Andrew Dessler, a 30-year climate scientist and Texas A&M director, counters Steve Koonin’s claims by exposing parallels to tobacco/fluorocarbon denial—where industry-funded misinformation delayed action despite clear evidence. He debunks fossil fuel cost myths, noting renewables will outpace them by 2026 (IEA), while coal alone kills tens of thousands annually via PM2.5 pollution in places like Evansville. Dessler warns unadaptable warming—permafrost collapse, ocean acidification—could trigger irreversible economic and political crises, with corporations evading accountability through entrenched political power. The solution? Proven tech like wind/solar paired with firm policy, not speculative fixes, to prevent future freedoms being sacrificed for survival. [Automatically generated summary]
In fact, I was going to say, you know, that's a fantastic book.
By Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway that really goes over this all the way into climate change about how science is used to try to undermine policy action.
And so then, you know, fast forward to the 80s and you have fluorocarbons and ozone depletion.
And in fact, the exact same thing happens.
The science is really well established, but the scientists are showing up saying the scientists have it all wrong.
And in fact, the arguments they're advancing Are almost exactly the same as the arguments that Dr. Kuhn is advancing.
If you take a Word document, you just do global word replace, ozone depletion for climate change, you have exactly the same argument.
In fact, I have a slide with a quote that I normally don't make people read a paragraph, but I think this is actually really useful.
If you go to slide 52, this is from 1989, and I think, is it going to show up there?
Yes.
So this is a quote from something that was said about fluorocarbon.
It says, That's exactly the same argument.
You know, we don't understand it.
It's natural variability.
It's identical argument.
And keep it back up.
In the next paragraph, New York Times reports talks about the disadvantages of CFC substitutes.
They may be toxic, flammable, corrosive.
They certainly won't work as well.
They'll reduce the energy efficiency of appliances.
They'll deteriorate.
$135 billion of equipment used CFCs in the United States alone, and much of this equipment will have to be replaced or modified to work well.
Eventually, that will involve 100 million home refrigerators, air conditioners in 90 million cars, central air conditioning plants, and 100,000 large buildings.
Good luck!
Total costs haven't even been added up yet.
And again, you know, windmills don't work.
You know, the costs are going to be extraordinary.
And, you know, you were around the 90s.
Do you remember the economic apocalypse that happened when we replaced CFCs?
No, I was going to say, I think Kunin's take on replacing things is essentially that there's so many people in third world countries in impoverished areas that rely on fossil fuels and that eliminating fossil fuels will be devastating to those environments because these people are going to lose out on massive amounts of income and economically it's going to affect them in a disastrous way.
So if you want to create a reliable carbon-free grid, you have a grid that's about, on average, produces 75% of its power from wind and solar.
And then the other 25% is what we call dispatchable firm power.
So it could be nuclear, could be geothermal, could be hydro.
It's a power source you can turn on and off to balance the The variability of wind and solar.
So when the wind stops blowing, you turn up your dispatchable, and when you're getting lots of wind and solar, you turn it off and you let wind and solar run.
And so you might ask reasonably, why use wind and solar at all?
Why just build 100% nuclear?
And that would work.
And I would actually support that.
But that's much more expensive.
Wind and solar are very cheap at this point.
And in fact, the marginal cost of wind and solar energy is zero.
They produce an extra joule of energy at no cost because they don't have any fuel.
So if you want to pay the least amount for energy, What you want to do is you want to have a grid that's mainly wind and solar, but then you have to have this firm power that makes up for it when the power, when wind and solar don't produce.
Because there are going to be times when they don't produce.
So that's part of why you need to have dispatchable energy.
You don't really need energy storage on a grid.
Now, there are some benefits to energy storage, especially storage that lasts a few hours, because you can collect energy at noon when solar is producing lots and shift it into the evening.
So you can shift the energy a few hours.
So you might want to use batteries for that, but you don't really need long-term storage To run the grid.
You just need some sort of dispatchable power to balance the renewable.
So is, when you have batteries that are attached to solar systems, is that just for individual use, like for off-the-grid homes and things of that like?
And again, the idea would be to shift power from when you're getting the most solar, which is noon, to when the demand is the highest, which is a few hours later.
So for most people who have solar panels in their house, they actually have an interlock system that when the grid goes down, their solar panels shut off.
And the reason to do that is for safety of the power line workers.
They don't want...
If the power line workers think there's no power on the grid, They don't want these solar panels feeding power in.
They walk in and they get shocked.
So the solar panels actually are designed to shut off when the power goes out.
Now you can put a battery on your house, you can have it disconnect from the grid, and you can basically make your house a little island.
We were taking a drive through the middle of Texas the other day and we saw one and it was so close to the highway and it was facing the highway and I had this irrational fear that the windmill was going to break off and go rolling down the road and crush us.
So it didn't back up because the gas supply essentially was choked off.
So especially in West Texas, a lot of the gas that comes out of the ground has a lot of condensates in it, things that condense and freeze.
So heavier hydrocarbons, water, and at the very cold temperatures, It actually froze the wells, so the gas couldn't get out.
It plugged the wells up.
And then what happened is, so you get this reduction in natural gas flow, and so then the power started to go down.
And this was very sudden.
This was in the middle of the night on February 15th, 2021. The power started to go down.
And then what happened was, a lot of the natural gas infrastructure is powered by electricity.
They have these compressors, they have valves, and once the electricity started to go down, all of the rest of the natural gas infrastructure started to fail.
And so you lost even more natural gas.
So it was really this cascading problem with the natural gas system are the dispatchable power.
And, you know, that event cost about $200 billion.
Between how much we had to pay for gas, plus all the damage, all the pipes that froze and burst.
I mean, it was an enormously expensive event.
One of the most expensive events Texas has ever experienced.
For that $200 million, which is all going to repair pipes, it's going to these really rich natural gas guys, we could essentially build enough nuclear power to replace most of our gas power if we had just done that.
But instead, we're spending all that money You know, repairing houses that were destroyed because the natural gas system failed.
I mean, it's crazy to me that we still rely on these systems that, you know, we can talk about fossil fuels, but fossil fuels have many huge disadvantages, not just climate change, but many others.
And, you know, we could fix this if we wanted to, but we're not.
And we're just sitting here paying money.
Year after year for these failures of fossil fuel systems.
Yeah, so let me just say, right off the top, I'm not an expert on the details of nuclear power.
Certainly, people are worried about nuclear power, meltdowns, etc.
The way I look at it is you have to trade off costs and benefits, and you look at climate change.
I mean, we can go over the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels, and I'd be happy to do that.
And if you look at all of those and you say nuclear, my view is I'm willing to take some risk With nuclear power to avoid all these other really terrible impacts.
Now, I do know that there's a lot of work being done on new technologies for nuclear, these small modular reactors, things that hold the promise of better nuclear power.
And maybe those will come out.
But even with kind of existing technology, from what I understand, I'm willing to take the risk.
My understanding of technology, the nuclear technology, rather, is that in 2022, there's many more failsafe measures than were when they designed, like, say, the Fukushima system, for instance.
But when you're saying like nuclear bros, so is your impression that these are real people that are just enthusiastic about nuclear power or are these trolls or are these people that work for some sort of a lobby and they're enthusiastic about getting nuclear pushed forward because they're a part of the industry?
And when you looked at Steve Coonan's assertions about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment and carbon in the environment, and what about human use is responsible for that?
Like, he put a bunch of percentages.
How much of it is agriculture?
How much of it is transportation?
Do you dispute his positions on those that the amount that humans, like with fossil fuels in particular, have an impact on the earth is smaller or at least less significant than a lot of the alarmists would say?
So he spent five minutes, well, maybe not five minutes, two minutes talking about climate models and how hard it is to do.
And, you know, it's like climate models are very uncertain.
And then At another point, he talks about the economic models.
He says, warming of, and again, I don't know the exact quote, but warming of two or three degrees, why that's 4% of GDP. That's nothing.
And, you know, economic models are terrible.
If you don't believe the climate models, the economic models are absolutely awful.
And I can go in, I can explain that.
In fact, let me tell you a story about economic models and why you should not believe them.
And we'll get back to how he doesn't talk about the uncertainty in those at all.
So in the 2010s, the Obama administration put out this thing called the social cost of carbon.
And that's basically the cost of the damages from one ton of carbon out of the atmosphere.
So they say, if you emit one ton of carbon, we have our economic model and it's going to cost $35 of damage.
And they have a way of doing it.
I won't go into details.
Then the Trump administration comes in and they redo the calculation and they get $3.
Now, what changed?
It wasn't the science.
It was the assumptions going into the economic model.
The Trump administration didn't put very much value on future people and didn't put any value on people outside of the U.S. And so what that means is the difference came down to a value judgment.
Do we care about damages to the rest of the world?
Do we care about damages to future generations?
That's not a scientific question.
That's a moral question.
And these economic estimates are completely suffused with value judgments.
Well, that was an example of the Trump administration, how the assumptions that go into these economic models can make a factor of 10 difference in what you estimate.
And if the assumptions that an economist makes when he's, the value judgments, the values of the economist when they're doing a calculation can make a factor of 10 difference, you can't look at that as a reliable number.
It says federal judge halts Biden administration from using social cost of carbon.
Can you scroll up so I can read what it says?
Federal judges barring the Biden administration from using the social cost of carbon put into place on January 20th, 2021. The decision issued Friday affects the interim figure in place now as well as an updated metric expected to be issued later this month.
So it says here, the case brought up by 10 states, including Louisiana and West Virginia, challenged the interim metric, arguing that it was arbitrarily set and would increase the cost of energy production and other activities.
So how much of an effect does this have on what you're saying?
I mean this is not – I mean my point is about the reliability of these economic estimates and these reliabilities that we have no – we have no idea what the cost of climate change is going to be.
It says here the plaintiffs did not challenge a particular use of the Biden administration's social cost figure, but rather its potential applications.
So, I guess what they're saying is that they don't want the Biden administration applying this idea of social cost.
And if you look at it, it's Louisiana and West Virginia.
Those are fossil fuel producing states.
And, you know, a social cost of carbon is bad for fossil fuels because it makes them pay for the impacts that they're—or at least it incorporates the cost of the impacts in the decisions.
But this doesn't challenge sort of—this doesn't have any impact on what I'm saying about these economic estimates Are not reliable.
And so when Dr. Koonin says it's only 4% of GDP, you know, maybe it's 4%, maybe it's 80%.
80%?
Sure.
Could you go to slide 28 now?
So, to give you an idea of how economists have no idea what the impact does, this is a plot of the damage.
So, it's the reduction of GDP as a function of temperature.
Now, unfortunately, this is in Celsius.
To convert from Celsius change to Fahrenheit change, it's multiplied by 2, about 2. So, 5 degrees Celsius is about 9 degrees Fahrenheit.
And you can see that These estimates don't agree at all.
You know, some people say that a 5-degree warming Celsius, about 9 degrees Fahrenheit, would only reduce GDP by, you know, 8%.
Yeah, so 3 degrees Celsius is about 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
That is where we're going.
And if you kind of even look at 3 degrees, the estimates differ by a factor of 10. Some people are saying 20% loss of GDP. Others are saying 2% or 3% loss of GDP. And all of these are lower limits.
It's going to be worse than this.
And the reason there are lower limits is because the majority of them add in, they do this what we call a bottom-up approach.
They say, okay, what's the effect of agriculture?
And what's going to be the effect of sea level rise?
And what's going to be the effect of warmer temperatures on productivity?
And they kind of sum them up.
But they leave out all of these things.
Ocean acidification.
How do you even value that?
Permafrost melting.
How is that?
All of these things are left out of many of these estimates.
And so, you know, the important thing, again, I can't get over is we have no idea what the cost of climate impacts are going to be.
Anybody who tells you that they know what three degrees is going to be like is either a liar or a fool.
We have no idea.
Now, I then cannot tell you it's going to be bad.
But I think it could be bad.
It could be very bad, especially when you look at the Texas freeze.
Well, it's just even if they are fixing it, how'd the metal get bent like that?
Look how the rocks and gravels pushed to the side.
So what Kunin was doing, in your mind, is looking at absolute best case scenario and ignoring all the potential things that could go sideways like these infrastructure things you're pointing out.
Yeah, I mean, you know, what does a defense lawyer do?
You know, my client is an upstanding family man.
You know, CO2 is plant food.
My client, you know, could not have done it.
It was somebody else.
You know, he was talking about ocean circulation.
It's ocean cycles.
He mentioned that during his interview.
And what he doesn't tell you is, you know, CO2 was found with the victim's blood all over him, and he was holding a knife, and there's videotape of him stabbing the client.
And I'd be happy to go over why we're so...
I mean, twice you asked him what fraction of the warming Is due to humans.
And he basically blew you off several times saying, we have no idea.
And that's one of the things that's absolutely wrong.
So begin with, let's be clear, we're talking about the warming over the last century plus, last 150 years.
So if you could go to slide 23, let me explain, and I'm going to give you kind of a cartoon version.
This is actually how I teach my undergrad class.
What we call detection and attribution.
And the first thing you have to realize is that if the climate changes, there has to be a physical reason.
If a house is burglarized, somebody did it.
And if the climate is changing, there has to be a reason.
So we can list the suspects.
So this is from the usual suspects, of course.
And we know what's changed the climate in the past, and so we can investigate this.
We know that continental drift, the fact that the continents are moving, that can change the climate.
We know that the sun's output, the sun is the ultimate source of energy for our climate.
If the sun gets brighter, that could cause climate change.
Orbital variations.
That's what actually drives the ice ages.
It's the fact that the Earth's orbit varies over long timescales.
Ocean cycles.
That's what he said.
Things like El Nino.
He said, you know, that could be it.
And then finally, you have greenhouse gases.
So can you go to the next slide?
And so we can exclude all the suspects.
We can exclude continental drift.
It's too slow.
The continents haven't moved in the last century.
Orbital variations, also too slow.
That's a 100,000-year process.
The sun, we have observations.
We measure the output of the sun.
It's not getting brighter, at least since we've been measuring them from the 70s.
Ocean cycles, that one actually is the hardest one To exclude, but we don't have any evidence to support it.
So imagine, you know, someone was on trial, and the only evidence that they did it was that they didn't have an alibi.
There was actually no evidence that they did it.
If you were in a jury, you wouldn't convict them.
You know, they said they were home playing their Xbox, but nobody saw them.
And so they obviously murdered that person.
You would not convict somebody for whom the only evidence Is absence of an alibi.
And for ocean cycles, that's the only thing you can point to.
We can't rule it out, but we don't have any evidence that it did it.
And then you have greenhouse gases.
So I like to call greenhouse gases the world's dumbest criminal.
It dropped its wallet at the crime scene.
It fingerprints.
There's videotape of it committing the crime.
It was bragging to his friends that it did it.
You know, when they arrested him, all the stolen stuff was in the trunk.
Can you go to the next slide?
So, again, I don't know if you want to read this, but we have massive amounts of evidence that carbon dioxide is responsible for the warming of the last hundred years.
And there's no other explanation.
And you put it all together, the scientific consensus is that we're responsible for all of the warming, 100%.
So we've known since the 1800s that if you add a gas, a greenhouse gas, those are gases that absorb infrared radiation, if you add that to the atmosphere, it's going to warm the climate.
We've known that since Arrhenius in the 1890s.
We also know that carbon dioxide is going up.
All right?
I mean, I don't think there's any dispute about that.
It's going up because humans are consuming fossil fuels.
That's the main reason.
And so you put those together, and in the 1890s, people were predicting that we would see global warming.
I mean, that was 1890s.
They said, we can't see it yet because we don't have measurements, but this is going to warm the climate.
So indeed, when you see the climate going up, you think, okay, that makes sense.
If you look back at the paleo record, we have reasonable estimates of what the climate was back a billion years.
Not super good, and you have to infer them.
There's obviously uncertainty in that.
But you can see that in periods when the carbon dioxide was low, there was a lot more ice on the planet, because you can tell if there's ice covering regions of the planet.
And so you can see this correspondence between low CO2 and lots of ice.
It's not perfect, and if you want to, you can point out a period, well, it's high CO2 here, but it's a pretty good correspondence.
You put that slide back up so I make sure I don't forget.
You know, I have, let me, actually, can you go to slide 26?
Actually, I can show you the data.
So this plot, the bottom plot, shows millions of years, and the left-hand axis, which goes with the orange line, is atmospheric CO2. You can see atmospheric CO2 varied from 2,000 parts per million, which is about five times as much as there is today, to 250 parts per million, which is about 60% of what it is today.
And the blue shows how far down, that goes with the right-hand axis, that shows how far down the ice went.
And you can see that in periods when the CO2 was low, there was a lot of ice.
Now, you can also see there's some variability that doesn't necessarily reflect itself with ice.
So if you go back 400 million years, right before the CO2 line starts, you can see a period that might have high CO2 in ice.
But there are lots of other things that could be going on.
A single outlier like that, you don't want to use to contradict the overarching picture of the trend.
And so going back to that line, the next one is called fingerprint.
So what a fingerprint is, is it's a way to separate various forcing agents.
So for example, if the sun were causing climate change, we would expect the entire atmosphere to warm.
That's a prediction that you can work that out just theoretically.
If greenhouse gases are causing the warming, the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere cools.
So that's a fingerprint.
And indeed, that's what we see.
We see the lower atmosphere warming, we see the upper atmosphere cooling.
Okay, that's a good, you know, I often ask that question to graduate students.
So basically, what's a good way to think about it?
So when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, I'm trying to think about a way to say you increase the emissivity of the stratosphere.
So basically, probably the best way to say it is, when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, if you add it to the lower atmosphere, you're basically trapping heat.
If you add it to the upper atmosphere, you actually increase the ability to radiate to space.
And so by adding to the upper atmosphere, it's radiating directly to space, and so it actually can cool the atmosphere.
In the lower atmosphere, it doesn't have the ability to radiate directly to space, and it basically just traps heat.
Now, I'm going to get angry emails about that, because that's a great simplification of it, but that's basically the way I think of it.
But the important thing is, this is really firmly established, theoretically.
So clearly there's an observable trend that matches the model that high CO2 is causing the warming of the lower atmosphere and the cooling of the upper atmosphere.
Now, when he talks about it and he shows these charts of a period of many hundreds of years and the temperature of the Earth over that time, it does seem to be having this fluctuating effect which mirrors what we're seeing now.
I mean, if you go back 60 million years, there was no ice anywhere on the planet.
There were palm trees in Wyoming.
There were alligators in the Arctic.
It was a different world.
It was also a high CO2 world, by the way, and that's not a coincidence.
So I wouldn't say it's unusual.
What I say is humans are driving this warming.
And, you know, modern human society with millions of cities of millions of people and trillions of dollars of architecture, of infrastructure, that's maybe 100, 150 years old.
We've never experienced the kinds of warming that's coming.
And it could be a terrible, terrible ride.
Nobody really knows.
And let me be clear, I'm speaking now as a parent, as a citizen, not as a scientist, because science doesn't tell you this.
My opinion, as someone who knows a lot about this, is I don't want to run the experiment.
I don't want to see if Dr. Coonan is right and the impacts are small.
I think we should take action.
And the key thing is, we can take action at very low cost.
Because, and we haven't talked about it, fossil fuels are incredibly expensive.
Not the price you pay at the well, but the cost to society is extremely high.
So, you know, we can take action at low cost.
It's a risk.
We should do this.
I'm speaking, again, that's my personal opinion, not as a scientist, because science doesn't tell you that.
What I'm saying about it being unusual, not that it's not unusual in terms of like historically over the time that the Earth has existed, but I mean that there's this moment where it's very clear that human beings are doing it.
So what can be done in terms of having an impact on the fossil fuel consumption and what would that do to this overall model of global warming or climate change, I should say?
Yeah, well, okay, so we know basically how to decarbonize our economy.
I mean, we can do it.
And in fact, if I have a good slide, which I think really, probably up front, which really shows this.
I will keep talking while I look for this.
So yeah, we know how to decarbonize.
Oh, can you go to slide 37?
So, you know, fossil fuels have already lost.
So they're already on their way out.
This plot is the ERCOT. So ERCOT is the Texas grid.
And this shows the power that's getting connected to the Texas grid by source.
And the horizontal line shows the different sources and the bars are different years.
Don't worry about the different years.
You can see nobody's hooking fossil fuels up to the Texas grid.
There's a little bit of gas, but it's mainly wind and solar.
And there's actually a little bit of battery.
It used to be, if you looked at older years, they had coal as a separate category, but nobody's hooked coal up to the grid in so long that they just lumped it in with other, which is zero.
Fossil fuels have already lost, and the reason they've already lost is they're expensive.
You know, people don't want, you know, if you're building energy, if you're an energy producer, you're going to build the cheapest energy source, right?
So, it's wind and solar.
They're winning in the marketplace.
And if you go to the previous slide, So, you know, at this point, it says renewables will account for 95% of the growth in global power generation capacity.
It says renewable energy has another record year of growth, says IEA, and another record year of renewable energy despite COVID-19, blah, blah, blah.
290 gigawatts of new renewable energy generation capacity mostly in the form of wind turbines and solar panels has been installed around the world this year, beating the previous record last year.
On current trends, renewable energy generating capacity will exceed that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined by 2026. I would have never guessed that.
The way it's been explained to me is that there's not enough minerals to support the production of enough vehicles that are made simply with electricity.
This is what's confusing, because I think I've read something that said that there are not enough rare earth minerals to power electric cars for every person on Earth.
Physically impossible, that they don't exist in terms of like the ore, whatever the mines that we currently have that are pulling these things out of the ground.
Well, certainly, if you want to build, if you want to scale up all of these renewable energy sources, you have to be able to build it.
And I do think that one of the concerns is not so much in the availability Of these rare earth elements, but more in where they're located and how they're mined.
So a lot of them are, you know, in Africa.
And I do think you don't want to create problems where the mining is.
Yeah, I mean, let's think about, let's say you're a battery manufacturer in the U.S. You realize that if you can figure out how to make a battery without that compound, you're going to be rich.
And so once electric cars pick up, the innovation is going to be extremely impressive.
And the reason I say that is not because, you know, pie in the sky, because that's our history.
The history of environmental regulations It's causing advances in technology.
You see that all the time.
Just that plot of the price of solar and wind, that's driven by concern for climate change.
It wasn't just like it happened to happen then.
It happened because people see renewable energy as a future, and so there was a lot of work done to produce that energy more cheaply.
And I think that's what's going to happen with electric cars.
I know that there are some theories and there's some concepts that they're working on in terms of like making these batteries more efficient and making these batteries quicker to charge and last longer.
But I didn't know that there's new technology in terms of like different minerals that are more common that could be used as batteries or in batteries.
Like, if somebody wanted to go and buy an electric car and they were on a very tight budget, there's a lot more financially viable options for internal combustion vehicles.
Most of the electric cars are aimed at a market for people who are concerned about climate change, people who would otherwise be buying a BMW. So I don't think there's been sort of the effort by the manufacturers to make a middle, sort of a lower price point But I will say, you know, the most exciting things for me is Ford and their F-150 truck.
I mean, yeah, you live in Texas, you know that you pull up to light, every other car is a F-150, it seems.
I mean, I think that a lot of the stuff that people talk about doing in space is going to turn out to be a lot more—that may turn out to not be economically viable.
The elimination of coal-powered plants and these other things that are putting CO2 and particulates into the environment, what can be done about those things and how long do you think it would take to implement them and what kind of an impact would that have on the overall effect that human beings are having on the climate?
So let me begin by saying nobody talks about shutting all this stuff off tomorrow.
It's like, you know, we're going to shut this off tomorrow.
There's debates about how fast to decarbonize.
My personal view is that this is sort of a multi-decadal problem that you probably just, you know, I think it's not unreasonable to shut down all the coal now, but the other stuff you probably want to let run out until it wears out.
Then you just don't replace it with fossil fuel infrastructure.
So coal puts out these chemicals, these small particulates.
They often are referred to as PM2.5.
It's a particulate matter with a size less than 2.5 microns.
And if you breathe those in, those actually go deep into your lungs.
They get in your bloodstream.
And there's lots of studies which show that Coal, if you live in very polluted air and you're breathing it in, you'll have heart attacks more frequently, you know, strokes, all these health impacts are associated with that.
And, you know, it's tens of thousands of Americans every year from coal.
And, you know, this is something, again, the anti-climate people, they don't talk about it.
It's just it's not something that supports their case.
When you just look at the sky from there, so these poor people that live in this area.
Scroll up so I can read that, please.
No, no, I'm sorry, down.
Evansville, Indiana.
To see one of the country's largest coal-fired power plants head northwest from this Ohio River City on east, Because there's another in the region.
In fact, nearly every direction you go will take you to a coal plant, seven within 30 miles.
Collectively, they pump out millions of pounds of toxic air pollution.
They throw off greenhouse gases on par with Hong Kong.
Or Sweden.
Industrial air pollution, bad for people's health, bad for the planet, is strikingly concentrated in America among a small number of facilities like those in southwest Indiana, according to a nine-month Center for Public Integrity Investigation.
Wow, this is horrible.
Look at what this says here.
It merged two federal data sets to create an unprecedented picture of air emissions.
They found that a third of the toxic air releases in 2014 from power plants, factories, and other facilities came from just a hundred complexes out of more than 20,000 reporting to the US Environmental Protection Agency.
So how does the EPA allow those Plants to stay open.
I mean, if you're looking at what these people are saying, where they've got a fine dust of mist over their child's play sets and the streets would be black with coal, like, how is that possible?
It is different from coal, but the idea of what's happened is these fossil fuel producers, as they become unpopular and uneconomic, they're looking to legislatures to rescue them.
So the same people who, and these are often Republican legislatures who talk about freedom, they're happy to take away consumers' freedom if it supports the people who give them a lot of money.
And effectively, that's what happens.
These fossil fuel companies are so powerful now politically that they can get legislatures to pass laws to force consumers to use them, or at least to force them to continue to allow them to be extracted.
If you go to the other side, there's another Texas law where they said...
Texas passes law banning investments with fossil divesting businesses.
So the state of Texas won't work with you if you divest from fossil fuels.
It's not like you have to use fossil fuels, but if you make a statement that you're divesting from fossil fuels, you're off the list from Texas.
And again, in a state that is based on freedom and companies making decisions for their shareholders, these companies that divest, they're making business decisions.
Yeah, I mean, certainly people are—you saw that March.
I mean, people are mad about it.
There are lots of people who—so Obama, during—he had something called the Clean Power Plan, and the Clean Power Plan would have essentially eliminated coal-fired power if it was written in such a way to explicitly cause coal-fired power to basically not—there would be no more building of coal-fired power plants, and it would really have caused them to be phased out pretty rapidly.
And that got hammered in Congress.
Actually, it wasn't a bill.
It got hammered in the court system.
It got sued.
All of these states sued.
It went through the court system and it got overturned.
There was an article, I think it was North Dakota, was canceling a lot of wind leases in order to prop up their coal.
So people who had leased space to build windmills, wind turbines, they were going through and they were canceling these leases in order to save the coal industry.
Well, you know, it goes to show you, I think, in our current political system, a lot of people don't have a lot of power.
You know, its districts are gerrymandered.
There's no limits on campaign giving.
And essentially what it's done is it's taken away power, especially from, you know, a lot of these coal plants are polluting the poorest neighborhoods.
If you go to Houston, you look around like the Ship Channel, the most polluted places are the poorest places.
Those people have no political power at all.
And, you know, they could go talk to their Sort of like the water in Flint, Michigan.
Yeah, it's exactly the same.
Those people have no power and they can't lobby.
Maybe their representative is pushing it, but there's not this groundswell of support in the rest of the legislature doing something about it.
So, in addition to pollution deaths, let's go through the litany of terrible things about fossil fuels.
So there's climate change, there's pollution, it's killing millions of people.
It also is bad for the economy because of the price swings.
Now, we have electric cars, so we don't really care, but if you own a gas car, The price is going up to $4, goes down to $2.
That's economically destabilizing.
And in fact, we know that a lot of recessions have been caused or they've been started by price swings from fossil fuels.
So it's really this, you know, if you have no idea what you're going to be paying, it's hard if you're a business owner or a citizen to make a decision.
You know, it's like gas is $2 a gallon.
Should I spend money on On tuition, or do I have to put money in the bank because I know gas is going to go up?
I mean, you don't know what the price is, so it's hard to do it.
Can you go to the next slide?
Oh, no, don't go to the next slide.
So, in addition, fossil fuels are a national security issue.
So, you know, we invaded Iraq.
You know, why do we do that?
We did it twice.
So we did it because of the need to maintain stability in the oil markets, especially the 1993, when, no, 91, invasion of Kuwait and Iraq.
And the thing I realized is even though we don't import a lot of oil from those places, the price of oil is set by the international market.
So if you buy a barrel of oil from West Texas, the price of that is set by the entire world.
And so that gives people like Vladimir Putin, gives people like Saudi Arabia the ability to manipulate the price of oil and hammer our economy.
So, for example, two years ago in 2020, Saudi Arabia and Russia got into a price war Drove down the price of oil.
The oil futures actually went negative here for a few days.
And that actually demolished, obliterated the Texas oil industry.
I mean, there were layoffs, there were bankruptcies.
It was really hard economically.
And so, from a national security standpoint, we don't want those countries to be able to hammer our economy by manipulating the price of oil, which they can do.
And if you look right now, You know, Putin sitting on this big gas supply that goes to Europe.
And, you know, there are all these implied threats about gas supply being sent to Europe.
And Europe is, you know, they need the gas.
And so he's got his, you know, he's got his hand around their necks.
And, you know, that's not a good situation to be in.
Yeah, so the Build Back Better plan had a lot of climate policy, and I don't think it had anything that specifically said these must be eliminated, but there was a lot of spending in there that would have led to a lot of good climate policy.
Isn't the problem with these bills, though, that they slip in a bunch of other stuff that people don't want to have attached to something that may be good?
Like, if you looked at the Build Back Better, there was a politician, I forget who it was, That held up the bill, and it was like thousands of pages.
And he's like, do you think any of these people that are trying to pass this have read through this?
And they probably haven't.
The problem is the shenanigans that go along with politics, right?
It's like the idea of the free market in terms of politics has never really manifested.
There's never been some better solution to the way we handle things now.
It's still large corporations that are influencing politicians to do things that aren't in the best interest of their constituents, and that's how they get elected.
And when they get elected, they bullshit us, and they get into office, they still do the same thing over and over and over again.
It's like a magic trick that we keep falling for.
It's like Lucy pulling that ball away from Charlie Brown every time he goes to kick it.
Well, I mean, we just need to make a decision that we're going to phase out fossil fuels.
I mean, as I said before, this is a political problem.
It's not a technical problem.
It's not a scientific problem.
It's we need to make a decision.
We need a policy.
And, you know, if you talk to economists, they will tell you we need to price.
You need to put a price on emissions.
So right now it's free to dump Pollution into the atmosphere, you don't pay for it, even though you're causing harms to all these people, you don't pay for it.
And you need to price that.
If you do that and you make people pay the full cost of their actions, that would go a long way towards fixing the problem.
So when you read a book like this that is essentially a non-alarmist perspective, you think...
I think that what this does is not just delays the inevitable, which is we do need to take a chance, but also puts us in a worse position because people are looking at it like it's not that big a deal.
And by the time they wake up to it, the amount of issues that we have will have multiplied.
I was pandering to the people on the committee to get them to agree with me.
And so...
And so, you know, by delaying, there's an economic cost to that because when we do switch, which we are going to do it because, again, solar and wind are the cheapest energy.
We're going to be buying it from, you know, wind turbine manufacturers in Europe and from China, solar panels from China.
So we're giving away the economics.
It's kind of like, what if we had not, you know, not let Silicon Valley grow up in the U.S.? You know, it's sort of that level of economic activity that we're giving away by not acting.
In addition, you're right, emitting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is effectively irreversible on any time scale that we care about.
What that means is, once the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere right now, it's at about 415 parts per million, which means out of every million molecules of air, 415 are carbon dioxide.
Once it goes up to some level, 420, it takes a very long time for that to come down.
Hundreds of thousands of years before it gets back down to pre-industrial.
And so we're going to be warming the climate for thousands of years.
So people in the year 3000, the year 4000, their climate will be determined by the decisions we make.
Decisions we make will determine the climate for a very long time.
And so we really don't have time to wait 40 or 50 years.
And, you know, it sounds like, you know, if I remember your previous guest, he basically said something like, you know, eventually we'll take care of this, but it's not a priority.
I think future generations beg to differ on that.
You know, they're going to be affected by this for a very long time.
And to me, that's one of the most challenging parts of this is the very long timescale of our impact.
So we could take potentially our iron waste and dump it into the ocean and that would make all this plankton grow and that would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere?
One of the things that Steven said when he was on the podcast was that the Earth is far greener now because of the fact that there's excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
This is sort of a proof of concept, is how I would look at it.
So people are working on this, but you have to realize that To pull 10 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere in a year, which is probably kind of around the magnitude we'd have to do, that would be just a titanic industrial process.
It would be equivalent to about all of the infrastructure we have to produce that much.
So think about all of the wells, all of the power plants, exactly.
So it's certainly theoretically possible.
It may be that we end up doing it, but I don't think we can rely on that.
You do not want to bet the farm or your kids' futures on that.
It says, sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought.
So this is from Nature.
It says, estimated cost of geoengineering technology to fight climate change has plunged since a 2011 analysis.
Now, is it possible that, like all these other things, like you were talking about solar, how solar was far more expensive and the yield was far lower, you know, 20 years ago, that as time and technology increases, they could get to a point where they could siphon this carbon dioxide from the atmosphere much more efficiently?
You know, we know that these natural gas reservoirs, where you'd put it, it stays there for a long time, because natural gas has been there for millions of years.
Yeah, I mean, over the next few decades, not tomorrow.
But, you know, natural gas, it failed during the Texas pandemic.
During the Texas cold spell.
And, you know, in Europe right now, natural gas is extremely expensive.
And so remember how I talked about a grid has intermittence and it has to have dispatchable firm power.
So if you go to the UK, their dispatchable firm power is natural gas.
And when the wind goes down, which you know it's going to do, you know there are going to be periods where the wind's not generating, they have to turn natural gas.
Natural gas is incredibly expensive right now.
They are paying out the wazoo for it.
We need to stop with commodity fuels.
We should be going to nuclear geothermal.
I think geothermal is a dark horse.
I actually think very highly of geothermal.
Geothermal, if you go back 10 years, the issue was always in the drilling.
But our drilling has gotten so good because of fracking, actually.
It goes down there, it gets hot, it boils, and you get this really hot steam coming out, and you use that to turn a turbine.
That's kind of the traditional way.
And people are working on all sorts of different things, using it in places where it doesn't get that hot, sort of lower temperature geothermal, and there's a lot of innovation going on in that space.
So I think that that's sort of the dark horse candidate.
Instead of nuclear, maybe we go with geothermal as dispatchable.
Yeah, I mean, in my mind, I kind of think about three different categories.
You have wind and solar.
Those are your intermittents.
You have some batteries that are very short term, a couple hours, and that helps you shift solar energy from when you get it at noon to the evening.
And then you have your firm dispatchable power.
It could be natural gas with carbon capture, although I think that's probably not good, where they capture the carbon dioxide before they vent it to the atmosphere.
That has not been demonstrated to be something that we can do at scale yet.
Then there's nuclear, there's geothermal, and then there's hydro.
If you live in a place where that's available, the geology is available.
Now, the use of petrochemicals and fossil fuel products has a bunch of different problems, and one of them is just the waste that's caused by plastic, and how plastic is essentially, most of it is put into landfills.
One of the things we found out doing this podcast is that most of the plastic that you think you're recycling doesn't really get recycled.
He's a brilliant young man who devised a method to extract plastic from the ocean with these, like, giant machines that sort of scoop plastic together out of the ocean and they use it to create products.
But, you know, that Pacific garbage patch, which is insane.
It's as big as the state of Texas, if not bigger, right?
Yeah, I mean, one day I worry that we're going to find out we've done something really terrible to sort of the ocean ecosystem and that it's going to affect humans.
Despite claims about hemp plastics' ability to clean oceans and limit landfill growth, the truth is less universally positive.
If current plastic consumption patterns persist by 2050, the oceans will contain more plastic than fish by weight.
Holy shit!
According to World Economic Forum report, in the meantime, plastics will continue to leach into the human body.
And while scientists debate the certainty of toxicity studies determining that bifenol A, BPA plastics, are carcinogenic, the FDA will continue to review BPA safety, and of course, plastic consumption will increase petroleum consumption, wrecking havoc on the environment and geopolitical stability.
What about other things that affect our environment?
You know, one of the things that people always like to point to...
I think decentralized currency would probably prevent a lot of the issues that we're dealing with, with monopolies and politicians and, you know, the kind of fiat currency problems that we have, don't you think?
So, what I was getting to is there's a lot of other things that people point to as having a negative effect on the environment, and one of them is a big one that gets into the weeds ideologically is veganism.
Vegan diets versus animal-based diets and whether or not you can truly have a renewable farm that's a carbon-neutral farm that grows plants and animals and does so in this sort of symbiotic matter where you can feed large-scale populations, but it's a carbon-neutral environment.
You know, I'm not an expert in this, but I do think that there are methods of not just stopping emissions, but actually sequestering carbon in soils through various farming techniques and things like that.
You just have to really convince farmers that it's in their interest to do it.
And so you talk about, well, maybe we could pay farmers to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and things like that.
Well, the people that have talked to me about this that seem to think that there is a way to do this, they're doing it on a very small scale relatively.
One of the problems morally and environmentally that we have with farming in this country is factory farming of animals.
Because it's horrific.
I mean, everybody's seen the videos, and it's like you know about the amount of waste that it causes and what it does to the environment.
And also...
Monocrop agriculture, because it's not normal to grow thousands of acres of one particular kind of plant, and in order to do so, you have to kill everything else, including all the animals, all the different things that could possibly consume your crops, all the different bugs.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you've got to realize that our agricultural system is optimized for profit.
It's not optimized for anything else.
And so factory farming is a way to produce the most pounds of hogs, you know, per dollar you're spending.
And if you want to do something different, people have to recognize that they're going to pay more At the grocery store, but you'll get these other benefits.
You'll have less climate impacts.
You'll have these moral benefits.
And so I think, as a general rule, we haven't done probably as good a job, and that's because there are people out there that are sort of combating us with misinformation, at really explaining all of the costs of our present Economic system.
You know, as we talked about with fossil fuels, you know, you're killing millions of people around the world every year from air pollution and, you know, that's a huge cost and all the cost of climate change and things like that.
And, you know, you just have to realize that people have to realize they might see higher prices for meat in the store, but there are benefits from that.
I mean, we could make the argument that you're killing millions of people with poor diets as well and that the main contributors to this poor diet economy are probably fast food.
Yeah, I mean, you got to go to some sort of a sustainable ranch and get some grass-fed, grass-finished beef on a free-range cattle where the manure is being recycled and they're using it and they're composting it and then they're having pigs roam and chickens roam and everything is sort of like feeding into the soil.
You know, the fossil fuel companies want to make money.
And, you know, they do whatever they can to make money.
If that means giving lots of money to politicians and supporting, you know, dark money groups who run ads against their opponents, you know, this is all stuff that, you know, they're looking at their bottom line.
They look at their job as to make the most money possible.
And if you believe that's your job, and most corporations, I think, do, Then you're willing to do anything to do that.
You'll buy politicians because it's legal.
It's completely legal to buy a politician in this country.
Now, when you look at the future, when you take into account all these issues, whether it's coal-fired power plants or fracking or agriculture, if you're being realistic, do you think we can turn this around?
So we've already warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's the green bar.
So we're already 20% of the way to an ice age.
Ice age amount of warming.
We're going in the opposite direction, obviously.
Ice age is down.
But we're going up 20% of an ice age amount of warming.
Business as usual, that's BAU, that's about 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's half of an ice age.
Okay, so that should scare the crap out of it.
Half of an ice age in terms of temperature change, an ice age of warming.
I look at that, and I look at my kids, and I think, holy crap, if this happens, I don't know how bad it's going to be, but half of an ice age of warming could be awful.
I mean, really, you know, Mad Max.
Now, whether you want to take action on that, that actually is not a scientific question.
Some people might look and go, Mad Max is cool.
I would love to live in Mad Max.
And so they might not be worried about it.
You know, some people might say, humans will adapt.
I have this infinite wisdom, infinite, you know...
Confidence.
Confidence, thank you.
Infinite confidence in humanity that we'll figure out some way to do it.
And I hate government regulation, so bring on the heat.
You know, I look at this, and again, I'm speaking as a citizen now, not as a scientist, but as a citizen, I don't have infinite confidence in humanity.
I look at COVID, I look at the Texas blackout, and I think, we're going to F this up.
When Kunin was talking about global warming and climate change, one of the things that he said was that what it will do is open up new areas for agriculture and that agriculture will move steadily north and that we'll adapt to that.
All right, so let's talk a little bit about some other impacts, because, again, agriculture is the one I think is probably the most likely we'll be able to adapt As well as possible.
Let's talk about something that's unadaptable.
For example, permafrost melting.
So, you know, we're melting all this permafrost at the top of the world.
You know, how do you adapt to that?
You know, all of the stuff that was built in the North, they essentially build it on permafrost with the assumption that permafrost will never melt.
So you build a house on permafrost, you say, okay, that's my foundation.
And then the permafrost melts and the house splits.
I read that one of the big issues, they were talking about Siberia, and that as Siberia slowly melts, that it's going to emit an incredible amount of greenhouse gases.
So that's certainly a possibility that scientists worry a lot about.
And that's one of the worst case scenarios.
Because if that happens, then we lose the ability to stop climate change.
Because even if we stop our emissions, it's what we call a feedback system.
And so permafrost is one really hard to adapt to impact.
And there's ocean acidification.
How do you adapt to that?
The oceans are more acidic.
You know, what are you going to do?
And then there are the things that are extremely expensive.
So imagine sea level rises.
You've got to build these seawalls.
You know, you have to do it around Houston.
You have to do it around New York.
These are tens of billions of dollars.
I mean, we're going to get to our, you know, my worry is we're going to get to a situation where we're spending all of our money just trying to stay alive, building stormwater infrastructure to handle more severe rainfall, building seawalls.
Building, you know, things to keep people alive and the temperature gets really hot.
Building new infrastructure for agriculture.
Because remember, as the agriculture moves, the infrastructure has to move.
All of your grain processing plants that were down here, you've got to rebuild them up here.
And so we're going to be spending all of our time and all of our money just trying to stay alive.
You're not going to have money to buy, you know, to buy a new iPhone or to go to college.
You know, it's all, you know, because that money is all going to be tax money.
I mean, you know, that's where it's going to come from.
And let me just add one thing, which I think is really important here.
You know, a lot of people are concerned about the freedom aspect of this, as I am.
You know, we saw with COVID that disasters often come with more government intervention in our lives.
You know, when COVID hits, you've got to wear a mask.
And in certain situations, you've got to get vaccinated.
And people don't like that, and I understand that.
What do you think is going to happen if there's a food shortage?
What do you think is going to happen if we have to relocate Miami?
It's going to be massive government intervention.
If you want to have a world where the government doesn't tell you what to do, we need to solve climate change now because it's going to be a much larger infringement on our rights if society starts to fall apart.
But to the average person that gets confused and doesn't know whether or not you're correct or Steve Kuhn is correct, a debate would be very beneficial.
That, you know, the scientific system of peer-reviewed papers followed by replication, you know, important results are always replicated by other people.
That's how science determines What is right?
And I feel strongly that in the one debate I did do, I thought it was terrible and was a waste of my time, and I said I would never do that again.
But policy is different.
You know, policies are value judgments, and I think you do have to have public debates about that.
So, you know, I think we do need to get out there and advocate for what we think we should do.
But the point is, like, when someone hears him or when someone hears you, there's people that would hear you and go, well, this guy's not right because Steve Coonan's right.
And I heard Steve Coonan say this.
And then there's people that hear you and go, well, he's right and Steve Coonan is wrong.
Because Steve Koonin left out all these different things, and he was incorrect about that, and he was way too lenient on the government when it comes to...
These kind of...
This could be settled.
At least it can be explained in a way that a rational person could have a more informed opinion of what's going on.
Yeah, you know, I think you overestimate the ability to settle these issues in a debate.
And I will say, you're absolutely right.
You know, this is why tobacco companies hired scientists to go out and push them, because they understand the power of a scientist saying, you know, X is true, Y is not true.
And so, yeah, you're absolutely right.
And, you know, it's going to be, you know, it's very frustrating to me to hear someone like Dr. Kuhn.
And what's particularly irritating Is, you know, there's always this little bit of conspiracy in there about like, you know, these people, they know the truth.
I'd be open to discussions about sort of parameters.
You know, I think the thing you don't want to do, in fact, he even made this point, which I thought was actually an excellent point, which is he's as worried about it as I was.
He said, make people write down their views.
I mean, that's what we do in the peer-reviewed literature.
He said, I don't want to just have a debate.
Make them write down their things and give citations and stuff.
And, you know, that's why you look in the peer-reviewed literature where People write stuff, it goes through peer review, then it gets published, and it's all written down.
It's much harder to get crackpot ideas out.
I mean, I can say anything to you about anything and, you know, I could just say it, but if I have to write it down and give you references, it's much harder to do it.
But I do think public debates about policy are really good, and we need to have people talk about what's the pros and cons of this or this.
My take on what you're saying is there's certain things that you're saying that are irrefutable.
First of all, the particulate matter in the air that's caused by power plants that are fueled by coal, and we look at that video from Evansville, that's horrific to me.
All that stuff's horrific.
The idea that the only way we can move forward is by continuing to do what we're doing already and fossil fuels and all that jazz, that doesn't make any sense to me.
And I do hope that there is some innovation when it comes to battery construction methods and efficiency and all that jazz and that we do move away from a lot of the stuff that we're doing right now.
I just, I wish there was no gray area.
I wish there was no legitimate intelligent people that thought differently.
That's where it gets confusing because I feel like, I read his book and it was pretty fascinating.
I've read several things where you rebutted him and I've read several things where you stated your position, so I was very excited to talk to you about this.
And like I said, there's many things that you're saying that I don't think anybody can refute, particularly the effect of using these things that's happening, not just in terms of warming, but in terms of pollution.
And we really should be taking into account what's happening with these increased levels of pollutants in our atmosphere.
This is not very simple.
You know, I get very upset when we were talking about that.
What is that Josh Fox movie called?
What the hell is it called?
The fracking movie.
Frack Nation or some shit.
What is it called?
Remember?
I've heard people dismiss that and dismiss the impact that it has, but how can you dismiss the fact that some people have water that you can't drink anymore?
How is that a dismissable thing?
If they're doing something that produces a significant amount of energy but also pollutes water to the point where it can't be digested anymore, You can't just only look at one aspect of that.
You can't only look at...
But look at the market.
Oh, so these people have to move out of their farm.
But they paid them off.
But where's that water going?
Where's that polluted water going?
What kind of an effect does it have on the animals?
What kind of effect does it have on the plant life?
Is it leaking into the atmosphere?
What's happening?
And how long do we...
How long does it take before we know what's happening?
Is this something that's real simple, that you can, you know, cut it off right there, and then there's no more damage done?
Or is this something that leaches out into our environment for decades or hundreds of years to come?
The impacts, especially on people of modest means, who are significantly impacted, Yeah.
and suffer really horrific cancers and other problems.
And as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder for people like that to get some sort of compensation or to get the harms addressed.
I mean, I do firmly believe, and I think this is a key thing about climate and everything else, that polluters should be accountable for the damage they pay.
And so the people who are spewing fossil fuel, You know, carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.
They should be held accountable for that.
And right now they're not.
And that actually is the core of the problem.
If they were actually being held accountable, fossil fuels would be gone very quickly.