Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3diFwO6ZoQ
[Music] all right we're up well thank you very much for being here andrew appreciate it why don't you tell everybody if you would uh what you do and what your credentials are so i'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at texas a m university i'm the director of the texas center for climate studies i've been studying climate and the atmosphere for about 30 years okay and uh i thank you for being here and i brought you on here to counter this book uh steve coonan who is my last guest and uh i'm trying to do this and and balance things out he has a very different take on what the science says about climate change than you do so let's uh i guess we should start i know you've read the book what do you think about his book yeah well let me start with a little context i think some historical context so um for decades on a number of problems there have been scientists who show up and say the consensus is all wrong so it started in the 60s with tobacco so you know the evidence was very clear that smoking is bad for you and then the scientists started showing up saying no you know we don't really understand uh there's there's all these problems with the science and what the tobacco companies figured out very early is that having a scientist advance that message was much better than having a pr person so they would go out and hire scientists to say hey we need you to push this message and they went out it was very effective they delayed the recognition that smoking is bad for you for decades have you seen the documentary uh ministers of doubt merchants have done yeah in fact i was gonna say you know that's the fantas a fantastic book uh by naomi oreskes and eric conway that really goes over this all the way into climate change about how science is used to try to undermine policy action um and so then you know fast forward to the 80s and you have fluorocarbons and ozone depletion and in fact the exact same thing happens the science was really well established but these scientists started showing up saying the scientists have it all wrong and in fact the arguments they're advancing
are almost exactly the same as the arguments that dr kuhn is advancing if you take a word document you just do global word replace ozone depletion for climate change you have exactly the same argument in fact i have a slide with a quote that i normally don't make people read a paragraph but i think this is actually really useful if you go to slide 52 this is from 1989 and i think is it going to show up there yes um it's worth so this is a quote from um uh something that was said about about fluorocarbon that says the current situation can be fairly summarized as following the cfc ozone theory is quite incomplete and cannot yet be relied on to make predictions the natural sources of stratospheric ozone layer have not yet been delineated theoretically or experimentally the antarctic ozone holds ephemeral it comes and goes it seems to be controlled by climatic factors outside human control rather than cfcs that's exactly the same argument you know we don't understand it it's natural variability it's it's it's identical argument and keeping a backup in the next paragraph new york times reports talks about the disadvantages of cfc substitutes they may be toxic flammable corrosive they certainly won't work as well they'll reduce the energy efficiency of appliances they'll deteriorate 135 billion dollars of equipment use cfcs the united states alone and much of this equipment will have to be replaced or modified to work well eventually that will involve 100 million home refrigerators air conditioners and 90 million cars central air conditioning plants and a hundred thousand large buildings good luck total costs haven't even been added up yet and again you know windmills don't work uh you know the cost would be extraordinary and you know you were around the 90s do you remember the economic apocalypse that happened when we were playing cfcs it didn't happen the economic apocalypse didn't happen we replaced them and none of that happened what did they replace them with with other cfcs there's so the original f11 f12 got replaced with these things we call hcfcs that are less damaging
those in layer and none of that happened and that that those people are the true alarmists in the debate the people that say we can't do it because we can do it and all and they're just trying to scare people into not taking action so uh you have a question no i was going to say i think coonan's take on replacing things is essentially that there's so many people in third world countries in impoverished areas that rely on fossil fuels and that eliminating fossil fuels will be devastating to those environments because these people are going to lose out on mass amounts of income and economically it's going to affect them in a disastrous way that's his take right uh i mean i'm not i i don't want to put words in his mouth certainly he argues that it's difficult to transition i think he said at one point during his interview with you that fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source which is not true in fact um let me i have a slide on that um if we go to slide 33 um this actually shows that now so your viewers may not know this uh and in fact a few years ago fossil fuels were the cheapest energy source but the prices are plummeting so this is a plot from lazard what they call the levelized cost of energy and you can see the left on the left side it's the price in 2009 and you can see the top dot is solar and it was extremely expensive in 2009 and then as you go down 2019 wind and solar are now the cheapest energy sources gas is close but but winsor are they are the cheap energy sources is it possible to replace all of the fossil fuel energy that we get with solar oh wow that's a great question and um uh i guess we'll just sort of let the conversation flow as it were so yeah so let's talk about what it takes to to what would what would a grid that's carbon free look like okay so everybody who's capable of tying their shoelaces knows that wind and solar are intermittent so solar doesn't produce energy at night wind doesn't produce energy when the sun's not blowing so everybody knows that okay and the wind
is not blowing when the winds blowing everybody knows that so if you want to create a a reliable carbon-free grid you have a grid that's about on average produces 75 of its power from wind and solar and then the other 25 is what we call dispatchable firm power so it could be nuclear it could be geothermal it could be hydro it's a power source you can turn on and off to balance the variability of wind and solar so when when the wind stops blowing you turn up your dispatchable and when the winds when you're getting lots of wind and solar you turn it off and you let wind and solar run i i was under the impression that wind was not very effective that these windmills don't produce that much power i mean some and some days in texas it's half our power half of our power comes yeah if it's a windy day really we get an enormous amount of power yeah texas has an enormous amount of power so we get from wind on windy days some days you don't get a lot of power that's incredible i did not know it was half of our power so conceivably with solar and with wind we could power the entire state and with you need some dispatchable power right you need you need some nuclear you need some geothermal you need some height you need something that you can balance the the renewable energy but much less than we're currently using that's right and so so you might say you might ask reasonably you know why use wind and solar at all why did it just build 100 nuclear and that would work and i would actually support that but that's much more expensive the wind and solar are very cheap at this point and in fact the marginal cost of wind and solar energy is zero they produce energy an extra joule of energy at no cost because they don't have any fuel right so if you want to pay the least amount for energy what you want to do is you want to have a grid that's mainly wind and solar but then you have to have this firm power that makes up for it when the power when wind and solar don't produce because because there are going to be times when they don't produce you we know we know that's going to happen so wind and solar also rely on there's there has to be some sort of battery that collects the
energy correctly no no so so that's solar right no they really don't so that that's part of why you need to have dispatchable energy you don't really need energy storage on a grid now there are some benefits to energy storage especially storage that lasts a few hours because you can collect energy at noon when solar is producing lots and shifted into the evening so you can shift the energy a few hours so you might want to use batteries for that but you don't really need long-term storage to run the grid you just need some sort of dispatchable power to balance the renewable so is when you have batteries that are attached to solar systems is that just for individual use like for off the grid homes and things of that like no no you'd be industrial scale batteries and again the idea would be to shift power from when you're getting the most solar which is noon to when the demand is the highest which is a few hours later right but what i'm saying is for individual homes most of them have battery backup systems they have systems that store the solar correct like i used to have a system like that yeah you know i don't i actually don't know the statistics i think most people have solar panels their houses don't have batteries but i think some people do but most don't have solar so they connect to the grid as well yeah so their grid goes down that means their solar power is down as well right that's right so for most people who have solar panels in their house they actually have an interlock system that when the grid goes down their solar panels shut off and the reason to do that is for safety of the power line workers they don't want if the power line workers think there's no power on the grid they don't want these solar panels feeding power and they walk and they get shocked so that so that solar panels actually are designed to shut off when the power goes out now you can you can put a battery on your house you can have it disconnect from the grid and you can basically make your house a little island but most people don't do that um if they do do that is is it really possible to power your entire home through solar that way
you know you can it's that's a question of how much you want to invest if you you certainly could do that i think if you have big enough batteries you could you could do that but um the grid is a good reliable backup most of the time and so i think that's what most people rely on they just hook up to the grid and you know when that when they're not when they're not generating power there's pulling energy off the grid and when they're generating excess power they're pushing it onto the grid right but i think one of the things that people like about the idea of solar power is that you're off the grid is that you don't have to rely on anything like if the big freeze happens again and everything shuts off you'll have a refrigerator you'll have heat right right oh yeah no i think that's that's right and i would love to have a house like that um but most people don't have houses that can disconnect from the grid so most of the people that do have solar power they have solar power and they're attached to the grid so solar is just a way of saving money and saving energy costs and saving your energy consumption yeah that's right so it's a way to pay less money for your power because you're not buying money off the grid and with wind they rely they have these massive wind farms right where they have these giant propellers in the air and those right how much is what energy does one of those things generate so uh order of magnitude something like 10 megawatts is sort of a general number for it so and to give you an idea um a megawatt is sort of a diesel locomotive so kind of 10 diesel locomotives a big a big coal-fired power plant is order a gigawatt a billion watts so you can think of a hundred windmills as about equal to a nuclear power plant but really yeah but that's strong well i mean if we're talking order of magnitude you know maybe it's 200 yeah but these big windmills these windmills are enormous have you ever seen one yeah i have they're pretty crazy they're they're enormous i mean they're you can't if you haven't seen one you just can't imagine how big they are yeah we saw one we were
taking a drive through the middle of texas the other day and we saw one and it was so close to the highway and it was facing the highway and i had this irrational fear that the windmill was going to break off and go rolling down the road and crush us yeah obviously i know that doesn't make any sense but that's how big it is yeah no they're they're they're enormous and but i think the important point here is wind and nuclear are not exactly uh substitutable powers again they play different roles in the grid um and and this leads that you mentioned the texas freeze let's talk about the texas freeze because i think that was really a great example of how the grid is supposed to operate and why it didn't operate and so uh you know texas we have a lot of wind and solar we also have a lot of natural gas so in texas natural gas is the power source that backs up the renewables when the renewables are not producing natural gas is supposed to step in and back it up i mean that's the way our grid actually works we we run as much wind and solar as we can and anything else is made up with natural gas there's a little coal a little nuclear and so during the texas freeze the renewables went down they were not producing very much power and again this people play this up like this is a problem with renewables this is not a problem with renewables we know renewables stop producing some of the time and when that happens you rely on your firm dispatchable power to make it up and that was the failure the gas system did not back up the renewables and why was that oh that's a really excellent question so it didn't back up because um the gas supply essentially was choked off so in especially in west texas a lot of the gas that comes out of the ground has a lot of condensates in it things that condense and freeze so heavier hydrocarbons water and at the very cold temperatures it actually froze the well so the gas couldn't get out it plugged the wells up and then what happened is so so you get this reduction in natural gas flow and so then the power started to go down and this was very
sudden this was in the middle of the night on february 15 2021 the power star go down and then what happened was a lot of the natural gas infrastructure is powered by electricity they have these compressors they have valves and once the electricity started to go down all of the rest of the natural gas infrastructure started to fail and so you lost even more natural gas so it's really this this this cascading problem with the natural gas system are the dispatchable power and you know that event cost about 200 billion dollars between uh how much we had to pay for gas plus all the damage all the pipes that froze and and burst i mean it was an enormously expensive event one of the most expensive events texas has ever experienced for that 200 million dollars which is all going to repair pipes it's going to these really rich natural gas guys we could essentially build enough nuclear power to replace most of our gas power if we had just done that but instead we're spending all that money uh you know repairing houses that were destroyed because the natural gas system failed i mean it's crazy to me that we still rely on these systems that that you know we can talk about fossil fuels but you know fossil fuels have many huge disadvantages not just climate change but many others and you know we could fix this we wanted to but we're not and we're just sitting here paying money year after year for these failures of fossil fuel systems now people have a fear of nuclear power based on chernobyl and three mile island and fukushima and the like what what is the current technology like when when you're looking at nuclear technology in 2022 how much safer is it how much more effective and efficient is it and like what's the best example of a new modern nuclear power plant yeah so let me just say right i'm not an expert on on the details of nuclear power certainly people are worried about nuclear power meltdowns etc the way i look at it is you're you have to trade off costs and benefits and you look at climate change you look i mean we can go over the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels and i'd be happy to do that and if you look at all of those and you say
nuclear my view is i'm willing to take some risk with nuclear power to avoid all these other really terrible impacts now i do know that there's a lot of work being done on new technologies for nuclear these small new modular reactors things that hold the promise of better nuclear power and maybe those will come out but even with kind of existing technology from what i understand i'm willing to take the risk my understanding of technology of the nuclear technology rather is that in 2022 there's many more fail-safe measures than were when they designed like say the fukushima system for instance yeah i mean every time you have a disaster people go into it and they say what went wrong and then you learn lessons and you incorporate those into the new plants i mean you do that with plain design right you do that with any kind of big industrial thing so there's no question in my mind that that's right that they're safer today than they were in the past and and you know uh but but let me say while i support nuclear and if if republicans came out and said we will solve climate change by building nuclear i'd be 100 gung-ho uh you know by no means am i one of these nuclear bros that you might see on twitter who you know fusion is 10 years away and you know i would also take geothermal what what are the nuclear bro saying oh you know there are there are people on twitter who will say you know we're fusion is right around the corner and you know you call them nuclear bros yeah why do you call them nuclear bombs they're usually sort of aggressive youngest men they probably watch this show they're probably steaming angry right now and are on tw they're actually on twitter right now searching for me so there's like nuclear fans as i was oh yeah oh yeah you should here's a test go on your twitter feed and say something like i hate nuclear just say that and tweet it out and see what the reaction is uh i don't read twitter all right well unfortunately yeah okay but i just post and ghost i got out of there yeah that's that's a good way to do it but when you're when you're saying like nuclear bros and so is your impression that these are real people that are just enthusiastic about
nuclear power or are these trolls or are these people that work for some sort of a lobby and they're enthusiastic about getting nuclear pushed forward because they're a part of the industry uh you know i think they're honestly enthusiastic about nuclear power the young guys who are bros yeah that seems odd to me you know this is my this is my experience on twitter so you know your mileage may vary they might be [ __ ] with you they might have found you to be a little sensitive do you know that they do that you know they got a little soft spot they start poking that is true but you know i like you i don't respond on twitter a lot i view it as kind of a push medium good for you um so there's nuclear people that are maybe a little overly enthusiastic about nuclear yes that's a good way to put it and when you looked at steve coonan's assertions about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment and carbon in the in in the environment and what about human use is responsible for that like he put a bunch of percentages like how much of it is agriculture how much of it is transportation do you uh dispute his positions on those that the amount that humans like with fossil fuels in particular have an impact on the earth is smaller or at least less significant than a lot of the alarmist would say no i think the numbers he gave are pretty accurate and let me just sort of preface this by saying i think that the facts that steve kunin gives are largely accurate um i could dispute one or two but the things he says are right but you have to understand that he's really acting like a defense attorney for carbon dioxide and a defense attorney they don't lie they get disbarred if they go in front of a court and lie but what they do is they give you this carefully curated picture of reality just like you know you sit down with the defense attorney and he explains why his why his um client is innocent you're gonna walk away thinking you know that that person is getting railroad of course he didn't
do it because you're not hearing the whole thing and and so and so it's not that what he said was wrong in fact many times he said no one's ever been able to prove anything i say is wrong and i have footnotes for everything and that's that's correct it's what he's not saying it's the it's it's the the where he emphasizes his uncertainty and lack of uncertainty that's really what's misleading i think in the argument so give me an example of that oh sure so he spent five minutes well maybe not five minutes two minutes talking about climate models and how hard it is to do and you know it's like climate models are very uncertain um and then at another point he talks about the economic models he says uh warming of and again i don't know the exact quote but warming of two or three degrees why that's four percent of gdp that's nothing and you know economic models are terrible if you don't believe the climate models the economic models are absolutely awful and i can go in i can explain that in fact let me tell you a story about economic models about and why you should not believe them and we'll get back to how he doesn't talk about the uncertainty and that was all so in the 2010s the obama administration put out this thing called the social cost of carbon and that's basically the cost of the damages from one ton of carbon out of the atmosphere so they say if you emit one ton of carbon we have our economic model and and it's going to cost 35 dollars of damage and they have a way of doing it i won't go into details then the trump administration comes in and they redo the calculation and they get three dollars now what changed it wasn't the science it was the assumptions going into the economic model the trump administration didn't put very much value on future people and didn't put any value on people outside of the u.s and so what that means is uh the difference came down to a value judgment do we care about damages of the rest of the world do we care about damages to future generations that's not a scientific question that's a moral question and these economic estimates are completely suffused with value judgments and they're really i mean i
could go on can you just expand upon what those economic damages would be and how it would affect people sure so you know damages of um okay so let's talk about the impacts of climate change actually let me get that to say let me just wrap up what i'm saying so the economic estimates are are absolutely unreliable in my view and and dr conan he didn't even mention that there was uncertainty and he says it's four percent as if that's a perfect number and that's exact that's a classic merchant of doubt strategy this number over here which convicts my which is not good for my client that's a terrible number let me tell you why this number this supports my client it's perfect uh and so that's a classic merchant of doubt strategy and you know he does that repeatedly it's not wrong i can't say what he said was wrong but i can say there was a choice he made to bolster his his client now which is carbon dioxide now um let's talk about the impacts of climate change what you're asking so let's talk about the so when you warm the climate you do a bunch of things not just the impact of climbing but you're saying that he is not looking at it in terms of like how it affects the world well that was an example of the trump administration how the assumptions that go into these economic models can make a factor of 10 difference in what you estimate and if if the assumptions that an economist makes when he's the value judgments the values of the economist when they're doing the calculation can make a factor of 10 difference you can't look at that as a reliable number that's my uh you know that's my opinion in fact i have a slide that shows the damages um let me find out where that one is so in your opinion he's he's looking at it leniently i just googled that and yesterday this happens a news article from a federal court decision it says federal judge halts biden administration from using social cost of carbon can you scroll up so i can read what it says federal judge is barring the bide administration from using the social cost of carbon put into place on january
20th 2021 the decision issued friday affects the interim figure in place now as well as an updated metric expected to be issued later this month huh right so he says there uh 51 dollars per metric ton so that's the value if this were the trump administration they would put five dollars per metric ton on that and again you know which value is right and this shows you that there's huge uncertainty in the in the estimates and so it says here the case brought up by 10 states including louisiana and west virginia challenged the interim metric arguing that it was arbitrarily set and would increase the cost of energy production and other activities so how much of an effect does this have on what you're saying uh this is uh noise i mean this is not i mean my my point is about the reliability of these economic estimates and these reliabilities that we have no we have no idea what the cost of climate change is going to be and so when he's saying when the they're ruling that you can't use that that term the cost like no what exactly what exactly they're saying put it put it back up again so i could see it one more time yeah i think this is actually a lot less than what you're trying to this is probably some scroll back up to the top so i can read the the headlines again so it's saying the federal judge halts by the administration from using the social cost of carbon they're not they're not they're not uh they're not uh stopping people from using that what they're saying is the biden administration reversed the trump administration and when you do that there are certain rules about how an administration can change an executive order from a different one and what they're saying is they didn't quite follow the right procedures that's my i haven't read this but that's my interpretation it says here the plaintiffs did not challenge a particular use of the biden administration social cost figure but rather its potential applications so i guess what they're saying is that they they don't want the body to destroy administration applying this idea of
social cost right and and if you look at it it's louisiana and west virginia those are fossil fuel producing states um and you know the social uh social cost of carbon is is bad for fossil fuels because it makes them pay for the impacts uh that there or at least it incorporates the cost of the impacts in the decisions but this doesn't challenge sort of this doesn't have any impact on what i'm saying about these economic estimates are not reliable and so when when dr coonan says it's only four percent of gdp uh you know maybe four percent maybe it's 80 and um 80 sure could you go to slide 28 so to give you an idea of how economists have no idea what the impact does this is a plot of the of the damage so it's the reduction of gdp as a function of temperature now unfortunately this is in celsius to convert from celsius celsius change to fahrenheit changes multiply by two about two so five degrees celsius about nine degrees fahrenheit and you can see that these estimates don't agree at all you know some people say that a five degree warming celsius about nine degrees fahrenheit would only reduce gdp by you know eight percent but that's a giant number isn't it eight percent is it april well this way if it's anybody forecasting that kind of a rise in temperature um no this but let me so why use that well i'm just saying at the end you can look at i mean let's go to three degrees so three degrees but is anybody even saying three degrees yeah three degrees is where we're at and three degrees centigrade six about five degrees fahrenheit that's where we're going now and how much of a time period that's 2100 so in 2100 we will be five degrees warmer overall global average yes wow so not five degrees is high that's at the very top end of the worst worst case scenario three degrees celsius five degrees fahrenheit i'd never heard it that high i'd heard like a couple of degrees maybe i'm reading the wrong side well okay so if you're so this is where being an american is a
disadvantage you know we talk in fahrenheit in celsius it is a couple degrees it's three degrees celsius that's a couple of degrees they tried to push that on us when i was in school we should have just accepted it we should we should have explained soccer they were judging for soccer as well remember that's that is correct um yeah so so three degrees celsius is about five degrees fahrenheit that is that's where we're going and if you kind of look at even look at three degrees the s the estimates differ by a factor of ten you know some people are saying twenty percent loss of gdp others are saying two percent or three percent loss of gdp i mean the and all of these are lower limits it's going to be worse than this and the reason they're lower limits is because um the majority of them add in they they do this we call a bottom-up approach they say okay what's the effect of agriculture and what's the going to be the effect of sea level rise and what's going to be the effect of warmer temperatures on productivity and they kind of sum them up but they leave out all of these things uh ocean acidification how do you even value that uh permafrost melting how is that value all of these things are left out of many of these estimates and so uh you know the important thing again i just can't get over is we have no idea what the cost of climate impacts are going to be anybody who tells you that they know what three degrees would be like is either a liar or a fool we have no idea now i then cannot tell you it's going to be bad but i think it could be bad it could be very bad especially when you look at the texas freeze i mean that was a really bad event that was 200 billion dollars of damages and that's a unique event though isn't it isn't it also unique in that texas has its own grid sure the every event is unique in its own way but the point i'm trying to make here is how vulnerable we are to these climate impacts you know we're extremely vulnerable to to these changes and so this idea that it's going to be nothing it's going to you know instead of you know you won't even notice it i mean nobody can tell you if that's right or
not and in many ways that's the biggest reason to act on climate change because we don't know this uh raise in temperature and the associated cost that's involved um what would that cost be because of would it be flooding near the coasts would it be uh drought like what what would be the added costs oh it's everything i mean we live in a world that is optimized for the temperature range that we're in so when you build a bridge for example the engineer says okay what's the temperature range that this bridging experience because bridges expand and contract and you have to make sure that it's like okay this is the range and then as you depart from that um i have some slides on that um which i will i will look up as i'm talking um can you go to 46 um we're just now getting the point where we're beginning to depart from the range of infrastructure so for example you can see on the left heatwave made this bridge too slow to function and so that's one thing you say well that okay that one thing by itself not a no it's probably a bridge that that opens would oh right right right and then yeah it looks like it is and then the other one does it look like it is well i don't know the details of that bridge to be honest i'm sure i'm sure in the comments it's got the lights yeah are those lights the ones that they use when they chicago i could check real quick yeah check that out because that seems weird but in any event i've seen this many places where bridges it gets too hot and the bridges they have to close the bridges because because of the asphalt and they're they expand you know they're made of metal and and stuff that expands when it heats up and um uh the slide on the right which you can't see more shows some train tracks and again when you build train tracks you assume a temperature range and does uh so it got too swoll from that's wild they lift like that um so it got too swoll and then it wouldn't uh disconnect yeah exactly and then the one on the
right that looks really old like what is that from um you know i don't know exactly when that picture was taken heat caused railroad tracks in new jersey to buckle right giving them a spaghetti-like look because they expand too much or because they made it in new jersey yeah a bunch of mobsters they cut corners what do you think jamie well it's this i've never seen that before it's because there's a it's because there's a body under there that's decomposing ah so that that is crazy like i did not know that if it got that hot that it would turn and and wiggle like that yeah i mean here's here's the thing they're they're pointed towards each other and they expand and if they expand into each other they've got they they buckle right and the thing about thing you have to understand is we have trillions of adaptations exactly like that to the climate you know when the when the pacific northwest heat wave occurred uh pavement in uh portland was buckling because it just got too hot they never expected it to get to 120 degrees right or however 115 however it got that high and so when when we when the temperature departs the range that we're kind of in now we're just there that's so there it is actually why roads in the pacific northwest buckled under extreme heat oh wow look at that that's crazy yeah looks like a little volcano underneath it yeah that's right and i mean it this is going to be incredibly expensive to fix the the trillions of tiny adaptations we have and so this idea that um you know this is not going to be expensive nobody has any idea how expensive this is gonna be nobody and so and so again for somebody to come on here and confidently say it's gonna be four percent of gdp uh with this much warming uh that's you know that's defense lawyer that's what defense lawyer says you know my client's a great family man and it's gonna you know uh here's another one he's so strong in rural australia bent a railroad track look at that that one's nuts that's even crazier than the one in new jersey that is insane is that real i don't know i think they're fixing it i don't i can't tell well it's just even
if they are fixing it how'd the metal get bent like that look how the asphalts pushed or the rocks rather and gravels pushed this side so um so what what kunin was doing in your mind is looking at absolute best case scenario and ignoring all the potential things that could go sideways like these infrastructure things you're pointing out yeah i mean you know what what does a defense lawyer do you know my client is an upstanding family man you know co2 is plant food uh my client uh you know could not have done it it was somebody else you know he was talking about ocean circus it's ocean cycles he mentioned that during his interview and what he doesn't tell you is the the you know co2 was found with the victim's blood all over him and he was holding a knife and there's videotape of him stabbing the client i'd be happy to go over why we're so i mean twice you asked him what fraction of the warming is due to humans and he basically blew you off several times saying we have no idea and that is abs that's one of the things that's absolutely wrong okay so what fraction of the warming is due to humans so the best estimate is that it's a hundred percent it's all the warming so let me let me explain why that's the case so so begin with let's be clear we're talking about the warming over the last century plus last 150 years so if you could go to slide 23 let me explain and i'm going to give you kind of a cartoon version this is actually how i teach my undergrad class at what we call detection attribution and the first thing you have to realize is that if the climate changes there has to be a physical reason you have to you know how if a house is burglarized somebody did it and if the climate is changing there has to be a reason so we can list the suspects so this is from the usual suspects of course and we can and we know what's changed the climate in the past and so we can investigate this we know that continental drift the fact that the continents are moving that can change the climate uh we know that the sun's output the sun is the ultimate source of energy for our climate if the sun gets brighter that could cause climate change uh
orbital variations that's what actually drives the ice ages it's the fact that the earth's orbit varies over over long time scales ocean cycles that's what he said uh like things like el nino he said you know we don't that could be it and then finally you have greenhouse gases uh so you go to the next slide and so we can exclude all the suspects we can exclude continental drift it's too slow the continents haven't moved in the last century uh orbital variations also too slow that's a hundred thousand year process uh the sun we have observations we measure the output of the sun it's not getting brighter at least since we've been measuring them from the 70s ocean cycles that one actually is the hardest one to exclude but we don't have any evidence to support it so imagine you know someone was on trial and the only evidence that they did it was that they didn't have an alibi there was actually no evidence that they did it if you weren't a jury you wouldn't convict them you know they said they were home playing their xbox but nobody saw them and so they're obviously they obviously murdered that person you would not convict somebody for whom the only evidence is absence of an alibi and that for ocean cycles that's the only thing you can point to we don't have we can't rule it out but we don't have any evidence that it did it and then you have greenhouse gases so i like to call greenhouse gas as the world's dumbest criminal it dropped its wallet at the crime scene it you know fingerprints there's videotape of it committing the crime it was bragging to his friends that it did it um you know when they arrested him all the stolen stuff was in the trunk can you go to the next slide so again i don't know if you want to read this but we have massive amounts of evidence that carbon dioxide is responsible for the warming of the last 100 years and there's no other explanation and you put it all together the scientific uh consensus is that uh we're responsible for all of the warming 100 so there's a lot of people that are just listening to this so we'll read this off theory the different
things you highlighted are oh sure theoretical reasons why adding co2 will warm the climate co2 is going up geologic record shows correspondence between co2 and temperature fingerprints and climate model supports yeah i mean let me i could talk a little bit more about this um so we've known since the 1800s that if you add a gas a greenhouse gas those are gases that absorb infrared radiation if you add that to the atmosphere it's going to warm the climate we've known that since erranus in the 1890s we we also know that carbon dioxide is going up all right i mean i don't think there's any dispute about that it's going up because humans are consuming fossil fuels that's the main reason and so you put those together and in the 1890s people were predicting that we would see global warming i mean that was 1890s they said we can't see it yet because we don't have measurements but this is going to warm the climate so indeed it is when you see the climate going up you think okay that makes sense if you look back at the paleo record we have good we have reasonable estimates of what the climate was back a billion years uh not super good and you have to infer them there's obviously uncertainty in that but you can see that in periods when the carbon dioxide was low there was a lot more ice on the planet because you can tell if there's ice covering regions of the planet and you can so you can see this correspondence between low co2 and lots of ice that's not perfect and if you want to you can point out a period well it's high co2 here and but but it's a pretty good correspondence um you put that slide back up so i make sure i don't is there any instances of high co2 but low temperatures um you know i have let me actually can you go to slide 26 actually i can show you the data so this plot the bottom plot shows millions of years uh and the left-hand axis which goes with the orange line is atmospheric co2 you can see atmospheric co2 varied from 2 000 parts per million which is about four times five times as much as there is today to 250 parts per million which is about
60 percent of what it is today and the the blue shows how far down that goes with the right hand axis that shows how far down the ice went and you can see that in periods when the co2 is low there was you know there was a lot of ice now you can also see there's some variability that doesn't necessarily reflect itself with i so if you go back 400 million years right before the co2 line starts you can see a period that might have high co2 and ice but you know there are lots of other things that could be going on you know the a single outlier like that you don't want to use to contradict the overarching picture of the trend um and then um going and so going back that line the next one is called fingerprints what what a fingerprint is is it's a way to separate various forcing agents so for example if the sun were causing climate change we would expect the entire atmosphere to warm that's a prediction that you can work that out just theoretically if client if greenhouse gases are causing the warming the lower atmosphere warms the upper atmosphere cools so that's a fingerprint and indeed that's what we see we see the lower atmosphere warming we see the upper atmosphere cooling that's a fingerprint of carbon dioxide what would it normally be if there wasn't there wasn't the amount of greenhouse gases how how do you determine like is there a percentage in terms of like what's warm in the lower atmosphere versus cool in the higher atmosphere right right so we're just looking at trends right so we're not we're not looking at we're not concerned with what's normal we're just concerned with what's what's been happening over the last you know we've been measuring up our atmosphere maybe 50 years on balloons and over that 50 years uh you can see temperatures going down actually probably not 50 years maybe 30 years you can see temperatures going down in agreement with what you would expect from adding carbon dioxide there's some other things going on there's ozone depletion which is also affects the trends in the in the stratosphere how do
we know that the temperature in the upper atmosphere goes down when you add carbon dioxide okay that's uh that's a good you know i often ask that question to graduate students um so basically you um think what's a what's a good way to think about it so so um when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere um i'm trying to think about a way to say you increase the emissivity of the stratosphere um so basically probably the best way to say it is when you add carbon dioxide the atmosphere if you add it to the lower atmosphere uh you're basically trapping heat if you add it to the upper atmosphere you actually increase the ability to radiate to space and so by adding to the upper atmosphere it's radiating directly to space and so it actually can cool the atmosphere in the lower atmosphere your your uh it doesn't have the ability to radiate directly to space and it basically just traps heat now i'm going to get angry emails about that because that's not that that's a great simplification of it but that's basically the way i think of it but the important thing is this is really firmly established theoretically okay and i doubt dr cooney would argue with that so so clearly there's an observable trend that matches the model that high co2 is causing the warming of the lower atmosphere and the cooling of the upper atmosphere it's not and it's important to say this is not a model result this is you know this is fundamental physics this is just a few equations this is not a global climate model i mean you don't need that kind of model this is just simple physical principles applied to the problem does anybody argue against this i don't think anybody would argue with that point that fingerprint so that fingerprint shows that greenhouse gases are responsible for a clear and measurable one yeah i mean here's here's the point let me just reiterate this uh dr coonan he doesn't say anything that's wrong he just doesn't talk about it so he's never going to talk about the co2 fingerprint because that doesn't support his client so do you think he's doing this because
of his i mean do you have an opinion about this is he doing this because of his past working for bp working for previous administrations he worked for the obam obama administration which was a more environmentally friendly administration than the trump administration but like what do you think would be the reason or the motivation behind doing something like that you know i don't care to speculate i actually have no idea what causes people to to say these things but as i said before you know he's not unique you know right people he's not the first person in climate change to say this what is kind of interesting is over time the coonan like person has changed their views quite a bit in the 1990s the people like him were saying the earth's not warming and they were saying it wasn't humans aren't having an effect and then as those arguments became increasingly ridiculous now he actually has quite in many respects i think we actually agree on a lot of things he agrees the earth is warming he agrees humans are having influence he's always playing up uncertainty to get to a conclusion that his client is he's trying to create reasonable doubt he's doing what a defense lawyer does reasonable doubt is his product in fact there's a memo from a tobacco executive which explicitly says that's our goal we're not trying to win the debate we're not trying to convince people that smoking is safe we're trying to create doubt in the mind of the general public and that's exactly the goal here it's not to prove that uh you know because he can't prove that that carbon dioxide he's just trying to create doubt he's trying to slow down action at least that's that's going to be the net effect if he's successful and again i don't understand i'm not going to say why he's doing it i don't i don't know now when he talks about it and he shows these charts of you know period of many hundreds of years and the temperature of the earth over that time it does seem to be having this fluctuating effect which mirrors what we're seeing now um not real well it depends exactly what
you're talking about so if you look at the last thousand years uh there's no period like the last hundred years in what way there i mean i i wish i had a slide of it i don't but i mean the last thousand years the temperature was basically pretty flat and we've had a one degree rise in temperature in the last you know it does look like a hockey stick you've probably heard of the hockey stick it does kind of look like a hockey stick and uh you know so so the the the paleo record doesn't really support the pain or the historical record doesn't show anything like last century now let me be clear the argument in favor of carbon dioxide is not that you can't go into the historical record and ever find anything like that that's not the argument the argument as i laid it out is we know carbon dioxide traps heat we know that that's fundamental physics we know we're adding carbon dioxide the atmosphere that's fundamental physics we know the earth is warming and it's warming about as much as our theories suggest so a lot of what this is is this kind of a shiny object to distract you like let's talk about uh greenland melting in 1930. that's a distraction it doesn't take away from the fact that humans are warming the climate and that as the climate warms greenland's going to melt a lot more so there are these aberrations and you look at long periods of time where it does get unusually warm it does get unusually cool but what you're saying is make no mistake about it the what's happening right now is unusual and it's caused by humans i wouldn't say it's unusual i mean if you go back 60 million years there was no ice anywhere on the planet there were palm trees in wyoming there were alligators in the arctic it was a different world uh it was also a high co2 world by the way and that's not a coincidence so what we're so i wouldn't say it's unusual i say is humans are driving this warming and you know modern human society with millions of cities of millions of people and trillions of dollars of architecture of infrastructure that's maybe 150 years old we've never experienced the kinds of warming that's coming and it is go it could be a
terrible terrible ride nobody really knows and you know my and let me be clear i'm speaking now as a parent as a citizen not as a scientist because science doesn't tell you this my opinion someone who knows a lot about this is i don't want to run the experiment i don't want to see if dr coonan is right and the impacts are small i think we should take action and the key thing is we can take action at very low cost because and we haven't talked about it uh fossil fuels are incredibly expensive not the price you pay at the well but the cost of society is extremely high so you know we can take action at low cost it's a risk we should do this and speaking again that's my personal opinion not as a scientist because science doesn't tell you that that's my personal opinion as a citizen what i'm saying about it being unusual not that it's not unusual in terms of like historically over the time that the earth has existed but i mean that there's this moment where it's very clear that human beings are doing it yeah that's that's yeah that if you mean unusual that way yeah yeah and that this is very measurable absolutely there's there's no there's no debate in the scientific community about this so what can be done in terms of having an impact on on the fossil fuel consumption and what would that do to this overall model of global warming or climate change i should say yeah well okay so we know we know basically how to decarbonize our economy i mean we can do it and in fact if i have a good slide which i think really probably up front which really shows this um uh i will keep talking while i look for this um so yeah we know how to decarbonize oh can you go to slide 37 so you know fossil fuels have already lost so they're already on their way out this plot is the ircot so ercot is the texas grid and this shows the power that's getting connected to the texas grid by by source and the the horizontal line shows the different sources and the bars are different years don't worry about the different years you can see nobody's
hooking fossil fuels up to the texas grid there's a little bit of gas but it's mainly wind and solar and there's actually a little bit of battery you know it used to be if you looked at older years they had coal as a separate category but nobody's hooked coal up to the grid in so long they just lumped it in with other which is zero i can't believe how big solar's impacted yeah no i mean this would never guess that yeah i know so fossil fuels have already lost and the reason they've already lost is they're expensive you know people don't want you know if you're building energy if you're an energy producer you're gonna build the cheapest energy source right so it's wind and solar and that they're they're winning in the marketplace and if you go to um if you go to the previous slide so um you know at this point it says renewables will account for 95 of the growth in global power generation capacity it says renewable energy has another record year of growth says iea and then another record year for renewable energy despite covet 19 blah blah 290 gigawatts of new renewable energy generation capacity mostly in the form of wind turbines and solar panels has been installed around the world this year beating the previous record last year on current trends renewable energy generating capacity will exceed that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026. i would have never guessed that yeah i mean this is new so i'm not i mean this is where are these um solar panels located that are gathering up this much power i mean they're everywhere it's it's rooftops it's large solar plants you're talking about in texas or i mean anywhere yeah i mean it's just it's everywhere um you know in california they're about to put solar panels over a canal there's lots of space to put solar panels so for example i would love it if they put solar panels on the parking lot outside my building because when i you know you walk out in july and get your car it's you know 300 degrees in there not literally but it feels that way yeah and so i would love to have you know there are lots of places to put solar panels that don't
affect use at all rooftops parking lots canals and so there's lots of space to put this and you know it's it's already uh as cheap i mean you can make an argument that maybe maybe it's not cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel but it's very close and if you look at the trend the trend is so steeply down you know that in a few years fo uh renewables are going to wipe out fossil fuels now what about when it comes to automobiles well i mean uh electric cars are much better than internal combustion cars you've ever driven one um yeah i don't know what you oh i have a tesla yeah so i mean it's much better than an internal combustion the way it's been explained to me is that there's not enough minerals to support the production of enough vehicles that are made simply with electricity yeah you know the people making i'm always i always find it ironic that the people who make those arguments are often people who will then tell you uh you know the free market works and we should let get the government out let the market so what does a free market do if cobalt becomes rare so people are smart and the free market will innovate they'll figure out ways to substitute other minerals for that they'll figure out i mean the market will innovate its way out of this if you believe in the free market you believe the market will find some solutions so i don't i don't know the exact they've scaled it though this is what's confusing because i think i've read something that said that there are not enough rare earth minerals to power electric cars for every person on earth that's physically impossible that they don't exist in terms of like the the or the whatever whatever the the minds that we currently have that are pulling these things out of the ground well i mean look i would i would be very skeptical of that remember when they said we're running out of oil yeah this is like that but that's a different thing isn't it i mean we've been extracting oil for a long time we've only been making electric cars for right but my point my points about innovation so innovation so so if it turns out
there's some chemists there's some mineral you know make it or some some element cobalt or something like that uh the engineers are smart they'll figure out a way around that i mean i i can't believe this way i can't really speak authoritatively it's not my area so i can't give you an authoritative answer but i generally believe in the free market and in this case i think the free market will will work to solve that problem but i mean you know i'm not an expert in that so let me just say that right but that's a key problem here right well certainly if you want to build if you want to scale up all of these um renewable energy sources you have to be able to build it and i do think that one of the concerns is not so much in the availability of these rare earth elements but more and where they're located and how they're how they're mined so a lot of them are you know in africa and i do think you don't want to create problems where the mining is right um and so i do think that's that's an issue rare earth magnets mostly made of say that word neodymium uh yeah neodymium dymium are widely seen as the most efficient way to power electric vehicles china controls ninety percent of their supply oh great prices of neodymium uh oxide more than doubled during a nine-month rally last year are still up 90 the us department of commerce said in june it's considering an investigation into the national security impacts of neodymium magnet imports yeah i mean let's think about let's say you're a battery manufacturer in the us you realize that if you can figure out how to make a battery without that without that compound you're going to be rich and so this is going to so once electric cars pick up the innovation is going to be extremely impressive and the reason i say that is not because you know pie in the sky because that's our history that the history of environmental regulations causing advances in technology uh you see that all the time you know just that plot of the price of solar and wind that's
driven by concern for climate change yeah it wasn't just like it happened to happen then it happened because people see renewable energy as a future and and so there's there was a lot of work done to produce that energy more cheaply and i think that's what's going to happen with electric cars i know that there are some theories and there's some concepts that they're working on in terms of like making these batteries more efficient and making these batteries quicker to charge and last longer but i didn't know that there's uh new technology in terms of like different minerals that are more common that could be used as batteries or in batteries yeah i mean there's a huge amount of research i'm not a battery person so i really can't speak on what the cutting edge of batteries is something if it was innovative would change everything right and i mean the thing i realized is that's extremely valuable if you're a company that makes batteries and you can come up with a different compound something like that um that's where that's that's gold you know um and so uh they're going to do that and that's the way innovation the free market works so that's a hope but this is something that's a necessity right like if we are going to use electric automobiles for every person on the planet this is a necessity and right now there's a just a hope that the free market steps in and finds some sort of a viable solution well as of right now there's enough of these minerals i mean you can go there is sure well as of right now you can go buy a tesla i mean the question is can you they're very expensive like if somebody wanted to go and buy an electric car and they were on a like a very tight budget there's a lot more financially viable options that are for industrial yeah for uh internal combustion vehicles yeah i know that's right and i do think that you'll see the price of those come down because that's the way the market works well actually what is a model three a tesla model three is like it's not too bad it's like i think i think 40 like 40k i think they start like somewhere around then and that's an amazing car for that amount of money 40 45 45 so a little bit more so it's not the cheapest car
no but you're right most of the electric cars are they're aimed at a market for people who are concerned about climate change you know people who would otherwise be buying a bmw so i don't think there's been sort of the effort by the manufacturers to to make a a middle sort of a a a lower price point um car but i will say you know the most exciting things for me is ford and their f-150 truck i mean yeah you live in texas you know that yes you pull up the light every other car is a f-150 it seems and did you see the new commercial they had during the super bowl the chevy silverado that's electric i did not see that but i heard about all the electric car commercials they pissed a lot of people off because they used sopranos theme song and then the kids from the sopranos were in the ad but the car the new chevy silverado electric looks amazing it looks cool it looks like see if we can find like a photo of it it looks like a silverado but it looks like futuristic there it is like look at that thing that's electric and that thing's sick it looks like a silverado but just a little bit more streamlined a little bit more futuristic oh yeah and if you get in and drive one it's like get rid of my internal combustion engine car i mean they're they drive better they're cheaper to operate you have lower maintenance issues like i said i have a tesla and i have the stupid one i have the plaid it's ridiculous it's the most ridiculous car i've ever driven at all that's the one car i would never get rid of so have you ever actually gone somewhere and like accelerated you know done the quarter mile as fast as it can what do you think of course i have how dare you ask me that question yeah it's preposterous it's 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds yeah it's i i had my kids in it the other day i'm like are you ready like let's go and it's like you when you accelerate on the highway it's literally like you're on a roller coaster you can't believe it's that fast yeah and it's silent yeah yeah so like when you pass people you don't even feel like a douchebag like if someone's
if you need to like if you need to merge in traffic you don't it's not making a loud noise you're just going wee right right it's a much less aggressive way of like merging with traffic so do you drive with full self drive on no i don't trust that yeah that seems a little sketch i mean i'm sure it's great but i've done it a couple times just to show people like watch this and then like look it's driving but no i keep my [ __ ] hands on the wheel yeah that's smart it just doesn't i mean i get it i get it works but it's like you don't want to be a statistic right right and it works 99.9 of the time not enough but it's that 0.1 yeah it's also it's like i want to if i see someone acting weird up there i want to slow down you know if i see some guy who looks like he's drunk i want to move over you know i want to be i don't want to just zone out right but i used to use it when i come home from the comedy store when i lived in l.a and i used to use it for that reason because i was tired because you know i'd come home it's like 12 30 at night i'll just get on the highway go to and just for 10 minutes just relax you know put my hand on the wheel but just i'm just driving straight and there's not that many people on the road and it's it's a little bit yeah i think on the highway is where i would probably trust it the most but even then when you see someone acting weird yeah like you want to you know sometimes you want to drive defensively you want to make maneuvers and yeah the human brain is really amazing at its ability to assess situations you just wonder uh you know the ai is not there yet maybe it'll get there at some point but yeah i don't think the ai's gonna spot drunks that good because you know like i'm good at spotting a guy who's not either on a phone or drunk whether you know they're kind of like drifting a little bit i'm like this [ __ ] guy and i'll either slow down or i'll get ahead of them i generally like to slow down let's keep my eye on those [ __ ] so um yeah electric cars are awesome um i'm a big fan and uh if they do innovate and figure out some sort of a way to i should ask elon about that actually like what they're going to do what the plan is in terms of like uh mass distribution yeah i know i think you know i'm sure
he's thinking about it and he has to be and the person who cracks it will be rich well yeah one of the possibilities it sounds really ridiculous but one of the possibilities is asteroid mining right i mean because they they've they've found these asteroids possibilities yeah i mean i think that a lot of the stuff that people talk about doing in space is going to turn out to be a lot more that may turn out to not be economically viable too difficult yeah it's true i mean you know you have to go somewhere get the asteroid bring it back you know mine it it's it's a hard problem yeah okay so um that's automobiles um the elimination of coal-powered plants and these other things that are putting co2 and particulates into the environment like what what can be done about those things and how long do you think it would take to implement them and what kind of a impact would that have on the uh the overall effect that human beings are having on the climate right so let me begin by saying nobody talks about shutting all this stuff off tomorrow it's like you know we're gonna shut this off tomorrow there's debates about how fast to decarbonize uh my personal view is that this is sort of a multi-decadal problem that you probably um just you know i think it's not unreasonable to shut down all the coal now but the other stuff you probably want to let run out until it wears out and then you just don't replace it with fossil fuel infrastructure and you know that's certainly achievable what are the offenders in order like what's the so um coal is the worst greenhouse or the worst fossil fuel uh you know someone i know calls cole the enemy of the human race do you remember when trump called it clean coal yeah so they you know there are some people on madison avenue that's like how do we rebrand this um you know clean coats it's alliterative um but it's like the least clean thing you think of you think of like grabbing coal you're getting it everywhere right think of it being in this in the air yeah so coal actually kills millions of people from air pollution around the world every year tens of thousands of
americans uh in addition it releases the most amount of greenhouse gases uh per joule per unit of energy you generate so it's really so so that's the worst that's the worst fossil fuel and we want to get rid of that as soon as we possibly can and the americans that are dying from it they're dying from the actual coal from poisoning in the air no it's it's so cold puts out uh these chemicals these small particulates they often are referred to as pm 2.5 is a particular matter with a size less than 2.5 microns and if you breathe those in those actually go deep into your lungs and get in your bloodstream and there's lots of studies which show that that coal that when you when if you live in very polluted air and you're breathing it in uh you'll have heart attacks more frequently you know strokes all these all these health impacts associated with that and uh you know it's it's tens of thousands of americans every year from coal and uh you know this is something again the the anti-climate people they don't talk about it it's just it's not something that supports their case so they just leave that out where is this happening the most in this country like where what's the most polluted by coal um you know that's a good question i don't know exactly where it is but it's anywhere that's downwind of a coal-fired power plant and let's find that out like um places in america most polluted by coal um i'd never heard that i didn't know that that many people yeah you know from coal poisoning every year yeah i mean i wouldn't call it coal poisoning i would call it air pollution because it's really it's really directly a result of coal exactly yes so it's coal poisoning yeah cold poisoning sounds better yeah i mean it's it's air pollution sounds like it's inevitable i'll tell you that's that's a good branding cold poisoning yeah it is it is exactly right how about make t-shirts say [ __ ] coal and just put like an asterisk over the u i would wear that [ __ ] yeah um so uh what do we got jamie anything that's i don't think that list is super prevalent so i'm trying to find it because it's just bringing up a lot of like
these coal plants are contaminators right is there uh area in north america most polluted by coal i was also going to say the way i googled it it's probably going to give me a small city i googled u.s city most coal pollution but like that's not you know they're not right but giant cities but even that small cities it might be enough to you know kill thousands of people what do what do we have for is it giving you a list a place in indiana what's that called i mean this story was written in evansville but i think it's just outside of that evansville i know somebody from evansville um i said can you go to slide 50. this will blow your mind there's seven coal plants within 30 miles of this spot oh geez yeah you do not want to live there holy [ __ ] see what that sky looks like google uh evansville who the [ __ ] do i i know someone from evansville it's like i don't know what part whoa that is nasty go back to that again go back to the beginning again give me some volume on this let me hear what they're saying southwest indiana has some of the worst air in the country people are suffering there i think their quality stinks you can feel your chest on a daily basis how difficult it is to breathe there was a fine dusting of ash it was all over the kids playset these streets would be just black with coal all the way up through the courthouse square would be covered with coal dust it's the sacrifice zone those folks have been blistered with particulate matter knocks and socks and acid rain for decades there's an inherent conflict between fossil fuel industries and public health and the environment our future generations rely on our protests here tear today our lives in eastern kentucky i think these conflicts aren't going away anytime soon [Music] what is this documentary it's called is it called super america's super polluters that's horrible when you just look at
the sky from there so these poor people that live in this area it's a you scroll up so i could read that please no no i'm sorry down um evansville indiana see to see one of the country's largest coal-fired power plants head northwest from the oh this ohio river city on east because there's another in the region in fact nearly every direction you go will take you to a coal plant seven within 30 miles collectively they pump out millions of pounds of toxic air pollution they throw off greenhouse gases on par with hong kong or sweden industrial air pollution bad for people's health bad for the planet is strikingly concentrated in america among a small number of facilities like those in the southwest in southwest indiana according to a nine-month center for public integrity investigation wow this is horrible look what this says here emerged two federal datasets to create an unprecedented picture of air emissions they found that a third of the toxic air releases in 2014 from power plants factories and other facilities came from just a hundred complexes out of more than 20 000 reporting to the u.s environmental protection agency so how does the epa allow those plants to stay open i mean if if you're looking at what these people are saying where they've got a fine dust of mist over their child's play sets and the streets would be black with coal like how is that possible how are they allowing that i mean have you seen our political system um yeah yeah i mean we have a lot of our politicians are essentially wholly owned subsidiaries of exxon mobil and though and you know they do what's in the best interest of fossil fuel um let me show you a i have a good slide that shows that can you go to 48 and just i mean just in texas um there are two bills um one bill uh you know this is the state of freedom where people should be allowed to do what they want to do well some some communities have the audacity to say we don't want any drilling in our city limits and of course the texas state government stepped in and said oh no you cannot rule your own life we rule your life for you and this is this is a fracking bill that's right but i mean it's really a drilling bill so they said
you cannot drill in the city limits they passed a law and they said you can't drill in the city limits and the texas legislature came in and said no you have to have drilling if people uh you know we're not going to let you ban drilling okay so it says saying that texas needs to avoid a patchwork of local regulations that threaten oil and gas production governor greg abbott on monday signed legislation that would preempt local efforts to regulate a wide variety of drilling related activities so this this is different though than the coal powered plant um drilling is fracking and drilling for oil which and also natural gas right it is different from coal but uh the the idea of what's happened is these fossil fuel producers as they become uh unpopular and uneconomic they're looking to legislatures to rescue them so the same people who and these are often republican legislators who talk about freedom but they're happy to take away consumers freedom if it supports the people who give them a lot of money and effectively that's what happens these fossil fuel companies are so powerful now politically that they can get legislatures to pass laws to force consumers to use them or at least to force them to continue to allow them to be extracted and if you go to the other side there's another texas law where they said texas passes law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses so the state of texas won't work with you if you divest from fossil fuels and again what so they passed a law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses well this is the so does that mean the state won't work with a company so the state won't work with a nuclear company a company that's making solar no they imagine you have a you have a bank and the bank says we're going to divest all of our investments from fossil fuels and they make a statement that yes then they would not state of texas would not work with them in some capacity oh it's not it's not like you have to use fossil fuels but if you make an if you make a statement that you're you're divesting
from fossil fuels you're off the list from texas and again in a state that you know is based on freedom and and companies making decisions for their shareholders you know these these companies that divest they're making business decisions right they're saying texas won't invest in these companies that divest right we'll work with them won't work yeah and so um you know and the idea is that this is probably good for the economy that's how they're looking at it in some way or is it just that they've been manipulated by special interest groups well you know i have my i have my theory about i'd love to hear your theory yeah my theory is that um these people care about getting re-elected and i think that one of the things that helps them get re-elected is getting a lot of money from fossil fuel companies so i do think that drives it i also do think that being pro-fossil fuel in a primary in texas is probably an advantage but that doesn't take away the fact that you know people's um you know the state is moving to curtail freedoms to enforce um fossil fuel use basically and this is a state where you know we we believe in freedom right now this is not indiana right evansville indiana the place that's the worst with the seven power plants in the 30 mile range how does that happen like how does anybody allow that to take place is there any effort to try to stop that from taking place yeah i mean certainly people are you saw that march i mean people are mad about it there are lots of people who so so obama during um he had something called the clean power plan and the clean power plan would have essentially eliminated coal fire power if it was written in such a way to explicitly cause coal fire power to basically not there would be no more uh building of coal-fired power plants and it would really have caused them to be um phased out pretty rapidly and you know that got hammered in congress it didn't um you know or actually it wasn't a bill it got hammered in the court system you know it got sued all these states sued it went through the court system and it got overturned and uh you know it
essentially got abandoned and the states are uh presumably suing because there's some sort of a financial interest by the people that are putting these politicians in place yeah that's basically right i mean there's a i don't know i don't have a slide of it you might be able to find it by googling uh there was a article i think it was north dakota was cancelling a lot of wind leases in order to prop up their coal so people who had leased space to build windmills wind turbines don't like calm windmills you know they were going through and they're canceling these leases in order to save the coal industry is there any sort of technology that can extract the particulate matter that these coal plants eject into the atmosphere um you know that's a good question i don't know oh yeah that's that's it that's the article very good how coal holds on in america in north dakota coal country officials rallied to save a coal-fired power plant at renewable energy's expense look at that is that real like look at look at the disgusting smoke that's pumping imagine living there and seeing that pumping into the air where you're raising your children yeah i know i would not want to live downwind to that thing i would say though most of the smoke is probably water vapor so but there is but there's there's particularly yeah there's definitely putting a lot of crap into the atmosphere and a lot of carbon dioxide it's just stunning that knowing what they know about evansville that that hasn't been that they haven't put the kibosh on that well you know it goes to show you i think in our current environmental or our current um uh political system um a lot of people don't have a lot of power you know it's it's districts are gerrymandered um there's no limits on give it campaign giving and essentially what it's done is it's taken away power especially from you know a lot of these coal plants are polluting the the
poorest neighborhoods if you go to houston you look around like the ship channel the most polluted places are the poorest places those people have no political power at all and and yeah they could go talk to their representative and he doesn't sort of like the water in flint michigan yeah exactly it's exactly the same those people have no power and they just they can't lobby you know they have they can't uh and you know maybe their representative is pushing it but there's not this groundswell of support in the rest of the legislation about it so when we're thinking about fossil fuel we can't just think about the effect that co2 has the environment in terms of warming we have to think about the effect of the particulate matter and the pollution and what it's doing to people's health yeah i know that's absolutely right um so go to slide 50 this is i mean we this is actually i think this will blow your mind um uh so this is a study that came out uh that in 2018 fossil fuel air pollution was responsible for one in five deaths worldwide worldwide not in the u.s and a lot of those were in places like india that have really really terrible air is that the place that has the worst uh probably at this point i would say it probably is deli they have a lot of two-stroke motors and things like that that really put out a lot of a lot of a lot of crap can you scroll down jamie so we can see what this says no that's that's a screenshot oh you could you could google that but go to the next slide go to the next slide because i think this is the other point so in addition to pollution deaths let's go through the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels so there's climate change there's pollution it's killing millions of people it also is bad for the economy because of price swings now we have electric cars so we don't really care but if you own a gas car uh the price is going up to four dollars goes down to two dollars that's economically destabilizing and in fact we know that a lot of recessions have been caused or they've been started by price swings from fossil fuels so it's really this is econo you know if you have no idea what you're going to be
paying it's hard if you're a business owner or a citizen to make a decision you know it's like gas is two dollars a gallon should i spend money on on tuition or do i have to put money in the bank because i know gas is going to go up i mean you don't know what the price is so it's hard to do it um can you go to the next slide oh no don't go next slide um so in addition uh fossil fuels are a national security issue so you know we invaded iraq you know why did we do that we did it twice so we did it because of the need to maintain stability in the oil markets especially the 1993 when uh 91 invasion of of kuwait and iraq and the thing i realized is even though we don't import a lot of oil from those places the price of oil is set by the international market so if you buy a barrel of oil from west texas the price of that is set by the entire world and so that gives people like vladimir putin gives people like saudi arabia the ability to manipulate the price of oil and and and hammer our economy so for example two years ago in 2020 um saudi arabia and russia got into a price war uh drove down the price of oil the price of oil the oil futures actually went negative here for a few days and that actually demolished obliterated the texas oil industry i mean there were layoffs there were bankruptcies it was really hard economically and so from a national security standpoint we don't want those countries to be able to hammer our economy by manipulating the price of oil which they can do and if you look right now um you know putin is sitting on this big gas supply that goes to europe and you know there are all these implied threats about uh a gas supply being sent to europe and europe is you know they need the gas and so he's got his he's got his hand around their necks and you know that's not a good situation to be in so this is not a thing that we can look at in terms of a compartmentalized problem like absolutely not one problem there's these all of these things chained together and they cause a cascade of issues that's right and and
and you combine that with the fact that we can switch you know it's not like this is terrible we don't have any alternative i mean if we didn't have any alternative i would fully support fossil fuels because we need power but we have an alternative that's not that expensive um you know people have done the studies we know solar and wind are reasonably cheap you build some dispatchable power build some even though they may be expensive build some nuclear plants we could get off largely get off fossil fuels there are some edge cases that it's hard trucks international airline flights you know we don't know exactly how we'll decarbonize those but you know there's a lot we could we could decarbonize the electric grid um yeah we know how to do that well just that indiana area alone with the seven power plants within a 30-mile range i mean that seems insane yeah it seems like there there should have been a solution offered up decades ago for that yeah there should have been but you know there's a lot of you know look look at you know it goes back to like the our government look at the senate so in order to get anything passed to the senate uh you've got to get all the uh senators voting you know forget even uh 60 votes for the filibuster for reconciliation they're trying to get the build back better plan which would have had a lot of climate stuff in they couldn't get mansion joe manchin senator from west virginia they couldn't get him to vote on it to vote for it so i mean you know that's the problem the problem is dysfunction in our government it is not a it's not a science problem it's not a technology problem it's a it's a governmental problem and i think the us over time is just you know our political system is is not responding to the needs of the people it's responding to the needs of the of people who are very rich so this build back better plan would have had something in there about eliminating these kind of power plants yeah so the buildback better plan had a lot of climate policy and i don't think it had anything that specifically said these must be eliminated but there was a lot of spending in there that would have led to a lot of good climate policy isn't the problem with these bills
though that they slip in a bunch of other stuff that people don't want to have attached to something that may be good like if you looked at the buildback better there was a politician i forget who it was that held up the bill and it was like thousands of pages and he's like do you think any of these people that are trying to pass this have read through this and they probably haven't that's the problem is the shenanigans that go along with politics right yeah i mean that's a political problem yeah and you know people vote i'm sure that guy whoever it was voted for bills exactly like that but ones he thought would help his career and help his constituents you know that's an excuse of the day perhaps yeah we're guessing yeah he might be very principled he he very well could be that's right but it's you laugh when you say that though you're laughing no i'm with you because that's how goofy the world we're living in when it comes it is i mean politics it's really hard it's really hard when you see how these people behave to think that they actually have our best interests in mind and i think this is all we have like all we're offered is like crap and crap and crap yeah you know it's like these the idea of the free market in terms of politics has never really manifested like there's never been like some better solution to the the way we handle things now it's still large corporations that are influencing politicians to do things that aren't in the best interests of their constituents and that's how they get elected and when they get elected they [ __ ] us and they get into office they still do the same thing over and over and over again it's like a magic trick that we keep falling for it's like lucy pulling that ball away from charlie brown every time he goes to kick it i mean every time it's the same thing yeah but i wouldn't blame us as much i mean there's a lot of things that the politicians do to sort of entrench their power you know gerrymandering is a classic thing you know if they gerrymander correctly your vote doesn't count i mean they've literally taken your vote away from you and um
you know you wonder once you get into a situation like that how do you get out of it because you can't vote the people out because you know they've literally said it so you can't do that and the complex system that they've put in place with yeah i mean it's it's so entrenched and these people are so the roots go so deep it's so hard you see like these nancy pelosi characters these career politicians it's like how would you ever get rid of these people yeah they're so embedded into the system and then you find out how much money they've made while being a politician and making a fraction of that a year like how are you so rich yeah like what are you doing yeah and over time it just gets worse i mean my 93 year old father lives in college station and you know he was denied a mail-in ballot i mean he's 93. it turns out he he made a slightly died they denied him because he didn't quite fill out the paperwork exactly right and i mean my wife had to finally call and and fix it but i mean you know they're making democracy harder to and this is all to entrench their power so what can be done right now um that we're not doing well i mean we just need to make a decision that we're going to phase out fossil fuels i mean this is a as i said before this is a political problem it's not a technical problem it's not a scientific problem it's it's we need to make a decision we need a policy and uh you know if you talk to economists uh they will tell you we need to price uh you need to put a price on emissions so right now it's free to dump pollution into the atmosphere you don't pay for it even though you're causing harms to all these people you don't pay for it and you need to price that if you do that you make people pay the full cost of their actions that would go a long way towards fixing the problem well i would imagine like in evansville would be non-profitable i mean it seems like the amount of money that those i mean there should be some sort of a crazy class action lawsuit yeah no i i i learned about it today watching the same as you did yeah that does seem like a terrible a terrible injustice so when
you read a book like this that uh is essentially a non-alarmist perspective you think that what this does is not just delays the inevitable which is we do need to take a chance but also puts us in a worse position because people are looking at it like it's not that big a deal and by the time they wake up to it the amount of issues that we have will have multiplied yeah i mean i think a lot of things are going on so let me give you an example so if you look at where for example solar panels china dominates the market in solar panels and in 2007 i testified before the texas house of representatives i said you know texas has an opportunity uh we could dominate solar panels we could start moving now and we could and if we don't you know construction yeah manufacturing we could be we could come to you know the saudi arabia of solar energy by building uh wind uh these solar panels and i said if we don't we're gonna be buying from china or france now we're not buying them from france but we are buying them from china france because people hated france back then remember the freedom fries i thought france is that's what i thought you were going with yeah i know it was just it was i was purely pandering that's stupid i was pandering to the people on the committee to get them to agree with me and so um uh and so you know by delaying there's an economic cost that because when we do switch which we we are going to do it because again soil and wind are the cheapest energy we're going to be buying it from you know wind turbine manufacturers in europe and from china solar panels from china so we're giving away the economics it's kind of like what if we had not you know not let silicon valley grow up in the u.s you know that it's it's sort of that level of economic activity that we're giving away by not acting in addition uh you're right uh emitting carbon dioxide the atmosphere is effectively irreversible on any time scale that we care about what that means is once the carbon dioxide carbon dioxide in our atmosphere right now it's at about 415 parts per million which means out of every million molecules of air 415
carbon dioxide once it goes up to some level 420 it takes a very long time for that to come down hundreds of thousands of years before it gets back down to pre-industrial and so we're gonna be warming the climate for thousands of years so people in the year three thousand year four thousand their climate will be determined by the decisions we make decisions we make will determine the climate for a very long time and so we really don't have time to wait 40 or 50 years um and you know it sounds like you know if i remember your previous guest he basically said something like you know eventually we'll take care of this but it's not a priority i think future generations beg to differ on that um you know they're going to be affected by this for a very long time and to me that's one of the the most challenging parts of this is the very long time scale of our impact is there any potential for a technology that extracts carbon from the atmosphere oh yeah yeah absolutely people are working on that so that's a big they call it direct air capture that's a big deal um the the it's expensive it takes a lot of energy to do that so in order in order to do that you really have to think about the energy system and where the energies are coming from you don't want to burn coal to generate energy to pull you know that would just be this closed-loop money-losing system so you need to think carefully about what you're doing um you know people talk about other things um fertilizing the oceans some people talk about trees trees it turns out is i'm pro-tree let's just use it one step at a time fertilizing the ocean sure so um yeah yes so um sometimes i get so excited about talking about this i go 100 miles an hour i love it so right so in a lot of places in the ocean it's nutrient limited so in other words the amount of algae that grow is limited by one one certain nutrient in a lot of places it's iron so if you dry if you draw drive a cargo ship full of iron and you just dump it out the back you could grow a lot of plankton the plankton would
suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then they would die and they would sink so we could take potentially our iron waste and dump it into the ocean and that would make all this plankton grow and that would suck carbon dioxide yeah that's that's the theory i don't think anybody seriously talks about that uh just because for a number of reasons mainly we really don't know if it would work um and how much iron would we need and where would we get it yeah you know i'd be honest i can't this is i probably shouldn't have used that as an example because that's not something people seriously talk about okay um but that was just an example of other ideas that people have come up with in the past what did i do what are other ones well there was an article a couple years ago about trees planting a trillion trees turns out that that's not a particularly good idea for a couple of reasons first of all and let me say i'm pro-tree i'm not anti-tree that's a risky stance i know it's uh you're going out there you're pro-tree i am pro are you a tree hunger um yes i would hug a tree as long as it's you know uh and so uh and so the problem with planting a lot of trees to pull carbon out of the atmosphere is that you need a lot of land it's not clear where that land would come from and then the biggest problem is a tree is not a good long-term storage for carbon because uh you have a forest it grows up and then the forest burns down all that carbon's back in the atmosphere and so uh you need to be able to store carbon for a very long time so trees even though i think we should be playing trees i love trees they're not a way to solve this problem one of the things that uh stephen said when he was on the podcast was that the earth is far greener now because of the fact that there's excess co2 in the atmosphere yeah that's right i mean so we know that of the carbon that we've added to the atmosphere a quarter of it has gone into the biosphere so a quarter of of the carbon we add goes into the biosphere a quarter goes into the ocean so the stuff that goes in the ocean is
acidifying the ocean so that's ocean acidification the quarter that goes into the land uh does green it so there's a corresponding negative effect to all the greening there's also you have to think about acidifying the ocean at the same time so with all the green if you're saying a quarter and a quarter that's literally half right yeah so half the carbon we add um doesn't stay in the atmosphere it's absorbed by the ocean or by plants exactly yes and so if they did plant a massive amount of plants everywhere it still wouldn't be enough yeah there's no if that were if if there were an easy way to pull large amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere that way we would be doing it now i i don't remember where i saw this i'm sure i saw it on the podcast someone jamie probably pulled it up but it was i think it was in china i forget where it was where they had essentially a skyscraper sized air filter that they were going to center in a city this is different but this is similar world's biggest machine capturing carbon from the air turned on in iceland operators say the orca plant can suck 4 000 tons of co2 out of the air every year and inject it deep into the ground to be mineralized is that a lot 4 000 tons uh so last year uh human emissions were probably 40 billion tons so so this is th this is not meant to be a major no it's not this is not meant to be a major this is a sort of a proof of concept is how i would look at it so people are working on this but you have to realize that to pull 10 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere in a year which is probably kind of around the magnitude we'd have to do that would be just a titanic industrial process sort of it would be equivalent to about all of the infrastructure we have to produce that much so think about all of the wells all of the all the power plants exactly so it's it's certainly theoretically possible it may be that we end up doing it but i don't think we can rely on that that is you do not want to bet the farm uh or your kids futures on that i mean jamie that there's an image right there click on that article it says sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than
scientists thought so this is from nature it says estimated cost of geoengineering technology to fight climate change has plunged since a 2011 analysis now is it possible that like all these other things like you were talking about solar how solar was far more expensive and the year was fought the yield was far lower you know 20 years ago that as time and technology increases they could get to a point where they could siphon this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere much more efficiently yeah just like when i was talking about batteries there is so much money in this if you could come up with a cheap way if you could do this for fifty dollars a ton uh you would be richer than crisis i mean you'd be the richest person in the world if you come up with a way to do that and carbon is valuable too right they could use it for things yeah you got to pump it underground i mean as long as as long as you use it for some way it's never going to escape [ __ ] up underground what if you pump it in there and [ __ ] that up you know we have we we know that these natural gas reservoirs where you'd put it uh it stays there for a long time because natural gas has been there for millions of years so i think we can we and we know how to drill we know how to do that that's i'm well understood talk to me about fracking now um i saw that documentary the josh fox documentary i don't remember what it's called was the water on fire yes yes what is that valid like what what do you think is about fracking and what what are the issues that it causes um you know i don't have a specific view of fracking compared to regular natural gas production non-fracking natural gas we just got to stop doing it i mean all of it just all natural gas production yeah i mean over the next few decades not tomorrow but you know natural gas it failed during the texas um uh during the texas cold spell uh and you know in europe right now natural gas is extremely expensive and so remember how i talked about a a grid has to have has intermittence and it has to have dispatchable firm power so if you go to the uk their dispatch will firm power is natural gas and when the wind goes down
which you know it's going to do you know there can be periods where the wind's not generating they have to turn natural gas natural gas is incredibly expensive right now they are paying out the wazoo for it we need to stop with commodity fuels we should be going to nuclear geotherm i think geothermal is a dark horse i actually think very highly of geothermal geothermal if you go back 10 years the issue was always in the drilling but our drilling has gotten so good because of fracking actually the advances in the ability how ironic yeah that explained geothermal to me so geothermal is you you extract heat from the ground then you use that in from lava like from just as yeah i mean certainly in certain places like iceland for example or california there are places that's geothermal they're actually pretty good at getting it not just from um or they're getting better at getting it not just from these really high temperature places but that's the traditional geothermal you inject some water down it gets really hot because of lava and just really hot rocks how deep do you have to go to do that i think thousands of feet just kind of miles or yeah a thousand feet a mile 5 000 feet a mile right isn't that what it is um so they have to go deep deep into the ground where it's far hotter and they take that and they use it sort of in a similar vein as nuclear power yeah or like any can any kind of conventional power it goes down there gets hot it boils and you get this really hot steam coming out and use that to turn a turbine that's kind of the traditional way and people are working on all sorts of different things using it uh in places where it's not it doesn't get that hot sort of lower temperature geothermal and all i mean there's a lot of innovation going on in that space so i think that that's sort of the dark horse candidate instead of nuclear maybe we go with geothermal as dispatchable and then you don't have to worry about the fallout yeah you'd have to worry about all the the known disadvantages of nuclear now fracking in terms of the fracking is used for not just natural gas but also oil correct uh yeah so they get both out of these fracked wells and in a lot of cases they
really care about the oil and they just vent the natural gas to the atmosphere or they they don't vent it they they sometimes they do that but they should flare it light it up yeah line of fire so if you look at a satellite image of uh you know north dakota from night uh you can probably find one you can see you can actually see the fires all these natural gas well these wells flaring natural gas they just keep the oil but while they're doing that they have to be doing some sort of damage to the atmosphere right oh yeah they're releasing a lot of carbon dioxide and and fugitive methane so not all the methane may burn um anything that's interesting you call it fugitive methane yeah and and you know the other thing about it is it produces air pollution you're burning methane you're getting you're getting crap blowing downwind it's very noisy very near one of those yeah yeah i mean it's really it's it's not it's not good i mean wind and solar by far are are are socially better sources of energy so wind solar geothermal and then potentially nuclear yeah i mean i would in my mind i kind of think about three different categories you have wind and solar those are your intermittents you have some batteries that help you that are very short term you know a couple hours and that helps you shift solar energy from when you get it at noon to the evening and then you have and then you have um your firm dispatchable power and that's it's you know it could be uh natural gas with carbon capture although i think that is probably knockout where they capture the carbon dioxide before they vented the atmosphere that has not been demonstrated to be something that we can do at scale yet um then there's nuclear there's geothermal and then there's hydro if you live in a place where that's yeah that's available the geology is available now the use of petrochemicals and fossil fuel products has a bunch of different problems and one of them is just the waste that's caused by the plastic and how plastic is essentially most of
it is put into landfills one of the things we found out doing this podcast is that most of the plastic that you think you're recycling doesn't really get recycled yeah that's very sad and let me just say um when i say we should we should get off fossil fuels i'm not talking about non-emissive non-emitting processes like like like plastic i think plastic plays a key role in our society we do create too much that's a whole different problem that needs to be solved but i think it's perfectly consistent that we continue producing oil to produce plastics until we can find a way to solve that i'm just really talking about generating energy with fossil fuels isn't there potentially different kinds of plastics that can be created from alternative sources yeah you're way outside of what i know about okay what i know scientifically but i think there's biodegradable plastics that are made from plant matter yeah i know i'm i'm i wouldn't be surprised at all like google um i think it's one of the problems with hemp being not illegal anymore but it was for the longest time google um plastic from hemp and whether or not it's scalable uh because uh you know obviously there's um do you know who boy on slot is i don't he's a a brilliant young man who devised a method to extract plastic from the ocean with these like giant machines that sort of uh scoop plastic together out of the ocean and they use it to create products but um you know that pacific garbage patch oh yeah which is insane yeah that's as big as the state of texas if not bigger right it's depressing it's it's enormous it's so crazy when you see how big it is like on a map and that that it's all waste and it's all within the last 70 80 years yeah from the advent of uh petrochemical products yeah i mean one day i worry that we're going to find out we've done something really terrible to sort of the ocean ecosystem and that its effect is beginning to affect humans uh oh here it goes despite claims about hemp plastic's ability to clean oceans and limit
landfill growth the truth is less universally positive if current plastic consumption patterns persist by 2050 the oceans will contain more plastic than fish by weight holy [ __ ] according to the world economic forum report in the meantime plastics will continue to leach into the human body and while scientists debate the certainty of toxicity studies determining that uh bicephanol by f by phenol rather biphenol a bpa plastics are carcinogenic the fda will continue to review bpa safety and of course plastics plastic consumption will increase petroleum consumption wreaking havoc on the environment and geopolitical stability um what about other things that uh affect our environment you know one of the things that people always like to point to crypto is that bad well i mean they're using a lot of power for to generate crypto to generate crypto and i think decentralized currency would probably prevent a lot of the issues that we're dealing with with monopolies and politicians and you know the kind of fiat currency problems that we have don't you think uh you know the i've one thing i've noticed about bitcoin is it seems to mainly be used by bitcoin bros and by um uh don't point to me man no not you but i mean i did though i did point to you sorry i meant i mean easy yeah no i i mean he's a bitcoin i mean bitcoin bros are on the same family tree as nuclear bros yeah i mentioned bitcoin on twitter and uh you will be inundated yes and let me just be clear to anyone listening so i'm not mentioning bitcoin so you don't have to go to my twitter feed um uh and it's also used by criminals and so uh while i understand the allure of bitcoin you use all sorts of money criminals don't just also use houses and they drink water yeah but i'm but but but you know 99 of the houses are used by honest people whereas with crypto i think like we probably don't want to talk about crypto let's let's uh i i realize now that was a strategic no worries no worries i know we're going with this so um but what i was getting to is there's a lot of other things that
people point to as having a negative effect on the environment and uh one of them uh is a big one that gets uh into the weeds ideologically is veganism uh vegan diets versus animal-based diets and whether or not you can truly have a renewable like a farm that's a carbon neutral farm that grows plants and animals and does so in this sort of symbionic matter where you could feed large scale populations but it's a carbon neutral environment yeah so that's you've opened a whole can of worms there so what we've been talking about so far is just uh emissions from energy yes and that is a pretty in my view and i think in the view of the people that work on this is a solvable problem over the next few decades we can solve that problem when you get into agriculture agriculture is actually a huge source of emissions for climate yeah and that is a much more difficult problem to solve i'm not saying it's not solvable but it's there's not with energy with with power there's a real clear path we know the solutions we know the technologies it's really just a political problem um you know it's not as clear that that uh with agriculture that you know we're going to be able to do that as easily and i think that a lot of it it will end up being a political problem but uh the agriculture sector exerts enormous power in our society you know why do you think we have ethanol blended into our gas you know it's not because that's actually a good way to use corn you know it comes from corn they make ethanol and they blend in the gas it's because in this really weird quirk iowa is the first state that nominates president so everybody who wants to be elected president has to go to iowa and say i'm in favor of blending ethanol into gas i mean that's why we have it you know when rick perry he would he would lambast that uh all the time when he was governor of texas and then he ran for president all of a sudden he supported it uh you know so you have these really weird political things going on in agriculture it's very powerful politically and so i but i i do think that um you know that's something that we have to work on you know getting our
emissions down from from agriculture um is there i mean have you ever studied this is there like a long-term solution to a viable carbon neutral farming system you know i'm not an expert in this but i do think that there are methods of of not just stopping emissions but actually sequestering carbon in soils through various farming techniques and things like that you just have to really convince farmers that it's in their interest to do it and so you talk about well maybe we could pay farmers to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and things like that well the people that have talked to me about this that seem to think that there is a way to do this they're they're doing on a very small scale relatively to like one of the problems morally and environmentally that we have with farming in this country is factory farming of animals because it's horrific i mean everybody's seen the videos and it's like you you know about the amount of waste that it causes and what it does to the environment and also monocrop agriculture because it's not normal to grow you know thousands of acres of one particular kind of plant and in order to do so you have to kill everything else including all the animals all the different things that could possibly consume your crops all the different bugs you have to kill a lot of stuff yeah i mean i think that you got to realize that our agricultural system is optimized for profit yeah it's not optimized for anything else and so factory farming is a way to produce the most pounds of of hogs uh you know per dollar you're spending and if you want to do something different you people have to recognize that they're going to pay more at the at the grocery store but it will but you'll get these other benefits you know you'll have less climate impacts you'll have these moral benefits and so i think as a general rule we haven't done probably as good a job and that's because there are people out there they're sort of combating us with misinformation at really explaining all of the costs of our present economic
system you know as we talked about with fossil fuels you know you're killing millions of people around the world every year from air pollution and you know that's a huge cost and of the the cost of climate change and things like that and you know you just have to realize that people have to realize they might see higher prices for meat in the store but there are benefits from that you mean we could make the argument that you're killing millions of people with poor diets as well and that the main contributors to this poor diet economy are probably fast food yeah no that's that's absolutely right and i do think yeah i do think that there's a lot of certainly that is a tremendous cost but the problem with that is kind of the same problem that we have with fossil fuels is that people want to do what the what they want to do they want to be able to go to whataburger like sir look at you there you guilty bastard that's i love whataburger see that's that's the problem that is the problem now that i know you know for the record i was driving in for the record that's what everybody says that's right that's what fast food's all about you know you don't have time to pull over and bust out a habachi and cook a steak that's yeah that's that's right yeah and even if you did who's growing that cow and how's it being yeah that's exactly exactly right yeah i mean you gotta go to some sort of a sustainable ranch and get some grass-fed grass-finished beef on a free-range cattle where they're the manure is being recycled and they're using it and they're composting it and then they're having pigs roam and chickens roam and everything is sort of like feeding into the uh the soil yeah so let me sort of talk about agriculture in general i i almost never talk about agriculture because i've talked to people who know a lot about it the thing i realize is incredibly complicated just you know farmers agricultural systems are one of the most tightly managed by humans of all the systems we have that's the one that humans manage and so there's a lot of capacity for adaptation for people to adjust things uh but you
know you just but nobody does anything if there's not a positive return on investment if they're not gonna make money from it so really the challenge here is to convince people to do things that are good for the environment that make them money you know a lot of farmers put wind turbines on their farms not because they give a crap about renewable energy they probably all hate you know hate al gore they do it because they get paid you know they get a monthly check for for doing that and so you can convince people to do the right thing uh if you financially incentivize them to do it and that's the key that is really the case that's always the key money always talks i mean if there's one absolute truth in everything having to do with this problem it's money talks but isn't that part of what the problem that got us to this position in the first place potentially with like when you're talking about growing corn for instance for ethanol like one of the things that we do is we subsidize farmers to grow corn oh yeah i mean money talks got us into this you know the fossil fuel companies want to make money and you know they they do whatever they can to make money if that means giving lots of money to politicians and supporting you know dark money groups who run ads against their opponents you know this is all stuff that you know they they're looking at their bottom line they're they they look at their job as to make the most money possible and if you if you believe that's your job and most corporations i think do then you're willing to do anything to do that you'll buy politicians because it's legal it's completely legal to buy a politician in this country now when you look at the future when you take into account all these issues whether it's coal-fired power plants or fracking or agriculture if you're being realistic do you think we can turn this around yeah so um keep it up slide 11. so let me sort of lay out sort of our choices here um no that's not it 11 yeah that's it so this is a bar chart that kind of shows
shows sort of our climate possible climate future so the one on the left that goes to about 10 degrees fahrenheit that's the temperature change from an ice age so if so i think we can all agree if the earth went an ice age that would be very bad can we agree on that i agree all right so and that's and that's surprisingly most people don't know that that's only 10 degrees away if we cool the planet by 10 degrees we would have an ice age and it would be an economic catastrophe i mean i i i can't not just economic right yeah yeah absolutely catastrophe in every way shape or form we wouldn't be able to grow food right and so so the so we've already warmed about two degrees fahrenheit that's the green bar so we're already twenty percent of the way to an ice age uh eyesight amount of warming we're going the opposite direction obviously ice age is down but we're going up twenty percent of an ice age amount of warming business as usual that's bau that's about five degrees fahrenheit that's half of an ice age okay so that should scare the crap out of half of an ice age half of an ice age in terms of temperature change an ice age of warming that i look at that and i look at my kids and i think holy crap this is we can't we you know if this happens i don't know how bad it's going to be but half of an ice age of warming could be awful i mean really i mean you know mad max now whether you whether you want to take action on that that actually is is not a scientific question some people might look and go mad max is cool i would love to live in mad max and so they might not be worried about it uh you know some people might say humans will adapt i have this infinite wizard infinite um uh uh you know confidence confidence thank you infinite confidence in humanity that we'll figure out some way to do it and i don't i hate government regulation so bring on the heat but you know i look at this and again i'm speaking as a citizen now not as a scientist but as a citizen i don't have infinite confidence in humanity i look at i look at kovid i look at the texas blackout and i think we're going
to eff this up when kunin was talking about global warming and climate change one of the things that he said was that what it will do is open up new areas for agriculture and that agriculture will move steadily north and that we'll adapt to that yeah so that's so okay so that's actually happening so agriculture is moving you can actually look at the average acre of corn that was grown and it's actually moved about 150 kilometers north and to the west so north and west is higher altitude so the cooler regions and that's actually right so eventually uh agriculture will move into into canada at some point it's going to move as far north as it can move and this is over what period of time that it's about 150 probably a couple decades mm-hmm that's that's not a lot of time that's that's not and and it's pretty recent and we haven't seen that much warming we've seen about a third of the business as usual warming uh but and so so agriculture as i said before agriculture is one of the most intensively managed and adaptable systems we have so saying agriculture will be fine uh that is not a very that should not give you any reassurance let's talk about some others would it be easier if we just invaded canada and took over um you know grow our stuff up there if it gets too warm because i think we probably should invade anyway at this point well you seem like they need our help yeah you know they put like uh gravy on fries i'm not sure have you ever had gravy on fries i have not had you've never had poutine i have not had poutine i'm not sure you should shut your mouth until you have it because it's amazing fair enough how dare you fair enough all right so let's talk a little about some other impacts because again agriculture is the one i think is probably the most likely we'll be able to adapt as well as possible let's talk about something that's unadaptable um for example permafrost melting so you know we're melting all this permafrost at the top of the world you know how do you adapt to that you know all of the stuff that was built in the north uh they they essentially build it on permafrost with the assumption the permafrost will never melt so you build
a house on permafrost you say okay that's my foundation and then the perfect frost melts in the house when you say the north what are you talking about where oh like anything you know alaska siberia they're building houses on permafrost out there yeah they build they build they put the foundation on the permafrost with the assumption the permafrost is never going to melt and it melts then it'll soften and then the houses will sink exactly the house just splits it doesn't sink it's you know you have these it becomes structurally un uh you know uninhabitable and that and that happens with roads that happens with all this infrastructure in addition you know as you heat up the permafrost it starts emitting uh greenhouse gases things like methane carbon dioxide one of the big issues uh they were talking about siberia and that as siberia slowly melts that it's gonna emit an incredible amount of greenhouse gases right so that's certainly a possibility that that scientists worry a lot about and uh that's that's one of the worst case scenarios because if that happens then we lose the ability to stop climate change because even if we stop our emissions it's still it's a what we call a feedback system and so so permafrost is one really hard to adapt to impact and there's ocean acidification how do you adapt to that the oceans are more acidic you know what are you gonna do and then there are the things that are extremely expensive so imagine sea level rises you've got to build these sea walls you know you have to do it around houston you do it around new york these are tens of billions of dollars i mean we're going to get to our you know my worry is we're going to get to a situation where we're spending all of our money just trying to stay alive building storm water infrastructure to handle more severe rainfall building sea walls uh building you know things to keep people alive when the temperature gets really hot building new infrastructure for agriculture because remember as the agriculture moves the infrastructure has to move all of your grain processing plants that were down here you got to rebuild them up here and so we're going to be spending all of our time and all of our money just trying to stay alive
you're not going to have money to buy you know to buy a new iphone or to go to college yeah it's all you know because that money is all going to be tax money i mean you know that's that's where it's going to come from and let me just add let me just add one thing which i think is really important here you know a lot of people are concerned about the freedom aspect of this as i am um you know we saw with kovid that disasters often come with more government intervention in our lives you know when covet hits i gotta wear a mask and you know in certain certain situations you gotta get vaccinated and people don't like that and i understand that um what do you think is gonna happen if there's a food shortage what do you think's gonna happen if we have to relocate miami it's gonna be massive government intervention if you want to have a world where the government doesn't tell you what to do we need to solve climate change now because it's going to be a much larger infringement on our rights if society starts to fall apart have you um debated anyone about this um so i have so okay so i have not debated anybody about this actually i take it back i debated this person richard lindsen in 2010. my feeling is that i won't debate the science so the science is set you know earth you know we're temperature's warming humans are caused i'm happy to debate policy because i think policy needs to be debated uh so if someone wants to debate energy policy with me why wouldn't you debate the science because the science has already been debated in in the scientific system i understand that but to the average person that gets confused and doesn't know whether or not you're correct or steve cooney is correct yeah so i think the debate would be very beneficial you know i disagree with that entirely because so because in a one-on-one debate without the ability to fact check people so so let's check them in real life in real time real time because i mean how do i do that he says this paper says this and i'm saying do you want me to read the paper
well i mean yeah it would be a debate that would take a week so we'd do a week i mean i don't even think it would take a week but there's certain points that you could get where you would go over them and we could kind of establish those points in advance like what what where is the contention like where's the disagreement and why does he feel this way and why do you feel this way and i feel like if we established like a set of parameters or a set of areas of contention well we can certainly talk about that i think you we need to work that out but let me just sort of finish what i was saying that you know the the pure the scientific system of peer-reviewed papers followed by replication you know important results are always replicated by other people that's how science determines what is right and and i i feel strongly that uh in the one debate i did do i thought it was terrible and was a waste of my time and i said i would never do that again but policy is different you know policies are value judgments i think you do have to have public debates about that so i'm so you know i think we do need to get out there and advocate for what we think we should do what what he said is that he got into this because he brought a bunch of people together to discuss the the what the science is and he said the science is not nearly as settled as he thought it was when he first started examining it and that's why he wrote this book and that's why he took a deep dive into the data you know that may well be true i i can't comment on why he did what he did well that that is why he did what did that's what he said but the point is like when someone hears him or when someone hears you there's people that would hear you and go well this guy's not right because steve coonan's right and i heard steve kuhn and say this and then there's people that hear you and go well he's right and steve coonan is wrong because steve coonan left out all these different things and he was incorrect about that and he was way too lenient on the government when it comes to like the these kind of this could be settled at
least it can be explained in a way that a rational person could have a more more informed opinion of what's going on yeah you know i think you overestimate the uh the ability to settle these issues in a debate and i will say maybe you're you're absolutely right you know this is why tobacco companies hired scientists to go out and push them because they understand the power of a scientist saying you know x is true why is y is not true and so yeah you're absolutely right and uh you know it's it's going to be um you know it's it's it's very frustrating to me to hear someone like dr coona and what's particularly irritating is you know there's always this little bit of conspiracy in there about like you know these people they know the truth they're afraid to say it i mean let me ask you why would i be afraid what do you think what bad would happen to me if i don't think you're afraid at all right but i do think that there are some people that agree with him that do not want to talk about it publicly i'm not saying what are they afraid of what are they afraid they're afraid well there's i think being called a climate science denier um being called a conspiracy theorist being maligned for your opinions i i think that's a real thing in this day and age don't you um you know i think that um certainly everybody gets pushback i mean i get a lot of pushback uh you know i get hate emails you're on the right side but the point is i'm still getting i'm still getting a lot of pushback so so everyone gets pushed back right so the push back doesn't the pushback doesn't change yeah you certainly know that um uh but but you know dr [ __ ] in his example that you can have a great career taking his position you know he's on the joe rogan show i mean how great is that yeah but i mean the point is it's like too that's a bad argument no no what i'm saying is he still has a good career and in fact the only reason i'm on is because he was on you would not have had me on well all right that's not true i definitely would have all right well listen i don't know anything about
client science so i'm i would be more than i did not have you on just because of that i had you on certainly as a result of him being on right but i most certainly would have had you on anyway right right well again so we can talk about we can talk about how to do it i'd be open to discussions about sort of parameters you know i think the the thing you don't want to do in fact he even made this point which i thought was actually an excellent point which is uh he he you know he's were as worried about as i was he said make people write down their views i mean that's what we do in the peer-reviewed literature he said i don't want to just have a debate make them write down their things and and give citations and stuff and you know that's why you look in the peer-reviewed literature where people write stuff it goes through peer review then it gets published and it's all written down it's much harder to get crackpot ideas out i mean i could say anything to you about anything and you know you know i could just say it but if i have to write it down and give you references it's much harder right right but i do think public debates about policy are really good we need to have people talk about you know what's what's the pros and cons of this or this my take on what you're saying is there's certain things that you're saying that are irrefutable first of all the particulate matter in the air that's caused by power plants that are fueled by coal and we look at that video from evansville that's horrific too yes all that stuff's horrific this um the idea that the only way we can move forward is by continuing to do what we're doing already and fossil fuels and all that jazz like that doesn't make any sense to me and i i do hope that there is some innovation when it comes to battery construction methods and efficiency and and all that jazz and and that we do move away from a lot of the stuff that we're doing right now um i just i wish it was i wish there was no gray area i wish there was no i wish there was no legitimate intelligent people that thought differently that's where it gets
confusing because i feel like i read his book and it was pretty fascinating i've read several things where you rebutted him and i've read several things where you stated your position so i was very excited to talk to you about this and you know like i said there's many things you're saying that i don't think anybody can refute particularly the effect of using these things that's happening not just in terms of warming but in terms of pollution yeah you have to look at the whole the whole menu of disadvantages and if you do that you realize we really should be phasing out fossil fuels as fast as possible and we really should be taking into account what's happening with uh these increased levels of pollutants in the in our atmosphere and that there it's not this is not very simple you know i i get very upset when we were talking about that um what is that josh fox movie called what the hell is it called the the fracking movie frack nation or some [ __ ] what's it called remember but i i've heard people dismiss gas land i've heard people dismiss that and dismiss the impact that it has like but how can you dismiss the fact that some people have water that you can't drink anymore like what how is that a dismissible thing how if you're if they're doing something that produces a significant amount of energy but also pollutes water to the point where it can't be digested anymore you can't just only look at one aspect that you can't only look at but look at the market also these people have to move out of their farm but they paid them off but where's that water going like where's that polluted water going what kind of an effect does it have on the animals what kind of effect does it have on the plant life is it leaking into the atmosphere like what's happening and how long do we how long does it take before we know what's happening is this something that's real simple that you can you know cut it off right there and then there's no more damage done or is this something that leeches out into our environment for decades or hundreds of years to come
yeah and i mean you make a lot of good points there's the impacts especially on people of modest means who are significantly impacted you know corporations just don't have to worry about that and you know so if you live next to there are lots of stories about people who live near these big industrial plants and suffer really horrific um you know cancers and other other problems and it's it's you know as time goes on it becomes harder and harder for people like that to get some sort of compensation or to get the the harms addressed i mean i do firmly believe and i think this is a key thing about climate and everything else that polluters should be accountable for the damage they pay and so the people who are spewing fossil fuel effluents you know carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere they should be held accountable for that and right now they're not and that actually is the core of the problem if they were actually being held accountable fossil fuels would be gone very quickly because it wouldn't be profitable exactly it'd be non-economic and so the really what you're what you're talking about is you know what what economists call externalities which are costs imposed on people who are outside of your transaction and that's really the problem that there are these free you can you can throw you know it's like you walk over your fence you throw your trash in your neighbor's yard if you do that for free why wouldn't you right yeah but you can't do it because your neighbor get mad and you know but but but that's essentially what a lot of corporations are doing right now and we let them get away with it because they are so politically powerful they've gotten to the point where they're more powerful than any any non-corporate entity they're more powerful than the people i think that's a great point and i think that's a good way to end this um is uh there anywhere online could you direct people online to like what's the best place to see your work and my soundcloud um no i don't know i do not have a soundcloud um is that one of the dad jokes that is one of my dad jokes um he should be rapping about climate change maybe he
could be on tick tock there is there is a climate change rapper who's actually quite good um yeah i would say that's true i'd say if people want to see me they should follow me on twitter andrew destler i'm always tweeting about climbing spell that please uh a-n-d-r-e-w-d-e-s-s-l-e-r one word okay and twitter and you have an instagram as well i do not have instagram okay good for you yeah um well thank you very much for coming here i really appreciate it it's been great i really enjoyed it i enjoyed it too it was very enlightening and i think it uh it helped a lot it helped to balance things out all right good good thank you and hopefully i'll talk to you again someday yes uh well hopefully he'll respond and maybe we can get something together i think i think it would be very uh enlightening for people i really do i think it would help a lot okay good thank you appreciate you thank you bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music]