The Bee Weekly: Russia Invades, Moral Fossil Fuels, and The Bee Turns 6
On The Bee Weekly, Kyle and Adam are joined by Mike Luso to talk about this week at the Babylon Bee as The Bee turns 6 years old, Russia invades Ukraine, and Biden gives an interesting State of the Union. Then Alex Epstein—no relation—brings his moral case for fossil fuels. You can find out more about Alex Epstein at the Center for Industrial Progress.com, get his book The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels or pre-order his upcoming book Fossil Future! This episode is brought to you by My Patriot Supply. Go to PrepareWithBee.Com! This episode is also brought to you by Daily Nouri! In need of Christian counseling? Check out our friends and Faithful Counseling! Kyle, Adam, and Mike talk about Ukraine and the State of the Union before looking at the Banger and Bomb articles of the week. Adam brings Weakly News and then the Bee celebrates turning 6 years old by going through some of its greatest hits! Kyle and Adam then talk to Alex Epstein about the moral case for fossil fuels and whether or not you can really run the entire nation on solar power. The Bee got some hate mail for making fun of Christians again. In the subscribers-only lounge, Kyle, Adam, and Mike look at the top subscriber-pitched headlines of the week and some love mail for making fun of Christians. Subscribers to the Bee also get the rest of the Alex Epstein interview!
Russia invaded Ukraine, but at least it ended COVID.
A stray rocket is going to crash into the moon, though some are suggesting it's actually going to crash into a sound stage in Hollywood.
We talked to Epstein.
No, not that Epstein.
And he wants a nuclear reactor in every garage.
And the Babylon Bee is now old enough that if you stack three Babylon Bees in a trench coat, they could get drafted into a war in Europe.
All this and more on the B Weekly.
All right, everyone.
Welcome to the Babylon Bee podcast.
Or what do we call now?
The B Weekly.
Welcome to the B Weekly, whatever the name of our show is.
Mike Lucia.
Friend of ours.
And former Chick-fil-A employee.
Do you have any cool Chick-fil-A stories?
Or did you have to sign an NDA when you work at Chick-fil-A?
No, I mean, besides, you know, wild Karens and the drive-through, nothing really extravagant.
You know, a lady once threatened, she tried to use a coupon that wasn't really a coupon, and she got mad.
And I told her we couldn't do anything.
How was it not really a coupon?
What was it?
So Chick-fil-A, if you guys are avid Chick-fil-A followers, remember when Chick-fil-A used to have paper coupons?
And then now everything's like digital scam.
Oh, okay.
That's like every business, right?
And I guess she had a paper coupon from like years back.
And I'm like, how did you even still have this?
Like, this doesn't even make sense.
And she was very adamant about using it.
I explained to her, I was like, I literally cannot give you the free item because there's no way for me to put this in the system.
Like, it's paper.
Everything's digital.
And she was just demanding free food.
And you would be surprised how many people come and just demand free food.
And it's like, these are people who have jobs, can obviously pay for a sandwich, but they just want free stuff.
And I'm like, okay, that doesn't make sense.
We should try that.
We should try it.
Just go to the demand free food.
Very entitlement.
A lot of entitlement for no reason.
And it's like, you know, nice neighborhood.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, I know how much money people are making here.
It's like, you have money.
And if you don't have any money, you're not eating at Chick-fil-A usually.
Like, it's not, I mean, it's, Chick-fil-A is not that expensive, but it's also not like the bottom of the barrel.
Yeah.
I mean, now it's expensive.
Yeah.
Inflation.
Sure.
Yeah.
That's everything.
Exactly.
You can also check out Mike Lusso on the Babylon B YouTube channel.
He was in one of our top videos, which was, what was the name of it?
I'm trying to find it here.
White Liberals Shocked as Black Man Gets ID, I think it was called.
I was the black guy in the video.
For those on audio.
Yeah.
In case you didn't.
It'd be so funny if you don't play the black guy in the video.
Oh my gosh.
So that's well.
And, you know, this is an exciting.
Oh, you guys might see like our balloons and stuff here because the Babylon B turned six this week.
Yes.
On March 1st.
So a little later, we're going to go through the top 10 Babylon B articles through history.
So that'll be fun.
But in the meantime, World War III is going on.
Yeah, Ukraine has been invaded by Putin.
It's a complicated situation.
Yeah.
I don't know.
It's so weird seeing all the footage come out in real time, like tanks driving down the street and you see like people commuting to work, like buy tanks.
It is crazy.
It's so crazy to me.
I saw a tweet saying this is the worst generation to see a world war because most of the like people call it misinformation.
I just say overload of information.
Most of like all the stuff that's been fake is just trolls tweeting stuff that doesn't like they make fake memes.
Like there was a whole like anime Ukraine meme thing going on Twitter and like it was it's it's funny.
It's hilarious, but yeah.
Yeah, it's weird seeing like the misinformation come out in real time.
And I saw people like post it, you know, people that are pro-Ukraine are posting, like, oh, this guy went and killed a billion people with one bullet.
And you're just like, I think that's probably fake.
And I mean, some of it's trolling.
And then it's also like, because you're getting the updates in real time, there's no, it's like the, you know, it's like not necessarily deliberately misinformation.
It's just people trying to kind of decipher what's going on as it's happening.
There's no time to validate.
It turns out information.
It hasn't been fact-checked or verified.
We need to wait for Snopes to fact-check it.
Exactly.
Snopes hasn't fact-checked it yet for us, so we don't know.
We also had State of the Union this week, which was something that happened.
Yeah.
I don't know.
A politician giving a speech, isn't that interesting to me?
Because it's something somebody else wrote and they're just standing up there reading it and it's all depandered to at the base or whoever they're trying to appeal to.
You actually watched it, right?
I did, yeah.
I just kind of thought it was like blah.
Like it wasn't really nothing real.
Like it wasn't like he definitely like stumbled over words and phrases a lot and you know, everything is bad right now, but he's trying to make it sound good.
But there wasn't anything I found like super interesting.
It was interesting that he said fund the police.
Yeah.
Like he made a point to be like, don't defund the police, fund the police.
Well, the thing is, and it's like, well, that's why everybody was saying, everyone not on your side was saying it's like, I mean, I went to school for journalism and like I understand like the dynamic between misinformation and like I like to know what people, especially politicians, actually believe.
Yeah.
And even when Biden was running, I know a lot of conservatives are saying, oh, Biden is anti-police.
I'm like, no, he's not.
Like, he is fundamentally pro-police.
Now, other people are, you know, anti-police, but it's like Biden did win because he was pro-police.
Like, oh, that was one of the aspects.
Because if he wasn't, like, the moderates wouldn't vote for him.
Yeah, it's kind of that war within the left.
Yeah.
Where he has to keep the people on the fringe happy, but he also has to kind of appeal to that moderate base.
So.
All right.
Well, let's go to our Babylon B banger of the week.
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Banger of the week.
This is our top shared story of the week.
Neil Young threatens to leave Spotify again unless Vladimir Putin backs down from Ukraine.
So he, yeah, so Neil Young threatens to pull his music off.
Very sad.
Not good.
This whole Ukraine thing, you know, you do see all the kind of virtue signaling of the, and I'm not saying anything about the conflict, but the whole like everybody's profile picture immediately changing to the new cause is always something that I'm like, eh.
Did you see Tim Dylan's tweet about he said something like, this is such a great time for all 75 media outlets to release their documentary on Putin.
And it's like, there's just so many documentaries like, what's his name?
He's like already he was like in Ukraine like day one like filming documentary.
What's his name?
The actor Sean Penn Sean Penn.
Oh, wasn't he?
He was in Ukraine.
Yeah, it's like, how did you get there so fast?
Yeah, he's just ready.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully Neil Young doesn't follow through.
That would be very sad.
Yeah.
And then we have the bomb of the week.
Bomb of the week.
California issues hypothermia warning after temperature drops below 68 degrees.
I thought that was funny.
It's very relevant to California.
It's relevant for us.
I think people just don't care about California.
It is weird how everything's been politicized.
And if you tell a joke about California, people assume you're going to slam California for being for having homeless or something.
You just make a general lighthearted joke and they're like, but California's communist.
We should have made it California issues hypothermia warning for all the homeless.
For the homeless people.
And commies and hippies.
Poop on the street freezes in California as temperature drops below 68 degrees.
Dude, I walked out in front and it was 29 degrees last week at one point.
And my whole car was frozen over.
Oh, wow.
Here in this state.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I went to go pick up my kids from school at like three o'clock and it was snowing on them.
So yeah, I would almost say.
Oh, wasn't it snowing in like Fontana?
Yeah.
A little bit ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it snows up there and you get up kind of towards the foothills.
So interesting.
Just wow.
We're suffering over here.
Pray for us, everybody.
Now let's find out what really happened this week as we go to weekly news with Adam Jenser.
It's time for the weekly news with Adam Jenser.
Joe Biden delivered the State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, marking the latest he's stayed up his entire presidency.
Biden appeared to get confused several times during the address.
He called Ukrainians Iranians.
He said a wall can't stop the vaccine.
And at one point he started throwing beads at AOC because it was Mardi Gras.
Biden started his speech by highlighting the sanctions the U.S. and other countries have placed on Vladimir Putin, which could shrink Russia's economy by 5%.
And you've got to hand it to him on this one.
If there's one thing Biden knows how to do, it's destroy an economy.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called Joe Biden on Monday using a satellite phone and urged the U.S. to send more ammunition, impose even harsher sanctions on Russia, and add his name to the wall at the comedy store.
Wow.
President Biden nominated federal judge Katanji Brown Jackson to fill Justice Stephen Breyer's vacancy.
If confirmed, she would be the first black woman on the Supreme Court and the second black woman after this black woman to be hired by Biden for being a black woman.
I'm pretty sure she wouldn't just be the second, but the first one that he's well, the second that he's announced, he's hiring specifically for that reason.
The U.S. released new nuclear attack guidelines that include social distancing and wearing masks inside radiation shelters.
They say the mask should cover your mouth and all three of your mutated noses.
When asked at a White House event whether Americans should be worried about a nuclear war with Russia, Joe Biden responded no.
And when has he ever been wrong before?
To protest the invasion of Ukraine, several artists have canceled upcoming shows in Russia, including Bring Me the Horizon, Youngblood, Health, AJR, and also some bands I've heard of before.
I've heard of Youngblood.
I don't know what that is.
Yeah.
But hopefully Putin will withdraw from Ukraine now that Bring Me the Horizon isn't coming.
And in the clearest sign yet that this is the start of World War III, this is real.
Plans for a concert by Franz Ferdinand have been canceled.
Bitcoin bounced back above $40,000 this week as many Russians switch from the crashing ruble to cryptocurrency.
It's an easy switch to make since both are fake currencies.
A stray Chinese rocket is going to crash into the moon on Friday.
It turns out they're not very good at driving spaceships either.
Yellowstone National Parks.
Yellowstone National Park celebrated its 150th anniversary this week.
So happy anniversary to Yellowstone.
And remember, there's still time to explode and kill us all before Putin does.
An elderly woman in Michigan got a tattoo to celebrate her 100th birthday.
And yeah, it looks sexy now, but imagine how stretched out and weird it's going to look when she's 110.
That's it for the weekly news.
Go get him.
Thanks, Adam.
That was great.
And now it is time for where are we at here?
We're in time for a birthday party.
Birthday party.
The bee turns six.
Wow.
Happy birthday, B. Happy birthday to you.
Here's the first article that ever went live on social for Babylon Bee.
Christian News Satire Site Launches.
And it's a picture of it crying Obama for the people who think we only start recently started doing politics.
Yeah, I think we launched with something like 17 articles and like eight or nine of them were political and then the rest were Christian.
So it was like half and half.
And now we do like all AOC jokes and one Jesus once in a while.
So we're going to go through the top 10 greatest hits of Babylon Bee articles.
These are, I think these are arranged by a number of shares on social media.
So our number one article of all time, Cracker Jack changes name to more politically correct Caucasian Jack.
Fantastic Photoshop there.
Number two is Biden cuts hole in masks so he can still sniff people's hair.
Yeah, April 2020, right?
Beginning of the pandemic there.
Yeah.
Next one is CDC: people with the dirt on Clintons have 843% greater risk of suicide.
That's one of those not the be things.
I look at that stuff.
I'm not a huge conspiracy theory guy, but I look at that stuff and I'm always a little like it is one of those things, like I don't actually believe the conspiracy theory, but it's a weird, like series of yeah.
My wife always says, if Hillary Clinton knocks on our door or like you know, people are like Weenie Kyle, she's like I'm gonna point them directly to you and tell them I have nothing to do with Babylon, so she's gonna sell me out.
Number four, LEGO introduces new, sharper bricks that instantly kill you when you step on them.
It's a nice one and I didn't even wash my feet for that picture.
It's kind of gross.
The next one, number five, Trump.
I have done more for Christianity than Jesus.
You know, what's funny is that one didn't do that.
Well, when we first posted it uh-huh, and then like it just started to go around make the rounds on the left, people thought it was real.
Oh, I see.
And then it just kept getting shared and shared.
And was that one or any of these?
Do you know ones that got the old Snopes fact check?
Uh, that one did uh-huh.
Uh, the other ones so far have not.
Okay, I will note when they hold yeah.
Motorcyclist who identifies as bicyclists sets cycling world like record.
There you go.
I think this is the only identifies joke in our top 10.
So not bad, we only have one and that's also the top video on the YouTube.
It is the top behind Elon Musk.
Don't count that one.
Uh, number seven, inspiring celebrities spell out, we're all in this, together with their yachts.
Uh, number eight, Bernie Tests negative for president.
That was a timing thing.
Oh yeah, so uh, celebrities spelling out that with the yachts got fact checked also.
So two of these have been so far.
Yeah, it's amazing what they decide the fact check, they don't have anything to do.
Fisher Price releases my first peaceful protest playset with house you can actually burn down.
And that one might have gotten fact-checked if I remember right, which is bizarre because it doesn't even look real the photo shows, clearly.
Yep, fact-checked.
Fun.
All right.
Number 10, Trump installs ejection seats throughout press briefing room.
And we have a nice Photoshop of that behind Mike over there.
Oh, yeah.
So some of these are on the wall, probably.
But yeah, well, thank you, everybody, for all your support and reading the site and watching the videos and subscribing to the podcast.
And those of you who are paying subscribers, it's just amazing to me that it's only been six years.
I usually talk to people about the Babylon B and they're like, it's only been that long.
They feel like it's been around for much longer than it has.
It does feel like it's been longer.
But yeah, six years.
So happy birthday, Babylon B.
And I hope you guys celebrate with us by clicking on many Babylon B articles.
Let's go now to our interview with Alex Epstein.
He is a guy who really likes gasoline.
Yeah, he's a big fossil fuel fan.
And we had talked to Elon Musk back in December, and Elon Musk was going on about solar panels and how you could, what was his thing about you could like do 100 by 100 square mile, 100 miles by 100 miles section and of solar panels and you could power everything with just that.
And Alex Epstein disagreed.
Had the gull to disagree with Elon Musk, the smartest man on the planet.
So take his opinions with a grain of salt.
Let's talk to Alex Epstein and see what he has to say.
He has a book called The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels that you can check out also.
Fascinating subject.
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And now for another interview on the B Weekly.
But we're here with Alex Epstein.
No relation.
It's Epstein.
That's how you make the decision.
Are you Epstein?
I am Epstein.
That's only mattered in the last year.
Yeah.
It's great.
It's great that you're successful.
It sucks as no matter how successful you get, you can never own an island.
That's true, but I have a kind of a goal that I've never publicly said, which is that by 2023, I will be associated with the name Epstein before that guy.
Oh, nice.
That's a great goal to have.
Probably not for the same reasons that would be.
No, no, it will be redeemed.
It'll be like, I think Brian Epstein was the manager of the Beatles.
It'll be great again.
It's Epstein.
That's a good thing.
It's Epstein.
And you've written the moral case for fossil fuels.
You also host a podcast, right, on YouTube that I've seen before.
You're an expert on fossil fuels.
You like fossil fuels.
So what is your favorite dinosaur?
Well, so fossil fuels don't come from dinosaurs, although they come from the time of dinosaurs.
But I mean, as a kid, I liked Allosaurus just because it had my name.
It sounded like me.
But I think I'm very conventional.
I mean, I just love the T-Rex.
He's really hard to not like.
I mean, he's just so powerful and beautiful.
That's classic.
That would really, I mean, you talk about an island.
So it's interesting to think about like if you're really rich, what are the things you can get from being really, really rich?
And there aren't that many, I think, that are that appealing.
I think Private Island is one.
Private jet is two.
Like that's 10 times or more expensive than just flying first class.
Like flying first class, if you do well, you can do it.
And let's say you have eight kids or something like that.
But owning dinosaur skeletons is another one.
I really love, I'm not at all a paleontology expert or even like someone who studies it, but I just love dinosaurs.
This is the rock that showed that he owns.
It's like a $38 million T-Rex skull that he has.
Right.
I mean, it's just, it's like, you know, like beachfront property is one of these things where it's super expensive, but like dinosaur bones are just this incredibly, it's just such a limited supply.
Yeah.
And so that's why you want to be really, really rich.
So you can afford those kinds of things.
It should be our currency instead of the gold standard.
We should have dinosaur fossils.
That's true.
Yeah, it's very hard to expand the supply.
By the way, I should just say, in case anyone can see my hand, I cut it on a razor like a minute after I arrived here, and they amazingly have a nurse who wrapped it up.
So it looks like I'm giving everyone the finger, but I'm very grateful to how prepared you guys were.
Yeah.
And we're glad you're going to survive.
Yeah, yeah.
Good prognosis.
Well, since you threw us a curveball and told us that fossil fuel doesn't actually come from dinosaurs, we're not really good at adjusting on the fly, so we're just going to ask all your questions anyway.
Okay, good.
Which dinosaur makes the best oil?
I like the Sinclair dinosaur.
Have you ever seen that one?
Oh, yeah, that's where I got a gas at this morning.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
That's exciting for me.
Yeah, so I saw that dinosaur today.
I've given speeches there, but it is, I think it's, it's, I like, I actually like thinking a lot about the history.
So you can think of it as it's ancient dead plants or more accurately, ancient dead life.
I think it's actually very powerful to understand fossil fuels that way because you understand both the benefits and some of the hazards of fossil fuels.
So if you think of it, just to simplify it as plants, it's also like plankton, which aren't technically plants, but you take like, you think about old plants.
And what's happened is they've, like right now, you can use plants as energy in the form of wood, right?
Like you can burn wood.
But what nature did with these ancient plants is it compressed them.
And so what you had is this very concentrated source of energy, oil being the most obvious there.
And so oil has what's, you know, remarkable, what's called energy density.
It stores a lot of energy in a small space.
And that's why oil is so, so difficult to replace around the world because you're dealing with something that has a large amount of energy in a small space.
And if you look at things like EVs, they're very difficult to do for larger vehicles because the strength to weight ratio of oil becomes more significant the larger the vehicle you're dealing with.
So they've got this concentrated quality.
Also, since you're talking about hundreds of millions of years, they're very abundant because you're dealing with the plants that have existed throughout all of history, you know, prehistory, all of this stuff.
So they're abundant, they're concentrated, they're also stored because just like wood stores energy, they store energy.
And that's really important for reliability, that you can get the energy on demand versus, say, the sun and the wind, which come in intermittently.
And if we talk about Elon, that's going to be part of the issue is he doesn't fully acknowledge the challenge of that.
But at the same time, they're plants.
And so they don't just have the hydrogen and carbon, which is what stores the energy.
They also have things like sulfur.
So when you burn coal, it can release what's called sulfur dioxide, which can cause smog.
Why is that?
Because the sulfur is part of the plant.
So the things that the plants need to grow are also things that become contaminants or pollutants when you burn the fossil fuels.
The other thing is they're hydrogen and carbon.
And so when you burn them, you get water, H2O, and you also get carbon dioxide, CO2.
So that's why I love thinking about the history of it because you get, it's this naturally stored, naturally concentrated, naturally abundant source of energy, but it does emit CO2.
And it does also, particularly coal and to some extent oil, have these other elements of plants that it puts in the air.
And so then with those, you need technology to reduce the emission of those.
Otherwise, it can cause you problems.
What happens when we run out of oil?
Can we do Jurassic Park, make millions of dinosaurs, and then harvest them for more oil?
I love, I love.
I mean, I honestly find the idea of Jurassic Park like so intoxicating.
One of the challenges with that, actually, and this relates to the CO2 issue, is that dinosaurs existed at a time when the planet was much more tropical and lush, including you have something like 10 times more CO2.
So you can have these giant plants, which the herbivores need, but also the carnivores, they eat the herbivores, right?
So you need, so that's one of the real challenges.
We don't have enough CO2 in the atmosphere of dinosaurs, which means we need to use a ton of energy to feed the dinosaurs.
But then if you think the oil came from dinosaurs, then you're using the dinosaurs to feed the dinosaurs.
And so it leads to challenges.
But the issue of oil running out is really, it's one that's weirdly thought about.
Like I sort of came on this because I had been critical of certain things Elon Musk had said on the show.
And one thing he says and that other people say is, well, we're going to run out someday.
So like, let's do it now, which doesn't make any sense to me because you can think, like, depending on your views of the universe, you can say, like, well, the sun is going to run out someday.
Or this element is going to last for 200,000 years.
And I think the best policy is just to have the policy of let's always do the most cost-effective thing.
And then over time, that evolves.
So there's this false alternative of we do the sustainable thing, which usually means repeatable.
Like let's use the sun because we can theoretically repeat it over and over and over for a billion years.
Although all the elements that go into it, you can't repeat over and over.
But the best policy is just to say, if the sun is ever the most cost-effective thing, do it.
But otherwise, use oil.
And then if you can only do that for 300 years, then use uranium.
And then you might figure out how to use the elements in water and just turn water into energy.
So I'm like, I think it's very important to think of it as energy evolves and we shouldn't aspire to use the most renewable thing.
We should always use the most cost-effective thing and then progress over time.
So that's interesting.
Yeah, you are on because you have disagreed with some of the stuff Elon Musk said when he was on the interview show.
And we want to say we never disagree with Elon Musk.
We're so glad that he came on our show.
He always retweets our stuff and gives us credit on like Kevin Sorbo.
So we have nothing against Elon Musk.
One of the points he made and others have made is switching to solar panels, that some like massive solar panels could power the world.
Now, bring up what you said when you said fossil fuels will last us a long time.
What is that timeframe?
Like if we use them, like I know I've heard about the sun, it's like billions of years.
Is it thousands of years, millions of years?
What's the timeframe for fossil fuels?
And in the immediate sense, what is the disadvantage to solar panels?
Are they actually worse for the environment?
Are they ineffective cost-wise?
Like as a rough number, you can think of it as conservatively.
There's 10 times more of all the fossil fuels of each one, including oil, which is usually considered the most scarce and hard to replace, more than we've ever used in the entire history of civilization.
So that's what's called the deposits.
But that's different than the amount that we will be able to use cost-effectively.
And there are terms like reserves and proved reserves and different, but the key is that there's huge amounts of it.
So it's like an endless ocean of this stuff.
And our ability to harness that ocean is bigger and bigger and bigger all the time.
So for example, you've probably heard of fracking and the shale revolution.
And that was a type of rock that was considered economically inaccessible for the most part, even 15 or 20 years ago.
And now there's more of that considered like a resource.
It wasn't a resource before, but it is now because we've harnessed it.
Like there's more of that even than we've used in the whole history of civilization, more of that left.
So there's no near-term concern about supply.
Like if you look at natural gas, there's something in the ocean called methane hydrates where you're talking about like 10 times more even than I've talked about so far.
So there is no at all issue of you could use, everyone could use fossil fuels for a century and you'd be fine.
And also over time, you can convert them into one another.
Like there are better and better ways of turning gas into liquid.
The key thing is the liquid.
And that I want to stress because it's how do you have energy when you're on the go when you're mobile.
And again, the concentration is the key thing there.
So you could talk about fossil fuels, but like for instance, with nuclear, it's pretty good at generating electricity.
But at the moment, it doesn't have very good solutions for portability.
Now, actually, in the long term, it may be the most promising because it's even much more dense than fossil fuels, but we don't have commercialized applications.
So we have icebreakers and aircraft carriers and stuff, but we don't yet have planes and that kind of thing that are nuclear.
And it's one reason why I'm big on decriminalizing nuclear so that we can have a lot of innovation.
Because logically, the history of energy is that you go from dilute sources of energy to concentrated.
So we started off with, you know, actually the sun, like most of our energy used to be renewable, the sun and the wind, and then we moved to wood, and then we moved to coal, and then we moved to oil.
And so the kind of next big logical thing is to move to nuclear.
But interestingly, the anti-fossil fuel modern environmental movement has criminalized nuclear.
So we've seen almost no progress there in many ways.
They criminalize nuclear, like it's illegal for me to have a nuclear reactor.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's good to know.
You better go shut that down right now.
I got to take care of it.
But I don't think it should be.
So this is an interesting thing.
I want to make sure we get to solar, but like nuclear is, if you look at the physics of it, it's the safest form of energy ever invented.
Most forms of energy, the hazard that they have is that they can go out of control very quickly.
Like they can explode in one form or another.
So like you have a coal plant that can explode.
You can have natural gas can explode quite easily.
Oil can explode.
A big dam, like a hydroelectric dam can wipe out 100,000 people if it just breaks.
Solar doesn't have that.
I mean, it can catch on fire, people like die falling off the roofs.
But in terms of safety, it's safer than the fossil fuels.
But nuclear is the safest of all.
Nothing can come close.
So the issue with solar, as I mentioned, that the history of energy is you use more and more concentrated energy.
And the other thing is that over time, you need energy more and more on demand.
So if you look at how we use energy today, like electricity in particular, how does that work?
Whatever we do in terms of our demand for electricity, the supply adjusts.
We have this amazing thing called a grid, which people don't appreciate.
But no matter how much electricity we use, and imagine you're a factory, like you can ramp up and it just happens.
And this is a magical thing if you look at electricity because electricity is very precise in terms of like you need exactly the right amount, otherwise things go haywire.
And yet we have this ability to generate exactly the amount of supply we need in response to substantially unpredictable demand.
What that means is you need a highly controllable supply.
So once you realize you need highly controllable electricity, the biggest challenge with solar and wind becomes apparent because these are uncontrollable inputs, right?
So the sun you cannot control.
Some days it's like you take a place like Utah or something like that.
Like it can just, you know, you can have a snowstorm and it can be unavailable for days.
But even you can have clouds.
Even where we are in California, it's not particularly predictable and it's not controllable.
It's not on at night.
It's not on, you know, late afternoon, early evening.
It's not on in the morning.
And so when you're thinking about the cost of that, you need to think about not only the cost of the solar panels and the transmission wires, but the cost of the whole backup system that turns an uncontrollable input into a controllable output.
And I would say 75% of my criticism of what Elon says is that he totally ignores or devalues this issue.
And my view is if you look at the full cost of solar, it is completely cost prohibitive if you factor in the backup.
If you just look at how much are the solar panels, yes, it's cheap, but nobody can operate anything just using solar panels.
They need the backup system to turn the uncontrollable input into a controllable output.
And so the whole idea of focusing on solar to me makes, I think it's a kind of primitive religious fetish of we just want to use the sun.
And that's a kind of appealing thing to people, like let's use the sun, let's use the wind, it's natural.
Because if you look at just what's actually promising, it would be using nuclear where you have this naturally concentrated, stored, abundant source of energy that could theoretically do anything and has a track record of providing controllable, mostly low-cost electricity for decades before it was criminalized.
So one of the very revealing things about the anti-fossil fuel movement is that they are the biggest opponents of nuclear.
And many pro-fossil fuel people like me are adamantly pro-nuclear.
And with Elon, I would fault him for he's not rapidly anti-nuclear, but he very much diminishes it.
He's for subsidies for solar.
And he doesn't acknowledge the fundamental challenges in solar.
And he doesn't, like, if you care about CO2 emissions, like you need to be rapidly pro-nuclear and be avidly in favor of decriminalizing nuclear.
So this involves, I'm going to just try to be as simple as possible with the numbers, but if people saw that interview, what happened was at one point, he just said it takes a relatively small amount of land to produce solar power.
And he mentioned in passing nuclear, like it's even more dense than nuclear, which if you think about it, like nuclear can store in a certain amount of space 1 million times what oil can store.
And in practice, it ends up being about in the thousands of times.
And if you think of sunlight, it's pretty dilute.
So it's a kind of weird claim how he makes that claim.
But part of how he makes that claim is he, and this was the thing I got really upset about.
And I should say, I really, like, he's a guy I would love, like, he's the type of person.
No, I would love to like him.
Like, he's such my type of person in the sense that like he's ambitious.
He like achieves things.
He's pro, interestingly, he's pro-human, which most kind of climate catastrophists are not.
Like he's pro-human.
He really likes human beings.
He stands for achieving.
Like there's so much I love about him.
I get so upset because he says these things that he, I don't, I don't, like he's psychologically, I can understand most people.
I cannot understand what's going on with him.
So maybe he'll watch this and he can explain because what he said there was just obviously false.
Like there can be no argument.
Even so the basic thing he said was he's talking about, I'll just give you the simple version.
You take a square meter of solar and in a sunny area, it gives you what's called one kilowatt, right?
Okay, so like one kilowatt is, you can think of it like a Tesla is 100 kilowatt hours.
So one kilowatt, if the sun shines there for 100 hours, it'll fill up the Tesla.
So he's saying this.
And then the basic thing he was doing is saying, okay, 20% with 20% efficiency, it's 0.2 kilowatts.
And that's the estimate he was giving.
All of his numbers were based on the idea of solar generating 0.2 kilowatts per square meter.
And the idea of the efficiency is the solar panel gets hit with one kilowatt of sun, but because of the technology, it can only convert one fifth of that into energy.
So it's 0.2 kilowatts, right?
And so all of his calculations were based on that.
But there's one problem with this.
The sun does not shine all the time.
It shines intermittently.
And this is the whole problem with the sun as energy.
If the sun shone 24-7, like you can do with a satellite out in space, it would be amazing.
All of its problems basically would be solved, and we should use huge amounts of solar energy.
One of the other things I like that I've seen you do on Twitter, you do something.
Well, you do this hashtag catastrophizing.
Yeah.
Can you explain that a little for us?
It's very interesting and they're kind of fun to read them.
Yeah, definitely.
So one point I make in chapter one of Moral Case for Foss Fuels, anyone can just, I think you can just get it free on Amazon.
And I have a new book, Fossil Future, where I go into more detail on it.
But when we hear these predictions about the future, we have to recognize that there is a 50-year track record of apocalyptic predictions about fossil fuels that have come false.
And they have three or four basic categories, depending on how you think about it.
One is we're going to run out of them.
soon.
So we've talked a little bit about kind of why that's wrong.
One is they're going to cause not just pollution, but catastrophic increasing amounts of pollution.
And the opposite has happened in most of the world.
Using technology, we've used more fossil fuels, but with less pollution.
And then the idea is that they're going to cause some dramatically negative climate change.
The dominant kind of public view in the 70s and the 60s was it's going to get very cold and now it's going to get very warm.
And in any case, people are going to die.
And interestingly, whether with cold or warm, they predicted a lot of the same things.
It's like going to be drought and famine and stuff like that, more storms.
Like whether it gets cold or hot, it's going to be worse, which I think reveals a bias against human impact and a belief that all human impact is going to cause bad things, regardless of whether it's warmer or cold.
And the idea that we inherited the exact perfect amount of CO2 in the exact right average temperature.
So you have this track record.
And I think it's very important for people to know the track record because it can break you of this idea of, oh, the media tells me experts say X, therefore I should believe it.
Now, expert knowledge is crucial and we need expert knowledge to know about energy, to know about climate, to know about environment.
But we have to recognize that the system that tells us what experts think, I believe is very, very broken.
I call this the knowledge system.
So you think about like, how do we know what the best opinion is about our impact on climate?
That has a, there's researchers who kind of discover things and even they can be influenced by negative things.
But then there are people who synthesize what they come up with, like who put it all together, which in climate is called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And they can have their own motivation.
So you could even have all the researchers be totally right, which would be hard enough.
But then the synthesizers could really distort it.
And then you have what I call the disseminators like the New York Times who tell us what the synthesis is.
And then there are what I call the evaluators, including politicians, who decide what to do about it.
And you can see this with COVID, like you have a similar thing, like there are researchers, but then there are people who are synthesizing it and they can distort it.
And there are people who are disseminating us and they can distort it.
And then there are people who are putting it.
Evaluating what to do about it.
Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot over the past few years.
And I didn't have this in this book, Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, but it's central to the book Fossil Future.
I call it the knowledge system.
And if you think of it as having these four stages of research, synthesis, dissemination, evaluation, you really get how even if all the scientists are doing their job, what they say can lead to terrible policies.
If you wonder historically, like why was it that we had things like eugenics, forced sterilization, even slavery, extermination of Jews and other groups in the name of science?
So it's not just that majorities believed it, but even prestigious scientific people.
I believe it's because the knowledge system malfunctions.
As a Christian, you know that God is always there for you, but sometimes things in this life can get overwhelming.
It's a crazy time, especially with the pandemic and all that stuff.
It's important to speak to a counselor, but you definitely want to talk to one who shares your faith and values.
Online counseling from faithful counseling is there for you.
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Go to faithfulcounseling.com/slash Babylon B. You're going to fill out a questionnaire and it'll help them assess your needs and get you matched with a counselor who shares your faith and a counselor that you'll love.
That's faithfulcounseling.com slash Babylon B. All right, if you want to see the rest of that interview with Alex Epstein, become a paying Babylon B subscriber and we will play that at the end of the subscriber lounge section.
And even if you don't want to see the rest of that interview, become a paying subscriber.
Even if you don't.
Just do it.
Yeah.
Even if you don't, for sure.
Do us a solid and become a paying subscriber.
We're going to do some hate mail now, but to set the stage for this hate mail, we're going to play this video, which is our Christian Woman Starter Kit commercial.
So let's check that out.
I really miss Adam Ford.
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Good natured chuckle.
Did you like that, Mike?
It was fantastic.
I don't know how anyone could hate on that.
We burned Christian Women good.
God, we crushed them.
Here is the hate mail that we got for that one.
This is from MT.
And MT says, why so many Christian attacks lately?
Some of it's funny.
The rest is just obsolete stereotypes and ignorant lies invented by liberals, atheists, and anti-Christians.
I dare you, tiny little cowards, to make fun of Islam and insult their prophet Muhammad.
I'm now unsubscribed.
I'll make fun of Muhammad.
What should we say about him?
What do you want us to make fun of?
He's fat.
We'll tease him.
We'll tease Muhammad a little bit.
She wants us to cyberbully her.
We'll do a sake of comedy.
We'll do it.
We'll make fun of Muhammad.
Yeah, we could do a Muslim woman's starter kit.
How could that go wrong?
That's wonderful.
We also got other hate mail on that one.
This is from Christina Cutliss.
Sounds like mocking a lot of decent people, not to mention mocking God.
No fear of God will not take you anywhere you'll like.
But of course, you're so arrogant, you don't give a blank.
You don't give a dot, dot, dot, dot.
She just didn't finish her thought.
Yeah.
I don't know what she was going to say there.
Like, you don't give a flaming platypus or something.
Yeah.
You know, who knows what she was going to say.
All right.
We are going to now move into our subscriber lounge.
So we got some bonus love mail from the Christian Woman's Starter Kit video.
And we have a classic story of the week.
We asked Mike Luso the 10 questions and we have some subscriber headlines and the rest of the Alex Epstein interview.
It is an action-packed subscriber lounge this week.
So join us for that.
And in the meantime, happy birthday, Babylon B. Thanks for tuning in this week, everybody.
Coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
You get to hang out with any three people, living or dead.
Who are they?
Lazarus from the Bible, just that way he can experience being resurrected and then dying again.
He's like, this keeps happening.
Stop it.
Do you have to be like, can they be fictional people?
Yeah.
Sure.
Elmo.
Talk to Elmo.
I love Elmo.
Don't look now, but look who we have here to surprise you.
This has been another edition of the Bee Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon B. Reminding you that someone out there knows something about Carmen.