 Yes, hi everybody. This is Nick Gillespie with Reason and I'm joined by my Reason colleague Zach Weismueller and we're going to have a live stream conversation with Michael Schellenberger, the best-selling author of Apocalypse Never. Michael, thanks for joining us. Great to be with you guys. And I just want to say at the outset we're going to be talking about the environment and natural kind of natural disasters and things like that. We won't be talking about your views on mental health and things like that just so if anybody was coming here because you did a great interview with Zach about your book San Francisco and related issues so people can go to that if they want to talk about that. Right now we are talking about the winter. Winter is coming in Europe and it looks like it's going to be a real shit show. Zach, do you want to run a clip of Michael talking to Congress earlier this year and then we're going to we're going to kick off from there. Here to the expansion of natural gas is the war on natural gas. President Biden is waging war on natural gas by refusing to allow expanded gas production on federal lands and offshore. His appointees at FERC are blocking the expansion of natural gas pipelines as well as LNG export terminals. The result is that we do not have enough oil and gas production for ourselves and to provide for our allies in Europe. We've been in this energy crisis for a year now. I was writing about the impacts in Europe a year ago. We should have been acting then to be expanding gas production to save our allies in Europe who are going to have rationing and industrial collapse this winter. Michael, can you explain what do you mean when you talk about a war on gas? What what what comprises the war on gas? Well there's so much to it actually it's it's pretty amazing. So there's at the ground level there's been a very successful effort to block pipelines. So you may know that there's a pipeline that Senator Manchin has been trying to get completed called the Mountain Valley pipeline from West Virginia. There's pipelines that should be going from the gas oil and gas fields of Pennsylvania to the east coast particularly to Boston. Boston has to import natural gas by ship which is much more expensive. It's called liquefied natural gas and they end up burning oil during the winters. Last several winters they burn oil for electricity which is very dirty and inefficient. So what what you want from an economic and environmental point of view is you want to have natural gas continue to replace coal and that means you need a lot of pipelines around the country. The other thing that you need is you need more liquefied natural gas terminals that basically cool the gas to I guess a negative couple hundred degrees centigrade. They're pretty amazing machines. They then convert the gas into liquids then they're shipped to Asia and Europe. Huge market for that and it will continue to boom. It's great for Americans great for American jobs. There's some concerns that you don't want to do so much of that that it increases natural gas prices at home. But there's I think ways around that particularly that's the role of having abundant pipelines and gas. And then we've seen at the political level Biden has approved fewer oil and gas leases for public lands and offshore than any president since president Truman. It's not even really an accurate comparison because there just wasn't that many oil and gas leases being given out back then. But basically Biden has just just not given out leases. And then there's in the financial sector this so-called ESG movement which stands for environment social and governance. They have definitely reduced private sector investment in oil and gas. I will say whenever I point these things out people point out that also the oil and gas industry is not making some of the increases of production that it could be making. I agree with that although I will say that I think that if you when you talk to folks in that sector they're kind of like we don't have any investment certainty because we've got a government that says it wants to shut us down. So these private sector decisions are being made with an eye because the public sector the government determines so much of how much oil and gas production there will be and are we going to shift all of our production for energy to China in the form of renewables and electric cars. So the war on natural gas I would say if I'd have simplified I'd say it's happening the grassroots level at the governmental federal level and at the private sector level. Before I bring Zach in could you talk a little bit about the ESG component of this. You know part of it so part of it is that producers might not be doing as much as they can because they're not sure of the regulatory framework. I think that kind of speaks for itself. But why would companies not you know why would companies that can produce a lot of natural gas not do it you know like where is where is the shareholder pushback coming from and is that really a problem if you know the people who own a company say you know what we don't want to produce as much of this stuff anymore. Yeah I mean it's very surprising to me I mean I was you know I was at the time I mean the advocacy to basically divest from fossil fuels which is not just coal but also natural gas and oil. I remember at the time being like well that's obviously not going to work because if you know if Harvard pulls all of its billions out of natural gas and oil companies somebody else will rush in that's just how markets work. But it actually has been so effective and so successful they've managed to get pension funds and big endowments and ordinary investors to basically convincing them that the future was in renewables not in oil and gas that it did have an impact. And to give you one anecdote there was a oil and gas producer in the United States called EOG that announced it was going to expand production and its its share its stock price was actually punished by investors who didn't want to see more investment. So again it's a little hard to disentangle because I think there's also been the oil and gas industry in the United States lost a lot of money between 2010 and 2020. US consumers benefited at about a hundred billion dollars a year in lower energy prices both gas and oil but the oil and gas guys there's a lot of bankruptcies a lot of failures they just didn't make very much money in some ways it was a net wealth transfer from the capitalist class to consumers which as someone that's concerned about the public interest is actually kind of a beautiful thing it's also thanks to that that we reduced carbon emissions but I think it's fair to say that oil and gas guys want to make more money now and they're happy to have a tighter supply but it's it's a complex picture because also they want the oil and gas leases they're you know particularly in Alaska but offshore the oil and gas companies want those leases one of the claims that's made is that they're not using the leases they have that it's it's not quite like that it's more like they don't know which of the areas that they've been given the oil the land and offshore are going to actually be productive in terms of investments you want more areas because they may not all be productive or they might not produce enough to make the investment worth it so I yeah I mean I think it's kind of amazing I can't think of another example of it where really you have a kind of superior product in terms of price which is oil and gas over say electric vehicles or renewables and it being really punished in the marketplace but that indeed is what's occurred there's also been you know efforts to change the boards of directors of the big oil and gas companies to some extent that's occurred they have had a bunch of people on the boards who are saying we need to move away from oil and gas to renewables like I think the new CEO of Shell in particular is comes from the renewables division so yeah I mean it's kind of an amazing story that that really non-market forces have had such a strong market impact Zach what do you uh what do you think you're right you know a lot of your work go it kind of touches on the way that some of these changes end up either being I don't know just purely ambition or cosmetic and then we end you know there's this effort to go towards some cleaner energy source but then we end up more reliant on some energy source that we don't want to be and you had this recent sub-stack post about OPEC and how you know now we're in the situation where Biden wanted to put downward pressure on gas prices so we drain to the strategic reserves and there was an opportunity to do that more cheaply but now we're back in a more expensive deal with OPEC could you just lay that out a little bit yeah and let me address the first thing I think you're alluding to which is that to people that are listening that might think well we do need to move away from fossil fuels because of climate change that is my view long term certainly but to give you a sense of it you know the replacement of coal with natural gas in the United States was the main reason that we reduced our carbon emissions 22% between 2005 and 2020 natural gas is also just cleaner in terms of normal air pollution than coal so I mean basically everybody's intuitive sense that natural gas is better than coal is correct and that's true for the landscapes on the water and the mining and all the rest the other issue is that you know this oil and gas security that we have in the United States it's really precious it's game changing it means that we're the largest oil and gas producer in the world this was a hard one security I mean it really was from the last OPEC crisis in the last OPEC embargoes in the early 70s that there was this bipartisan effort to expand technological innovation to create the fracking revolution which is really a one of the most important innovations in frankly world history you know it sounds exaggerated but fracking really allowed the United States to reindustrialize bring fertilizer heavy manufacturing back to the United States so anyway oil and gas is very very important from an economic and environmental and national security point of view now on this issue of OPEC sorry I laugh it's you know there's what's going on in the world is actually quite tragic and poor countries are going to suffer the most and people are going to die you know I mean bluntly from lack of fertilizer from cold and from pollution so it's not a funny laughing matter but the behavior of the buy administration it's so shocking it's such a you know what do they call what do the kids call it such a clown car show you know I mean they basically here we had in 2020 we had the bottom fell out of oil prices we had you know because of covid oil prices declined to around $24 a barrel Trump said well let's buy that oil and reef and use it to top off the strategic petroleum reserve democrats killed it led by Chuck Schumer who said we didn't want to bail out of the oil industry of big oil well now we learn from some pretty good reporting by CNN I'll give them credit on this one that the Biden administrations had been secretly offering OPEC plus and by the way the plus and OPEC plus refers to Russia so offering OPEC plus basically $80 a barrel to refill the strategic petroleum reserve in exchange for OPEC not cutting production I mean that's kind of shocking and then and then of course OPEC plus passed on it they said no we don't want to do that the Biden administration I just think this is a case where ideology can make you stupid where the Biden administration what they could have done is just said hey you know market forces OPEC is gonna do what OPEC is gonna do we don't control OPEC you know we do control how much oil and gas we produce domestically because we're not part of OPEC but instead they basically got themselves in a situation where Biden went to Saudi Arabia as you may remember in July they fist bumped the crown prince they've they said they're gonna lift sanctions on Venezuela they re-announced that yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported it today then they came out to later today and they said no we're not going to lift sanctions on Venezuela now you've got the head of the National Economic Council Brian Deese saying we're open to any kind of policy options I mean I just joked that he's going to go into Reddit and start looking for ideas because they're so intellectually bankrupt at the White House it's hard not to take a little bit of pleasure in the in just the total mess that is occurring but it is serious business in the sense that energy shortages are going to crush I mean they're just having a devastating impact on Europe and not just this winter it's going to be many winters they're losing aluminum glass steel manufacturing it's very sad and dangerous you realize that you can't print energy you can print money so they're headed for a fiscal crisis that's driven by the lack of energy what could they because we talked about we just talked a lot about what the Biden administration has done to contribute to this but what could and should have European countries done differently to make themselves less reliant on Russian gas so that when this disastrous you know invasion happened they weren't stuck in the situation they are now yeah well so one data point is that Europe produced more natural gas 15 years ago than Russia exports or than Russia exported before its invasion of Ukraine that's shocking they they Europe allowed its natural gas production to decline Europe has shales it has this rock formation called shale you know about a mile underground they could have started fracking for it they should have they actually started mapping it out if you look like 10 10 15 years ago the British and French and Polish and various governments were kind of looking at it and and intriguingly you have two sources they may be the same source of intelligence but the former secretary general of NATO and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton both said that that Russia was funding anti-fracking advocacy in Europe a French professor claimed the same thing there's some rumors that they were also finding anti-nuclear advocacy we know that the energy director the energy minister of Belgium her business partner worked for Gasprom which is the Russian gas company so yeah I mean Europe I think look the big picture here is that nations need energy security if you don't have domestic oil and gas production and you need to either burn coal or nuclear as an environmentalist I prefer them to build nuclear that's what basically France did not just after world war two but after this early 70s OPEC shocks they just scaled up nuclear it reached 80 percent of total electricity at one point France under pressure from Germany and under its own kind of internal self-loathing I call it battered wife syndrome for the nuclear industry they France decided that they were going to shut down nuclear from 75 to 50 percent which meant increasing gas consumption it's just bonkers so yeah I mean what we should do now is that we should help the Europeans to frack their shales and we should expand nuclear power right now they're just going to burn a lot more coal and tragically another tragedy they're going to burn a lot of wood in fact the demand for wood fuel has gone up so much you guys they've actually capped the price of wood fuel I mean it's uh this this is in Europe I mean this is you know we're not talking about Albania this we're talking about you know the thick of western Europe central Europe yeah what explains well I guess first off could you talk a little bit about fracking and the type of energy that we get out of that and why that is a categorically different type of of fuel than burning coal or oil out of the ground because this is one of the things I can remember a time from your your writing as well as reasons Ron Bailey and others where things like natural gas and fracking was considered it was going to be a bridge fuel that environmentalists liked that it was going to help us get from an era of very dirty energy to cleaner energy but we weren't quite there yet and fracking and natural gas seemed to be you know the it was going to be the bridge fuel and now it's vilified everywhere can you just give us a short history of of what is good and bad about the type of energy you're saying we need more yeah so I mean just you know natural gas it's the cleanest fossil fuel it's the only fossil fuel you can burn in your home it's the only fuel that you can burn in your home without requiring elaborate filtration systems that we did burn coal in homes but you had to have these special stoves so we just have this experience with gas it's just obviously the superior fuel it was always viewed as kind of a waste byproduct of petroleum until we started you know creating natural gas hookups in the early part of the 20th century first half of the 20th century you know normally we were getting both oil and gas from these reservoirs these underground reservoirs you just drill a single vertical well into it and then the gas just comes out we always knew that there was gas trapped in between in tight sands or shale shales a kind of rock formation but it's a you know it's a you all kind of experienced with it's a kind of soft so we knew that gas was trapped in there long story short there's a huge effort by the US government I actually was one of the first people to write the history of it with the oil and gas industry to figure out how to get that gas out of shales it's such a cool effort it gets reduced to fracking which has a sort of you know because the way the word sounds it just sounds bad but basically you're drilling these these wells into the shale and then you're running these horizontal wells and then they can just run three 360 degrees and then they they they shoot out like this frack fluid and then with like little bits of sand and then it holds open the shale and the gas comes out it's really remarkable and they use underground mapping 3d mapping to be able to see where the gas where what hasn't been fracked yet and what they need to move around and get the gas from so that was a huge game changer and then also offshore gas production was a huge game changer basically became clear that gas wasn't this highly limited resource that there was abundant natural gas and and of course as you know because Iran and others you know that we don't run out of fuels we actually find a more superior fuel and move to it that was the case with wood to coal there were some regional shortages with wood but coal was more abundant had higher heat content and was cheaper and then gas became cheaper so gas actually became cheaper than coal which was something that nobody thought was going to happen so this was always well predicted in the 70s my mentors who are Jesse Osable and Cesar Marchetti who I write about in apocalypse never they kind of they had this vision of these energy transitions from wood to coal to oil to natural gas to uranium back in the 70s and that was sort of mainstream views and you see some environmentalists like Carl Pope of the Sierra Club Michael Bloomberg who all were very pro gas but then Bill McKibbin and others they started putting out this bogus stuff saying that gas was worse than coal which you know violates your intuitive sense because of course it produces half the emissions half the carbon emissions is coal and they said well but there's the leaks of the gas which is methane and that's true there is a methane is a more potent greenhouse gas but it also is much shorter lived and so it ends up breaking down in the atmosphere before carbon dioxide does so so it doesn't really make sense it's still better online so yeah I mean I think that what can I say there was mass formation psychosis around fracking um similar to the the mass formation psychosis around nuclear that's the term term of I guess we used to say moral panics but right and people would say we're getting more scientific these days right we have more complicated terms yeah is there you know one of one of the fears about fracking is you know that it destabilizes local you know geology and it causes earthquakes it you know is any of that accurate or is that something we don't know enough about because fracking has been around for decades but not at the scale that we've been doing it right right in the fracking that we were doing that we're doing now is much more into these shales it's more horizontal so you're actually creating more destabilization yeah I mean there it does in some places create small earthquakes they're really small I mean this is not you know I mean that yeah there can be impact on houses it's something you have to guard against there's ways to prevent it and in some places you may not be able to frack but there's just so much shale in the United States and around the world that you can there's definitely places you can do it without having those small tremors impacting homes and it's also by the way not a just a consequence of fracking for gas the older forms of gas most famously in the Groningen region of the Netherlands they have a huge amount of gas but it's they're taking so much gas out that you're getting the sedimentation of the you're getting a kind of settling of the ground and so then the houses are kind of falling apart and you're getting these earthquakes but it's a huge source of controversy because Netherlands could be significantly ramping up its gas production but it won't I guess the bottom line Nick I would say is that there are obviously environmental impacts of natural gas production but they are seriously outweighed by the impacts of coal in terms of the impact on landscapes but also water use and polluted water and then even more just because it's an energy density issue even more outweighed by the impacts of wood I mean it's you may have seen the New York Times article about the logging of birch and in trees in Romania and the use of turning these I don't know if they were ancient forests but certainly very old growth forests into firewood I mean it's it's really one of the one of the tragedies so anything I mean gas is just a greatly superior to that and obviously then you have nuclear which is the king of power well we're going to get to nuclear in a second could you also you you had mentioned in passing that you know it this is not just a question of people being cold in their houses which you know in Europe which is bad enough can you explain the knock on effects of if if Europe if industrial Europe central Europe middle Europe western Europe southern Europe doesn't have enough energy it's you know people are going to freeze and some people will die from that but it's also going to have these other effects on what they make and how they do it can you explain that a little bit yeah absolutely and thanks for asking that because of course there's been a number of government officials in Europe when they're trying to you know look on the bright side they say things like we have enough gas to get through the winter what they're actually saying is that we have enough natural gas to keep our people warm through the winter they are definitely not saying that they have enough natural gas to keep electricity or energy prices low nor enough natural gas to be able to provide for their industrial purposes so there are some industries which can switch from natural gas to petroleum or coal but there's other industries where the natural gas is itself a feedstock the most famous of course is fertilizer which is uh nh4 nitrogen combined with hydrogen or is it nh2 i guess i get my chemistry mixed up but basically uh natural gas of course is ch4 so you're taking the carbon atom off and you're adding the nitrogen atom that's how you get fertilizer there's other ones like aluminum factories they have to be constantly running to keep that molten glass from clogging up the pipes there is steel manufacturing which depends on cheap and abundant energy so and that's sort of the main event i mean there's always been recognition there's been a debate and i don't know that you i think there's a way in which some may be impossible to ever calculate but there's been a debate among economists about how how important is manufacturing to the economy i think it's fair to say that everybody agrees it's more it's more important than other sectors at this point there's some people that kind of go you know retail manufacturing manufacturing provides so much value in such high paying jobs has many more knock-on effects than say opening a Walgreens or a drug store also which are impacted by energy prices so it's really the potential loss of this heavy manufacturing and particularly in germany not only but certainly in germany spain and portugal you know it's just in portugal and they get you know like 50 billion dollars over the next five or ten years from the EU just transferred to them portugal's you know it's a tourist economy right you know it's not it doesn't have the heavy industry so portugal i found people very relaxed about this energy crisis but i was kind of like look your whole economy depends on the industrial powerhouse of germany if you lose that portugal will be affected not just from the tourists that don't come but just even in the net transfers the whole lifeblood of the european union the lifeblood of the european economy is in its energy intensive heavy industries all of that is in jeopardy right now and in serious jeopardy how does the rupturing of the Nord Stream pipelines affect that situation because uh one of your more controversial sub stacks and there's a lot of controversial ones uh highlighted this tweet from a former polish defense minister where he seemed to be thanking the us uh legend you know implying that they were responsible for what happened there uh why did you highlight that um and what did you think about the plausibility of the claim um and then just more broadly what's the practical effect of what happened there all right well you you you point out it's very controversial so i'm gonna be very careful the way i talk about it i reported that i've reported a couple things basically the first is that the the former defense minister of poland not some random dude on the internet credited the united states with blowing up Nord Stream one and two pipelines i have not speculated about who did it however i've also noted and just observed who might have an interest in taking out the pipeline and the things that people have said about the pipeline so it's worth pointing out that biden when he was asked about the pipeline back in february a reporter said you know um the reporter asked about the pipeline he said if russia invades ukraine we're gonna take out the Nord Stream pipelines and the person was like well how could you do that you don't own the pipelines they're not yours and he said trust me we'll take them out something like that so i mean you kind of come on you got to report that at least you have to report on what the polish from a defense secretary said and then if you actually read the media coverage of course there's this you know very quick to say well of course the united states would never have done this so maybe the united states would never do something like this and of course russia's evil and so if something bad happened then of course russia did it but if you actually read what the analysts say and i'm an analyst too it's hard to figure out how this was in russia's interests you can easily see how it would be something that the united states might want to see happen but russia has been able to turn on and off supply of that gas pipeline it didn't need to blow it up now you can make these different arguments for it we can get into it more in some ways it doesn't really matter but i will point out that afterwards russia has been just totally consistent that it did not blow up its own pipeline and the united states said the same thing but then you also had anthony blinkin the secretary of state say well this is a great opportunity for europe to move to renewables so i just found some of those behaviors a little suspicious um but in terms of the strategic importance i mean first of all that was a huge that's i mean these were big pipelines to bring in lots of natural gas into europe they were very important yes there is another pipeline that goes for turkey called turk extreme and there's pipelines to go through Ukraine they don't provide nearly as much gas so for russia it was certainly a lot of gas i mean there is a part of me that actually is glad that the pipeline is no longer there i'm not sure i agree with the idea that it should be blown up but i think there is something to it which is to say one thing you worry about is that you could start to get governments in europe that basically say uh we want to end support for the war in ukraine in exchange for restarting gas from russia i worry about that because i do think it strengthens putin i think he is a bad actor and he should be contained in the old-fashioned cold war view of containment i haven't written about ukraine and so i don't really have a view of whether that's good or bad to support that effort but i don't love the idea of the european union being divided on whether or not to restart gas flows from russia is it is it safe to say that you know what you strip out the politics and whatnot but what this kind of illustrates is that if europe is so heavily reliant on one provider of energy you put yourself in a you know you're kind of putting your own head on the chopping block right because if that if something goes wrong like let's say you know it's not that the north stream gets blown up or that russia is revealed as a bad actor but you know there's a revolution in russia and the energy stops flowing you know that then europe is kind of screwed absolutely i mean that's the big lesson nick it's it's as usual the big lessons are the simplest and the most obvious but the ones that we tend to run past but which is that energy security is paramount for every nation particularly big nations that other smaller nations rely on like germany or like the united states and this is why it would be absolute madness for the united states to become dependent on china for renewables particularly solar wind and electric vehicles they have i don't say a monopoly but they have huge dominance over the materials mind the refining and the materials production as well as the actual production of solar panels so it would be crazy to sacrifice that democrats kind of wave their hands on this issue when i erase it with them they kind of go well we'll reshore those industries let's reshore the industries first before becoming dependent on them i have other reasons to think that'll never happen because of the high cost of renewables and the big environmental impacts but nonetheless i think the obvious lesson is that you wouldn't want them to go trade our hard one energy security for dependence on china well yeah in fact can we run that clip of the uh of the trump uh ad and let's use that as a kind of palette cleanser to talk more about this question of energy security or independence or dominance as the highest energy cost and we are no longer energy independent or energy dominant which we were just two short years ago we are a nation that is begging venezuela and saudi arabia for oil so that's a uh clip from a kind of you know campaign ad that trump released a couple days after the raid on mara lago i'm one of his social media network sites um you know uh michael what what does he get right and wrong in kind of talking about energy in those terms i mean i by the way i never voted for the guy um i voted for hillary and biden just to get that out there so you are part of the problem because you know there was there was a libertarian in both of those races who would have we wouldn't be having these problems yeah we would be having a wide range of other problems but certainly not those trying to make up for it now nick i'm trying to make up for my reporting right i mean look trump looks great right now on energy i mean it's just you can't i just i just don't think there's any other way to read it i mean his very direct and blunt warnings at the united nations that germany was becoming overly dependent on russia we have video of that we have a video of him bluntly warning the germans across the table at negotiate who are laughing during that un speech they're like come on what is you know this guy is full of shit right in just that most patronizing way i love germans by the way i mean i have huge respect for the germans but there is that side of them the pomposity and the smugness that comes across very strongly that was also by the way of course the moment that trump is being accused by everybody as being a russian agent like a you know like a manchurian candidate for putin and here he is warning europe against it by the way as a side note i went and looked back at the mainstream news media coverage of trump i suspected at that time i suspected it would be bad it was unbelievable they were actually fact checked trump and they claimed that he was not telling the truth about europe's dependence and of course trump because he's trump he made some exaggerations he said things like you know 40 percent of its energy as opposed to 40 percent of its gas i mean stuff but it was real nitpicky stuff the broad direction that trump was going in was spot on and absolutely i mean like energy i think this is uh it's hard for people people if you don't understand energy you can get a lot of things wrong in terms of economics and also in foreign policy but what we saw is that europe became overly dependent on russia for for energy and it was and therefore there wasn't a deterrent on russia being able to invade ukraine now russia might have invaded ukraine no matter how dependent europe was on russian energy but it meant that that europe wasn't able to harm russia economically in the ways that it could have had it been less dependent on russia for energy now we see biden going to saudi arabia i mean but you have to remember biden in i believe 2019 certainly in the presidential the recent presidential election he said that saudi arabia should be a pariah state given that we the overwhelming evidence that the the crown saudi crown prince was involved in the killing of uh the journalist at washington post kashogi and and then you kind of and then there's a on there's a civil suit against the crown prince of saudi arabia in a debate over whether he should be um whether he has sovereign immunity or whether he should be tried united states the biden administration has now intervened in that lawsuit and said that he should basically they've it's complex but basically taking the side that he should not be tried here in the united states for these things so you can already see in the case of saudi arabia venezuela the united states having to kind of you know change its position rather than just do the obvious thing which is to produce more oil domestically is energy independence really possible in the you know the world that we live in where resources are spread all over the globe it's kind of like you got to pick you're always going to be dependent on some other country for some material or some input that goes into the kind of energy you're producing i mean with nuclear i was reading that like 40 percent of some sort of uranium enrichment technology is in russia uh so it's like you go solar with uh and you're relying on rare earths out of china or you go nuclear and you have this new dependency on some sort of russian technology and or wherever the minerals happen to be and then also just having the interdependence you know the the theory generally has been that it's it's good to have some level of inter inter dependence because that forces you know coming to diplomatic solutions rather than trying to build some sort of self-sustaining autarky that creates you know higher likelihood of war yeah yeah i mean i use the word energy security because i think that's the right thing to be looking at not energy independence robert brice makes a very similar point and rightly so that some amount of interdependence is good and we think trade is good and we think trade is good for nations and it's good for you know it prevents wars you know there's an incentive against wars you know could be can also obviously you know reduce the deterrent for invasion like we saw in europe but generally no i agree i think some amount of interdependence is good i also think a lot of security is good now the interesting thing about the united states is because of our geography we're covering such a vast landscape and in a particular landscape we could be very very independent much more independent than almost anybody else you know we have a lot of uranium in the united states it's we certainly could do more uranium refining making more of our own fuels we have tons of oil and gas with tons of coal hopefully moving away from it but certainly we could manufacture solar panels um uranium fuel rods i think we are unusual in that sense you know like france doesn't have uh tons of oil and gas although it does have shales but yeah you want to see more security and that is why in many ways nuclear is the the crown jewel of the energy system because it provides the highest level of security you know if you have your nuclear power plants you can stockpile just gigantic quantities of fuel without really any trouble so i think that security is the right way to look at it i would say if you if you if you love america and you think that we have a really great uh system of democracy and that we are a more benevolent than malevolent influence on the world then i think what we should be doing is expanding nuclear power at home and then and then so that we can export more natural gas abroad both to help our allies in europe and asia but also as a way to support liberal democracies around the world you know exporting natural gas is a great way to to gain relationships with the nations it's notable that's what putin did he replaced a lot of the gas production at home with nuclear power so i think that's the right direction of travel to go in let's um you know this brings up a question for me of you know so enter going into energy security is the idea that we would you know have more control over source you know sources of fuel and energy at home we you know if we're europe you would have you know some production capacity you know in your country whether it's nuclear you're talking about the netherlands with fracking and things like that and you're going to be picking up stuff from other places as well but then there's this sense of urgency and this you know in prepping for this i was talking to Zach i you know just over the past couple of weeks i've been talking to a lot of younger people that you know they tend to be millennials and gen z but you know let's say under 40 and one of the things that they talk about is like you know michael like you might be saying okay well we can use natural gas for a watt blah blah blah and they're pretty adamant that no there is not time for that like we need to decarbonize the you know we need to decarbonize the economy now and if not by now then by 2050 at the latest zach you want to throw up that chart um and you want to explain this a little bit uh zach where this comes from but this kind of speaks to that sense of urgency yeah so the you know the ip cc report always talks about you know are are we going to warm by 1.5 degrees celsius by 2100 or two degrees celsius by then and then the world economic forum kind of put together this infographic that lays out the difference between that that half degree difference which i guess is dependent on how aggressively we uh decarbonize in the next 30 years um and so yeah you can see you know it shows you know doubling of uh well it's hard for me to see on a little screen here but um um uh here i guess the the question is you know um how concerned should we be about um that half degree difference and uh how likely is it that um we're gonna you know achieve that yeah i mean so so let's just let's talk about some basic things that everybody agrees on um more warming is worse than less warming you know where we built our civilization in a particular temperature band our cities our farms our natural areas and so we all else being equal we don't want to see temperatures rise that much of course not at all else is equal and that all of our security and prosperity as a result of cheap energy and in general and in particular because of fossil fuels um i think we also know that the biggest cause of emissions reductions in the United States which had the largest emissions reductions in world history were mostly due to the switch from coal to natural gas so i don't have a lot of patience for people that tell me that they're they have an urgent view of climate change but then are opposed to natural gas if you want to urgently reduce carbon emissions you need to use more natural gas and you can just look at what's happening now we're going to burn more coal this year than any other period in history even though uh we don't need to be because of the war on natural gas so if more natural gas lowers emissions right now in the short term you guys know i'm a huge advocate of nuclear power i think ultimately where we're going i want to build nuclear plants as quickly as i can but it takes a while and it takes you know the first few ones are going to take 10 years we're going to get faster at it if you build the same kind of reactors with the same people japanese at the end of its last nuclear build was getting was building a reactor in two years which is like the blink of an eye for nuclear but that's where you want to go but if you want to reduce emissions right now use more gas or and less coal and wood that's kind of the bottom line and i'm not a huge fan of this it's just false precision to be able to say here's the here's how these species are impacted at these temperatures you know there's already a lot of uncertainty around what the temperature change would be from an existing amount of accumulated carbon dioxide emissions it's called the climate sensitivity but then there's huge uncertainties about the impacts on natural landscapes on on natural disasters on impacts but it's more like direction of travel is what matters you know you want to if you're using coal you want to go to natural gas if you're using natural gas you want to go to nuclear you should not shut down your nuclear plants if you're going to add more nuclear then build more reactors at the sites that you have i'm a big adjacent possible type of person so i'm always sort of like just very practical at this point is there is there a drop-off i mean because this is you know and and i'm you know sensitive to this when i think you know going back to you know the 90s really there has been a persistent you know message that is being sent that the earth is in balance you know the earth is imperiled and that you know if we go one degree too far it's kind of like frying an egg where you can't bring it back that you know it's cooked and that's it yeah is that fundamental framework which i think is embedded deeply in the minds of younger people yeah is that just wrong and how do how do we reach people to suggest that this is not you know it is not that one degree too far and then everything ignites yeah well and by the way so first of all yes that's wrong that's um you're that's the imposition of a kind of both false precision but also a kind of apocalyptic tipping points religiosity onto the natural world that's not there to give you a sense of it for apocalypse never i went and looked at these scenarios that predicted the collapse of agriculture at four degrees centigrade and there's no there's no science to that you know the fact of the matter is that we can produce food at very high temperatures around the world and the main event remains whether you have access to fertilizer irrigation and tractors so sub-saharan africa will have huge increases in food production at high temperatures if it just uses modern forms of farming rather than it's currently uh premodern forms of farming you know there's other tipping points there's this kind of daisy chain scenario where they kind of go the the the gulf stream shuts down the atlanta the amazon lights on fire and burns uncontrollably methane's released it's this kind of um there's not it's not science it's science it's science storytelling or science fiction but it's certainly not anything that the ipcc uses for its scenarios it's um you know voslaw smiel who's one of bill gates is a big guy he's now a best-selling author i believe he's become quite famous but he wrote a really good book on global catastrophes looking at all the different forms of global catastrophes including supervolcanoes and wars and pandemics and asteroids you know actually made me a little bit of an asteroid alarmist i must admit i'm actually very much in favor of these efforts to kind of knock asteroids off of their trajectory um but it was hard to find a apocalyptic scenario on climate change because it's just a kind of gradual increase of temperatures that's what climate change is average increase it's an increase of of average temperatures over time so yeah like you don't want it to get really hot but it's just really has to be understood as an incremental uh impacts rather than sort of tipping points or apocalypse well there are some things that we're already seeing some of these effects and i just want to play this clip of biden recently down in florida where i am where we were just hit by a category for hurricane um and he made this comment as of ours out west are are down to almost zero we're in a situation where the colorado river looks more like a stream there's a lot going on and i think the one thing this is finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there's climate change we should do something about it but folks i also want to uh jill and i have had you all in our prayers what's your reaction to that well climate change is real we don't need the we can we have good temperature data now we have both good land based temperatures we also have good ocean temperature data so clearly temperatures are rising i think the evidence is very strong that it's almost entirely if not entirely caused by humans we know carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are heat trapping so for me that no that's an issue what i object to is the claim that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and intense there is no good evidence that that's what's occurring to give you a sense of it there have been 15 category four and five hurricanes those are the largest hurricanes over the last 100 years 10 of them were before 1960 and five were since 1960 i pointed out that if you go look at the full data set from going back to the early to 1900 or from the early or from the 19th century there's no increase in landfalling hurricanes in the united states of all kinds are major hurricanes that goes actually a slight downward trend but but it's within the realm of uncertainty but nonetheless and why do we look at landfalling hurricanes because we those are much more reliably measured in the period before satellites so i wrote a piece this week where i objected to the fact the financial times showed rising hurricane frequency since the 19th century they did that they created that graph in violation of explicit warnings by the national oceanic and atmospheric administration that that was not accurate that is not reliable and that all of the increase that they can detect is due to better detection measures namely satellites which can spot 100 percent basically of hurricanes whereas in the 19th century you could reliably get landfalling um uh most landfalling hurricanes but not all of them and certainly not ocean based ones and in terms of fires we know that we are not doomed to high intensity fires in california because of climate change you have to manage the forest through mechanical clearing and prescribed burns to reduce the woody buildup of fuels in the forest that's not true and in terms of droughts we've had huge droughts forever in california we had two periods of mega droughts lasting over a century i believe in the ninth and in twelfth century or eleventh century we had huge mega droughts that lasted like more than a century in california so it's not to say that climate change isn't having impacts it will particularly we can see that there's there's going to be impacts in terms of temperature extremes heat waves and precipitation but those are not the same as natural disasters natural disasters are strictly measured as deaths and costs and on neither of those measures uh in fact on both of those measures uh the costs and the deaths are going down which is why what are the what are considered natural disasters the number of what are considered natural disasters actually declined from the year 2000 through 2021 if the if you're in agreement though that you know you said earlier that it's better all else being equal if there's less warming just because those changes will be less dramatic and easier to cope with therefore you know leaning into natural gas and eventually nuclear uh more strongly makes sense the the thing you hear often from advocates of renewables as well look at the prices of renewable technology over time they've been consistently dropping i'm going to share a graphic that's get shared often um that just you know shows the price of uh solar panels and wind turbines and battery power going down and down and down and becoming more and more cost effective um why do you think that that's not a winning argument well it's true i mean the cost of of producing solar panels wind turbines electric cars electric vehicles has gone down the electricity from solar and wind has uh the cost of it has gone down but the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and the cost of dealing with the inherent intermittency or unreliability of solar and wind makes electricity very expensive so we saw the electricity in california it's now the most expensive electricity in the continental united states it increased sevenfold between uh the year 2000 um sorry between 2010 and 2020 we've seen the same thing in australia you see the same thing in europe that adding a lot of solar and wind the costs of managing the unreliability outweigh the savings of the electricity produced by those technologies now the but there is another issue which is just that there is an energy security issue now you could say well well you can bring solar panel and wind production back to the united states but that means the solar panels and the wind turbines are not going to be cheap anymore they're going to be much more expensive you have to remember that the solar panels and the key ingredient polysilicon in solar panels is overwhelmingly made in shinjiang province same thing for lithium batteries for electric cars for me this is a fundamental moral issue you cannot import products being made by incarcerated legal muslims in concentration camps full stop that's effectively financing what the state department calls a genocide i have a bunch of people that claim that this is not the case but but the bundeshtag and the state department and bbc and new york times and people that actually are big boosters of china made solar panels and electric vehicles um all agree that that is what's going on people are being rounded up and put in concentration camps and they're being offered a chance to work in these solar panel and battery factories you bring those firms back to the united states and those products are not going to be anywhere close as cheap and then that doesn't then that doesn't even deal with the um you know there's a huge waste problem that nobody has dealt with on solar panels and wind turbines which according to a review in harvard business review says would increase the cost of electricity from solar by fourfold whereas nuclear already includes the cost of waste management in its electricity production do you um where where does the um where does the hesitancy about nuclear power come from and i realize that's a large question but um if we have nuclear power um and obviously it's been winding down uh in a kind of profound way in the us and also in europe but where is the hesitancy uh you know or the you know when you talk to people and again especially younger people they talk a lot about wind and solar uh and the batteries that will buffer the intermittency of you know of these sources and nuclear just kind of disappears michael you know we're a bit older than zack so we remember you know when nuclear was the promise and then when nuclear became the nightmare with three mile island and chernobyl and fukushima to a degree um you know how do how do we get past that kind of blind spot for nuclear power particularly new forms of nuclear power that are going to be smaller and less kind of uh fear inducing yeah i mean it is a huge question it's hugely complex and super interesting and i think maybe one of the most important questions in the world which is why i dedicate a lot of apocalypse never to it but also now i'm writing a second book the war on nuclear why it hurts us all that's going to come out next year i think it's really interesting i mean there's there's sort of financial motives there's political motives and then there's i would say spiritual or psychological motivations against nuclear on financial the problem with nuclear is that they're a little bit like hydro electric dams that when you build them they pay themselves off after 30 years and then they can run for 80 to 100 years or longer they're functionally immortal because you can just replace the parts over time that means that people that are trying to make money off of producing electricity are deprived of that opportunity so you see rent seekers in particular are threatened by nuclear if you have nuclear you don't need renewables if you have nuclear you really don't need anything else let me look at france right so nuclear threatens the financials of of what i would i assume is it is it safe to say that you know kind of natural or gas and oil interests were anti-nuclear back in the day because they were like a direct competitor and a better competitor oh for sure and i document the financing of oil and gas investors and into attacking nuclear for sure now that's not it's not the whole sector i mean there's certain parts of the sector that were more aligned with renewables those are the guys that were attacking nuclear particularly over the last 10 years when gas was cheap and they had the alliance with renewables i think the political motivations are similar which is that you know if you're trying to get support for a green nuclear green new deal and you want to have all this money for community non-profits and basically all sorts of rent seeking and and and you're trying to kind of control people's lives through a super grid where you can control when people use their dishwashers and you can exercise the sort of significant amount of social control then i think you are against nuclear it also deprives the the other kind of it just you know like if you have a nuclear powered economy with zero emissions then you don't need to moralize about the need to ride your bike or take mass transit or whatever you can you can justify 55 lives doesn't really matter right how it is fascinating if i might just i'm sorry zach if i might just point out that you know both in the students for democratic society port your on statement and young americans for freedom the right wing group the sharon statement in the early 60s they both literally took for granted the idea that we would have free ubiquitous non-polluting energy that that would not be something we would be dealing with and in many ways they were you know they they took different paths to kind of like what you do in a world where everything is possible that that was kind of the existential challenge not yeah you know what do you do in a world of reduced circumstances and possibilities for life yeah and the sort of backlash to that vision of cheap and abundant nearly unlimited energy and thus basically every other resource the backlash to it was identical to the backlash by robert thomas malthus the british economist in the late 18th century who when that very same vision was proposed by godwin and condorset and the other enlightenment utopians really people that thought that technological progress would allow for you know really an end to sickness and death and human freedom and it was very exciting and thomas malthus was like this is terrible you know all this human freedom and there have to be constraints it came from a deeply kind of i don't know anti-human i think is the best word for it impulse kind of like that's i don't want to see humans with all this potential and that got to i think the spiritual issues which is that you know it that there there was sort of a revulsion of a very deep psychological and spiritual level to abundance and that may seem strange because i think the vast majority of people want abundance but i think there is a very powerful very intelligent very intellectual group of people that are revolted by universal abundance and universal freedom and they want the control they want to have the means to control the society and to control other people and to keep other people down and i think that's certainly certainly a big part of the early environmentalist movement or you know up through the mid 70s and this is you know the club for growth is part of this and paul earlick like there is a revulsion saying now that's a pipe dream but also even if it were true it is distasteful morally or spiritually to just have more than you need and we should want less and less do you think that's still at work because again going back to the conversations that i realized that you know this is a small sample and whatnot the younger people that i talked to i mean environmentalism you know kind of green energy and the need to get away from carbon in all forms um you know it's it's very deeply heartfelt it's been pumped into them since they were in the womb and it doesn't seem to come from that sense of revulsion at like abundance it's like no this is the existential problem that my generation is going to deal with that the world is going to become unlivable they don't seem to be that upset about the idea that you know you'd be able to keep your cell phone charged you know without without end i agree with you in fact it makes me very optimistic because in some ways that's the exact same vision i have which is a vision of radical abundance and radical decoupling to use a bit of jargon of human welfare from environmental destruction and i think it's no surprise then that those zoomers and younger millennials are are much more open and enthusiastic about nuclear what's missing is some understanding of the physics of energy and the fact that energy density is what determines environmental impact energy high energy densities reduce the amount of material use the amount of natural resource that's required for producing energy and everything else in the society so i mean i do i think this is like a you know this is a brilliant tool for decar for dematerialization because you can you don't need a stereo console system a television set you can just use your iphone but it requires a lots of energy so no i agree with you nick i i i think that's really positive and i think that i think once those folks understand more of the technological problem the inherent physical problems and technical and therefore technological and economic problems with renewables and the huge benefits of nuclear i think that they will end up embracing more of this pro human pro abundance vision zack we want to we're out of an hour zack do you want to uh take us out what's on your mind too yeah well i i've seen a lot of that abundance or that enthusiasm for nuclear among younger politically active people and among libertarians and i think you're you know um no small part of bolstering that enthusiasm um but uh the question i often get from libertarians about this is um you know the economics of nuclear and like is it actually viable you know as a market technology we all know like the history of nuclear technology came out of a massive government program the the manhattan project is what you know split split the atom and everything and um it's always been very tied up with the government um there's a chart that uh nuclear critics often put up here which is like the levelized this is the lizard levelized cost of uh certain um energy technologies and you can see nuclear uh in the kind of bottom third from the bottom there is you know not as good as gas or coal um you know even uh you know solar appears like solar farms and stuff appear to outcompete it um so i mean how is that how much of that is a relic do you think of or you know an outcome of the the kind of extremely tight regulation around nuclear how much of it is that nuclear really would just need to be a pretty much you know a government run energy program um or is there you know hope for a market-based type nuclear future sure and let's just take on that chart for a second here i mean i think what they're saying that a chart shows a buying a new solar panel the electricity from a new solar panel uh is cheaper than the electricity from a new nuclear plant of course it's not cheaper than electricity from an existing nuclear plant almost nothing is cheaper than the electricity from existing nuclear plant and you might say well but you could say that about anything that's true you could although the difference is that nuclear plants last for so long solar panels are replaced every 15 or 20 years whereas these nuclear plants last for 80 and in fact um i'm a huge defender of existing plants and think that the best way to in the cheapest way to expand them is by just adding reactors to existing plant sites in terms of the role of the government you know most of our energy technologies come from the government uh bell labs under us subsidies created the dominant form of solar panel wind turbines were heavily subsidized in denmark and around the world the chinese government has heavily subsidized these technologies natural gas turbines came out of uh jet plane development including combined cycle always received money from the u.s government uh nuclear is special in the sense that it is a dual use technology and so there's always going to be some amount of government oversight the economics are pretty straightforward um and there's not really any debate about it bigger plants produce cheaper electricity because you don't need as many workers to build operate or regulate those plants as you do um uh um or you get more electricity you don't need as you don't need a concomitantly large number of people i hope that's clear um and then the other issue is just the same workers building the same kind of reactor over and over again is the only way we know how to reduce the costs so my view is america is a very libertarian country i've actually come to appreciate that a little bit more in my old age um and but mostly nuclear is the kind of state-owned technology around the world but the way the united states has always done it and i think that the future of nuclear is going to look a lot like the past of nuclear that nothing has occurred with the technology or the physics or the tech or the economics to change how it'll occur the united states had two national champions this is our our alternative to state-owned enterprises it was westinghouse and general electric those two technologies are still there i would like to see the united states government and this may be um you know just too much interference for libertarians but nonetheless i think it's sensible that the united states government would make a commitment that we want to expand nuclear to something like 50 of our electricity up from 20 by say 2050 and that you would have two national champions both of whom i think would have foreign partners like you might do the westinghouse uh with the french or the koreans and you might do the general electric and the hitachi with the japanese and you would create some incentives nothing super onerous to encourage the expansion of nuclear domestically i think we can do it in a way that will satisfy most reasonable libertarians that will create some competition between designs and firms but also try to capture those economies of scale that are so essential to bringing down the price of nuclear uh zach you've got a couple of comments from our audience which is online at youtube and facebook and twitter um michael let's uh do a rapid fire on some of these questions zach you want to uh pose them yeah hold on i just lost the track of it for a second um while he's doing that uh michael is it is it a good sign that germany has walked back some of its anti-nuke uh you know actions and that in california that gavin newson you know has extended the life of diablo canyon you know a controversial nuclear power plant there california is 100 good news it's maybe one of the happiest uh moments of my life was helping to save that plant it also was it's also somewhat bizarre but like you're never sure how much of a role you play because also there was a fact that we have a huge energy crisis we didn't have enough activity but i think germany and belgium which also is shutting down its nuclear plants show that countries that are fanatically anti-nuclear will still shut their plants down in the energy crisis and that local pro nuclear advocacy definitely plays a positive role the german situation is so crazy nick basically the energy the economy and energy minister a guy named robert heybeck is a diehard green it's literally like one of his life goals was to shut down germany's nuclear plants but then they're in this huge energy crisis so he said well we're gonna keep two of the three operating past january but only on emergency need basis even as they're of course massively expanding coal production and then belgium did shut down a nuclear plant late last month so um so it's i would just say you know the our local comrades in germany need to step up their campaign to pressure heybeck he really needs to be fired i mean we really needs to be a campaign to fire the economy minister he's so grossly irresponsible he's hurting germany so germany is touch and go at this moment there's definitely other countries that have recommitted to nuclear in a big way japan south korea and france and britain all come to mind but germany and belgium the kind of the dark heart of the green movement of europe are still they're still they haven't yet uh finally admitted the need for nuclear i'll also just point out in passing that belgium is also the birthplace of the smurfs uh so they have a lot to answer for that explains a lot actually you have uh comments yeah there's a comment down there at the bottom says uh i heard the only way to get nuke plants insured is with government backing don't know if that's true uh what what role you know does government back insurance have on the reality of nuclear yeah i mean it's true that the government does um ensure the insurers so the nuclear plants do need to get private insurance and then the government provides a limited liability but when you look at it a lot of industries have limited liability so you have it for big chemical plants you obviously have doctors have limited liability there's just a set of industries that we provide limits on the liability because the you know there there's just a risk of those costs of lawsuits becoming so large that they make it uneconomic and you think if it's an important uh public good then you need to have limits on liability so it's not really or it's not a real concern of my view and not only that but uh we haven't ever had to use that so people say it's a subsidy but it's a it's a limited liability it's never if it's a subsidy it's never been used before do we you know part of the problem with nuclear plants and you know i'm thinking in particular i remember Three Mile Island and you know the china syndrome had come out a couple weeks before and like that cemented all of the the the you know negative mumblings about nuclear power in the united states um do we have anything to fear or what do we have to fear from a Chernobyl from a Fukushima Three Mile Island ultimately you know was clearly overwrought the way that it was treated but i mean you know is this a categorically different type of risk than a chemical plant or a gas and oil plant which you know do explode from time to time yeah i would say it's a it's a different risk i wouldn't say it's a larger one to be perfectly honest i mean obviously we had a terrible accident with bhopal in india where many thousands of people were killed we have now had two bad nuclear accidents Fukushima and Chernobyl what we know is that the reaction to the accidents was worse than the accidents themselves a very common theme in a lot of domains of modern life but basically you know you need people need to shelter in place meaning stay in their home if there's an accident or there is some temporary evacuation but people can return to those places very soon after you know even we saw three years after Fukushima they did a study of one of the of the people's bodies who were in one of the most radioactive parts of Fukushima and they had below dangerous limits of radiation from just eating the food that had been affected by the radiation so you know they cleaned up Fukushima Fukushima was a low radiation area to begin with they they could have left it at colorado levels of radiation that's the state i'm from where people live a very long time very low rates of cancer very high radiation so it's the short version is just nick that people that people think that radiation is a super potent toxin it's not it's just the dose makes the poison and we're surrounded by radiation all the time and if an accident happens you just got to deal with it i mean i pointed out on twitter the other day that there was a shelter in place order um in monorail california because a lithium battery site caught on fire and it created lots of toxic smoke so certainly from many many things in society can create hazards and we manage it we do you know we're safer and healthier than ever yeah last question from the audience before we wrap up here from alan colvin what are some thoughts on solar geoengineering uh google searches on the subject of climate change what what are some thoughts that you might have about giant atmospheric scrubbers which will be designed to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere like carbon dioxide okay i'm not i can answer the first one i'm not sure i can do the second one yes i mean there's there's no doubt that we can cool the earth by shooting a bunch of reflective you know solar reflective particles into the atmosphere you know like sulfur dioxide i'm against it and i'm against it because not because i don't think it can be done but because i do think it can be done and i don't think that it could ever be done democratically how in the world would you get the consent of all of the nations of the world to agree to something like that i also am just concerned about making the world colder you know you got to remember that more people die of cold than heat so if you had to choose between global warming and global cool and you would choose global warming like i said all is being equal you wouldn't want to change the temperature at all but i don't love the idea of making the earth cooler at all it could threaten agriculture i don't like the anti-democratic nature of it and in terms of scrubbers i mean okay here's what i'll say we have air capture you can pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere this is very expensive and my view is just moving from coal to natural gas to nuclear is going to result in the carbon emissions breaking down over time um and stabilizing technology that should be like developed as a kind of escape hatch if things get too bad like an emergency lever that you can pull if you know things do get out of control in terms of the the rate of warming well i don't i my concern is i don't think that that moment could or should or will arrive in the sense that i don't know again like we said i don't really believe in the tipping point stuff i just think it's science fiction and also it wouldn't resolve the problems of cooling the side effects of cooling the earth or the democratic problems i'm very i'm very concerned about it i actually am unhappy that bill gates and harvard are moving forward on it i thought it was an interesting thought experiment but it bothers me that they're still doing it i just it um yeah it's just it's just undemocratic and i think humans have made really good progress and moving away from that kind of authoritarianism and that kind of you know environmental dictatorial behaviors and so yeah i'm i'm just against it and it's funny i find it some strange bedfellows along with me on it but i i don't i don't like really anything about it including the catastrophist discourse that surrounds it all right we're going to leave it there michael schellenberger bestselling author of apocalypse never thanks for joining reason uh to talk about uh the war on gas what's going to you know what europe's winter is going to look like what america's winter spring summer fall next winter might look like zak wise miller thanks so much for uh participating in manning the tech here uh and for those of you who are watching this is going to automatically uh fill your feed at youtube in particular in facebook it will live on long after all of us are gone and probably all human life has been extinguished from you know it'll be there with our cassette tapes and uh disposable diapers or something so michael schellenberger zak wise miller thanks so much for uh helping out good to be with you guys