551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
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This is Dr. Jordan B. Peterson. Watch parenting.

available exclusively on Daily Wire Plus. We're dealing with misbehaviors with our son. Our 13-year-old throws tantrums. Our son turned to some substance abuse. Go to dailywireplus.com today. If you're concerned about people who are struggling, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more important than energy. There's a great experiment going on right now as we've put more intermittent energy, led by solar and wind, onto grids. How much can you push that? When that

sun or wind go away, something has to be there immediately to back that up.

to make it continue to work. And it's brutal managing a grid that has things coming and going. The most appropriate way to serve the poor is to make energy radically available reliably, period. If you want to clean up the atmosphere emissions as well as the land, the air and the water, you have to accelerate economic development. If this is all true, then why the hell aren't we doing it? We're not out of energy options, we're out of ideas. The banner of

of war that's flown by the Greens is the carbon dioxide apocalypse narrative. The best solution to that is clearly nuclear. Clearly. But the Greens, as they're doing in Spain, as they already have done in Germany, they're anti-nuclear, which indicates more strongly than anything else that the story is not about carbon dioxide pollution. It's about something else.

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So I had the opportunity today to speak with Scott Tinker, and I've spoken to Scott before and on a podcast, and he was a contributing speaker at ARC and delivered one of the most popular public speeches that we've ever put on the ARC platform on energy and the environment. Why should you listen to this podcast? Well, there's a bunch of reasons. The most important

practical is that Scott will walk you through what you need to know to basically have a schematic understanding of the

structures upon which your abundant world depends, the energy infrastructure. And he'll tell you a story that you won't hear from other sources, and it's accurate. And you need to know these things because knowing them helps you understand what opportunities the future holds. And so much of what we're told about the future is transmitted to us by people who

ratchet their way to power by terrifying and compelling the population. And that's the sign of a kind of tyranny.

Scott offers something much more like an invitational vision, which is that we could have an abundant world for everyone if we set our mind on that. There's no fundamental scarcity of natural resource. There's no looming apocalypse that we can address by making the world a worse place, that the pathway forward to abundance and plenitude and opportunity is through

ample energy provision of all sources and the elevation of the poor in the world to the status of, well, roughly of the developed West.

Can we do that? Yes. There's no shortage of resources. That entire conceptual structure is faulty. There's shortage of will and resolve. And you need to know this. You need to know this if you're young because...

A world that's rife with apocalyptic fear-mongering is one that will demoralize you. You need to know this if you're going to have children, because you have to understand what kind of world they could inhabit and what kind of world the doomsayers will doom them to if the narrative is wrong. And I don't know anyone who knows more about this and who's a more thoughtful and informed speaker about such issues than Scott. And so do yourself a favor and pay attention to this podcast.

So, Scott, I thought I'd start this with a bit of a story from Spain. I received this today, found this today from the Telegraph, which I sometimes write for. As you know, most people watching perhaps know, or at least some do, the whole country faced a blackout, and more than the country, right? Into Portugal and France as well. Just a few weeks ago, I think it was the biggest blackout

Well, it's described in the Telegraph as the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times. So another number one for Spain. The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain's giant blackout. Faith in the current investigation has reached rock bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sanchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity. Red Electrica...

there's a name for you, which runs the grid is accused of stonewalling everybody. Sources in Brussels have told the Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain's rushed

phase-out of nuclear reactors from 2027. The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st century smart grid capable of handling it. Okay, so what's the background to that story? They also put a woman in charge of

of the entire electrical grid who had absolutely no experience in the area, and she's been an unmitigated disaster. And so, well, that sort of sets the stage for our conversation. I mean, we've talked a number of times for everybody watching and listening about

Scott's participated in the ARC Endeavor Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London. We're trying to build a visionary alternative on the international side for a future of abundance and distributed responsibility instead of top-down apocalyptic nightmare control. And so that seems like a good alternative. And Scott's been extremely helpful on the energy side because he shares the ARC vision with

of low-cost, reliable energy distributed worldwide as the foundation for peace and abundance and direct aid to the poor in the most possibly effective way. And so we're going to run over that territory today and...

Scott is very well connected among people who understand how the energy system works and he's going to, well, share his expertise with us so that we can sort out just what the hell's going on. So let's start with that. So comments about the Spanish situation and its implications for Europe more broadly and Australia for that matter because they're experimenting with the same thing. Right. Well, it's good to be here with you and

That's a tough situation and tragic. It's dangerous for human lives when you have major blackouts like that. So I always go back to some of the underlying principles of all these things, Jordan. And I am not against any form of energy. In fact, I've put solar in an indigenous village in Colombia, our Waco people.

That's all they had. We put three and a half kilowatt array to put light bulbs in mud huts and ceiling fans in a refrigerator. They didn't have wires, they didn't have roads, they didn't have pipes. First electricity, get started with it. Scaling things is the great challenge in energy. And so when you, let's just think about the physics of these things a little bit. Intermittent source of energy, the sun sets at night.

And it's cloudy sometimes, and sometimes it's cloudy for a long time. The Germans have a word for it, Dunkelflotte. Sometimes it hails, too. And sometimes the wind, you know, quits blowing. So when that happens, in the modern world anyway, the developed world, we like our electricity 24-7. We want it on. And when it's not on, systems fail, big systems. So there's a great experiment going on right now as we've put more intermittent energy...

but it's led by solar and wind onto grids and how much can you push that because what has to happen when you increase the percentage of intermittent energy on an electric grid is when the because we consume electrons in real time right you generate them you use them when that

Sun or wind go away, something has to be there immediately, right then, in real time, to back that up, to make it continue to work. And it's brutal managing a grid that has things coming and going.

Right, the grid is designed for stable inputs and relatively predictable outputs. Stable inputs, 60 Hz, you know, bring it to us. No fluctuations that burn out your electrical equipment or make it fail. Just like, you know, you could fry a blow dryer in your home, you can fry bigger things on a grid if you get big grid fluctuations.

Okay, so there's two problems at least. Yeah, at least. Okay, so let's lay it out from first principles. The first thing we could agree is that there's no abundance, and that means a plethora of starvation-level poverty and hand-to-mouth existence in the absence of energy.

There's no real difference between energy and work and no difference between work and wealth. So if you're concerned about people who are struggling, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more important than energy. Now, you made a case that on the energy front, there are two cardinal concerns. One is abundance of supply, but the other is regularity and predictability of supply. Reliability. Reliability. As important as provision. Right. And let's come back...

because it's such a big component of my work and life's passion too. Let's come back to those who don't have much or any in transitioning. So we're kind of starting with the rich world. We're starting here with a modern world, right? The developed world. We have a grid and it's a complicated beast. Grids are not simple. They have multiple different inputs.

transmitting across, stepping up to big voltages, transmitting across multiple different wire systems. Think of interstate freeways, stepping down to state highways, stepping down to county roads, stepping down to the little driveway that goes to your house. Well, that's what your wires do. So you're having to take big voltages coming out of power plants and step them down ever more to little homes and industries and businesses. Right, yep.

And hospitals. And hospitals, and guess what? AI and data centers that want 99.99% reliability. Right, right. They have to always be on. Like jets, let's say. You can't fail. Right. Essentially, you can't fail. Right, right. So, you're putting all these inputs in, and the more inputs in some ways is good. Right.

uh optionality and energy is good like your stock portfolio your real estate portfolio i like options in energy if you get limited to one or two you're betting a lot on that thing i don't buy one stock so i don't mind a lot of inputs but we've got to realize that they're not all created equal and when we talk about the intermittent forms of energy the sun and the wind and some others

They come and go, and that's not judgment. That's just physics. That's just the reality of the way the sun and the wind work. So I got to have

Something there. So... What's that German word for the wind drought? Dunkelflaute. Right. And so there's lots of situations in Europe in particular so far where the sun isn't available because it's a northern place fundamentally. Germany's cloudy. And neither is the wind. Right. So, and then it's my understanding as well that to the degree that your grid is reliant on intermittent power sources...

You need backups that, as you said, are instantly available, right? So that means you can't start up a nuclear plant because that takes a long time. Correct. But also that have the same capacity as the system you're replacing. Yes. So what that implies, as far as I can tell, is that if you build a primarily solar and wind grid, you have to have...

so far, either a nuclear or fossil fuel backup that's ready online to go, which essentially means you have to build two systems. Yeah, you're building two systems. And they're redundant, which makes them expensive. Right, right. I mean, you think poor air traffic controllers, I flew today, have a

pull out your hair job, stressful, try managing a grid. 'Cause I've been inside them. ERCOT is the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas. Texas has its own grid. It's Texas. We can secede someday from the nation. We have our own electric grid. I've been inside ERCOT and there are a wall of panels and grid operators and all the different lines and you see arrows flowing different directions and they are literally calling on people, start up that gas plant.

Shut it down. Make sure the- Orchestrating it. It's incredible. Make sure the baseload nuclear is always running. You don't turn nukes on and off. Yeah. They just run. We have four nuclear reactors in Texas, two at Comanche Peak, two at South Texas Project. They always run. Coal, it likes to always be on. Yeah. Think of cooking indoors in your kitchen. Would you bring charcoal in and light it up? That takes a while to get started. And once it's going, it takes a long time. How many industrial processes rely-

even for their physical integrity on continuous power supplies. I know there are industrial processes where if they lose power long enough, steel smelters and so forth, it devastates the plant. Refrigeration, freezing, medicines, hospitals. No, everybody likes it always on. Some are not fully reliant on it. But so, you know, coal isn't great for that. Nuclear and coal, they're called baseload.

they satisfy the minimum demand on that grid. So that's what you want in place. You need that in place, some baseload. That's the foundation. Foundation. Yeah. And natural gas...

It's like cooking. I can turn on my gas stove, boom, it's hot. Right, right. Cook, cook, cook, turn it off, boom, it's gone. Right. Natural gas is extremely clean too, all things considered. No sulfur, no SOX, no nitrogen and NOX, no mercury, no particulates. Right, right. It has CO2 when you burn it. Hey, the plants love that, Scott. Well, we won't go there. But let's, yeah, relative to coal and oil, natural gas is extremely clean. It doesn't have all the...

Why? Coal is all carbon. Hydrocarbons or oil is complex carbon and hydrogen chains. Natural gas is CH4, methane, one carbon, four hydrogens.

It has more energy intensity density, natural gas, than oil and coal. And that sounds weird. Gas? Per unit weight. Right. So I take a pound of natural gas, you gotta get it really cold to make it liquid or super critical form. A pound of natural gas has more energy in it than a pound of oil. Might be worth explaining in some detail this notion of energy density and its relationship to transportability, for example. Sure.

Sure. And we'll come back to the grid. Yeah. Yeah. But and so and also I want to say with the grid, the electricity, most people don't think about this, including our leaders. Electricity is only about 25 to 30 percent of our total energy consumption. Uh-huh. 65 to 70 percent is something else.

Okay, and that's all the fuels we use, the molecules to do transportation and commercial and residential and industrial uses of various kinds. So travel is a huge part of that. Travel is a big piece of it. Residential, commercial, and industrial heating and cooling, basically, to keep buildings cool or warm. And then we use molecules for a lot of other things. Right.

fertilizers yeah which feed what half the world's population at least now and growing ammonia comes from methane yeah yeah um and and plastics we use a natural gas for plastics all the things we do in the world that have physical constructs around them are molecules so we're not going to electrify everything that's a silly notion right right sound bite but it's a silly notion

Right. And we've even attempting to electrify things for 100 years, 150 years. We're up to 25 to 30 percent of what we use. Right. And even in this country still, we're not over 50 percent in the U.S.

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I read that Ford Motor Company loses $45,000 on every electric vehicle it sells. On the trucks. Yeah. The lightning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's rough. They're all backing off. Yeah, well, Tesla manages it, but very few other people have been able to do it. And you need a hell of an infrastructure for Tesla to work. And I don't know how well those vehicles operate in frigid temperatures. Right.

or hot ones right yeah they're tough you have to cool they're tough um again that's a good topic to come to but i'd say density is a fundamental concept i did a tedx talk to 1100 kids and the way i explained density to start it was with food i just said hey

There's kale and there's cow. Right. And they both give me calories. Only marketers think kale is food, by the way. Well, okay. And a lot of people have written me and said, kale? Can you pick something else? But no, kale and cow are kind of fun. And I threw in ice cream too. But I'd have to eat a whole lot of kale to get the same calories.

as a piece of steak, just volumetrically, right? And so the density, when you start thinking about density, you can think about it in food terms now. Chimps chew eight hours a day. Yeah, cows chew forever. Right, right, exactly. And multiple times with multiple stomachs, right? Right. Because their food is not dense. They do a lot of the work for us, cows. Right.

Now, I happen to think, at least for my body, a mixture of food inputs isn't a bad thing. Okay, I don't have allergies, I'm good. So I have vegetables, I have some fruits, I eat meat for sure and other things, and it's a diverse diet. Think about that like energy. So in density terms, we come back to energy. Energy per unit weight, right?

Things like hay, our first energy effort that our vehicles ate to motor themselves around, and wood, and dung, and other kinds of biomass were the early human-like things used.

For energy. And many of the world's poor now. And still do. We are consuming more of those things than we ever have still, which is ironic. There are more people. So not percentage-wise, but in actual consumption units, more of those. Now, you start to transition naturally. We discover charcoal or coal. Nature took all the plants and made it into a dense carbon form called coal. Nature did the work. Time, heat, pressure.

So now I've got dense plants called coal. And in 1804, the very first commercial steam engine for a train in Wales took its first journey, 1804. And there were a billion people in the world in 1804. We'd grown from 110 million in 1000 BC, it was a perfect census back then, we know. They counted them all. 110 million to 1 billion in those thousands of years. And then we went from 1 billion people

to 8.3 billion people in a couple hundred years. The hydrocarbon age kicked off coal and oil, again, carbon and hydrogen, natural gas, mostly methane, or mostly hydrogen and methane. So this was the accelerator of human development because now we had an energy source that could do useful work for us

And humans didn't have to labor and toil ourselves or with a plow animal of some kind. Yeah, I think Bjorn Lohberg has estimated that each of us are served by the equivalent of 40 servants. At least. In the rich world. Yeah, in the rich world. So think about density. We've gone from that. Coal is denser by weight. Oil, denser still. Natural gas, by weight, denser still. And then...

the magic uranium and thorium radioactive elements come along and they have a density per unit weight a million times more than wood. Right. A million. A million times. A million times. Yeah. So,

All a nuclear reactor does when you put, I say all, put little uranium pellets that are about a centimeter tall, I've held them that wide, stuff them into these fuel rods, you activate them, basically you split those things, fission, and that creates a bunch of heat. And those are sitting in a

pool of water the water starts to boil make steam turn a turbine run a generator right it's just a different source of heat than burning coal or burning natural gas or burning oil to make electricity different source of heat and by the way the sun at the towers that's heat too all that's doing is boiling water with a bunch of mirrors so along comes uranium and thorium and nuclear and and this changes things we can do a tremendous amount of work

Let me give, so give the listeners a feel for that density. In that little uranium pellet, there's enough energy contained in there to, the equivalent energy to drive my car from New York to LA back to Dallas. One pellet. Think of the gasoline that would take a lot, and gasoline is very dense. Think of, so you start to extrapolate, this is the energy density

Certain forms of energy just won the physics game. Uranium and natural gas, basically. Yeah, well, when you're using vehicles, they have to transport themselves. So, anything that's energy dense means that there's much less that isn't useful to transport. It's interesting, too, on the nuclear side, that we should just take a small detour here before going back to the grid. Well...

One of the things that really stymies me, and this is why it's also necessary to think about the story that's being told about such things, is that the banner of war that's flown by the Greens is the carbon dioxide apocalypse narrative. But the best solution to that is clearly nuclear. Clearly. And France has demonstrated that like no other country, I would say. And

Because nuclear produces zero carbon dioxide. So if that's the enemy, then why would you do anything other than nuclear? But the Greens, as they're doing in Spain, as they already have done in Germany, they're anti-nuclear, which indicates more strongly than anything else that the story is not about carbon dioxide pollution. It's about something else. Now, we can talk a little later about what it might be about, but it's certainly not pro-industry. And the case you just laid out indicates that

Well, the Industrial Revolution, a billion, seven billion of the world's people rest on the shoulders of the Industrial Revolution. And that revolution itself is a function of energy density and reliability. It is. Right. So that's a first principle story. That's the first principle. Energy underpins healthy economies and, and we'll come to this, healthy economies are...

can afford to invest in the environment. Yes, right. This is something Lomberg has talked a lot about, right? You get people up above $5,000 a year GDP, they take a long-term view of the future because they're not scrabbling around in the mud wondering where lunch is coming from. Yes. Right, right. So isn't that cool? That's such an optimistic observation. No, it's incredible. Because...

if you understand that then you understand that the proper way forward to a sustainable future which is hypothetically the goal is to eradicate impoverishment correct right so that's that's great you'd think the left would jump on that yeah when we should talk about some of those things and i've probably been talking about that little triangle for 25 years energy the

you know, energy, the economy, the environment, and all those investments, the cleanest air in the world, not talking about atmosphere, but the stuff we breathe, particulate matter 2.5, is where it's rich. Right. The worst air in the world is where it's poor. Right. They just can't afford to clean it up. So this is a fundamental, and it goes that direction, energy, the economy, the environment. Right. And ironically, kind of a

important point here if you want to clean up the atmosphere emissions as well as the land the air and the water you have to accelerate economic development you have to accelerate human flourishing yes not push it down right you should say that again and we know this is right we can see what's happening in europe because as germany has rampaged down the idiot green road

Their power has become more expensive, more unreliable, and dirtier, right? They're failing on their own marker of success, as well as failing on the economic front. You know, if you're a degrowth advocate for whatever reasons you might be, that seems like success, but it's just rebranded failure. So we want to reiterate this point so everyone understands, if you actually care about the environment,

You want to do everything you possibly can to put people in a situation where they can take a long-term view and take care of everything that's around them. And they can't do that when they're scrabbling around in poverty.

And it's not just the billion who are in extreme poverty. Let's call them the emerging world. It's the next four to five billion people that have intermittent energy. Their power comes and goes. Their fuels vary and are not reliable to them. So it's this whole three to four billion people kind of emerging, another three to four billion developing, right?

and 1.4 billion developed. And that's an energy transition hierarchy. That's an energy transition hierarchy. That's a global health hierarchy. That's an access to food hierarchy. That's a clean water hierarchy. That's a clean soils hierarchy. That's a clean air hierarchy. That's opportunity for your children hierarchy. It's everything. And so if you could picture the average of the wealthy world,

1.3 billion of us, consume about 50 megawatt hours and we make about $50,000 per person. 50 megawatt hours per capita, $50,000 per capita. That's the average of the wealthy world annually. The U.S. is higher than that. Okay. 50-50. That's kind of convenient. Yeah.

At the end of every year, I tear apart a bunch of data for several weeks. It's my fun. And so I kind of was working on population data, economic data, and energy data at the end of last year. And this is cool. Conveniently cool. 50-50. Yep. All right. Sticks in your head. 50-50. Seven billion other people in the world are below that. Some way below it. Now, it's not

It's not, well, there's a bunch of folks here and then there's some here and then here. It's a complete continuum. All right. But for convenience sake, there's 4 billion people emerging. You know, we have 50 megawatt hours. They have five or three or one. And proportionally about $1,000 to $5,000 per capita. Right. Nothing. Right.

Think about that. That's a couple cups of Starbucks or something a day. And then as you come up through that, there's the developing world and then the developed world. Lumped all the 7 billion people. And they're stuck. They're kind of stuck here. They haven't moved much. They're getting a little bit more. While the wealthy world, we consume more energy.

and we're getting a lot wealthier. Now, we're consuming less energy per unit wealth, which is cool. That curve is flattening. It's really cool. Yeah, that's great. In fact, there's a lot of... That's the pattern of real economic development, right? It's awesome. More for less. It's awesome. Efficiency. So that's also... Well, that's also an indicator of the utility of pursuing abundance because it turns out that if you pursue abundance intelligently...

you produce a innovative environment that allows us to extract far more from less. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you plateau. And some of it is, well, you don't need any more stuff. You know, there's that reality. But we're making better things, more efficient things. There's a rebound effect. An economist back in the 1800s, Jevons, showed, well, if you get a really nice, efficient economy,

let's call it a refrigerator, and you're using a lot less energy and it doesn't cost as much, you're gonna get two. Right, right. And we do. Right. Two cars, two TVs, 20 pair of blue jeans. I'm literally not exaggerating. Instead of, I just need two or three. You know, the C40 Consortium, the green advocates on the municipal side,

have posited that in order for us to reach net zero effectively, there's 40 of the world's biggest cities are part of this consortium. We're only going to be allowed three articles of clothing a year. 95% reduction in automobile ownership too, because you don't need a car to do whatever the hell you're doing. That's a vision of scarcity. But your point fundamentally is that the pursuit of scarcity will exacerbate environmental catastrophe. It does. It does. It does.

Yes, it does. And the removal of choice and basic human freedoms and liberties. And opportunity and the ability to live. Let's kind of set the idea that we could tell people what they can do aside for a second, even in places that tell people what they can do.

I see it behind me, the Soviet Union post. I went there in 82 for three weeks when it was still the Soviet Union. The Cold War was on. We were behind the Iron Curtain, and I was out of college, and it left a huge impression on me. I saw what it was like to live without liberty. In a command economy. It was a very intense situation.

And I went out when I shouldn't at night from hotels and met with young people my age, 22, 23, invincible. These are embedded forever. These are memories that are embedded forever of the look in young people's eyes who are now in their 60s if they're still here. So what that system does, it doesn't work. You can't tell people that. Spain's going to make it work.

How's that working? We'll eventually come back there. But getting back kind of this dialogue, yeah, energy, economies, and that gives you the wherewithal to invest in cleaning up environments. And we see that in all sorts of different... Right, and that final 50, 50, 50, 50, that's the bottom half of the world? Well, no. Oh, okay. So you say, okay...

Here we are with this continuum and there's the 50/50. And I asked myself the question, why are we considering light bulbs and mud huds, which I've done, electrified? The world organizations say, well, that's electrified. No, no, that's a light bulb and a mud hud. Right. It's more than they had. They can read at night. Yeah, yeah. Et cetera, it's a start.

If we had a light bulb in a mud hut here, we'd call it a brownout, Jordan. We would be in a brownout situation. We'd be one lamp. So what would it take really to lift 7 billion people in various stages to 50 megawatts hours and 50,000 bucks? So I ran the numbers. And then by when? So it turns out the world today, all in, let's call it primary energy consumption. These are the fundamental factors.

inputs we've been talking about. Biomass, coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, big dams, and waves and tides, potentially all other this little teeny thing today. So those are the, these are what come into the system. I didn't say electricity. You have to make electricity. Electricity is not primary energy. We make it. So the things that make electricity, um,

If you look across the world today, all in, we consume about 620 exajoules of energy. That means nothing to anybody. What's an exajoule? It's a big number. Okay. 620 exajoules powers 8.3 billion people to varying levels. Just take it as 620 something, some unit, okay?

to lift everybody up to 50/50 would take almost three times that. Almost 1,800 exajoules. For the oil and gas people, that's about 1,800 trillion cubic feet of gas a year equivalent.

other units of energy measurement that are used. Tripling though. So 3x. Now, that's not scarcity. That's not saying, hey, we're running out. Everybody's got to conserve. You can only have one pair of shoes and two pair of clothing. No, no, that's saying we've got to find out how to make triple our energy, our primary energy in the world. Is it there? Some worry about that. Well, yes. The answer is there's a lot of energy in the world.

It's in a variety of forms. But the density, here's where density comes back in. If I'm going to make another 1,200 exodules or up to 1,800, I've got to use the densest forms of energy. That little uranium pellet, uranium oxides, thorium, another radioactive element. These are both fission inputs. And in the next period of time, we're not that far away from

fusion working, not commercial yet, but fusion, that's hydrogen. It's a pretty common thing. So we've got to go, we've got to get our heads around this idea that to literally lift the world out of poverty and all the good things that come from that, we've got to go dense, dense, dense. You're not going to be doing it with low density forms of energy. There'll be good pieces of that portfolio of

the optionality and energy. I don't mind solar and wind where it's sunny and windy. You got a lot of sun here. Use it, you know, in places that make sense. It's a really, a very efficient use of the sun when you've got great sun. You know, you're in lower latitudes. You don't have many clouds. Winter doesn't happen much. Da-da-da-da. That's a pretty good use of sun, and that use is called capacity factor.

So if I've got 100 units of sun and I can make it generate 30 units throughout the year, that's a 30% capacity factor. And that's pretty good for solar. Nuclear, 90% or more capacity factor. Nuclear is always on. Okay, so let's talk about nuclear and scarcity as well. I mean, okay, so...

What are the objections to walking, running down this road, let's say? Well, you know, it's pretty obvious that energy is harnessed to serve the poor. I think that's incontrovertible. The mere fact that there was 1 billion people and now there's 8 billion shows how useful energy is. And the immensely high standard of living, there are no energy-poor rich countries.

That's right. Okay, so now the next issue is going to be... There's some energy-poor people in rich countries. Right. But there are no energy-poor countries. Right, right. Okay, so now we face the issue of, well, we can't go to 1800.

Because there aren't enough sources of energy. It's a finite resource. But you deal with that with... Okay, so layout why no is the answer. So we'll talk about... And what the intelligent mix is. My suspicions are that...

The more we rely on nuclear, the more we can shepherd our use of fossil fuels because fossil fuels are useful for fertilizer and for plastics and nuclear isn't and for transportation, let's say. And a lot of other things, petrochemicals and all sorts of things that we use.

fossil fuels for that most people don't know. So is it the case that it's foolish to use fossil fuel in many ways for energy if it's replaceable by nuclear? So let's separate again our thought of electricity and molecules. Let's just, the simplest form we can do, electricity, molecules. Electricity is used for quite a few things.

and more things now. We need it. Electrons are very useful things and electric motors are actually very efficient machines, more efficient than a combustion engine, the motor. The battery isn't. The battery is less dense than dung on a per unit weight basis. A battery is a lot less dense than dung. Really? Yes, on a weight basis. That's why it takes a thousand pounds of battery to drive a car.

A Tesla S is a thousand pound battery pack, 7,000 batteries the size of your cell phone and that under the whole floor bed. It just, it has physics limits. Okay. So, so as we, but let's do electrons and molecules. We need molecules for a lot of useful things and burning them arguably is maybe not the best use if we had perfect other options for them. Now,

I can electrify some things, vehicles, small cars, bigger cars. I can do hybrids for bigger buses. But because there's so much weight in that battery, when I fly here on an airplane...

the whole airplane would be a battery. Right, right, right. To get me to go... There's not much use just flying batteries around. Yeah, it's kind of cool. It's an electric plane, but it's doing nothing else. Right, right, right. And so, go up that density curve again, I'm putting jet fuel, diesel, in those wings. Really dense energy. And that allows me to haul weight in humans and luggage and freight and other things. So...

You have to think about the end uses of energy. It's not crazy to burn molecules when they're the only thing that will do that job. The rockets that Elon Musk launches and takes to space aren't flying on batteries. Those are on LNG. And they're actually on natural gas, but hydrogen too. So molecules have a great use for some things, natural gas and oil.

Electrons have a great use for other things. We should try to get to the point where we're using the right form of energy to do the right job. Nuclear makes electricity.

Right. And heat. You make a lot of heat with nuclear. What's its utility potentially for transportation? I mean, we've had nuclear subs for like two generations. Yeah, 60, 70 years. Yeah, four generations really. My nephew was the third in command, or my cousin, third in command of a nuclear attack sub. I've been on it. It's an incredible little, I didn't get to see it, but the core is not very big. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're putting...

quite a bit of oomph to drive that patented propeller. So what's the impediment being to small modular nuclear, given that we've actually had it since, when was the first nuclear submarine produced? I can't remember, 50s and 60s, somewhere in there, and also aircraft carriers. We've had small reactors for a very long period of time. Yeah, light water. I know people are afraid of nuclear for, well,

Well, because of nuclear bombs and so fair enough, but the bomb and the nuclear plant aren't the same thing. And I know these new plants, the thorium plants are radically safe fundamentally. Yeah. When I was young, I was trained to be terrified of nuclear war. Yeah. It's a cold war. I mean, in kindergarten...

I got under my desk and drills and hid, preparing for a nuclear attack, Jordan. Because I knew the desk would protect me from a nuclear attack. Yes, of course. I was safe under the little desk. So my generation grew up, your generation, scared of that. Oh, definitely. And there's still some reverberation in fear. Fear is extremely powerful. You know this better than I do as a psychologist. It's a powerful motivator.

And it inhibits logical thinking sometimes. I mean, the beginning of wisdom is do away with fear. Okay. But that's the fear we were trained with. Young people today haven't had that fear of nuclear baked into them. They've had climate baked into them. Yes, right. They're terrified of that. And they literally are gutturally terrified of that. They are emotionally, psychologically depressed people.

don't want to have kids, get married, suicidal. Well, that's a feature, not a bug, to stop them from having children. Bjorn Lomberg estimated that each additional mouth on the planet produces four times as much as it consumes. That's the average. So the notion that not having children is good for the planet isn't a very wise notion.

Maybe it depends what you do with the children. In a productive world. Right. If you aren't allowed to be productive, you don't have the energy to be productive. It depends on where you are on that productivity scale. But, you know, Maslow outlined it pretty elegantly, I think, when he looked at the hierarchy from self-actualization kind of on down through love. But those bottom two tiers, safety and

Security. These things are made, I know those are addressed by energy and wealth. The fundamental physio things that we need, physical things we need, and safety and security. Those bottom two tiers in that pyramid, energy and wealth. That lifts people up.

So that's what we're talking about here with 7 billion people is the fundamental things that make everybody safer, more secure and productive. Food in your stomach, some clothes on your back, a shelter, some climate control. Perhaps if you're living in a hot place or a cold place,

et cetera, clean water to drink. These are healthcare, education. These are fundamental things. Well, clean water to drink and sufficient food is 95 plus plumbing. That's 95% of the health problems solved. Big time. Yeah. Big time. That is literally what drives a lot of those things. So you get to 7 billion people, that's a lot of energy. And you asked the question, do we have it? Are we running out? We would run out if we were using hay.

and wood and cutting, you know, biomass and dung. There's not enough of that to do 8.3 billion people and growing. We can talk about population because it's fascinating demographics, but there's not enough of that. Coal, there's quite a bit of coal still left in the world. Hundreds of years supply in the U.S. Asia has a lot of coal, blah, blah. Other impacts of coal from burning it.

That's also a solvable technological problem. It's solvable. The thing that you have to do, though, you want to say, what's my energy returned on my energy invested? That's a metric, EROI, it's called. And so how much energy does it take throughout the whole energy system to get useful energy out? With coal, you're mining it, moving it on trains, barges, trucks. You burn it.

And if you're going to get out the SOX and the NOX and the particulates and the mercury and the CO2, each one of those things is a bolt-on system that runs on more energy. Right. So you're lowering your EROI the more you clean up that coal. And it's still useful. It still has a decent return, even after all that. But it's expensive because every one of those things isn't just energy, it's money.

So now I've taken coal from affordable and reliable to kind of expensive, more expensive and reliable. Right. China doesn't do all those things. Sometimes their scrubbers are on, sometimes they're off. Depends on what their economy is needing and the cost of electricity. Right, right. We don't do that here. You turn off those here in regulated societies.

you get massive fines or go to prison as you should. So that's the nice part about density again, oil a little bit less of those scrubbers, natural gas, you don't need any of it. You don't need CO2 if you wanna remove it, but there's a little bit of particulate in natural gas, not much, not much mercury, a little sulfur, sometimes there's sulfur gases scrubbed out, but a lot less work needs to be done to make natural gas clean.

and we clean it up in our, and we cook with it in our homes. You know, it's not, I don't worry about that. There's some studies that say you should, I'm not. So that's the beauty of energy density again. - Depends on what else you have to worry about. - Depends on what you have to worry about. - Burning dung natural gas is not gonna be that much of a problem. - Looking pretty good. - Yeah. - Looking pretty good if you're cooking with wood. LPG is saving so many lives in this world, replacing wood and charcoal and huts and homes. And I'm not talking a few lives.

There are 3 billion people and 2.8 billion people in the world today that cook indoors with solid biomass. Right. And 3 million of them die every year still, Jordan. 3 million people from breathing indoor smoke, particulates. Right. The major pollution problem. That's it. In cities outdoor, this is just indoor. There's another two, at least that many outdoors breathing indoor particulate pollution, real pollution. So you replace that with an LPG tank, liquid propane.

You save lives, instantly save lives, or an induction cooktop, something that doesn't have that happening. It's an incredible life-saving technology, if you will. So on the abundance thing, back to that, here we are, there's a lot of natural gas in the world. Okay, a lot. So what does that mean in terms of like supply out into the future? Hundreds and hundreds of years. Let's add something to that too. Well, and it's complicated because what happens is that

If scarcity starts to emerge, the price of the commodity rises and the rising price incentivizes innovative ways of finding more of it. And well, fracking is a great example of that, which the fracking revolution, which is essentially unheralded publicly, what propelled the US to energy independence in no time flat. Correct. And there's no reason to assume we're out of those options. No. No.

That's, we're not out of energy options, we're out of ideas sometimes. Yeah, well, price increase, that'll motivate more ideas. So in '08, Mr. Obama brought me up to ask me to be Assistant Secretary of Energy under Stephen Chu. '08, first term, first month, Obama and I visited and we talked and they were looking at me doing fossil energy, coal, oil, gas.

Strategic Patrol and Reserve and other things. And I spoke with the secretary and this was right as that fracking revolution, evolution really, because I know that it's kind of an evolution of technologies, came together. The Barnett shale really kicked it off in 2001 and two with George Mitchell. But by 08, we saw the Barnett, the Fayetteville had gotten started. The Haynesville was coming. The Marcellus is just getting started. These are big shale gas basins in the country.

And you mean big. Big. They're huge. They're big. Right. And oil followed. More technology. Natural gas is a little molecule. I mean, this is, I think you'll be interested in this. Why do you have to frack? Why do you have to crack rock? Okay. And here's why. And when you're cracking rock, what you're doing is putting water, which is not very compressible, under a lot of pressure and then putting it into the ground and

under pressure and releasing that pressure and that pressure release cracks rock down there a couple, you know, five, six, ten thousand feet. Cracks the rock, makes these little teeny cracks. Why? Well, because the holes where the natural gas is, are, the molecules are, are about, they're so small they're in the nanometer scale. I could fit about a hundred of those little holes across the width of one human hair.

So that's the natural gas pools that far underground. They're not pools at all. They're micro reservoirs. Yeah, there are a hundred of those little teeny pools across one human hair. And so the molecules, it's not easy to get them out of there.

Now, so you've got to crack that rock. You're creating, you've got little teeny rooms and you're creating little pathways, doorways and hallways for them to flow toward a lower pressure area. And that wellbore, when it comes down and goes down and cracks rock and then you open it up, you've created a low pressure pipe and everything wants to go towards low pressure. Like humans. Hey, less pressure. Give me less pressure. I'm good. I don't like the high pressure. In they go. And they start to flow up. So that's why...

Fracking, hydraulic fracturing, came about. It had been happening again for five decades. Yeah, well, I grew up in northern Alberta. Oh, yeah. Cracking vertical. Cracking vertical. And then the horizontal wells, they came together. So that changed things here. Our natural gas production in 2007-8...

from shale that's the name of these rocks was was uh about four percent of our natural gas came from shale in 08 today 70 percent wow of all that's such a revolution since 07 and oil right oil was essentially nothing from shale

And now it's 63% of our oil comes from shale. - Wow, well there's a great example of technological revolution. - Less than two decades. And the oil molecule, it's a big complicated, remember complex carbon hydrogen chains. You can't get it out of those little holes very easy. You gotta, technology continue to evolve to allow the Bakken, the Eagle Ford, and West Texas Permian Basin to produce oil. This is revolutionary. Now look, so that's supply, won't last forever.

But this is important. We've been producing those now for 20 years, some of those basins, and 10 years. The amount of, total amount of oil and gas in those basins is called the resource. Is it accurately estimated, do you think? It's pretty accurate. My organization did those studies for 20 years, and others have too, but we did that resource estimates of all the big shale basins at UT Austin, Bureau of Economic Geology.

You can estimate what's in place. The reserve, and this is where language gets kind of funny, is what you can produce with today's technology at today's price. Price changes, reserves change. It's not people finagling stuff. I can produce more at a higher price. The price goes down, so the reserves change. And then you got your production. Of all those tanks, those resources, we've only produced about 5%.

Great. In those 20 years. There's 95% still down there. So how do you know how... It's hard to get out. Do you know how the magnitude of those reserves that you're describing compares to reserves like the oil sands in northern Alberta? I do. I do. Yeah. Yeah. So all those basins added up in the U.S. is about 500 billion barrels equivalent. There's a lot. Big numbers. The oil sands in Alberta...

I don't know those numbers precisely, but they're big numbers, too. They're in that range, but very hard to get out. Right, right. Completely different technology. Our first film, Switch. But if the price rises, you could get it out. And if you're allowed, and the environmental regulations allow it. Right. Because the cool part about, we featured those in our first film, the stuff at the surface that they're mining...

And for your viewer, I mean, these are conventional oil reservoir that's been impacted by surface waters and the oil, all the light stuff came off. So it's really heavy kind of tar-like oil. Right, right, right. So for your listeners, that's what we're talking about here. So you got to move tar out of rock. Not easy. You can mine it at the surface. That's pretty environmentally destructive, but that's 20%.

80% is below the surface. And what they do is they drill wells down in and they inject steam at high pressures because when you put heat on tar, it becomes a liquid and kind of a sludge. And then they flow this sludge in and they add more natural gas and other things and they make it into an oil again and move it away. So they're literally taking...

tar or heavy oil sands away that way. Huge resource. So the idea that we're going to run out of fossil fuel if we, especially if we shepherd our nuclear resources with some degree of intelligence, that's not a foreseeable future. No, it's not. And here's the biggest, here's kind of the mic drop on it all. Okay.

The US and Canada and Argentina are really the only ones producing oil and gas from shale today. We're not the only ones that have it. Right. Well, there's resources in Holland, right? In the Netherlands. Germany and Poland. Yeah. But the big ones, because these are the source rocks. It's the kitchen. This is where the oil was made millions of years ago and then leaked off.

Into these conventional reservoirs with time heat and pressure and time up comes the oil. Those are the source rocks That's what they're called mere de wheel in French, you know, the mother of oil sits down there You where you find these conventional oil and gas fields like we have in the Middle East and Russia and South America, etc There's sort there are mature source rocks leaking oil and gas. I

Some of the most mature and biggest source rocks in the world are in, you guessed it, the Middle East and Russia. They've been quietly testing them, quietly seeing, hey, let's learn that technology. How do we get ready?

Because it's more expensive. What I'm describing is more expensive. And they still have these conventional reservoirs, a lot of oil and gas in the Middle East, a lot of gas in Russia, some oil. Big basins. Right, so that's backed up by more expensive sources that are much larger. Yes, and they haven't even produced them yet. How much larger? Well, here we've literally created a production curve that is higher than it was in the 70s. King Hubbert, a famous guy that worked with my dad at Shell, said,

predicted peak oil in the US in 73. And he was right until we turned it around with shale. And now we're producing more oil than we ever have.

So it will be more than they've produced so far in each of those regions, at least. Right, right. And remember- Do you think all those stores have been discovered or is that still- They know where their source rocks are. They're quietly testing them. Yeah. Why? And guess who was against fracking? If you chase the money back in the early 2000s, the anti-fracking movement, you chase it to Russia and the Middle East, and it's not even that hard to track it.

Yeah, surprise, surprise. Sheiks for shale. I wrote a piece about that. I mean like, oh no, the US is coming back. All of a sudden OPEC doesn't control. It was a wild time. That's when fracking becomes dangerous. It's gonna cause earthquakes. Yeah, and it lights on fire and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Documentary films.

Nonsense. Yes. So, well, and you've got to do fracking, right? Let me defend that. You can't go out there like the wild west. Fracking is a major industrial operation. It is. You're lining up big trucks around a hole, putting a bunch of water under pressure. You're producing oil and gas. You've got to do it right. Well, then you hope that the developed world would do it right because that's where you'd expect it to be done right. This is where you want it to be done right. Absolutely. And it's regulated. Occasionally, there's a bad actor.

So what I'm saying here, remember we have 95% still left in the U.S. Very hard to get a lot of it out technologically, but we'll get more. Middle East and Russia haven't even started to release that because the oil they sell to the world's markets today is cheaper. Right, right. So the arbitrage is better. Yeah. Okay, they're just getting more. Well, the Saudi fields are like $5 a barrel to produce something like that. Yeah, yeah. Depends on the fields, and I've been there many times. It depends on the fields. Yeah.

But yeah, it's an incredible... There's lots of stories we won't go into, but they're just beautiful reservoirs. Right. Now, some of them are getting kind of old, and the oil doesn't last forever. Remember that leaked off, but they still have their source rocks. So I don't want to give people the impression that oil and natural gas are forever. They're not. They're naturally formed. They are...

They're not replaceable in human time scales because it's millions of years to cook those plants. But there's a lot of resource still left. To what degree does an oil field that's been abandoned replenish? Not done.

Okay, so they're really taken dry. They aren't dry. Absent new technology. They're not taken dry. We leave a bunch of oil and gas behind in shale and in conventional reservoirs. Think of your driveway, your cement driveway, when you spill a little oil on there. Can you get it out? It's stuck in that limestone. That's just limestone. Cement is limestone. It's stuck forever. It sticks to the rock forever.

And that's what secondary and tertiary recovery processes do. They put in carbon dioxide, ironically, CO2 floods. And it changes the way the oil and the rock interact. It's called wettability and releases more oil. So there's these enhancements. But you're putting something kind of that costs money, just like the bolted on coal. It's expensive. So I'm putting money in the ground to get more oil out.

I can always get more oil out, but I don't always get more money out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the things you put in have to be cheaper than the value of the oil that you produce. So what do you think a reasonable time frame, when we're thinking about ensuring future natural resources, let's say...

Given the rate of technological transformation, we can't predict out 200 years. We certainly can't predict out 100 years. When we're thinking about whether we'll run out of something, do you have any sense of what a reasonable timeframe of computation would be? We don't run out of things. We don't run out of commodities. Why? Why?

something better comes along. - Right, right. - You described it. The supply demand economics kick in and we say, well, holy crap. - We'll switch. - Let's invent something better. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And there we go. The only thing-- - This is why the economists are always at war with the biologists. - Correct.

Because the biologists have fallen into this foolish Malthusian thinking. And the economists say, no, we're innovative enough so that we switch directions. Correct. And that is... You see, the biologists should understand this because the fundamental distinction between human beings and all other animals is that our environment is not fixed. Yeah. Right? It's unbelievably malleable, which is why we can live everywhere. Right. And so as you're... There's a biological reality underneath the economic reality. It's like...

Well, we're going to run out of natural resources. No, we're going to run out of the game we play with that commodity now and then. We'll just switch to a different game with a different commodity. And in a complex industrial environment,

There's many games like that that we can switch to going on all the time. Incredibly complicated. And you see the technological uses of these things with energy always changing. I was riding over here today and there's this autonomous car just driving along with us, you know, and so...

you don't run out of oil, it becomes too expensive. And back to what we talked about earlier, we start using it for those things that only it can uniquely do. Yeah, right. Instead of transportation and burning it, well, maybe we use hybrids or maybe we use...

Fuel cells, hydrogen. There's a lot of hydrogen in the world. You gotta make it. You gotta split the water. - But we can make it with nuclear. - You take nuclear, you can split the water molecule, hydrolysis essentially. You can split the methane molecule easier, energetically cheaper. That's called steam reforming. So I make hydrogen and I can put it in a fuel cell and drive my cars. So this will, it's economics. Which one's more affordable today?

There's optionality out there in the future. We're not going to run out of oil. And I haven't even talked about one important source of, two important sources of natural gas. One is called hydrates. I don't know if you've heard of natural gas. Oceanic and permafrost. You're freezing, they're called clathrates. You're freezing gas molecules. And you're not freezing molecules. You're locking them up in ice. In the deep ocean floor, because it's cold and...

pressure and dark and in the permafrost, there's a plethora of methane locked up in ice. They're called hydrates. I don't know if you've heard of them. That's in the ocean. In the ocean and up in the permafrost. Also in the permafrost. Northern Russia, northern Canada. So that's the ice equivalent of shale rock. It's the ice. Yeah, that's a decent analogy. It's the ice equivalent of shale rock. You've locked this methane. How much of that is there? It's bigger than anything we've talked about.

Okay, okay. So the fossil fuel scarcity argument is nonsensical. They're expensive. Right. So I don't want your listener to say, oh, well, why don't we go do that? It's expensive. It doesn't matter if you get rich enough. If you get rich enough and with technology...

The cost goes down. The cost comes down. And so when you need that thing, there it is. Yeah, so at some point, there'll be a threshold of price, hypothetically, where beginning to investigate the use of hydrates will make economic sense. And then what'll happen is people will figure out how to do it, and the price will fall dramatically. Boom. And then there's this crazy thing. And I, myself, I like to say when I'm completely thought something that was completely wrong, which is often, there was a guy named Thomas Gould.

And he talked about abiogenic gas, abiotic gas, not from organics. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've wondered about that. I've read about that. Russian guy. I haven't been able to make heads or tails of it. So a really smart guy that I respect tremendously. I was with him in D.C. earlier this week named Jesse Ausubel. He's done so many cool things.

Really smart thinker. Jesse Ausubel. You'd love him on. He'd be a great guest. Okay. And he could talk about, he started many things, but one of those was this thing called the Deep Carbon Observatory. And he got for a decade a bunch of smart people together to look at whether there's natural gas, carbon, deep in the earth that couldn't have come from organics. Right, right. And they concluded, yes, there it is.

And there's a lot of work to be done, but there's natural gas in the world still from other terrestrial things that you can make CH4. It doesn't have to be organics in that sense. Carbon is a pretty common element and so is hydrogen. So that work show we got a lot of thinking to do and that's here on earth. So I might sound a little sanguine about oil and gas,

It's there at the right price for the right needs for molecules and then nuclear for electricity. Right. So we come back to the original piece here. Molecules, electricity. What are the impediments? There's regulatory impediments. There's narrative impediments. I mean, one of the reasons that we've started to communicate more and more publicly is because

we have determined at ARC, this happened at least in part because I read analysis 20 years ago that, and I think they were Lomborg's analysis, that showed that

If you make poor people rich, they pollute less. And I thought, oh my God, that's the magic key. It's like you can solve the problem of poverty, abject poverty, not relative poverty, the devastating form of life-threatening poverty, opportunity-destroying, stunting poverty,

And you can solve the environmental problem at the same time. Like, why wouldn't you do that? That's such an opportunity. We should. Right, right. So then when we aggregated together ARC, one of our foundational platforms, this intermingling of energy and environment, was...

Well, we need to change the, we certainly need to change the scarcity narrative, the Malthusian narrative. We're not going to run out, folks. There aren't too many people on the planet. There isn't finite resources in the way we conceptualize them and the way we conceptualize that because resource itself is a fungible thing.

I think the idea of natural resource is essentially a Malthusian and Marxist idea at its core. Natural resource, yeah, like what? Air, maybe. Maybe air. Because you can just breathe it. You still have to expend the energy. Clean water? No, that's not natural. That takes a lot of work. A lot. Okay, so... Yeah, so that's this thought that...

and I've been in 60 countries in the world, I've been lucky into them, the worst environments in the world, the physical environment where the worst soil, the worst water, polluted water, local air is where it's poor. Every time, every time. Well, that's also where people kill and eat all the animals when they starve, right? And you only have to do that once. And you're living- So there aren't any animals. Correct. Right. So your local resources can have limits,

And gathering of wood, for example, deforestation can have limits. In Nepal now, we take in our second film, Switch On, they've had to restrict gathering of wood. But a lot of people can only cook with biomass. And this is where LPG is so critical to them and induction cooktops because the forests are literally being...

Right. And uncontrollably. So, another thing to point out is that natural gas is an excellent substitute for deforestation. Oh, completely. Right, right. Saves the forest. So, okay. And oil saved the whales. We used to use whale oil to light our homes and for other uses. And then along comes this natural thing. And really, it was kerosene that came out of oil initially. And we put that in lanterns. And boy, it burned. And it wasn't explosive, like refined kerosene.

Gasoline's are another thing. So there's this wonderful technological transition that happens with energy systems where we keep getting denser, cleaner, and ironically, more reliable and in many ways more affordable, especially if you adjust for the time value of money. That's why we can do so much work with it.

What prevents that? You keep going back to it. That's it, man. Damn it, Scott. Why aren't we doing this? It's so perplexing to me. Yeah. Because, see, I've tried to trace it back. And a lot of this comes out of the scares, the environmental scares of the 1960s, combined with the biologists' insistence that Malthusian realities dominate the world. And they're...

The environmental concerns of the 1960s had some grounding, but they were the kind of concerns that would only emerge in a rich country. So that's the first thing we might want to notice that. When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the fact that our industrial processes were

creating a certain degree of havoc in some specified ecosystems was the sort of thing that wealthy people could afford to worry about. Right. And then did. And then Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, those people, man, they got a lot of sins on their conscience. And their notion was overpopulation in a world defined by finitude. Right. And that's had a... I can't think of a doctrine that's done more harm than that.

Maybe the communist doctrine, possibly. Marxist.

possibly that but apart from that that notion of intrinsic malthusian scarcity now there's a great story about that right because paul ehrlich who is the master biologist of the malthusian nightmare so the malthusian nightmare is the idea that human beings are best modeled as mold in a petri dish we'll multiply uncontrollably and rapaciously until we devour all of the biological substrate and then we'll all cataclysmically starve right it's like no

No, there's nothing about that that's right in the human situation, if things are mastered properly, because we can switch the substrate. So, and that's actually what, that's why we have a cortex, right? I mean, our niche is substrate switching. That's what we have evolved to do. Let me support that for a second. Hold that thought for a second. The substrate switching that's going on right now with wealth is,

So if you look at, and there's reasons this, I'm going to preface it. Some of this might not be good in terms of outcome, but here's what's happening. So I'm going to describe it. Fertility rates against wealth. Right. If you look at that, highest fertility rates down to the lowest, wealth going this way. The wealthiest countries over here and our fertility rates are below replacement of 2.1. Yep. The poorer you are, the higher your fertility rates are.

Because you need kids, for one thing, to do the basic agrarian kinds of things, and they die of a tooth infection or diarrhea. It's morally awful in a modern world, so-called. But it isn't fertility rates driving wealth. It's wealth pulling down the fertility rates. And part of the reason that's happening is, you just described it, we have a brain. People are saying, we choose not to have as many kids.

Morally, religiously, we could talk about that and you'll be better than me, but this is just what's happening. So the fertility rates in almost every country in the world have been plummeting the last 30 years, except Africa. So the point you're making is that-

In 2075, most demographers agree now, given the current trends in fertility rates plummeting, population in this world will peak. Right. And it won't plateau, Jordan. It'll plummet. It plummets. Which may be the next problem we really have to face. We're going to be going, whoa, this has got all... 2075, my kids will still be alive. And so why am I not concerned about resources?

Well, I kind of believe that's coming and there may be a human super cycle. Who knows? We may choose to have more kids and not go extinct. I think we're going to choose to have kids personally. I think so too. But I don't think we can provide enough energy for 50 years to get everybody 50 megawatt hours and 50 grand. 50, 50, 50. We can do that. And this is what Toby Rice and I have started the Energy Core, C-O-R-P-S, to try to do that very thing is to not get mud huts and light bulbs to literally help

Everybody's doing great work in this area. Lift the world into prosperity. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah. What's stopping that? Well, that's the next issue. Well, the Malthusian hypothesis is one, but you put a dagger in its heart on the population side because Ehrlich's fear, the Club of Rome, these desperate people, they presumed that

there'd be a never-ending cycle of population increase. But it's not happening. No, the opposite. Of the opposite of what they predicted is happening. Exactly, exactly. Is that wealth...

produces a maybe cataclysmic decline in the birth rate. Now, that's something we could modify and likely will, but that's the opposite of what they predicted. And then there's the famous bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon, Julian being the economist, right? Who was a polymath and a genius in a completely different intellectual category than Dr. Ehrlich, I'm afraid. And they had a famous bet, I think it was in the 1970s, when Ehrlich

was proposing that by the year 2000, commodity prices would shoot through the roof as a consequence of scarcity and everyone would be dying of starvation. And Simon bet him famously that he could offer his own basket of commodities and that

A weighted average of that commodity basket would be less expensive in 2000 than in the 1970s. Yes. And who won? Inflation adjusted, less. Right. Yeah. Simon won. Yeah. Right. Early. Right. And then the response of the Malthusians is always...

"Oh, I just got the timeframe wrong." And I can speak about that from a scientific perspective. You don't get to get the timeframe wrong. You can't say, "Eventually, I'll be right." It's no... Your theory has to define the timeframe over which your bloody prediction remains valid. And so that failed. It was wrong. Peak oil failed. A lot of these peak things

I don't think that prediction will ever be correct. Yeah, I don't either. Because of what we just talked about. Humans, as we adapt, we adapt and we choose if we're allowed to. I mean, look at China. One child policy. Oh, wait.

We're not all boys, we're not replacing. China is at 1.2 fertility rate. 1.2, India went below 2.1 last year, India. Now the population will grow their math, that's math. But eventually India peaks and China said three kids, we'll financially incentivize you to have kids. And the kids are saying,

No. Yeah. Yeah. This is big stuff. Yeah, that's for sure. I'd love to be alive in 2075 and be able to sort of see how we start to find things if growth isn't the measure of good.

What is? How does a generation of young people take care of us oldies for the next 50 years? Because there's more of us than them in rich societies. Elon Musk's robots will take care of that problem. Or he's having enough kids too. Yeah, some of his kids too. But in poor societies, it's young. There's a population pyramid. It's young.

poor societies and they die. Yeah. Maybe into the 50s and then you get into these moderate societies, wealthy, and in rich societies, the whole thing inverts. We're old. We're toppling over because of this very issue. And this is non-trivial stuff. That's really important. It's also not the problem we thought we would have.

Or some thought. Right, right. Another indication that predicting the future turns out to be a very difficult thing. Especially if you have to put a time term on it. Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, and this is partly what started to make me, apart from the fact that I sorted out this relationship between abundance and environmental stewardship, which was so important, and opportunity. But then I also began to deeply understand the fact that the climate models...

are unstable and we stack economic models on top of that unstable foundation i read this week that that and who knows how accurate this is that we've underestimated the carbon dioxide off gassing of the world's volcanic vents by a factor of four right only a factor of four which means it wasn't an estimate it wasn't even a guess it was just an error right and so we don't know and um

When you stack, we don't know how to model the climate, not properly. And when you stack an economic model on top of that, that purports to predict out 100 years. Right. Obviously, no. No. Yeah. There's very important work that the IPCC. Yeah. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself has put out in its last major report, AR6.

Working Group 1, which is kind of the technical group that looks at the models and some of the outcomes of those things. Working Group 1, Chapter 12. Then you expand all sections and go to Table 12.12 and this big thing. You showed me that. There's a table here. And I have a lot of respect for the IPCC for publishing this table because it shows...

With the highest degree of confidence, which is hard, statistically highest degree of confidence, what are the impacts, the extreme weather impacts that have emerged from the historical past so far? And the past being 100 years, because that's how far we can measure it, or less. Right. Of all these things, what has emerged from the past so far? And Jordan, there's only three things. It's gotten warmer. The oceans have gotten warmer. And one other thing. Yeah, how far down?

Yeah. And then they run it to 2050 and 2100, the composite models. In the worst warming scenario, RCP 8.5, the worst. Nobody thinks, no climate scientists really think that's going to happen. But let's run the worst. What's going to emerge? Not much more emerges. By 2100...

So if you look at the white space in that table, and again, you bring the degree of confidence lower, stuff could start to emerge with a 50-50 or 70% or 30% confidence. But when you're up there, what's really emerged with high, high confidence, there's a ton of white space in that table. It's really important to understand, I'm not saying that

I don't think that... I think humans have helped to warm the planet some. I think CO2 and methane have done that. 280 parts per million up to 430. The much greener planet. And it's greener, it's food. There's pros and there's trade-offs for everything. Of course. Everything in the world has trade-offs, okay? And change has costs, right? Change has costs. Any rapid transformation... Change scares people. Yeah, and it disrupts ecosystems. But this table says to me, hey,

Young people, especially. It's not an existential threat. Humans aren't gone in 15 years. There's some time in here to think wisely, do wisely, react wisely. And then you compound that with the population demographics and our energy access and lifting the world all up from poverty so they don't remain anchored down here. Seven billion people and we're over here.

That doesn't end well, Jordan. No, no, that's right. That never ends well. You look at any historical country, region in the world, and

And you're growing disparity. The masses rise and they say, enough. We have to do this. It's not just for them. People who have nothing to lose have nothing to lose. Right. It's very dangerous to put people in a situation where they have nothing to lose. And to enforce that on them, to say they can't develop their fossil fuel resources. Nuts. They have to transition. Africa has to transition immediately to green energy. And guess what? No longer ignorant.

I put a 40 watt panel on a Maasai house in Kenya. And the first thing they got in this little metal shed cooking indoors, you go in there, you literally can't stand the heat and the smoke. I don't know how they do it and they die. First thing has a cell phone. Everybody in the world knows what's going on in the world now. It's no longer a secret. No secrets. So this...

No secrets. This has to happen. We've got to, for everyone, bring everybody up. Got to unleash energy. Dense energy. All forms generate. I like solar and wind for certain things where it's sunny and windy. Great. They're not going to, they don't address these demands. Nuclear, natural gas for molecules, cooking fuels, etc.

Oil is still important for lots of uses, as we've described. Coal in some places to continue to lift out of poverty until they can transition away from it. Accelerate economic growth to protect the environment. Great. That's a good place to end. Look, this is what we're going to do because there's still a part of this story that hasn't been told because Scott and I haven't managed to delve into the conceptual underpinnings of the fact that despite...

the reality that Scott has outlined, which is very positive and also factually grounded and what benevolent in its essential intent, especially with regard to the world's poor. We still haven't cracked

the fundamental problem on the conceptual side, which is if this is all true, then why the hell aren't we doing it? And as fast as possible. And where did this count, this utterly destructive counter-narrative come from? And why is it still being promulgated? And so I would love to cover that on the YouTube side, but we're out of time. And so we're going to cover that on the Daily Wire side. So you can join us there. Thanks very much for your time and attention. Thanks, Scott. It's always...

on education listening to you. I appreciate it very much. We need to get you to teach a course

for Peterson Academy on energy literacy. Seriously. Now we've got a lot of courses on there that are free market, economic oriented, because we'd like to bring our content to the developing world, especially to Africa, and that'll be happening relatively quickly, as soon as we can get the translation technology up and running. But we'd like to teach free market economics, and this energy literacy is energy slash environmental literacy. This is

crucially important to invert the narrative. So, and in the proper manner, and you think for those of you out there who are listening, and maybe there aren't very many of you who have a left-wing orientation, you know, one of the things you really want to ask yourself is, are you going to serve the poor or not? Because that's hypothetically the basis of your ethos. And the most appropriate way to serve the poor is to make energy radically available reliably.

Period. So think it over from first principles and decide who's on your side and who's not. And why the people who are objecting to this are doing it. Because that's a mystery. We're going to talk about that on the Daily Wire side. Great. Thanks very much, sir. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.