that makes you least credible on the climate denial front is probably your posting at British Petroleum, because—yeah, yeah. So, tell—let's talk about that. So, why doesn't that sound so chill, like BP, right?

So, um, I'm—this is about 1980—uh, 95, sorry. 2004, and I had—my name had been fed into a search that BP was running for the chief scientist, and eventually I get a call from the then-CEO, John Brown and he says, "Come be the scientist," and I said, "I don't know anything about the oil business or the energy business. I know energy is conserved; I'm a physicist, but I don't know about practical energy." And he says, "Don’t worry, you’ll learn."

And they brought me in not to help them find oil or gas; they were very good at that; they didn’t need me to do that, but to figure out what 'Beyond Petroleum'—which was the tagline at the time—what 'Beyond Petroleum' really meant in terms of technologies, in terms of viable businesses. And so I picked up the family and we moved from Pasadena to London. I moved from academia to the private sector and I’d like to say, for the first couple of years, I was the world’s highest-paid graduate student, because I had one of the company run of the industry just learning all this stuff about practical energy.

In the end, I think I helped them quite a bit over the five years I was there, teaching them how to think about energy: what technologies were promising, what ones might actually make a difference in terms of the environment, but also in terms of a viable business. So it was a wonderful experience, and I would assert one of the problems we have today is that people who talk about energy don’t really understand energy systems or the energy businesses. And any academic who’s working in those fields, I would say go spend a year in the private sector, because it will change your perspective enormously.

Okay, well, let’s delve into that a little bit. So you opened up two avenues of questioning there. I would say one is, well, three: why did you decide to leave academia and go to the private sector? What did you learn about, say, Beyond Petroleum?

I mean, first of all, I think it’s rather peculiar in some real sense that British Petroleum has as its motto, 'Beyond Petroleum,' given that the fossil fuel industry is so necessary and stable, but it's very interesting that they have done that. And then, so I’m very curious to pick your brain about what you actually saw as promising, if anything, on the alternative energy front.

So, and then I guess the third question is, what did you learn as a consequence of working in private industry that you really didn't know when you were working in academia?

Oh yeah! Okay, okay, wow! That’s a very broad palette! Let me just talk personally: why did I decide to leave? Yeah, I had been provost, which is second in command at Caltech for nine years when BP approached me. Nine years is a long time to spend in any job, particularly one that's as demanding as trying to corral 280 faculty together and oversee the research operation. I had always been interested in the private sector and had discussions with colleagues; I understood that energy and climate were hot topics and well worth investigating.

So, you know, as usual, I took a leave first to see how it would work out, and was gone for two years while I was getting settled into BP. And those were the motivations: I was just interested in energy at the time. Of course, there was the opportunity to go live in London and get exposed to a much bigger world than I was involved with in Pasadena.

Right, right, so there's a lot of that return by curiosity, sounds—yeah, a lot of my—it's just about curiosity. Yeah, it sounds like I've always had fun doing what I'm doing, and with a physicist's tools and physicist's orientation, you just like to do that.

I mean, as one of my elders once told me when I was a young faculty member, a PhD in theoretical physics is a license to poke your nose into anybody's business, right?

And I've just had great fun doing that.

Right, so, and go ahead, go ahead!

Oh, I was just gonna say, return—return now to this issue of what did you learn on the energy front? I mean, what did you see as promising? Let’s say outside of petroleum, and in what manner and why was BP interested in that?

Yeah, so BP was interested, like a lot of energy companies at the time—and still—for several reasons. One is, look, the purpose of a private company is to make money and to do it legally and to do it predictably. They have to do that in the environment: the regulatory environment, the technology, the economics, these days the stakeholder environment.

And so I think the CEO at the time, John Brown, was one of the first leaders in the oil business to recognize we had better take this low-carbon business seriously, if only because that's where the stakeholders and the government were going. I think that nicely segues into, you know, what did I learn about business?

We can talk about energy in a minute, but what I learned is, first of all, it is about making money, and it is about reliably delivering a quality product. It is about taking risk, particularly in the oil and gas business; you invest a lot of money up front in the expectation that over 20 or 30 years, the revenues from the oil you produce, the gas you produce will pay back. So it’s a lot of capital upfront, big bets, sometimes risky, in a very complicated regulatory environment, particularly for an international company.

So, you know, one of the things I came to admire were the people who led these organizations: how they managed to juggle so many different dimensions at once. It’s a lot harder than just sitting in your office and scribbling on a piece of paper about equations, right? And it's very complicated.

Another thing I learned is that energy is about scale. You know, unless you’re really going to introduce a technology that’s going to make a material difference, at least at the few percent level nationally or globally, you’re not really doing very much. You might be making money, which is fine, but if you want to impact the energy system, it’s about scale.

And so, I’ll give you one example just to illustrate that. I was once talking to a famous guy, who shall remain nameless, who was not an energy expert; this was a policy guy. And he says, “I know what the answer is: we take all the carbon in the used tires and recycle it into fuel.” And, okay, he said this with great passion, and so I sat down for a minute after we talked, or even as we were talking, and I calculated how many cars in the U.S. and how many tires and so on and how much carbon is there, and it turns out it can’t make a difference at all, right? It’s very tiny. And so people don’t understand the scale.

Yeah, well there’s nothing more annoying than arithmetic.

Yeah, right? Well, you know, that’s—I was a physicist; that’s my first inclination! Right, how big is it? How much is it going to make a difference? How much is it going to cost? And so on. In the department, owners who used to talk about, you know, new technologies impacting quads of energy. The U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year; quads—barrels of oil? The world uses 100 million barrels of oil a day, about.

So think about that for a second! In terms of energy, the U.S. is only four and a half percent of the world's population, but we use about 20 of its energy. So not because we’re energy pigs or energy gluttons, but in fact, because that energy improves our quality of life enormously.

Well, people aren't going to be energy pigs or energy gluttons as a general rule because energy isn’t free, and so everyone is motivated to the degree that they can be motivated by reasonable energy pricing to be as effective and efficient as they possibly can be.

And I suppose maybe you can produce a small increment in that efficiency by raising the price, but that doesn’t strike me as a particularly good solution. So what did you see as promising on the alternative to fossil fuel front?

Promise? Yeah, so, right. And, let me answer that question in the present day rather than in the 15 years ago when I was thinking hard about those things for BP. First of all, it's really hard to get rid of chemical fuels for transportation. If you think about a truck or a train, you really are playing—you need the energy density that fossil fuels provide.

You know, we run our cars on gasoline, or in Europe, on diesel and we want to shift to electric, and I think that shift is slowly underway, though there are many barriers. But when you put the nozzle of the pump in your car, you’re wielding about 10 megawatts of power, whereas if we charge up the battery on an electric car, we’re talking about 100th of the power flow. So it’s really hard to beat the energy in chemical fuels.

And so some folks— the world is still going to run on chemical fuels. The fuels we use today emit carbon fossil carbon because we dig the oil out of the ground and use it to make gasoline, which then enters the atmosphere.

We could make those fuels out of biological materials, and we've been doing that in the U.S. by making corn ethanol, which is a phenomenally inefficient and not very environmentally friendly way of doing it. But there are other biological ways of getting carbon in view. And when I was in the Department of Energy and in BP, this intersection of biology and energy—making chemical fuels out of biological materials—was something we thought was very promising.

We started a whole institute at Berkeley in Illinois to pursue that. I think it's still in the research and development stage, but if we’re going to have transportation fuels for heavy transportation, then I think this biofuels is going to be very important.

Do you worry about the competition between cropland utilized for biofuels and food production? Are you thinking more about oceanic, like algae?

No, no, algae doesn’t—yeah, algae is kind of tough, actually, for various technical reasons. We would grow things, but you know the idea was to use plants that do not compete for farmland or to use the waste part of the food, the cellulose, rather than the carbohydrates.

And is there anything on that front that’s viable, like commercial and at scale at the moment, or no?

No, no, no, no, no, we can’t do it. It’s the cost which is really the issue. You know, you got to break down the cellulose, which is the structural material of the plants, into sugars and then ferment the sugars, and the cost right now is still two to three times what gasoline costs.

Okay, well, so we could say—and people do say— well, damn the cost! It's real costly if the planet burns up in a hundred years, and so why not just force people to—or require or incentivize people to, you know, pay three or four times as much for their energy usage now?

Well, I think, you know, as we’ve seen in France and other places, when you try to do that, people get very upset. And in fact, you know, this whole energy transition that we're talking about, if you do it too rapidly, it's tremendously disruptive, because energy touches every part of our lives.

And so you got to go slow; there is no climate crisis—we can get on to that in a bit. Let us take our time, develop the technologies, introduce them gracefully, and eventually, we do emissions as required.

Yeah, well that graceful introduction doesn’t seem to me to be something that can manage be managed from a top-down perspective very straightforwardly. I mean, first of all, we’re seeing a tremendous amount of instability on the energy provision front in Europe at the moment, partly because of winter, partly because of the war, partly because of, um, I would say clueless, hypothetically environmentally oriented policies in the past.

But, so let me lay out a couple of the problems I see with renewables, and tell me what you think about—sure! Okay, sure!

Well, the first is that obviously—and this has really been a problem in the UK recently—you don’t get a lot of electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, and we've had prolonged periods of wind drought in the winter in the UK, and that’s a real catastrophe.

Now, people object to, you know, the— the German word 'Dunkelflaute.'

Yes, you heard that word?

Yes, yes! Okay, so, for other people who haven’t heard it, it means when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, so you get no electricity from wind or solar.

The German translation is something like a dark stillness.

Right, right. Well, um, and so we hear a lot of noise about the cost benefit and effectiveness of renewables, but the cost of renewable energy on the wind and solar front is generally estimated at the cost when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, not when it’s dark and there’s no wind at all, because the price actually moves towards the infinite at that point.

Now, the problem technically, as far as I can tell, apart from whatever environmental damage wind and solar might be producing in and of themselves, like the death of birds and bats, for example, the big problem seems to me to be twofold: one is that they’re cyclic on a daily basis and a weekly basis and on a monthly basis, and we don’t have good storage and it isn't obvious we’re going to have it soon.

And storage itself, everything that needs to be mined and so forth to make batteries, has a non-negligible environmental cost. So, it doesn't—it doesn’t have to be sewage.

So let me back up.

Yeah, yeah, okay, so we’re on the electrical grid now, and we would like our grid to have three qualities: first of all, it should be reliable. The reliability standard in North America is like one day out of a decade that the bulk power system should go down. The second is we would like it to be affordable.

Yeah, if electricity prices get too high, it’s a terrible disruption. And the third thing is we’d like it to be clean, both in a local pollution sense but also in a CO2 emission sense.

So reliable, affordable, and clean. I like to think about the old joke during the Cold War: you know, smart, honest, and communist—choose two out of three!

Alright, so reliable, affordable, clean. We have a reliable and affordable system based on coal and natural gas. You can be reliable and clean if you do nuclear energy or you do carbon capture and storage with gas or coal, or you can be affordable and clean with wind and solar, but you can’t have all three.

The most expensive part of a useful grid is the reliability; it’s not the wind and solar, and because you can have up to a month’s worth of 'Dunkelflaute' where the wind and soil are not producing at all, the backup system—whatever it is—needs to be at least as capable as the wind and solar system, which means the cost is going to be at least double, because wind and solar are the cheapest.

Alright, so, and people have done detailed studies using real weather data and cost for wind and solar and nuclear or batteries and so on, and it turns out that we're going to at least double, if not triple the cost of electricity if we go to a renewable-heavy grid, and I don’t think that's a very good thing at all.

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Okay, so, so let's delve into that a little bit more, because I just want to highlight for everyone exactly what’s being said here. So, because you need a continuous supply of power—and that’s particularly true in the winter or perhaps when it’s extremely hot—you need a continuous supply of power that’s capable of being reliable during peak usage hours.

So, because wind and solar cannot do that and we don't have the storage to use wind and solar, we have to have two parallel power systems. And so, I can’t see how anybody can think that’s a good idea.

Now, that's especially the case when, if you produce two parallel power systems, you make energy much more expensive; but also, you introduce unpredictabilities into the fossil fuel or coal or nuclear end of the equation, because it isn't obvious to the people who are investing in those technologies exactly how much attention is going to be paid to their needs.

And so, you complicate the economic infrastructure upon which the provision of reliable fossil fuel and nuclear has already been predicated, and so you're going to have to also trigger the economic incentives because that backup system is going to sit idle.

Yeah, a good fraction of the time, but you’re still paying the capital expense. Somebody took out a loan to build that gas plant with CCS, and how are you going to compensate them when they’re only being used 10 percent of the time or less?

Okay, so I think you could make a radical case that switching to renewables under such a situation, if the renewables are wind and solar, is just ill-advised, period.

Because of the problem of having to double the energy infrastructure system.

Yeah, yeah! Okay, and so, there’s another problem and that’s the critical materials problem. You mentioned cobalt, I think, a little bit a while ago. The renewable technologies for their magnets, for other components, the wiring use a tremendous amount more of non-exotic—I’m sorry—of exotic materials: rare earths, cobalt, nickel, copper—not so exotic but very important—and the world does not have the capacity to produce those materials at the scale and cost that’s required.

Okay, so now let's talk about costs. So from what I'm able to understand—and this is fairly basic—is that because energy sits at the base of everything we do, because there's no difference in some real sense between energy and work, and there's no difference between work and even minimal human flourishing: shelter, opportunity for your kids, provision of inexpensive and plentiful food, the fundamental basics—every time we make energy more expensive, what we do is we tilt hundreds of millions of people who are just starting to struggle their way out of absolute poverty right back into desperate scrabbling around in the dirt, fundamentally.

And so, and then you might say, well, that’s absolutely necessary because of limits to growth. We—the planet just can’t tolerate the multitude of people striving for economic security that are currently engaged in that struggle—and so, tough luck to those people.

But the thing that really bothers me about that, apart from the fact that it’s cruel beyond belief, is that I don’t see any evidence at all that tipping hundreds of millions of people back into absolute poverty is going to do anything but make the planet a hell of a lot worse.

I mean the situation in Germany is quite illustrative of that now because we've got a perfect storm in Germany, as far as I can tell. We’ve got dependence on a dictator, Putin, or on Petro dictators, because Germany, for example, has just made a big deal with Qatar because Canada sent them away empty-handed.

And then energy costs are extremely expensive in Germany, and so lots of industrial enterprises are leaving, going to places like China and the U.S. And then, also, the entire power structure is now incredibly unreliable and it’s more polluting by a large margin than it was 15 years ago.

Yeah, all true!

Okay, which is incredible for a, you know, credible for a country that is founded on rationality and sensible engineering and invented many of the technologies that are used in a modern fossil also fuel-based energy system. Nuclear fission was discovered in Germany, right?

This is crazy! I think, you know, Mrs. Merkel is at the heart of a lot of those decisions. She is a trained scientist; she’s a physical chemist. I know from talking to people who have talked with her—she understood all of this but was beholden to the electorate and made the decision based on politics rather than what she knew.

Yeah, well, you know, about energy technique, yeah, I don’t even think that this is based on politics per se. You know, I think what happens to these leaders—and I've seen a fair bit of this in Canada and I know about it firsthand, and in the U.S. for that matter—is that people get inflamed about a particular issue because they’re afraid, let’s say climate change, and then the politicians, who have very little courage on the electoral front, use very, very badly designed public opinion polls to sample people's terror at the level of whim, and then they pander to it.

And I don’t actually think that that’s necessary because I don’t think there’s any evidence at all that that kind of public opinion poll-driven pandering is a reasonable short, medium, or long-term political solution. So it’s actually quite a mystery to me, you know.

Go ahead, go ahead!

I was going to say in these issues, at least for climate and industry, there are underlying scientific and techno-economic realities and you cannot violate them without running into big trouble. And Germany is a wonderful example where they just ignored the technical-economic realities.

The same is true of the climate story where some combination of some of the scientists, the media, the politicians, and the NGOs have quite unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat. Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects. They can’t be distilled down into sound bites. What we do involves trade-offs, and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough about those trade-offs to make a decision.

Yeah, well, some of that’s a problem! It really is, in part, a problem of complexity, right? I mean, because you can imagine, there’s an attraction to relatively simple hypotheses, and maybe that’s a good one—that’s Occam's razor in some sense—although you don’t want your explanations to be any simpler than they need to be.

And so we have—well, it’s reasonable to be concerned about the environment. Part of the environment is climate; part of climate is carbon dioxide. Maybe we should just focus on carbon dioxide, and then we’re doing the right thing. And that’s where people get led down the garden path because you don’t get to be a planetary savior by jumping up and down and saying carbon dioxide is bad.

Like, it—that’s too oversimplified! And the politicians capitalize on that, right?

So let me give you one simple response to that, which I found to be pretty effective, and I would credit Alex Epstein, free in general thought, right, and whom I know you’ve spoken with. There are one and a half billion of us in the developed world—U.S., Canada, EU, Japan, and so on—and we enjoy abundant energy.

It’s a little more expensive at the moment because of market issues, but by and large we’ve got a great deal of energy, and it gives us the kind of lives we live. There are six and a half billion people on the planet who don’t have that energy, and as they develop, as they improve their lives, their energy demand is going to grow.

And the only way—sorry, not the only way, but the most effective way to let them have that energy is by fossil fuels: electricity, gas, coal; transportation, oil. And I think Alex very effectively argues that it is immoral to deny them the opportunity to develop with adequate energy!

Yeah, well, we can—I think I’ve heard of an adequate response. I would push that past unethical into the realm of murderous. I think it’s absolutely unforgivable for the West to ever say anything about whether or not the developing countries—and that would include China and India—have any right to start moving away from wood and dung, which also kill many, many people while they’re burning, toward coal and natural gas and nuclear.

And I’ve not heard any leader address that issue directly. I’d love to ask John Kerry or, you know, your leader, Trudeau, or the people in the EU, “Where is your morality about these six and a half billion people?”

Well, there is no good answer! Well, this is the argument, as far as I can understand it, and I’ve been trying to follow along, let’s say, on the psychological front, trying to piece this together. It’s something like, “Pay now or pay later!”

Sure! Many, many people are going to suffer if we raise energy prices and put on limits to growth, but that will be nothing compared to the suffering of people 50 to 100 years down the road if we don’t take emergency action now.

So that’s nonsense!

Okay! Nonsense!

Okay, why? That’s not what the science says! Okay, let me start with, again, something pretty simple. Let’s look at the last 120 years: since 1900 to now, the globe has warmed about 1.3 degrees Celsius. In that time, we’ve seen the greatest improvement in human betterment we’ve ever seen.

The population has gone up by a factor of five in that 120 years; the GDP per capita has gone up by a factor of seven; longevity increased from 32 years to the current 72 years across the globe; literacy fraction has gone up enormously; the fraction in extreme poverty has gone down; and so on—even as the globe warmed another 1.3 degrees!

Now, the IPCC projects best guess right now about another 1.3 degrees of warming in the next hundred years? Do you think that that additional warming is going to reverse or even significantly derail the progress we’ve had?

It’s just nonsense! And in fact, the IPCC reports say that at least on the economic front, a few degrees of warming is a few percent hit on the GDP, which will increase anyway substantially over the next—yes, yes! So instead of going up by 400 percent, it’ll go up 385, right? Something like that, which is within the uncertainty—well within the uncertainty prediction! So the notion of a climate catastrophe is just nonsense!

Okay, so I’m going to—I'm going to push you on that and I’m going to try to take the hypothetical alternative scientific perspective. So back, I guess it was a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, something like that, Thomas Malthus wrote his famous essay on population and extinction, in some real sense.

And so, for all those of you who are listening, you need to know this idea. So Malthus, who was quite a smart observer, noted that in natural populations there are often cycles of boom and bust.

And so under standard natural conditions, a population of animals, and that would range anywhere from single-celled animals, say an impetu dish, up to deer, you know, grazing on the plains, a population would expand until it consumed all of the available resources—that would be mostly food in the case of animals—and then, having over-consumed, would precipitously collapse.

And that's balanced in the natural world to some degree by predation and the inter-community and inter—what would you say?—competition between different species, but fundamentally, given limited resources, a given population will expand until it exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment.

Now, Malthusian biologists assumed that that model was relevant to human beings by assuming that we were subject to the same constraints. And so you really saw this kicking into high gear in the 1960s, where people like Paul Ehrlich, who has plenty of sins on his conscience, let's say made the case in the mid-60s, along with the Club of Rome, that by the year 2000 we’d have so many bloody mouths to feed on the planet that commodity prices would shoot through the roof and everyone would start—I remember reading, as you probably did, “The Limits to Growth,” right?

Right? Right! And the time frame was?

Well, the time frame prediction was the year 2000! Now, one of the things we should point out that if you’re putting forward a scientific hypothesis that’s testable and falsifiable, it’s incumbent upon you to specify the appropriate time frame.

You don’t, of course, to say the human race is heading for an uncontrollable Malthusian catastrophe sometime in the next 10,000 years? It’s like, you can just go away with those ideas!

If you can’t specify the damn time frame, then you should shut the hell up! Verifiable, testable hypotheses are the essence of science, right?

So, absolutely! So, okay, so people like Ehrlich, who predicted, for example, that commodity prices were going to spike through the roof by the year 2000 and everyone was going to starve, are wrong! And the reason they’re wrong, at least in part, is because the Malthusian predictions—they don’t apply to people!

And I think the reason they don’t apply in some fundamental sense is because we’re capable of the death of our ideas instead of the death of our bodies, right? So we can adapt to—

Yeah, adaptability is maybe the defining characteristic of humans!

Alright, we are wonderfully adaptive. People live, you know, from Hudson Bay down to the equator and we do just fine.

And I think one needs to judge by past experience: you have to have faith that we, as a species, will figure it out because we’ve always done that in the past.

Yeah, we’ve done it under more trying conditions than we have now, I might say. Absolutely!

You know, and there’s a lot of brain power available in the world now too, and that’s one of the massive benefits of having a larger population. I mean, there are more smart people alive now, especially smart and educated people, than there has been at any point in the past.

And we’ve got to let them, you know, do their thing.

Alright, and that’s got to do with governance and regulation and so on, but absolutely, there’s tremendous human capacity right now.

Okay, now, the IPCC—why don’t you explain exactly what that is and also tell everyone, because all the climate doomsters hypothetically predicate their propositions on the IPCC reports, which—and they’re regarded by as gold standard—people like Bjorn Lomborg also accept the IPCC prognostication but have pointed out, like Epstein and you have pointed out too, that well, it’s one thing to read the IPCC report, and then it’s another to read the summary and then the summary of the summary, which is mostly what people read, and it starts to become non-scientific and political or theological as it gets condensed.

So what do you think the IPCC reports actually say apart from the fact that we’re looking at about a 1.3-degree increase in average temperature in the next hundred years?

Yeah, so we do see—we have seen in the past an increase in the Earth's temperature. The IPCC will say that's consistent with it all being driven by human influences, but they allow for the possibility that there's natural variation in there.

So that’s just on the temperature. What they say about extreme weather events is that apart from things directly associated with the temperature, like record high temperatures or heat waves, you don’t see much trends globally.

There’s, you know, drought—hard to see a trend; hurricanes or tropical cyclones—hard to see any trend at all over a century. Maybe there’s a little thing we can talk about afterward.

Sea level rise—proceeding at the rate of one foot a century globally. Different locally—we can talk about that a little bit if you want.

Mid-latitude severe storms and so on—not much going on at all. It’s hard to find trends. It doesn’t mean that the trends aren’t there, but they’ve just not emerged from the data.

Okay, so I wanted to—yeah, sorry, go ahead!

I was going to talk a little bit about the IPCC, please do!

So this is an exercise carried out by the UN roughly every six or seven years. They convene a thousand scientists from countries around the globe who are supposed to survey, assess the scientific understanding of human-induced climate change. That's really important, because they focus on, you know, what might be attributable to humans as opposed to natural climate change, which is an important part of the story.

And so they split up into various working groups, write very detailed thousand, two thousand-page long reports that actually, in my opinion, do a pretty good job of assessing the science. Those reports are then packaged, if you like, or summarized into summaries for policymakers, where the scientists don’t have as much of a hand in writing those summaries; the governments intervene quite a bit.

And when you compare the summaries—which is what serious people would read if they’re not climate scientists—to what’s actually in the reports, there’s lots of disconnect.

And I can give you some examples at some point, and then of course you get the media, where you have journalists who don’t know very much at all about the science—they’re on a climate beat in the newspaper—and so they have to provide climate stories that catch the attention.

And then you've got the politicians who grab onto all of this, and so at the end of this long game of telephone, what comes through is very little reflective of what the actual science says.

Alright, so, okay, so now you hear very frequently that 97 percent of scientists agree that, well, global warming exists or climate change exists. But my understanding of that is the following, and so correct me if I'm wrong: so 97 percent of scientists agree that there is credible evidence that some proportion of the current trend towards warming is attributable to human activity and, more specifically, to carbon dioxide.

So, be some fraction of the 1.3 degrees that have—

Yeah, right, right! Whether it’s a half or whether it’s whole, I think people would disagree on!

Right, right, and there’s some disagreement about exactly the range of hypothetical temperature increase over the last hundred years or the next hundred.

Okay, so that’s the 97. What percentage of scientists do you suppose actually take an apocalyptic view specifically in relationship to carbon dioxide?

Yeah, do you have any idea, a sense of that out?

No, you know, no, and you know the 97 numbers are a made-up number also!

Yeah, entire flawed study! I think, you know, the scientists are not behaving as though it were apocalyptic. I would say 95 percent of them are not in that camp, but look, that’s just my anecdotal perception.

You know, I’d say it’s hard to imagine folks a lot, yeah, right? And you know, none of them are kind of jumping off the roof and saying, "My God, we’d better do something, or we're headed for a climate Hell highway!" Climate Highway to Hell, or something is what the Secretary-General of the UN said a couple of months ago!

Right! Well, so then, no, we’re not—okay, well, this is—it's an issue! It’s a long-term problem; we can deal with it! But there's no reason to ring alarm bells.

Okay, well then, I’m going to play Devil's Advocate from another direction for a moment. So I would say, of all the data points that I've encountered over the last 15 years investigating the nexus between energy and environment, the data point that's left out at me most strongly is the fact that, oh, since the year 2000, the world has greened by 15 percent, primarily in semi-arid areas!

So let’s just walk through that for a second. So 15 percent is a lot; it’s bigger than the entire landmass of the United States, and 'green' is a lot different than 'brown' or 'dead.' And semi-arid means that plants are growing in places that are damn near deserts!

And as far as I can tell, that's pretty much the opposite of what the climate apocalypse prognosticated. And more than that, I can't shake the suspicion—and I would love to be corrected on this, if you can see somewhere that I'm wrong—why the hell isn’t that good news, especially when it’s also allied with the fact that our crops are much more productive as a consequence, too?

So I could say, “Hey, look at this! It turns out that there’s no more effective way of delivering fertilizer for plants worldwide than to burn fossil fuels!”

Yeah! So, so, so let’s back up on the science for a second first.

So plants love CO2, right? We pump CO2 into greenhouses in order to get the plants to grow better, right? Now in the atmosphere the concentration is about 420 parts per million of CO2; we raise it to over a thousand parts per million in greenhouses to help the plants grow. The CO2 not only lets them grow faster, but it lets them use water more efficiently, right? They don’t have to open up the stomata and lose water as much.

You're 15% since 2000? If you’d asked me, I would have said it’s more like 40% since the 1980s.

Alright, so yeah, things are growing better on Earth since 1980, wow! Right? Something called the leaf area index has gone up; NASA produces maps that show this; they write press releases that show this, but somehow it’s not really present in the media.

Okay, so how come we’re not—how come we can’t take the stance that carbon dioxide is a net good? Because that’s such a developing statistic: 40% since the 1980s?

I mean, I don’t know of another set of data that has—that scale, right? That’s really something, and green—that’s important!

Right! And if you look at the agricultural yields and so on—whether it’s in the U.S. or India—it’s been going gangbusters on producing crops!

You know, this is certainly one of the benefits, and it’s a significant one that has to be weighed against hypothetical detrimental effects from global warming. And the net of them is a few percent, again it’s in the noise; you can’t distinguish it.

There are other factors about human well-being that are much more important than whether the climate's changing or not! So, you know, if I were to be a little snarky, it’s almost a nothing burger.

The science says that if you read the reports.

But the detrimental effects get hyped up by various players!

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The other thing that I’ve seen the drum being beat about quite assiduously, let’s say, in recent years—and maybe I don’t know how much you know about this, I don’t know enough about it, that’s for sure—there are people who are claiming now—and maybe this is because some of the shine has gone off the climate apocalypse—that we’re headed for a mass extinction!

And I read a couple of computer models the other day that were published saying that there's a domino effect with regards to mass extinction. And I mean there are a lot of people—and although there’s a lot of greenery now and there’s more forest in the Northern Hemisphere, so you know, those are powerful countervailing proclivities—but do you have any specific knowledge about our effects on the mass extinction front?

Yeah, no, no, you know, like a senior academic, as you and I are, you're reluctant to talk about things you don’t know much about, and I’m very careful about that.

Um, I don’t know about the projections you’re talking about, but I’m a priori very suspicious because these are complicated physical-biological systems, and small effects can have a big influence. And so I’m skeptical.

If I were to look at those papers, one of the first things I would ask is how well have you reproduced the past? Because unless you can reproduce the dominant changes that we've seen over the last 100 years, thousands of years, whatever, I don’t have much confidence in your ability to predict!

Well, okay, let’s talk about models some more. So one of the things I want to point out to people—and you tell me what you think about this—is that it is perfectly possible to produce pretty damn good computer models that predict the behavior of the stock market in the past.

And the stock market’s very complex, of course, because it’s an index of, well, the sum total of human economic activity plus political activity. So it’s a very dynamic system, and it’s full of weird feedback loops because, as soon as you can predict it, you perturb the system.

But in any case, here’s the fundamental point: it doesn’t appear to me at all that the stock market is more complex than the climate, and if you could produce a model that could predict the climate, then you could produce a model that would predict the stock market.

And if you could produce that model, even if you only got—were right 51 percent of the time consistently, you would soon have all the money! And I don’t see anybody who’s developing these very complex models who has all the money.

So I don’t think that they can make models that can model the behavior of systems that complex!

And so let’s talk about models a bit.

So let’s talk about models a little bit! Let me back up again and talk about some of the basics: the most used models for the climate system are what are called general circulation models. They cut the atmosphere and the ocean up into cubes about a hundred kilometers on a side, 60 miles on a side, and going up 20 layers in the atmosphere and 20 layers down in the ocean.

And we have a difference; the stock market is—we have some underlying physical laws—the laws of conservation of energy, mass, momentum, and so on—that govern how the air, the radiation, both sunlight and heat radiation, water vapor flow through these boxes.

Newton understood those, or Euler back in the 19th century or even earlier, and we can build such models and use computers. So you wind up with a voted 10 million boxes covering the Earth, going up and down in the ocean, atmosphere, and then you follow the flow of stuff through these boxes every 10 minutes—10-minute time steps—and you do that for a century or so, and you got some description of what you think is the climate.

But there are lots of problems with that. One is that 60 miles on a side is not sufficient to describe the difference in climate between New York and Washington, D.C., or New York and Toronto, for example. So that's one.

And the second is, a lot of phenomena happen on much smaller sizes; think about thunderheads, for example. They happen on a few-mile scale, so you have to make up some assumption about what’s going on inside each of these boxes, and different people make different assumptions.

A third is that the boxes are not really cubes, but they’re pancakes, because the atmosphere is really thin compared to the size of the Earth, and the ocean is also pretty thin. And so you have to make up assumptions about how things move vertically that are not directly tied to the fundamental physical laws.

So all of those, you know, make a lot of trouble, and that’s why the world has 50 different such models, and to get predictions, they average all of them together.

Okay, so let’s take that apart just so everyone understands. So the first is, these models are not very high resolution, either spatially or temporally.

So you have to use huge cubes plus you’re only temporarily—temporally.

Well, temporary is pretty good—10 minutes.

Well, spatially, right?

Right! But it’s terrible. But we also—well, perhaps on the temporal side! I mean, the thing is we’re looking at relatively small deviations in temperature, right? If it’s one degree over a century, this is not a huge effect!

And what that means is that the models aren’t high resolution enough to be accurate to that scale; they’re simply not.

That’s true! That’s true! Now that doesn’t—okay, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t model, because our models get better and better all the time. But there’s a big difference between modeling something, even if you can make it accurate to predict the past and being able to model the present.

But there’s a walloping difference between being able to model the present and being able to model climate a hundred years from now, because the air is compound as you predicted out into the future!

Well, yes!

Um, that’s certainly true, although you hope to be describing averages that are reasonably well-predicted.

You know, there are several comments about that. One is, you know, human influences are small; they’re—as you say—a one percent effect. We’re concerned about a rise of two degrees, while the Earth’s surface temperature is about 300 degrees.

So it’s like a one percent effect! The second is, we’re interested not in describing the climate but in describing how the climate responds to those influences. That’s the big question, and that’s an order of magnitude harder job than describing the climate itself.

The third thing is we’re looking over time scales of 100, 150 years, and we have terrible data to describe what happened in the past.

Yes, we have reasonable confidence about the average global temperature, but what goes on in the oceans—which is really where climate happens—the oceans are the long-term component of the system. We have terrible data until about 20 years ago when we started putting out floats of various kinds.

Well, how good is the ocean data? I mean, the ocean's pretty damn deep and it’s not like we can measure everything that's happening in the ocean.

I can’t imagine we understand long-term current flows from the depths well enough to be predicting climate alteration on the scale of a few degrees. That just strikes me as unbelievably preposterous!

Right, studies that have attempted to reproduce the warming of the ocean show that the ocean was warming at about half the current rate even as the Little Ice Age started to end.

And so untangling this long-term natural variability from the effect of human influence, which has only really been significant for the last 70 or 80 years or so, is a very, very difficult problem. Maybe the central problem in climate!

Okay, now you talked about when you were at BP you got somewhat excited about the possibility of biofuel; we didn’t really continue down that road.

Um, what do you—what are your thoughts on the nuclear front, let's say? And did you see developments there that you regarded as—?

Like with a lot of people talk about modular nuclear power, for example.

So, right, so full disclosure first, you know, I began life as a nuclear physicist, right? And so the atom is my friend!

I’m a scientist, not an engineer. I don’t think I could build a critical credible nuclear reactor, but I certainly understand how they work in great detail and understand the economics and the business and so on.

I think if the world is serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear power has to be a big part of the future: essentially zero emissions, reasonably economic, and a demonstrated technology!

Right, roughly 20 percent of U.S. electricity comes from fission; 80 percent of French electricity comes from fission—maybe it’s 75% now.

So, you know, we know how to do this. The problem is that the big ones, particularly in the U.S.—the existing power plants of which there are about 90-something now—in the U.S. are very expensive!

You have to put down a lot of money at the beginning—10, 20 billion dollars—and then you don’t start to pay it off until 30 years hence when you sell the electricity that you’ve been making. And so you need a stable and sensible regulatory environment for these big capital expenses.

Well, look, I mean, we were building nuclear power plants, you know, 60 years ago, and so we should be better at it now, especially at the modular level.

So one of the things I’m curious about, well, too, I suppose, is to what degree does insane regulation make nuclear power unbelievably expensive?

And then the second question would be given that insane regulation does make nuclear power extremely expensive, do you think there’s any possibility at all, practically speaking, that that red tape could be reversed?

I mean, Germany just built an LNG port in like five months, so you know, what—it's obvious we can get our act together when we need to!

We can do this!

Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, regulation has been a big part of why big nuclear is expensive.

I’m all for making sure these things are safe—we have to do that; that’s the primary consideration—and the industry believes that as well.

The problem is that in the U.S., we have built every reactor custom-built; they’re all different! Right? Even if the names are more or less the same in detail, they’re different.

The hope is, with small modular reactors, is to focus the regulation so that you can get one design approved, and then you can make a hundred of them!

Right! And ship them around the country; you build them in a factory, and you put them on a flatbed rail car and bring them to the site. It would also ease the economics, because you pay for the first one, and then you use the cash flow from it to finance the second one and the third one and so on at a site!

Yeah, well, Rolls Royce is doing that—they’ve got a proposal.

Right! So in the U.S., there are two companies—I remember the name of one of them called NuScale—and I think they hope to have the first one in the ground within the next five or six years.

You know, you’ve got to come down the learning curve, right? Now the costs are more expensive than big nuclear per kilowatt hour produced, but as they come down the learning curve and build more of these and so on, the costs should come down; they’ll still be more expensive than gas, for example, to make electricity, but at least you won’t have the CO2 issues.

The waste issue, which people talk about also with respect to nuclear, is a technically solved problem!

Okay, how is it solved?

Monitored, retrievable storage! You put it underground, you monitor it, the waste decays, the heat from the waste decays. After 100 years it's almost all gone, and then you can pull it back out if you needed the energy in it.

You know, we only burn about five percent of the uranium in the waste that’s there in the waste.

And so it's soluble.

So, okay, I started looking into the sorts of things we're talking about about 10 years ago, and maybe 15 years ago.

Okay, so one of the things that really shocked me—well, there are two things. The first was that when I started looking into the energy and environment nexus in detail, I got more optimistic rather than less.

And I thought, “Oh my God, things are a lot better than I thought they were! People are getting richer at a stunning rate! It looks like there's a positive relationship between population growth and wealth! The planet is cleaner and better off in many ways than it's been for a very long time!”

Like there are real reasons for optimism!

And then I also—so that was shocking! Then I also learned—and this was also shocking—that there’s a very positive relationship between GDP and environmental, let’s call it, awareness and concern.

So it looks like once you get people up to about the point where in their country the average GDP is five thousand dollars per person, people can stop scrabbling around in the dirt and burning everything and eating everything in sight, and they can start to think about what sort of environment they’d like to have for their children.

The technical name is the Kuznets curve, which you probably—

Right, right, right!

And so then I thought, “Oh, well isn’t this interesting? What this should mean is that if we wanted to, we could work really hard internationally to make energy cheap, and we could pull billions of people—the remaining people in the world—out of abject poverty, and the consequence of that would be that they would start to become locally concerned about environmental maintainability and sustainability, and then everyone would have enough to eat, and they’d all be educated, plus the planet would be better off!

And then the question was, okay—and here’s a question that we can really delve into—why the hell aren’t we doing this? It’s like instead, we’re buying this crazy apocalyptic narrative that’s making the planet worse, that’s driving energy costs up, that’s destabilizing us sociopolitically when, as far as I can tell, the pathway forward to abundance and sustainability is pretty damn obvious and also not particularly expensive!

So what the hell's going on?

So, I walk—I quote two folks relevant to this. One is H.L. Mencken, who was a journalist in the early part of the 20th century in New York, a very astute, very acerbic.

And he’s got a line in one of his books, which I’ll try to reproduce: “The purpose of practical politics is to keep the electorate alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety.”

And you see the politicians grabbing onto these issues, whether it’s the climate, whether it’s immigration—they do it on both sides, right? All sides—the missile gap in the 60s, you know, whatever.

The truth was behind these, the politicians amp it up in order to get the electorate to actually do something, right?

So that’s one quote. The second is there was this guy named Anthony Downs who was an economist working in the 60s through the 90s or 2000s; he was first at UCLA and then at Brookings, so he’s quite on the left and had a number of insights to his credit.

But one of them was what he calls the issue attention cycle. Namely, some issue, whether it’s pesticides or climate, bubbles among the experts for a while; nobody pays much attention to it. It suddenly bursts into the public consciousness, and everybody gets both alarmed, but also enthusiastic about the ease with which they’re going to solve it.

Then everybody discovers, “Boy, this is going to be really hard to solve.”

And eventually, the issue fades with time or morphs into something else!

Yeah! And I think we are at kind of that third phase now with the climate, where everybody is really realizing just how hard—and I would say almost impossible—it’s going to be to reduce emissions.

Certainly, net zero by the end of the century looks like it’s just not going to happen!

So you know, I think that’s what’s going on!

Well, I'm going to add some psychological layering to that. You can tell me what you think of this.

Well, so first of all, people are tilted toward attention paid to negative events. And so, for example, people are much more hurt by a loss of five dollars than they are made happy by a gain of five dollars.

So we’re quite low—now, I think the reason we’re loss-sensitive is that, well, you can only be so happy! But you can be 100 dead! And so being more sensitive to threat—in terms of magnitude of response per unit of reinforcement—makes sense given that we're finite and vulnerable.

And then we also have the problem that any given threat—almost any given threat—could, in principle, be personally and socially apocalyptic.

So, for example, it could be the case that the aches and pains that you’re experiencing today are the ground zero for an epidemic that’ll kill one-third of the United States!

Right? I mean it’s very unlikely, but it happened with the Black Death, and I mean the possibility of an apocalyptic outcome is always non-zero.

And in fact, in personal life, it’s always 100 percent because the worst thing that could possibly happen to you will for sure happen to you, and so it will eventually happen!

Well, right!

And so I think one of our problems is that because we’re sensitive to negative information and because there’s always a potential apocalypse bubbling away in the background, it's very hard for us to distinguish collectively between threats that are valid apocalyptically and those that aren’t.

And then we tend to err on the side of panic, let’s say, and that wasn't such a bad thing when our responses weren’t as large as the potential problems, because now, now what happens is that if we stampede in one direction, we’re so powerful that the bloody stampede can be much worse than the problem!

We’ll be back in one moment! First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series, Exodus!

So the Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything! And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost— you will pay the piper!

It's going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert.

And we're going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine.

The highest spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny.

I want villains to get punished, but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price?

That’s such a Christian question!

You know, Bill Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2018, I think for one of the things he wanted for was the realization that there’s an optimal way in which to decarbonize. If you do it too rapidly, it’s too disruptive, and you deploy immature technology. If you do it too slowly, carbon dioxide builds up and promotes a greater risk.

So I think people need this kind of multi-decade, if not century perspective on making these changes; but also going back in time, the realization that we have managed much worse threats and crises.

And as Bjorn Lomborg says, we should cool it a bit, relax, think it through, and do it in a deliberate!

Yeah, well, we’re also not that good, particularly now, at adopting, say, a few centuries-long time frame, and it’s not surprising because we don’t live that long.

But I mean, if you look in at Medieval Europe, there was the capacity for sustained imagination. So a lot of the great cathedrals, which were amazing engineering projects for their time, were construed over multiple centuries.

People who started them knew they wouldn’t finish them.

So there was that sense of long-term continuity!

But maybe one of the byproducts of a very efficient and hyper-productive capitalist society is that we tend to have a shorter time frame for expectation of results.

You know, and there’s obviously benefits to that, right? Because why the hell not fix the problem in the next quarter if you can?

But there’s going to be some issues that require a time scale of centuries.

I mean, I think the Bible, you know—

Go ahead, please!

No, we have, you know, been seduced perhaps by the digital revolution, where the technologies change every couple of years!

Right? I mean, you know, if you go back a decade or two, we were using eight-track tapes and so on, and now, of course, it’s all MP3s or MP4s or whatever.

Energy is very different; the systems need to work as a system. The facilities last decades, and we demand high reliability, so energy changes on multi-decade time scales.

It doesn't change every year or two, and people have come to expect that things can change rapidly when, in fact, there are good physical and economic reasons why energy cannot change!

Right! Well, so that's a complex cognitive problem too, right? To be able to distinguish between those problems that are amenable to rapid solution and those problems that aren’t—that's not a trivial cognitive exercise!

It’s not obviously—especially if you don’t have specialized knowledge, right? Or if you don’t have experience!

I mean, not to knock the younger generation; I have three kids myself, and you know they’re all wonderful people, but if you’re a 22-year-old just having graduated from undergraduate education, you don’t have the perspective!

I certainly didn’t!

And getting this perspective through life experience, through reading more, and understanding more about the world, gives you a different view of these things!

Some people say that, you know, you and I will not be around to see the worst consequences of climate change—

But we have seen the world navigate far more difficult things!

Yes! Yes!

And to do it successfully—not without pain and turmoil, but we will persist as a species!

Well, yes! And I mean, I would say that things have turned out quite a lot better than I presumed they would when I was young.

I mean for—and how old are you, Dr. Coonan?

I’m 71.

Okay, so you’re about—you’re 11 years older than me! So, you know, both of us grew up in the Cold War era, and I would say our apocalypse was probably nuclear.

And it seems to me that we had more reason to assume that the nuclear threat was a genuine apocalyptic nightmare than the climate apocalypse we have now, given what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis—and then again in the 1980s, we were damn close a couple of times!

And we might be on the threshold now with regards to this war with Russia, so who the hell knows, right?

But it was certainly the case that among people in my generation, there were a substantial number of young people who were seriously affected enough psychologically by the ever-present threat of nuclear war, let’s say, to be very demoralized and disenchanted about the future, to think, “Well, why the hell bother?”

Because the probability we’re going to end up in a nuclear winter is so high that it’s just pointless to do anything.

And then there was the usual murmurings in the background about overpopulation and so forth and coming scarcity and all of that, and then really what's happened since then is that pretty much everything globally has gotten way better than anybody could have possibly imagined!

Absolutely!

And very surprising ways!

So not only is the planet greener, but it’s much better fed, and obesity is a way bigger problem than starvation—

Except—and starvation almost never occurs except for political reasons!

I mean distribution issues!

Yeah, exactly!

And so, you know, all things—literacy has gone up. Communications, mobility, health, longevity—I mean, as I said, over 120 years, the world has improved like it has never improved before!

Yeah!

So then we have—and I mean, it’s not like we’re getting stupider, and I’m a bit concerned on the AI front, you know, but so far the additional computational resources we've been able to put at our disposal have been used in a fairly intelligent way!

I mean, China is kind of worrisome on the totalitarian front—and yeah, but it isn't obvious to me that China is going to be particularly successful in their totalitarian ambitions.

The Chinese themselves seem to be getting pretty damn sick of having the state interfere with absolutely everything you do every second of their lives!

So I could easily see China undergoing a collapse that something akin to what happened to the Soviet Union in 1989.

That system is just too damn unwieldy, and you know, you see these people in Iran clamoring away for freedom, and so, you know, maybe we’ll see a positive development on that front!

That might be nice!

And so I just don't see any—okay, first of all, I don't see any reason for an apocalyptic outlook! We could—we could make things a hell of a lot better than they are now—

Very, very!

With absolutely—

Now, who do you see operating at the international level, on the leadership front, that you regard as—or do you see anyone that you regard as a credible advocate for like a sensible nexus of environment and energy policies?

You know, it’s very tough to find that, because if you speak out against the prevailing catastrophe narrative, you get shouted down, and you get no traction at all!

But what I do think is that, again, there are techno-economic realities that will eventually cause the system to do the right thing.

I talk in private to leaders of energy companies, to politicians, finance folks, and I think if you and I were having that conversation with them in private, there wouldn’t be too much disagreement.

But many of these leaders feel captive or beholden not to shareholders but to stakeholders, and they dare not say anything!

Yeah, well, a lot of that is off the narrative! A lot of that’s just straight outright cowardice in my mind!

I’ve lost how many—you’ve been—you’ve been—you know, I mean you wrote this book "Unsettled," and people went after you!

But look at you—you’re alive! You seem to be thriving! Your book was quite successful!

I mean how did you escape the apocalyptic consequences of council culture?

Like, how did you—

I think one of the foundations of the book, or one of the principles when I wrote it is that I would only use material that was out of the IPCC reports or the quality research literature or the primary data itself.

In other words, I wasn’t making anything up! It’s all traceable back to those gold standard sources.

And so people can accuse me, as they have, of cherry-picking or not telling the whole story. Of course, I have responses to all of that, but by and large, they have a very hard time criticizing what I’ve written.

They can criticize me, show for the oil industry, not a climate scientist, a denier, etc., etc., but by and large, I’ve only gotten very positive reactions from other people who’ve actually read the book.

I mean, I can tell you stories about some of the nonsense criticisms.

Yeah, yeah!

But, but, I mean, you’ve been able to do this and, you know, you haven’t been like hung and drawn and quartered by the horrible mob!

I know it’s—I know that being mob can be very unpleasant.

And I, I know many people who’ve been canceled and it’s a life-changing experience, so I’m not trying to minimize that.

But you’d hope that there would be a modicum of courage on the political front so that some people could come out and say, “Well, you know, we don’t really need to go down this idiot limits to growth route that we’ve been pursuing expensively and counterproductively for 60 years!

We could just do what we could to make energy more abundant and cleaner and cheaper for poor people, and we could raise their— we could raise their sights to the future.”

And as the measures that governments are implementing to try to get to that unattainable future, whether it’s bans on internal combustion engines or increased renewables that are going to make the grid expensive and unreliable, eventually people will be impacted directly and they’ll be mad, because it’s not being done in a graceful or thoughtful way.

And I think people will then say, “Why are we doing all this again?”

You know, the U.S. is only 13% of global emissions, and if the U.S. went to zero emissions tomorrow, it would be negated by a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world!

And so, you know, the best thing the U.S. can do is develop technologies!

Right! To try to get there and not make massive changes itself.

Well, it’s also the case that the U.S. did lower its carbon output by a substantial amount and the reason for that