July 17, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
04:28
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Bjorn Lomborg has written a truly, truly important book. | |
| My friends, it is amazing. | |
| We live in a world of panic. | |
| And he does not deny for a moment that the world is getting warmer. | |
| So he starts off from a place where even your relatives who think that the world has 12 years to survive can say, what, he denies that the world is getting warmer? | |
| No, he doesn't. | |
| How climate change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet. | |
| So you said that you thought that there was something good in a Joe Biden plan, and what was it? | |
| So Joe Biden promises a lot of things that are basically going to spend a lot of money and not do very much good. | |
| But he does talk about one thing, namely innovation. | |
| Energy innovation. | |
| So look, fundamentally the problem is that right now, Fossil fuels is one of the cheapest ways to get dependable and reliable and cheap energy. | |
| And that's why most people around the world use mostly fossil fuel. | |
| Trying to force people onto more expensive or less reliable energy is hard. | |
| You can do it a little bit, but you will fail when you try to push people too much because their energy bills go up. | |
| They're going to be dissatisfied. | |
| They're going to book you out of office. | |
| So the only long-term way that we're going to fix global warming is if we can innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels. | |
| Imagine if we could make some sort of green energy, and that could be a lot of different things. | |
| It could be solar and wind with batteries, but it could also be nuclear, it could be fusion, it could be lots of crazy ideas that are out there that could potentially work. | |
| But if we could get one technology that would be cheaper than fossil fuels... | |
| Everyone would switch, not just rich, well-meaning Americans, but also Chinese, Indians, everybody in Latin America, and so on. | |
| The point here is, if we can utilize the market mechanism to actually make cheaper green energy through innovation, that's what solves the climate problem. | |
| And, of course, that's what has solved most human problems throughout history. | |
| Not telling people to do with less, but to do things smarter and cheaper. | |
| So, you are on board, not only with the supposition, or the truth, if you will, that the world is getting warmer, but that the primary cause of that warming is anthropocentric, is anthropic, however one wants to... | |
| Human-made. | |
| Yes, human-made. | |
| Is that correct? | |
| Yes, absolutely. | |
| And the human-made is carbon emission. | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay. | |
| Because we burn fossil fuels and a little bit of other things like... | |
| Right. | |
| Do you realistically believe that a non... | |
| Based on the technology we have now, so essentially it's wind, solar, and nuclear. | |
| I am a big aficionado of nuclear. | |
| And I find that I do believe that anybody who believes the world is coming to an end and doesn't advocate nuclear power Doesn't really believe what they say. | |
| Would you react to that? | |
| Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. | |
| If you think this is the end of the world and you need to have CO2 free energy, of course you should go nuclear. | |
| Look, first of all, nuclear is CO2 free. | |
| It is... | |
| Base load power, so you can have it 24-7. | |
| The only problem, and it's incredibly safe, actually, if you look across, you know, people think about Chernobyl and... | |
| Right, so the only problem is what? | |
| I'm curious. | |
| The only problem is cost. | |
| So existing nuclear power plants are incredibly cheap to run because we've already put in the money to build them, and we've committed eventually to decommissioning them. | |
| But new power plants... | |
| Turn out to be very costly. | |
| And so if you want to have new power, and that's what you have most of the developing world, but also some in the rich world, as we're facing an old plant, they're tremendously costly. | |
| And so right now, nuclear power is just as, if you will, just as ineffective as solar or wind. | |
| Oh, that's interesting. | |
| All right, we'll be back in a moment. |
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