March 4, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
14:31
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| People will tell you that solar and wind is incredibly cheap. | ||
| And that's technically true. | ||
| This is why it's such an insidious argument. | ||
| So everybody has seen this graph of, you know, over time, how solar and wind has just come down in price, and they're very cheap right now. | ||
| So people will tell you, solar and wind, some of the cheapest electricity on the planet. | ||
| But what they don't tell you is, yeah, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but otherwise it's the most expensive power on the planet because it's infinitely costly. | ||
| You can't get it. | ||
| And so the reality is, if you actually look at, you know, if you look across the world for how much energy do you get, sorry, how much electricity do you get from solar and wind and how much is the price, you get a very clear upward sloping. | ||
| You have cheap countries that have virtually no solar and wind, and then you just get more and more expensive. | ||
| So you have China and India down here, you have the U.S. a little higher up, they have the EU all the way up there. | ||
| And the reality is there's no countries down here that are saying we have lots of soul and wind and cheap power. | ||
| Bjorn Lomberg, you, I think, are a Rubin Report veteran at this point. | ||
| This has got to be about the dozenth appearance in one form or another, sometimes digital, sometimes on location, sometimes in studio. | ||
| You've been talking about climate for a long time and basically telling people, in short, calm down. | ||
| It seems to me it's catching on suddenly. | ||
| The hysteria. | ||
| At least from an American perspective, the hysteria around climate does seem like it's calming down. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| And do you think there's sort of an American version of that that might be different than a European version that might be different than some other place? | ||
| So it's very clear that people are starting to realize their current policies have been incredibly costly, and maybe we should find another and smarter way. | ||
| Uh, there's certainly a lot of movement and momentum in saying this is not nearly as big as we thought it was. | ||
| Uh, part of that is caught up in that whole culture war thing. | ||
| Uh, so in some sense, I'm not really sure whether people believe it or whether they just, you know, sort of, uh, parrot it because it fits into whatever they're called. | ||
| Wait, let's stick with that for a minute because I think that's super interesting because as people have sort of post-COVID and post-exposing lies of the media about Trump or whatever it might be, I think that has helped the argument against the hysteria as it relates to climate change. | ||
| That's pretty interesting that it just was another bucket of the craziness in some way. | ||
| But what I also fear in some ways is that we're very easily being posed in this. | ||
| It's either the end of mankind or it's nothing at all. | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| Oh, it's all natural kind of thing. | ||
| And that's not what the science says. | ||
| It sort of inconveniently says, yeah, it's a problem. | ||
| It's not the end of the world by any means. | ||
| But it's probably a good thing to look at and be aware of. | ||
| And I wonder whether the pendulum is going to swing too far in the other direction and we're all just going to say, oh, never mind. | ||
| And that would be dumb, too. | ||
| There definitely might be an inclination in that, as people have become so tired of nonsense in this area. | ||
| And also because they've become really annoyed with all the consequences of people saying, this is a problem, so we're going to control you every move, and we're going to make it harder for you to heat your home or cool your home or drive your car or anything else. | ||
| And that is... | ||
| Just silly. | ||
| That's never going to work. | ||
| That's what the election of Donald Trump has shown. | ||
| You're not going to keep accepting that, and we need to find another and smarter way to deal with it. | ||
| So right now, what are some of the top-of-mind solutions to all of this with you? | ||
| I mean, I've written many books about it. | ||
| You have a laundry list of things that people can sort of personally do and what they should be thinking about. | ||
| What have you been just thinking about lately as some of the conversation around this has shifted? | ||
| So I think I want to share with you two important things. | ||
| One is that we need to recognize that people will tell you that solar and wind is incredibly cheap. | ||
| And that's technically true. | ||
| This is why it's such an insidious argument. | ||
| So everybody has seen this graph of, you know, over time, how solar and wind has just come down in price, and they're very cheap right now. | ||
| So people will tell you, solar and wind, some of the cheapest... | ||
| Electricity on the planet. | ||
| But what they don't tell you is, yeah, when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but otherwise it's the most expensive power on the planet because it's infinitely cost. | ||
| You can't get it. | ||
| And so the reality is, if you actually look at, you know, if you look across the world for how much energy do you get, sorry, how much electricity do you get from solar and wind and how much is the price, you get a very clear upward sloping. | ||
| You have cheap countries that have virtually no solar and wind, and then you just get more and more expensive. | ||
| So you have China and India down here. | ||
| You have the U.S. a little higher up. | ||
| They have the EU all the way up there. | ||
| And the reality is there's no countries down here that are saying, we have lots of solar and wind and cheap power. | ||
| That you need to know. | ||
| So currently you're being sold a tall lie. | ||
| This is just not true. | ||
| Now, eventually, maybe we can make that happen, but don't bet on it. | ||
| Certainly don't put your entire electricity system that way. | ||
| So why wouldn't it be that in a sort of a tropical environment, just let's just do solar for a moment, putting aside wind for a second, in a tropical environment where the sun is shining all the time, why wouldn't that just be driving down costs all the time? | ||
| So here's the news for us. | ||
| It's not shining all the time. | ||
| It's only 12 hours a day, right? | ||
| At best. | ||
| So absolutely, solar, for instance, in California is amazing. | ||
| For when it's on the middle of day, sun is shining, it's very hot, people want to run the air conditioners, and there's virtually free power from solar panels. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's only about 10%. | ||
| So you should absolutely have that. | ||
| But it's not going to solve the major part of electricity. | ||
| And remember, electricity is only a small part of energy use. | ||
| So yes, there's some sense to do some solar, and likewise with wind. | ||
| But the point that has been argued for a long time is, oh, this is going to solve everything. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| And it's not going to solve a very large part. | ||
| And if he tried to do that, you very easily end up with enormously high... | ||
| Electricity bills. | ||
| Is some of that just a battery issue? | ||
| It's fundamentally, the problem is, if you run a society that needs energy or electricity 24-7, but you only have it sometimes when there's no clouds or when it's windy and at daytime, you need massive backup, just to give you a sense of proportion. | ||
| So they've done the simulations for the U.S. to say, what would it take to run the U.S. entirely in solar, entirely in wind? | ||
| And they estimate, you would imagine, you know, entirely in solar, you just need, you know, 12 hours to get over the night. | ||
| But no, sometimes it'll be cloudy and then you won't have for the next day. | ||
| And sometimes it'll be cloudy for a long time. | ||
| In the wintertime, there's less solar and all that stuff. | ||
| It turns out that you need about three months of battery. | ||
| Right now, the U.S. has about 10 minutes. | ||
| So you would need so much power. | ||
| So much batteries that it would cost you about a third of the U.S. GDP every year. | ||
|
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Just to literally get the battery infrastructure. | |
| Right now we believe that you can only... | ||
| No, no, the infrastructure is not included. | ||
| Oh, that's not even included? | ||
| Well, it's a rough calculation. | ||
| I've just taken what's the wholesale price of what the cheapest... | ||
| You're telling me my neighbor's Tesla Powerwall can't run the whole city for a month? | ||
| It can't. | ||
| It can run it. | ||
| I mean, there's some sense to some of this. | ||
| For private people, especially if you get to sort of scrunch on everybody else's backup system when it runs out, but you can't have a whole society running this. | ||
| And because these batteries only last about 15 years, you have to keep rebuying them every 15 years. | ||
| That's what drives up the price so dramatically. | ||
| So obviously, you know, the U.S. spends about 3 or 4% of its GDP on buying electricity. | ||
| It's a very bad deal to have to spend another 33 to get backup. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What countries are doing better at this now? | ||
| What countries are incorporating some of the policies and solutions that you've been talking about? | ||
| So, unfortunately, I think we're not quite there yet. | ||
| I think Trump's intuition can be very, very good. | ||
| Get rid of a lot of the crap, as he would probably say, and then let's start doing smart stuff. | ||
| So, very clearly, you want to make sure that there's a lot more fracking, that there's a lot more gas. | ||
| Gas is both cheap... | ||
| It's available, it can help a lot of countries around the world, and it also has a much lower CO2 emission. | ||
| So this is absolutely the way to go in the short run. | ||
| This is why the U.S. has been leading the world in cutting its carbon emissions. | ||
| Not because of Obama, not because of Trump either, but because of a lot of gas producers that have just simply made gas much cheaper than coal. | ||
| You need to do that also for Europe, also for the rest of the world. | ||
| Obviously, Europe has put itself in a very... | ||
| We should also be looking at nuclear power. | ||
| So, nuclear, remember, promised in the... | ||
| 50s and 60s. | ||
| They could power the entire world for too cheap to meter kind of thing. | ||
| And of course, that didn't happen. | ||
| To a large extent, that's because of incredible amount of red tape. | ||
| I would love to see Trump... | ||
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Right. | |
| Is anyone building nuclear plants right now? | ||
| I assume they probably are in China. | ||
| They're building a lot in China. | ||
| Not a lot in the sense that everything is big in China. | ||
| But yes, they are building more nuclear power than anywhere else in the world in China. | ||
| And again, China can actually make this fairly cheaply. | ||
| But everywhere else, because we do it in start-stop fashion, we don't design it as an industrial product, but rather like this one unique opera house that we're building. | ||
| And, you know, it all has to be perfect. | ||
| And then, of course, the costs escalate to the point where third-generation nuclear, the current generation, is just not commercially viable. | ||
| And so what you really need is to get fourth-generation nuclear power going. | ||
| So the idea is, and this is still a sales pitch, I'm not totally sold on it, but it's, you know, make these modular. | ||
| Small nuclear power plants that you just simply, you get them signed off on the factory level, and then you just churn out 100,000 of them. | ||
| You sell them everywhere, you just plug them into existing networks, and they run. | ||
| They're built to be inherently safe, and there's no nuclear proliferation issue. | ||
| You can't make a weapon out of it. | ||
| They're basically like prefab houses. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| And that is fantastic if we can make it work. | ||
| And of course, remember, we've been told before that, you know, this is going to be incredibly cheap, so let's just see. | ||
| But this is one of the things that we should be looking at. | ||
| And again, remember, China is doing it, the U.S., and I would hope Europe also, but the U.S. certainly should be making sure that you are ahead in this game. | ||
| Where do you see the future of fossil fuels in all of this? | ||
| One of the things that Jordan Peterson talks about all the time is for all the people that tell you how much they love humans and humanity, they're the same ones trying to get rid of fossil fuels. | ||
| And that's the quickest way to get probably hundreds of millions of people to freeze still now. | ||
| I mean, look. | ||
| We're a fossil fuel-based civilization. | ||
| People have this idea that we somehow transcended, but as you pointed out, that's just because you don't have any idea where most of the power and it comes from. | ||
| So in 1971, 50 years ago, more than 50 years ago, we got 87% of our energy from fossil fuels. | ||
| Today, it's down to 81%. | ||
| So yes, we've moved a slight bit down the curve, but we're not. | ||
| We're still more than four-fifths based on fossil fuels. | ||
| Half of humanity lives off of calories that are produced with fossil fuel-based fertilizer. | ||
| Or to put it in the other way, if you stop, as Jordan Peterson points out, if you stop that, 4 billion people would... | ||
| Starved to death. | ||
| This is the reality. | ||
| Now, again, it is probably a good idea to transition this out in this century and find smarter and better technologies. | ||
| A nuclear could be one, but obviously a nuclear is not obvious how you make fertilizer from that. | ||
| So there's a lot of other challenges built into this. | ||
| I think the best way to think about this is to say we need to have everything on the table. | ||
| Again, I don't know what the future—I'd be a lot richer if I knew what the future would be like. | ||
| So this is much more about just saying, look, make sure you look at all of these things. | ||
| We invest a little bit of research money in all of these things. | ||
| Many of them are going to fail, but some of them are not. | ||
| And those are the ones that are going to power the 21st century. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing. | ||
| As it relates to our conference, where do you think the energy conversation falls into the broader— I think that it probably has fallen a little bit lower maybe than you'd like but yet it sits there where everyone knows we have to deal with some of this stuff. | ||
| Anyone you ask always thinks that the thing he or she is doing is the most important thing in the world. | ||
| And of course, I'm going to tell you, energy is one of those things. | ||
| I do a lot of other things that are also incredibly important. | ||
| But yes, energy is one of those things. | ||
| It's great that we have a conference where people talk about a lot of different things, and there are a lot of different challenges. | ||
| But energy underpins a lot of what is basically our prosperity. | ||
| And remember, prosperity is what fixes most problems. | ||
| If you're poor, yes, it sucks from climate change, but it sucks from pretty much everything else. | ||
| Just being poor is a bad deal. | ||
| And so the reality is, if we can lift people out of poverty, if we can get them into prosperity, if we can find a way to get people to flourish... | ||
| They will be much better off in all kinds of ways. | ||
| They will want to fix their air pollution problems and all the other problems with the environment. | ||
| They will want to find cleaner energy sources. | ||
| They will want to do all that. | ||
| But they will also want to have their kids brought up better and better education and better health care and all these other things that matter for human flourishing. | ||
| So I think, yes, there are lots of other things we need to talk about. | ||
| I'm glad we do that at this conference. | ||
| But energy is incredibly important because that's really what underpins our prosperity. | ||
| I'd say good luck continuing this, but I don't think you need luck. | ||
| It seems like it's working out. |
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