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July 3, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
07:52
Environmentalist Says Enviro-Alarmism Hurts Us All
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Time Text
One of the leading environmentalists with a hundred pages.
In other words, a quarter of this book is footnotes, but it reads extremely easily.
Apocalypse Never.
Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
I've spent a good part of my writing and broadcasting life talking about this alarmism.
In one of my books, I just...
List the number of hysterias of my lifetime that have captivated the public.
Do you have a theory on this?
Is the hysteria over the world collapsing?
The Al Gore induced hysteria.
Is it deliberate?
In other words, we need to make the world hysterical as it were.
Is it manipulative?
Do they truly believe this?
What is your thinking on the whole thing?
Well, those are really important questions and really interesting questions.
And, of course, they're really difficult questions because we can't see inside people's minds, and so we don't know.
So we have to look for hints, suggestions.
I'll always say simply what I think, and then I can try to complexify it a bit.
I mean, I think that for the most part...
Apocalyptic environmentalists are in the grip of a religion.
They don't know that they're in the grip of a religion, though.
So you or I might say we're Jewish or Christian or Muslim or Hindu or something, and we say that's our religion.
Apocalyptic environmentalists, they don't say that.
They say, no, no, you might have a religion, but I am secular or atheist or I don't believe in God.
I know from science.
Yes.
Yeah, science proves it.
This is the most dangerous thing, is that they have a religion and they don't acknowledge it, they don't really admit it.
Now, do they know sometimes that they're lying?
Yes.
And I can document cases where I can show that, and even some confessions from people, particularly around nuclear.
I mean, the advocacy against nuclear and the advocacy for renewables basically consists entirely of lying to people.
I don't really feel the need to soften very much because I've now done the research I can make that claim.
Renewables, they claim, are better for the environment than fossil fuels.
They're not.
They're worse.
They claim that nuclear is particularly bad for the environment.
It's not.
It's the best.
And the reasons for that are physical, inherent to the energy density of the fuel and the power density of their production, of electricity production or the conversion of those fuels into electricity.
That is not controversial.
Energy density and power density are like the gravity of energy analysis.
You just measure the size, how much land a plant takes, and the amount of electrical output, and that's your power density number.
And in fact, we've known now, there's two beautiful books on this that show that the Industrial Revolution...
Could not have happened without coal.
Wood did not provide enough energy for the Industrial Revolution.
They had to have coal to have industrialization.
And so we know that you can't power an industrial civilization on renewables.
It just requires too much land.
I mean, I cite the best study on this, a full book-length study published by MIT that shows that we currently use a half a percent of land in the United States for energy production.
If you did 100% renewable, you would need 50%.
Of the U.S. landmass.
That's never, ever going to happen, and even attempting it has been ecologically devastating.
So for me, maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I just kind of go, when there's a lie, when there's truth that is so obvious and so clearly understood among scientists and scholars that is being denied publicly and denied to journalists and denied by journalists and denied by journalists, eventually...
Eventually, the truth will win out.
That is my belief.
And I just think Apocalypse never will make it happen sooner rather than later.
That's the hope.
That's why I'm devoting so much time to it.
I've thought through all of these issues my whole life.
Whenever I hear eventually, it's like eventually the good wins.
The tragedy is though that until the eventually happens, the amount of damage Done by the liars.
Eventually communism fell in the Soviet Union, but not after 20 to 40 million people were murdered by Stalin and the other communists.
Eventually the Nazis were defeated, but 6 million Jews and millions of others were slaughtered.
So the damage these people are doing with the Let me ask you then, when you hear, I heard yesterday, just yesterday, I don't remember if it was national or California, mandate that all cars being built by 2035, that's 15 years from now, be electric cars.
What's your reaction?
Well, so the car, so transportation, I mean, let me say one thing before I answer.
Let me come to it a little indirectly, which is that You know, apocalypse never describes what is really the main event in terms of protecting the environment and in driving human prosperity, which are energy transitions.
So in a small farmer economy, in a subsistence farming economy, which is what we all used to live in, but now just a billion or so of us do, it's a renewable-powered economy.
They use wood energy.
They might use water wheels or windmills.
And then as they start to develop, they use the highest form of renewable energy, which are large hydroelectric dams.
But then you transition to coal, to petroleum, to natural gas, to uranium, which is for nuclear, which is a positive direction because in each stage in that energy transition, you're moving up the energy ladder.
You're using less of the natural environment.
You're getting more energy out of a lump of coal or out of a lump of uranium than you would a lump of wood.
So that's just some context.
Now, the easiest, if we want to reduce air pollution and reduce carbon emissions, I don't think climate change is the most important issue in the world.
I do think it's something we should continue to do something on.
I point out that we've already been reducing our emissions, as you mentioned.
The easiest thing to do is just build nuclear power plants like so many countries have, and you can then produce zero-carbon electricity.
The hardest things right now, if you wanted to try to replace petroleum in the transportation economy, the problems, I think everybody knows, there's just problems with electric cars, with batteries.
They're very material-intensive.
They're very expensive.
Obviously, you have a range problem.
So there's some real debate.
These scholars around whether or not the big investments for future energy for transportation should be from hydrogen gas or from electric batteries and my view is we don't know yet and there's just a lot of demonstration that needs to be done before we can just before we somehow know that lithium batteries which just have big problems are somehow going to be the best.
Okay, we'll continue.
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