https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=reaABJ5HpLk
I was very much struck by how the translation of the biblical writings jump-started the development of literacy across the entire world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor’s home was the first school, and every morning it would begin with singing. The Christian faith is a singing religion. Probably 80% of scripture memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible, a Bible printed on the press of Johann Gutenberg. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is available to everyone. From Shakespeare to modern education and medicine and science to civilization itself. It is the most influential book in all of history, and hopefully people can walk away with at least a sense of that. Some of the scientists, the media, the politicians and the NGOs have quite unreasonably hyped the alleged climate threat. Both climate and energy are complicated, nuanced subjects. They can’t be distilled down into sound bites. What we do involves trade-offs, and the politicians will not let the public be informed enough about those trade-offs to make a decision. It really is in part a problem of complexity, right? I mean, because you can imagine that there’s an attraction to relatively simple hypotheses, and maybe that’s a good one. That’s Occam’s razor in some sense, although you don’t want your explanations to be any simpler than they need to be. And so we have, well, it’s reasonable to be concerned about the environment. Part of the environment is climate. Part of climate is carbon dioxide. Maybe we should just focus on carbon dioxide, and then we’re doing the right thing. And that’s where people get led down the garden path, because you don’t get to be a planetary saviour by jumping up and down and saying carbon dioxide is bad. That’s too oversimplified. Hello, everyone. I’m continuing my investigation today into the, well, I’d say energy and environment nexus, investigating the apocalyptic nightmare that’s our hypothetical future. And I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about that, and today I get to talk to Dr. Stephen Coonan, who’s extremely well qualified to be discussing both issues, energy and environment. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and a university professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. Dr. Coonan’s current research focuses on climate science and energy technologies. Through a series of articles and lectures that began in 2014, Coonan has advocated for a more accurate, complete, and transparent public representation of climate and energy matters. He wrote a bestselling book, Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters was published in 2021. Coonan has a multi-dimensional career. He served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy from 09 to 11, where he led the inaugural Quadrennial Technology Review. Before joining the government, he spent five years as Chief Scientist for British Petroleum, helping them think through the development of alternatives to fossil fuels. For almost 30 years, he was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, and he also served there for nine years as Vice President and Provost, facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers and catalyzing multiple research initiatives. In addition to the National Academy of Sciences, Coonan’s memberships included the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Jason Group of Scientists, who solve technical problems for the US government. He’s been a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analysis since 2014 and is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He served similarly for Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven and Argonne National Labs. He has a B.S. in Physics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from MIT. He’s the author of the classic 1985 textbook, Computational Physics, and has published 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of Physics, Astrophysics, Scientific Computation, Energy Technology and Policy, and Climate Science. Looking forward very much to talking to Dr. Coonan today. Okay, so the first thing that we need to point out to everyone is that Dr. Coonan is by any standard an outstanding scientist. 200 publications would put him in at minimum the top 1% of published research scientists. So in Caltech’s a deadly institution, or at least it was, up there with MIT, and one of the jewels in the University of California system. And then it not only… No, no, no, no, it’s a private university. It’s not one of the universities. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Oh, that’s right, it’s Caltech, Caltech. Yeah, yeah, my mistake, my mistake. A small west coast technical school as we used to describe it. Right, right, right, right. So do you think that there’s a STEM school in the U.S. that has a better reputation than Caltech other than MIT? Well, you know, I used to like to say when I know both institutions very well, I used to like to say Caltech was like the best fifth of MIT. It’s about one fifth the size. But in terms of, again, it depends on which discipline you’re looking at, but overall you can’t really distinguish between Caltech and MIT in some domain, Stanford. These are all really good schools. Right, right. And the best of science and engineering, not only the education, but for this discussion more importantly, the research. Okay, so now you also… Another thing for everyone to consider here is that Dr. Kuhnen has also not only worked as a researcher and a lecturer, etc., but he also worked as a scientific administrator. I think that’s probably the right phraseology within the university system. So was able to evaluate and track and learn about a variety of different scientific disciplines, but then also worked in the private sector for BP. We should address that right off the bat. And then in government. So you really have a broad, very, very broad background professionally. Now, I suppose the thing, the appointment in principle that makes you least credible on the climate denial front is probably your posting at British Petroleum because… Yeah. So, Kel, let’s talk about that. So why doesn’t that just make you a shill for BP? Right. So this is about 1980, sorry, 2004. And my name had been fed into a search that BP was running for the chief scientist. And eventually I get a call from the then CEO, John Brown, and he says, come be chief scientist. And I said, I don’t know anything about the oil business or the energy business. I know energy is conserved. I’m a physicist, but I don’t know about practical energy. And he says, don’t worry. You’ll learn. And they brought me in not to help them find oil or gas. They were very good at that. They didn’t need me to do that. But to figure out what Beyond Petroleum, which was the tagline at the time, what Beyond Petroleum really meant in terms of technologies, in terms of viable businesses. And so I picked up the family and we moved from Pasadena to London. I moved from academia to the private sector. And I like to say for the first couple years I was the world’s highest paid graduate student because I had run of the company, run of the industry, just learning all this stuff about practical energy. In the end, I think I helped them quite a bit over the five years I was there, teaching them how to think about energy, what technologies were promising, what ones might actually make a difference in terms of the environment, but also in terms of a viable business. So it was a wonderful experience. And I would assert one of the problems we have today is that people who talk about energy don’t really understand energy systems or the energy businesses. And any academic who’s working in those fields, I would say, go spend a year in the private sector because it will change your perspective enormously. Okay, well, let’s delve into that a little bit. So you opened up two avenues of questioning there, I would say. One is, well, three, why did you decide to leave academia and go into the private sector? What did you learn about, say, beyond petroleum? I mean, first of all, I think it’s rather peculiar in some real sense that British petroleum has as its motto, beyond petroleum, given that the fossil fuel industry is so necessary and stable. But it’s very interesting that they have done that. And so I’m very curious to pick your brain about what you actually saw as promising, if anything, on the alternative energy front. And then I guess the third question is, what did you learn as a consequence of working in private industry that you really didn’t know when you were working in academia? Oh, yeah. Okay. Wow, that’s a very broad palette. Let me just talk, firstly, why did I decide to leave? I had been provost, which is second in command at Caltech, for nine years when BP approached me. Nine years is a long time to spend in any job, particularly one that’s as demanding as trying to corral 280 faculty together and oversee the research operation. I had always been interested in the private sector. And through discussions with colleagues, I understood that energy and climate were hot topics and well worth investigating. So, you know, something, as usual, I took a leave first to see how it would work out and was on leave for two years while I was getting settled into BP. And those were the motivations. I was just interested in energy at the time. Of course, there was the opportunity to go live in London and get exposed to a much bigger world than I was involved with in Pasadena. Right, right. So a lot of that was driven by curiosity. Sounds like it. Yeah, a lot of my life is about curiosity. Yeah, it sounds like it. I’ve always had fun doing what I’m doing. And with the physicist tools and physicist orientation, you just like to do that. I mean, as one of my elders once told me when I was a young faculty member, a PhD in theoretical physics is a license to poke your nose into anybody’s business. And I’ve just had great fun doing that. Right. So, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to return now to this issue of what did you learn on the energy front? I mean, what did you see as promising, let’s say, outside of petroleum? And in what manner and why was BP interested in that? Yeah, so BP was interested like a lot of energy companies at the time and still for several reasons. One is, well, the purpose of a private company is to make money and to do it legally and to do it predictably. They have to do that in the environment, the regulatory environment, the technology, the economics, these days the stakeholder environment. And so I think the CEO at the time, John Brown, was one of the first leaders in the oil business to recognize we had better take this low-carbon business seriously, if only because that’s where the stakeholders and the government were going. I think that nicely segues into, you know, what did I learn about business? We can talk about energy in a minute. But what I learned is, first of all, it is about making money and it is about reliably delivering a quality product. It is about taking risk, particularly in the oil and gas business. You invest a lot of money upfront in the expectation that over 20 or 30 years the revenues from the oil you produce, the gas you produce, will pay back. So it’s a lot of capital upfront, big bets, sometimes risky, in a very complicated regulatory environment, particularly for an international company. So, you know, one of the things I came to admire were the people who led these organizations, how they managed to juggle so many different dimensions at once. It’s a lot harder than just sitting in your office and scribbling on a piece of paper about equations, right? It’s very complicated. Another thing I learned is that energy is about scale. You know, unless you’re really going to introduce a technology that’s going to make a material difference, at least at the few percent level nationally or globally, you’re not really doing very much. You might be making money, which is fine, but if you want to impact the energy system, it’s about scale. And so I’ll give you one example just to illustrate that. I was once talking to a famous guy who shall remain nameless, was not an energy expert, but was a policy guy. And he says, I know what the answer is. We take all of the carbon in the used tires and recycle it into fuel. And, okay, he said this with great passion. And so I sat down for a minute after we talked or even as we were talking and I calculated how many cars in the U.S. and how many tires and so on and how much carbon is there. And it turns out it can’t make a difference at all. Right. It’s very tiny. And so people don’t understand the scale. Well, there’s nothing more annoying than arithmetic. Yeah. Right. Well, you know, that’s that I was a physicist. That’s my first inclination. How big is it? How much is it going to make a difference? How much is it going to cost and so on? In the Department of Energy, we used to talk about new technologies as impacting quads of energy. The U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year. Quads, barrels of oil. The world uses 100 million barrels of oil a day about. And so what’s a quad? What’s a quad? A quad is 10 to the 18th joules, roughly. It’s actually 10 to the 15th BTUs. But it’s just about 10 to the 18th joules. All right. And the U.S. uses about 100 quads of energy a year. The world as a whole uses about 550 or 600 quads a year. So think about that for a second in terms of energy. The U.S. is only four and a half percent of the world’s population, but we use about 20 percent of its energy. So not because we’re energy pigs or energy gluttons, but in fact because that energy improves our quality of life enormously. Well, people aren’t going to be energy pigs or energy gluttons as a general rule because energy isn’t free. And so everyone is motivated to the degree that they can be motivated by reasonable energy pricing to be as effective and efficient as they possibly can be. And I suppose maybe you can produce a small increment in that efficiency by raising the price, but that doesn’t strike me as a particularly good solution. So what did you see as promising on the alternative to fossil fuel front? Promising? Yeah. So, Dwight, and let me answer that question in the present day rather than in the 15 years ago when I was thinking hard about those things for BP. You know, first of all, it’s really hard to get rid of chemical fuels for transportation. If you think about a truck or a train or a plane, you need the energy density that fossil fuels provide. You know, we run our cars on gasoline in Europe in diesel, and we want to shift to electric, and I think that shift is slowly underway, though there are many barriers. But when you put the nozzle of the pump in your car, you’re wielding about 10 megawatts of power. Whereas if we charge up the battery on an electric car, we’re talking about one hundredth of the power flow. So it’s really hard to beat the energy in chemical fuels. And so some fraction of the world is still going to run on chemical fuels. The fuels we use today emit carbon, fossil carbon, because we dig the oil out of the ground and use it to make gasoline, which then enters the atmosphere. We could make those fuels out of biological materials, and we’ve been doing that in the U.S. by making corn ethanol, which is a phenomenally inefficient and not very environmentally friendly way of doing it. But there are other biological ways of getting carbon into fuel. And when I was in the Department of Energy and in BP, this intersection of biology and energy, making chemical fuels out of biological materials, was something we thought was very promising. We started a whole institute at Berkeley and Illinois to pursue that. I think it’s still in the research and development stage, but if we’re going to have transportation fuels for heavy transportation, then I think this biofuels is going to be very important. Do you worry about the competition between crop land utilized for biofuels and food production? Are you thinking more about oceanic, like algae or LJ production? No, no, algae doesn’t. It’s kind of tough, actually, for various technical reasons. We would grow things, but the idea was to use plants that do not compete for farmland, or to use the waste part of the food, the cellulose, rather than the carbohydrates. Is there anything on that front that’s viable, like commercial and at scale, at the moment? No, no, no. We can’t do it. Which is really the issue. You’ve got to break down the cellulose, which is the structural material of the plants, into sugars and then ferment the sugars. The cost right now is still two to three times what gasoline costs. We could say, and people do say, well, damn the cost, that it’s real costly if the planet burns up in 100 years. Why not just force people to, or require or incentivize people to pay three or four times as much for their energy usage now? Well, I think, as we’ve seen in France and other places, when you try to do that, people get very upset. And in fact, there’s tremendous disruption. And in fact, this whole energy transition that we’re talking about, if you do it too rapidly, it’s tremendously disruptive because energy touches every part of our lives. And so you’ve got to go slow. There is no climate crisis. We can get onto that in a bit. Let us take our time, develop the technologies, introduce them gracefully, and eventually reduce emissions as required. Yeah, well, that graceful introduction doesn’t seem to me to be something that can be managed from a top-down perspective very straightforwardly. I mean, first of all, we’re seeing a tremendous amount of instability on the energy provision front in Europe at the moment, partly because of winter, partly because of the war, partly because of, I would say, clueless hypothetically environmentally-oriented policies in the past. So let me lay out a couple of the problems I see with renewables and tell me what you think about that. Sure. Well, the first is that obviously, and this has really been a problem in the UK recently, you don’t get a lot of electricity when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. And we’ve had prolonged periods of wind drought in the winter in the UK, and that’s a real catastrophe. Now, people object— Do you know the German word dunkelflauter? Yes. Have you heard that word before? Yes. Yes, okay. Which, for other people who haven’t heard it, it means when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, so you get no electricity from wind or solar. The German translation is something like a dark stillness. Right, right. Well, and so we hear a lot of noise about the cost benefit and effectiveness of renewables, but the cost of renewable energy on the wind and solar front is generally estimated at the cost when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, not when it’s dark and there’s no wind at all, because the price actually moves towards the infinite at that point. Now, the problem, technically, as far as I can tell, apart from whatever environmental damage wind and solar might be producing in and of themselves, like the death of birds and bats, for example, the big problem seems to me to be twofold. One is that they’re cyclic on a daily basis and a weekly basis and a monthly basis, and we don’t have good storage, and it isn’t obvious we’re going to have it soon. And storage itself, everything that needs to be mined and so forth to make batteries, has a non-negligible environmental cost. So it doesn’t have to be storage. So let me back up for a second. Yeah. Okay. So we’re on the electrical grid now, and we would like our grid to have three qualities. First of all, it should be reliable. The reliability standard in North America is like one day out of a decade that the bulk power system should go down. The second is we would like it to be affordable. Yeah. If electricity prices get too high, it’s a terrible disruption. And the third thing is we’d like it to be clean, both in a local pollution sense, but also in a CO2 emission sense. So reliable, affordable, and clean. I like to think about the old joke during the Cold War, you know, smart, honest, and communist, choose two out of three. All right? So reliable, affordable, clean. We have a reliable and affordable system based on coal and natural gas. You can be reliable and clean if you do nuclear energy or you do carbon capture and storage with gas or coal. Or you can be affordable and clean with wind and solar, but you can’t have all three. The most expensive part of a useful grid is the renewable energy. The most expensive part of a useful grid is the reliability. Right. It’s not the wind and solar. And because you can have up to a month’s worth of dunkelfauta, where the wind and solar are not producing at all, the backup system, whatever it is, needs to be at least as capable as the wind and solar system, which means the cost is going to be at least double because wind and solar are the cheapest. We all have done detailed studies using real weather data and costs for wind and solar and nuclear or batteries and so on. And it turns out that we’re going to at least double, if not triple, the cost of electricity if we go to a renewable heavy grid. And I don’t think that’s a very good thing at all. Well… You know, wind and solar can be a supplement to an existing grid, but they can never be the backbone. 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Most of their refunds are over 10, 5,000 per person, people can stop scrabbling around in the dirt and burning everything and eating everything in sight. And they can start to think about what sort of environment they’d like to have for their children and grandchildren. The technical name is the Kuznets curve, which you probably know. Right, right, right, right. And so then I thought, oh well, isn’t this interesting? What this should mean is that if we wanted to, we could work really hard internationally to make energy cheap, and we could pull billions of people, the remaining people in the world, out of abject poverty. And the consequence of that would be that they would start to become locally concerned about environmental maintainability and sustainability. And then everyone would have enough to eat and they’d all be educated, plus the planet would be better off. And then the question was, okay, and here’s a question that we can really delve into. Why the hell aren’t we doing this? It’s like instead we’re buying this crazy apocalyptic narrative that’s making the planet worse, that’s driving energy costs up, that’s destabilizing us sociopolitically, when as far as I can tell, the pathway forward to abundance and sustainability is pretty damn obvious and also not particularly expensive. So what the hell’s going on? So I quote two folks relevant to this. One is H.L. Mencken, who was a journalist writing in the early part of the 20th century in the US, very astute, very acerbic. And he’s got a line in one of his books, which I’ll try to reproduce. The purpose of practical politics is to keep the electorate alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety. And you see the politicians grabbing on to these issues, whether it’s the climate, whether it’s immigration. They do it on both sides, all sides, the missile gap in the 60s. Whatever the truth was behind these, the politicians amp it up in order to get the electorate to actually do something. So that’s one quote. The second is there was this guy named Anthony Downs, who was an economist working in the 60s through the 90s or 2000s. He was first at UCLA and then at Brookings. So he was quite on the left. He had a number of insights to his credit, but one of them was what he calls the issue attention cycle, namely some issue, whether it’s pesticides or climate, bubbles among the experts for a while. Nobody pays much attention to it. It suddenly bursts into the public consciousness and everybody gets both alarmed but also enthusiastic about the ease with which they’re going to solve it. Then everybody discovers, boy, this is going to be really hard to solve. And eventually the issue fades with time or morphs into something else. And I think we are at kind of that third phase now with the climate where everybody is realizing just how hard and I would say almost impossible it’s going to be to reduce emissions. Certainly net zero by the end of the century looks like it’s just not going to happen at all. And so I think that’s what’s going on. Well, I’m going to add some psychological layering to that. You can tell me what you think of this. Well, so first of all, people are tilted towards attention paid to negative events. And so, for example, people are much more hurt by a loss of five dollars than they are made happy by a gain of five dollars. So we’re quite loss sensitive. Now, I think the reason we’re loss sensitive is that while you can only be so happy, but you can be 100 percent dead. And so the more sensitive threat in terms of magnitude of response per unit of reinforcement makes sense given that we’re finite and vulnerable. And then we also have the problem that any given threat, almost any given threat, could in principle be personally and socially apocalyptic. So, for example, it could be the case that the aches and pains that you’re experiencing today are the ground zero for an epidemic that will kill one third of the United States. Right. I mean, it’s very unlikely, but it happened with the Black Death. And I mean, the possibility of an apocalyptic outcome is always non zero. And in fact, in personal life, it’s always 100 percent because the worst thing that could possibly happen to you will for sure happen to you. And so eventually happen. Well, right. And so I think one of our problems is, is that because we’re sensitive to negative information and because there’s always a potential apocalypse bubbling away in the background, it’s very hard for us to distinguish collectively between threats that are valid apocalyptically and those that aren’t. And we tend to err on the side of panic, let’s say. And that wasn’t such a bad thing when our responses weren’t as large as the potential problems. Because now what happens is that if we stampede in one direction, we’re so powerful that the bloody stampede can be much worse than the problem. We’ll be back in one moment. First, we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan’s new series, Exodus. The Hebrews created history as we know it. You don’t get away with anything. And so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the tyrant and violate your conscience without cost. You will pay the piper. It’s going to call you out of that slavery into freedom, even if that pulls you into the desert. And we’re going to see that there’s something else going on here that is far more cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine. The highest ethical spirit to which we’re beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of freedom against tyranny. Yes, exactly. I want villains to get punished. But do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price? That’s such a Christian question. You know, Bill Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2018, I think, for one of the things he wanted for was the realization that there’s an optimal way in which to deal with the problem. The realization that there’s an optimal way in which to decarbonize. If you do it too rapidly, it’s too disruptive and you deploy immature technology. You do it too slowly. Carbon dioxide builds up and promotes a greater risk. So I think people need this kind of multi-decade, if not century perspective on making these changes, but also going back in time, the realization that we have managed much worse threats and crises. And as Bjorn Lomborg says, we should cool it a bit, relax, think it through, and do it in a deliberate manner. Yeah, well, we’re also not that good, particularly now, at adopting, say, a few centuries long time frame. And it’s not surprising because we don’t live that long. But I mean, if you look at medieval Europe, there was the capacity for sustained imagination. So a lot of the great cathedrals, which were amazing engineering projects for their time, were construed over multiple centuries. People who started them knew they wouldn’t finish them. So there was that sense of long term continuity. But maybe one of the byproducts of a very efficient and hyperproductive capitalist society is that we tend to have a shorter time frame for expectation of results. You know, and there’s obviously benefits to that, right? Because why the hell not fix the problem in the next quarter if you can? But there’s going to be some issues that require a time scale of centuries. I mean, I think the Biden administration… Go ahead, please. No, we have been seduced perhaps by the digital revolution where the technologies change every couple years, right? I mean, if you go back a decade or two, we were using eight-track tapes and so on. And now, of course, it’s all MP3s or MP4s or whatever. Energy is very different. The systems need to work as a system. The facilities last decades. And we demand high reliability. So energy changes on multi-decade time scales. It doesn’t change every year or two. And people have come to expect that things can change rapidly when, in fact, there are good physical and economic reasons why energy cannot change. Right. Well, so that’s a complex cognitive problem too, right? To be able to distinguish between those problems that are amenable to rapid solution and those problems that aren’t, that’s not a trivial cognitive exercise. It’s not obvious a priori, especially if you don’t have specialized knowledge. Right. Or if you don’t have experience. I mean, not to knock the younger generation, I have three kids myself, and they’re all wonderful people. But if you’re a 22-year-old just having graduated from undergraduate education, you don’t have the perspective. I certainly didn’t. And getting this perspective through life experience, through reading more and understanding more about the world gives you a different view of these things. Some people say that, you know, you and I will not be around to see the worst consequences of climate change. But we have seen the world navigate far more difficult. Yes, yes. And to do it successfully, not without pain and turmoil, but we will persist as a species. Well, yes. And I mean, I would say that things have turned out quite a lot better than I presumed they would when I was young. I mean, and how old are you, Dr. Kuhnen? I’m 71. OK. So you’re about, you’re 11 years older than me. So, you know, both of us grew up in the Cold War era, and I would say our apocalypse was probably nuclear. And it seems to me that we had more reason to assume that the nuclear threat was a genuine apocalyptic nightmare than the climate apocalypse have now, given what happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis and then again in the 1980s. We were damn close a couple of times, and we might be on the threshold now with regards to this war with Russia. So who the hell knows? Right. But it was certainly the case that among people in my generation, there were a substantial number of young people who were seriously affected enough psychologically by the ever-present threat of nuclear war, let’s say, to be very demoralized and disenchanted about the future, to think, well, why the hell bother? Because the probability we’re going to end up in a nuclear winter is so high that it’s just pointless to do anything. And then there was the usual murmurings in the background about overpopulation and so forth and coming scarcity and all of that. And then really what’s happened since then is that pretty much everything globally has got way better than anybody could have possibly imagined. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And in very surprising ways. So not only is the planet greener, but it’s much better fed. And obesity is a way bigger problem than starvation, and starvation almost never occurs except for political reasons. Right. Distribution issues. Yeah, exactly. And so all things… Literacy has gone up, communications, mobility, health, longevity. I mean, as I said, over 120 years, the world has improved like it has never improved before. Yeah. Yeah, so then we have… And I mean, it’s not like we’re getting stupider. And I’m a bit concerned on the AI front, you know, but so far the additional computational resources we’ve been able to put at our disposal have been used in a fairly intelligent way. I mean, China is kind of worrisome on the totalitarian front. But it isn’t obvious to me that China is going to be particularly successful in their totalitarian ambitions. The Chinese themselves seem to be getting pretty damn sick of having the state interfere with absolutely everything they do every second of their lives. So I could easily see China undergoing a collapse that’s something akin to what happened to the Soviet Union in 1989. Their system is just too damn unwieldy. Right. You know, you see these people in Iran clamouring away for freedom. And so, you know, maybe we’ll see a positive development on that front. That might be nice. And so I just don’t see any… OK, first of all, I don’t see any reason for an apocalyptic outlook. We could make things a hell of a lot better than they are now. Very, very… Absolutely. Now, who do you see operating at the international level on the leadership front that you regard as… Or do you see anyone that you regard as a credible advocate for like a sensible nexus of environment and energy policies? You know, it’s very tough to find that because if you speak out against the prevailing catastrophe narrative, you get shouted down. And you get no traction at all. But what I do think is that, again, there are techno-economic realities that will eventually cause the system to do the right thing. I talk in private to leaders of energy companies, to politicians, finance folks. And I think if you and I were having that conversation with them in private, there wouldn’t be too much disagreement. But many of these leaders feel captive or beholden not to shareholders, but to stakeholders. And they dare not say anything that is off the narrative. A lot of that’s just straight outright cowardice in my opinion. I’ve lost… I mean, you wrote this book, Unsettled, and people went after you. But look at you. You’re alive. You seem to be thriving. Your book was quite successful. I mean, how did you escape the apocalyptic consequences of council culture? How did you manage that? I think one of the foundations of the book or one of the principles when I wrote it is that I would only use material that was out of the IPCC reports or the quality research literature or the primary data itself. In other words, I wasn’t making anything up. It’s all traceable back to those gold standard sources. And so people can accuse me, as they have, of cherry picking or not telling the whole story. Of course, I have responses to all of that. But by and large, they have a very hard time criticizing what I’ve written. They can criticize me, show for the oil industry, not a climate scientist, a denier, et cetera, et cetera. But by and large, I’ve only gotten very positive reactions from other people who’ve actually read the book. I mean, I can tell you stories about some of the nonsense criticisms. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you’ve been able to do this and you haven’t been hung and drawn and quartered by the horrible mob. I know that being mobbed can be very unpleasant. And I know many people who’ve been canceled. And it’s a life changing experience. So I’m not trying to minimize that. But you’d hope that there would be a modicum of courage on the political front so that some people could come out and say, well, you know, we don’t really need to go down this idiot limits to growth route that we’ve been pursuing expensively and counterproductively for 60 years. We could just do what we could to make energy more abundant and cleaner and cheaper for poor people. And we could raise their we could raise their sights to the future. As the measures that governments are implementing to try to get to that unattainable future, whether it’s bans on internal combustion engines or increased renewables that are going to make the grid expensive and unreliable, eventually people will be impacted directly and they’ll be mad because it’s not being done in a graceful or thoughtful way. And I think people will then say, why are we doing all this again? You know, the U.S. is only 13 percent of global emissions. And if the U.S. went to zero emissions tomorrow, it would be negated by a decade’s worth of growth in the rest of the world. And so, you know, the best thing the U.S. can do is develop technologies, right, to try to get there and not make massive changes itself. Well, it’s also the case that the U.S. did lower its carbon output by a substantial amount. And the reason for that was fracking, which is not something that the environmental apocalypse would have predicted. In fact, quite the contrary. That’s that’s the major reason, the substitution of gas for coal. But another reason is that the renewables have grown in electricity generation in the U.S. I don’t know the exact number now, but wind is something like 13 percent of U.S. electricity generation. It’s got reliability issues. It’s got land issues. It’s got materials issues. But that’s another reason emissions have come down somewhat. Right. So you’re so all things considered, you’ve remained fundamentally optimistic. You think that’s a temperamental characteristic or do you think that was driven by by your exploration of the on the ground realities? And then I want to talk to you, too, about, you know, you said you’ve been accused of not being a climate scientist. And first of all, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a climate scientist. Right. I mean, that’s that’s not our category that a scientist falls into. You your your basic training was in physics. So maybe we’ll return to that just for a moment. What what makes you a credible observer on that front? But let’s deal with the first issue first. You know, I think temperamentally, I’m optimistic. I think my mother, who’s still with us at age 91, is was the youngest by about 15 years of four children. And she grew up and still has incredible optimism about things. So I think it’s partly in my psychological DNA. But, you know, it’s it’s also I’m very quantitative. I do numbers. And when you look at the numbers, which are, you know, somebody once said, I think it was Kelvin or Rutherford, unless you can express it numbers, your knowledge is of the most meager kind. And so most people don’t do that. But I do. And I’ve dug into the climate energy story. And when you look at the numbers, as I think you said a while ago, it’s not so bad. There’s no apocalypse in the future. Yes, there are issues, but we will navigate them. So I think it is a combination of both being informed but also being naturally optimistic. Right. Well, that a bit of a tilt towards optimism is what moves people out into the world. And, you know, I also don’t know so much if that’s properly characterized as optimism or something characterized more accurately, let’s say, as useful faith. I mean, there are reasons to assume that things will go to hell in a hand basket, but there’s reasons to assume that we could manage as well as we have in the past or better. And I think that one of the attributes that tilts us towards managing well in the future is the willingness to have some faith in our ability to adapt and to and to do the right thing. And, you know, when we’re constantly presenting young people with the picture of human beings as destructive environmental and cultural forces, we squash that natural faith, which is, well, yeah, there’s problems because being alive is a problem. But we have a host of potential solutions at hand. And we’re not without resources in the face of our challenges. And the resources are multiplying. This is the second immoral dimension of what the current scene looks like. Not only are we trying to deny six and a half billion people adequate, reliable, affordable energy, but we are particularly in the West depressing the younger generation in a most unreasonable way. They don’t want to have children. They think the world is going to go to hell in the next 10 years and so on. That’s complete nonsense. And then somebody needs to stand up and say that. Not only do they not want to have children, they don’t even want to have sex. I mean, we’ve really demoralized a whole generation. And, you know, there is something terribly immoral about that, because my hypothesis is that if you think poor people should starve because energy prices should go up, and if you think that demoralizing young people is a good way to ensure the long term sustainability of the planet, you and I are not on the same side. Not even a little bit. I think it’s absolutely reprehensible that we’re casting people back into poverty, both in the West, because we’re doing that to poor people who are marginal now, but more importantly in the developing world. And this continued demoralization is absolutely inexcusable. I would love to engage with some of the leaders. John Kerry, Bill Gates, my former friend and colleague Ernie Moniz, who was Secretary of Energy, a very good Secretary of Energy, all of whom are on the more alarmist side of these things, I’d love to have this kind of conversation with them and ask them about those two immoral dimensions. It’s very hard to get a serious discussion. I recently have done four debates with credible people on the other side, presented the arguments against rapid decarbonization, and I’m proud to say I won all four debates. We should put those in the links to the description so if you could send those. Who did you debate? I will send those to you. So the first one was against a climate scientist from Texas A&M, Andrew Dessler, who is much more of a climate scientist than he is an energy guy, and you need both here. The second debate was, and probably in my view the best one, was against Daniel Schrag, who’s a professor of earth sciences at Harvard, and has been and still remains a good friend and colleague. The third was against an energy economist at Columbia named Gernot Wagner, and then the fourth was again against Andrew Dessler, who wanted a rematch. The problem with talking about this is you need to understand both the climate science and the energy side. There aren’t many people, by virtue of my background I have perhaps been exposed to both in ways that most people have not. Well that’s another problem with regards to let’s say public opinion is that, well first of all, most people aren’t climate scientists, that’s for sure. In fact, they’re a very small percentage of the population. And then as you pointed out, if you add the additional requirement of having some expertise on the energy front, you’re taking a very small fraction of a very small fraction of people. And maybe you can count them on, I don’t know, maybe there’s under a hundred of them in the world. There just aren’t that many. And so part of this is also the case that the whole species is starting to wrestle with problems of a level of abstraction and a level of magnitude that are really unforeseen. And so we don’t, when I worked for the UN committees that were working on the sustainable goals, one of the first things I realized was, oh, no one’s an expert in sustainable development. That’s not an area of expertise. No one knows how to do this. And so we are in some sense casting around in the dark. And part of the problem with that is we do fall into our apocalyptic heuristics very, very easily, especially if that can be weaponized for political purposes. It’s a little hard on young people, it’s a little hard on poor people. But you know, you need to approach these problems with an inquisitive mind because there are so many different dimensions and you want to go out and learn enough about them to be able to ask the right kind of questions to the expert. Yeah, well, you know, the other thing we do to young people, this really made me disenchanted in some ways with what was happening in universities. There were many reasons for that disenchantment. You know, the other thing that we convince young people of right when they’re in their messianic phase, that’s a Piagetian developmental stage between about 16 and 20, is that the way forward morally to take your place in broader society is by taking the route of political activism. And that basically means that what you do to be a moral person is to identify the perpetrators of the apocalyptic catastrophe and then go make life miserable for them. Instead of teaching young people that, no, you should actually spend a few decades developing the knowledge necessary to make some real progress on these fronts, you shouldn’t assume that there’s some cabal of enemies that you’ve identified when you’re 18. And you certainly shouldn’t assume that the mere fact that you’re out waving a placard and protesting means that you’re on the right side of history or even in relationship to your own psychological development. So my interaction with young people these days is mostly through the courses I teach at NYU. I teach climate and then energy, two separate courses to master’s level students. And fortunately, I think already there are a mix of engineers and MBAs, so they have this desire to actually do something positive rather than simply, as you say, wave flags and complain about what’s being done. And what I find in both courses is how much the eyes get opened up, whether it’s about the climate science, which I teach almost entirely out of the IPCC and the research literature, or the energy, which I teach, you know, both the technologies, the business, the regulation, and so on. And, you know, I think it’s gratifying to see eyes open up. That’s one of the great benefits of being a teacher, as you know. But also it shows to me that people can spend a little bit of time to learn some of these basics and then be critically questioning, inquisitive about these very complicated but important subjects. Right. Well, and it’s also very heartening to know that you can do that at NYU and that that’s working. You know, when I was about to publish the book, I sent the manuscript to both the president and the provost, whom I know well, since former academic administrators tend to hang out together. And their response was, you know, Steve, I don’t know if I agree with everything you’ve written, but you’ve got a right to say it, and we support that. Well, thank God for that. So, all right. Well, look, that’s probably a good place, time to close. We’re at about the end of our 90 minutes here on YouTube. I’m going to talk to Dr. Kuhnen a bit more on the Daily Wire Plus platform. As many of you who are watching and listening know, I like to take my guests and do some investigation into their particular biography because I think it’s useful for people to hear about how people’s successful destiny makes itself manifest in their lives. And it also helps please me on the clinical front because I like finding out about people’s lives. And so we’re going to switch over to the Daily Wire Plus platform to do that for about half an hour. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and for bringing what you know to the attention of all the people who will be watching this and listening across the podcast platforms and on YouTube. And it’s very it’s quite positive to to be speaking with so many people who are knowledgeable now about the climate apocalypse and who have drawn the conclusion that this is something that we can handle and that we could handle in a very good way if we were even remotely careful. And hopefully that will be as you pointed out, maybe the tide is starting to turn on this and we’re going to start to understand that we can think in terms of centuries and that we can actually manage this.