Sept. 26, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:24
2803 The Science of Climate Change - A Conversation with Dr. Patrick Moore
Why has there been an emphasis on the last hundred years when people speak about climate change? What are the untold benefits of increased CO2 levels? Is it true that there is a near scientific consensus on Climate Change? What are some examples of Climate Change advocate hypocrisy? Why did Dr. Patrick Moore leave Greenpeace? What does the science say about genetically modified organism (GMO) such as golden rice? Stefan Molyneux speaks with one of the founding members of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore. To buy "Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist" please go to: http://www.fdrurl.com/PatrickMoore
Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, 15-year, incredibly brave, some dare say, foolhardy advocate for environmental issues who's since shifted to providing sustainable environmental advice to government and business groups.
Dr.
Moore, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Very nice to be with you, Stefan.
Alright, so I'd like to jump in at the deep end if you can.
So I've been promoting what would be called climate change skepticism, which is sure, yes, CO2 emissions are increasing, but anybody who claims to know for certain exactly where that's going to lead is pretty much talking out of some orifice other than his mouth.
I wonder if you could talk about some of the challenges that you find in the existing climate change paradigm, which again is rejected by a lot of scientists, but is put forward from various political bodies quite strenuously.
Well, I think the first thing to recognize is that all the emphasis is on like the last 100 years of history when people talk about climate change, and the climate's been changing for over 4 billion years, and we actually have a pretty good historical record of The average global temperature going back over a billion years and certainly the last half billion years since modern life emerged in the Cambrian explosion.
So we know what the temperature of the Earth has been over that period and for the vast majority of it, it has been much warmer than it is today.
Not just two degrees warmer, but six or eight degrees warmer average global temperature in about 22 degrees Celsius range, maybe even 25 Whereas today the average temperature of the Earth is 14.5 and during the height of the last glaciation it was around 12.
So it's actually much closer to an ice age now than it is to a greenhouse age which life has evolved in throughout most of its history.
The other thing to recognize is that human beings are a tropical species.
We evolved at the equator for a couple of million years before we invented fire, We figured out how to build shelters and make clothing that was warm.
And that's the only reason we can live where there's frost.
And if you think of that, that's anywhere sort of north of the southern United States and anywhere north of Greece and even further south.
So people were not able to live in this kind of climate that the majority of us in western countries live in until very recently in the evolution of humans.
So we're actually a tropical species.
And so to think that a two degree increase in global temperature is going to be catastrophic for us or for virtually any other form of life strikes me as basically being ignorant of the actual needs of living creatures.
The whole thing about the ocean becoming acid is totally contrived.
It's not possible for that to happen from a chemistry point of view because the ocean contains so many salts It doesn't matter what the concentration of CO2 is in the atmosphere.
It's not going to turn the ocean acidic.
And yet this is, you know, now that it's stopped warming for quite a few years, there had to be a new catastrophe scenario, I suppose.
And so ocean acidification has now, to some extent, taken the place of global warming, seeing as though there is no global warming.
And if you want to establish a causal relationship between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere And the warmth of the atmosphere, the temperature of the Earth.
Going back in history, there isn't much evidence of a lockstep relationship.
There's some correlation, but there was an ice age 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than it is today.
So there's lots of examples where CO2 and temperature are completely out of whack with each other and don't appear to have anything to do with each other at all.
You've got a situation now where for the last 18 years there has been no net warming of the Earth's atmosphere and yet about 30% of all the CO2 we have ever emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been emitted during that time because it's going up so quickly.
It's like an exponential curve where it's now over 400 parts per million, but How many people know that the optimum CO2 level for plant growth, including all the trees and all our food crops, is 1500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than it is today.
And just coincidentally, 2000 ppm is sort of around the average it's been for the last 400 million years, not down at 400.
So the final point I'd make to kick it off is that today, right now, CO2 and temperature are are both lower than they have been through nearly all of modern life for the last half billion years and therefore I personally believe that not only will warming and increase CO2 not be negative but will be very positive for most forms of life in that they will improve the growth
of our crops the growing seasons in the higher latitudes in Canada and Russia which is a huge part of the Earth's landmass and that warmth We'll generally be good for us if it happens.
Now, there is no guarantee that it's going to get warmer just because there's more CO2. But there is pretty much a guarantee that plants will grow faster if there's more CO2. So there'll be a silver lining in it even if the CO2 doesn't cause the Earth to warm.
And you've made a great argument around if the CO2 had gone in the opposite direction, what we might be facing in terms of plant death.
Yes, it's amazing to note that, I mean, what people don't understand is that because the EPA and others have characterized carbon dioxide now basically as a pollutant, even as a toxic pollutant, and carbon pollution is spoken of all the time, when in fact carbon dioxide is the most important food for all life on Earth.
There is simply no question of that.
If it wasn't for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, There would be no plants, and therefore there would be no animals, because they wouldn't have anything to eat.
So all of life is dependent, with very few exceptions, like the microbes that live at the sulfur vents in the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
There's some forms of life that do not use CO2 as their primary food, but it's like minuscule.
So we have to get that perspective, and if in fact CO2 had gone down, From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when it was at around 260, 280 parts per million, if it had gone down by the same amount it's gone up because of our emissions, all the plants in the world would have started to die.
And in fact, we know that during the major glaciations, there were times when CO2 was drawn down close to 150 parts per million, and it would have at that time been causing very serious problems for plant growth.
Because below about 150, you start to lose the ability of a plant to survive.
It just isn't enough CO2 for them to make it.
And so all the plants in the world today, even though we see them growing quite well, are in fact starving for CO2. They would grow faster and would survive better if the CO2 was three or four times higher than it is today, and people are worried about it being 50 ppm higher.
Well, 350 was supposed to be Bill McGibbon, the author of The End of Nature, which is where he got his fame at the beginning.
The organizer of 350.org basically said some years ago that if it reaches 350 ppm, we're doomed.
Well, now it's at 400 and we're still not doomed yet.
And so I think people should take note of the fact that It is okay if it goes up by four times from the plant's point of view.
And if there's anything we need in this world, it's plants.
I mean, it's the very essence of our survival is that food crops are grown to feed us, otherwise we die.
So I think we should take serious note of that and balance this idea that CO2 may somehow cause harm, which I don't actually believe, But people who are worried about CO2 should balance that notion with the idea that CO2 is the most important food for all life on Earth.
It's really a beautiful thing which struck me recently that the increase in human population, which is to some degree of course, and industrialization driving CO2 emissions, that the increase in human population may put resources into the atmosphere that drives the increased crop production that we need for the increased human population.
I think that's actually quite a beautiful synchronicity.
Well, it's really cool for me to recognize that James Lovelock The British scientist who is the father of the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that all life on Earth is acting in concert like one sort of super organism to control the chemistry of the atmosphere to make it more conducive for life on Earth.
And when the whole global warming issue emerged, he took the position that humans were a rogue species, basically, that we were going to destroy Gaia by putting these emissions in the atmosphere.
I visited him in 2002 in his West Country home in England and spent a whole day with him.
He wanted to convince me that nuclear power was part of the solution for the future, which he did at that time.
But I wanted to convince him that human CO2 emissions may well be part of Gaia's bidding.
If we're part of Gaia, why would we be a rogue species?
That's too much like original sin for me.
And so I feel that if Gaia is real, And I'm not religious about it.
But if there is an interaction, positive and negative feedback, that all of life is interconnected, I know that.
So I suppose it is possible that by putting all this CO2, and now Lovelock has changed his mind just in the last few years.
He used to think that we were the enemy of Gaia, and now he has postulated that perhaps the reason we're putting these CO2 emissions out is to stave off another ice age, as he puts it.
Or another major glaciation.
And so that is a more rational way of looking at what we're doing.
We know that the CO2 is going to result in better crop growth.
I hope it results in a warmer world.
I ask people in my lectures, how come there's 300 million people in the United States and only 30 million people in Canada, which is larger geographically?
One word, cold.
There's no other reason.
It's because it's too cold in Canada for people to live very far north of the 49th parallel.
The only reason they're up there is because there's a mine or some oil and gas operation where you have to go into a camp.
Nobody's building cities up there.
The one or two big towns that are up there are hard places to live because it's winter nine months of the year and frozen like an ice cube most of the time.
So wouldn't it be better If the northern reaches were warmer, which they were through all of the greenhouse eras.
Just a few million years ago, all the Canadian Arctic islands were fully forested and giant camels roaming around in them.
And then the ice age came, the Pleistocene ice age, which we are still in.
People think the ice age is over because the last glaciation ended, but there's been four or five of these major glaciations during this ice age.
There is still vast sheets of ice on the North and South Poles, indicating an ice age.
Because in the non-ice age periods, which people call the greenhouse ages, there is no ice on the poles, and that has been the norm through most of the history of modern life.
Right.
Now, from the philosophy of science standpoint, one thing that I found very difficult when debating what are sometimes called the thermageddonites, the we're going to melt and burn in hell, is that, to me, where there's no falsifiability, it can't be called science.
And I don't know what the null hypothesis is.
For global warming, it seems like every variation is proof of it.
It seems like something which you can't disprove, even the 18 years, as you point out, of no warming has not done anything.
I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you talk about in your lectures that it's extremely likely and so on, and you say this is not science, and the fact that there's no null hypothesis for the hypothesis means that we're not really dealing with science.
So what are your thoughts on that?
Now what we're actually dealing with is a belief system which is based on a couple of points.
The first point it's based on is the theoretical fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
If you increase the concentration of CO2, all else being equal, you might expect the temperature to increase.
But all else is not equal and there are positive and negative feedbacks involved.
And the real wild card is water vapor and water.
Water is the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere when it's in the form of a gas, as a vapor.
But when water's in the form of a liquid, it's called a cloud, and that is not a greenhouse gas.
That has a completely different physical and chemical property in the atmosphere, and we can't predict what the effect of increased CO2 will be on the water component in the atmosphere.
It may result in higher evaporation, And more clouds and therefore dampen the effect of CO2 or even negate it altogether.
So that is why it's impossible with computer models because that's the next step in the chain.
Okay, theoretically CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
So now we build computer models which contain assumptions about the impact of CO2. And one of those assumptions in all the computer models is that CO2 will be exacerbated by the effect of the water vapor.
And that is not proven in any sense of the word.
So it may be in fact that water vapor actually negates and even counters the effect of CO2. And then there's all these other variables like solar irradiation, ultraviolet, infrared, cosmic radiation, etc., etc.
The Earth's wobbles and the Earth's eccentricities and The 100,000 year Milankovitch cycle and the oceans and all the heat, because the oceans contain more of the Earth's heat than anything else that can move it around, like water can and air can, the atmosphere can.
So I think what we've got there is a construct that is not any kind of a proof.
There is actually no proof.
Anything that even would be close to a scientific proof based on observation of the real world because the output from a computer model is not an observation from the real world It is the output of a computer model nothing more and it can be a useful tool, but it is not a crystal ball I think that's my main point about computer models is just that they're being used as if they were actually able to predict the future like It would be easier to predict the outcome of a horse race,
surely, than it would be to predict the outcome of the global climate.
And yet, who has a computer that can predict the outcome of horse racing?
Otherwise, some guy would have that computer and be winning all the horse race bets.
Oh, yeah.
No, you take that algorithm and apply it to the stock market and end up owning the majority of the planet if that sort of random walk predictability were possible.
Now, I think another thing that is often undermentioned is any system that has remained relatively stable for billions of years would not generally be susceptible to self-reinforcing extrapolations.
So, you know, of course, when CO2 goes up, then plant growth goes up, which consumes CO2. So you would expect any long-term system, and I guess this is something to do with ecology, of course, you expect any long-term system to have built-in checks and balances, so to speak.
Otherwise, it simply wouldn't remain a long-term system.
Have you talked at all about that?
Well, no, I think given the situation that is occurring, it appears as though the CO2 that we are emitting is not being absorbed or sequestered as rapidly as we're emitting it.
Otherwise, it wouldn't continue to go up.
So I think it's possible that as long as our exponential and then maybe leveling off, but still extremely high compared to The capability of the Earth to absorb at high level of emissions, it's possible that the atmospheric level of CO2 will continue to go up for some, perhaps even centuries.
As long as it doesn't go above about 5,000 from a human health and animal health point of view, that's no problem.
It's been at 10,000 and life flourished during those periods.
So that's a long ways from now.
That's more than 10 times what it is today.
So there's nothing to worry about in the short term, in my estimation.
It's not toxic.
It is a plant food.
The plants want more of it, and that would be good for us in terms of crop growth and forest growth.
There's a forest in Germany, an experimental forest, covering quite a large area.
A paper just came out on this.
Since 1870, they have been monitoring the growth rate of the trees in this forest.
There has been a 40% increase in growth rate, and they're saying, well, it may be due to the slight increase in temperature that has occurred, the longer growing season, but it's almost certain that it has to do with CO2 fertilization as well.
Because every greenhouse grower purposefully pumps the exhaust from their heaters, whether it's a wood heater or a gas heater, which is rich in CO2. Into the greenhouse to increase the growth of the plants in there.
Every greenhouse grower knows that and they all do it.
Especially during the cool period when they're heating their greenhouse, they can increase the growth rate by 50 to 100% of tomatoes and cucumbers and that sort of produce.
And we know that for a fact.
And the reason that's possible is because the plants actually want more CO2. They can grow faster if they have it.
It's just like if you starve a human being, they're stunted.
And the plants are starving.
I mean, not literally, but they're not getting as much food as they would like to grow as fast as they can.
Undernourished, I guess we could say.
Now, there is this...
Statistic that is bandied about in the media, and I think you can never rebut an incorrect cliche often enough, which is there's sort of 96% or 98% consensus among scientists that, you know, anthropogenic global warming, CO2 emissions are there, a big problem, and so on.
But I've also read that this number is kind of fallacious, that there's a lot, I think you've pointed out in your lectures, 30,000 scientists I think the scientific community is very much divided.
On the one hand, you have the self-defined climate scientists who say that, well, if you don't have a degree in climatology, you can't call yourself a climate scientist.
And yet, Michael Mann For example, his PhD is in physics.
It's not in climate science.
Yet they say the other people are not climate scientists, and they are, which by their own definition, they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves.
So it's a self-defined clique of people.
So you're only really a good climate scientist if you agree with catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
Otherwise, you're either some other kind of scientist, a geophysicist, a geologist, an earth scientist, a geographer, You name it, or you're really not a scientist at all.
And they've said that to me.
I got two PhDs in science, and they say I'm not a scientist because I'm not working in a lab.
It's true, I am not a research scientist, but that's only one kind of scientist.
And so this whole definition of who qualifies to have an opinion is an issue.
And secondly, the 97% is entirely contrived in the first place.
There are thousands of scientists who disagree with various aspects of catastrophic human-caused global warming.
It's very much like the layers on an onion.
There are many questions around climate change.
Is the climate changing?
Which way is it changing?
Are we responsible for some of it or most of it or almost none of it?
Is it going to be good or bad in this country or that country at this latitude or that latitude?
Who are the winners?
Who are the losers?
There's all these questions around climate change.
The one bottom line is the climate is always changing except when it's in a pause like now.
And it seems to be pretty much stable at the present time.
Which way will it go next?
Up or down?
I wouldn't bet on that.
The Russians are saying, the cosmologists especially, are saying we're going into another little ice age of some sort or other because of the way that the sun is behaving.
And because They think the sun is important in the Earth's climate.
Of course, they're right.
But there are other factors.
And so, again, there's no crystal ball on this.
And anybody who says they know what the future of the Earth's climate is going to be, they're the ones who should not be allowed to call themselves a scientist.
Because it is the duty of scientists to be skeptical of people who think they know the future.
Because nobody knows the future and can never know it.
Partly because of chaos theory and the interaction of multiple variables that are operating in real time in nonlinear fashion.
You know, you just cannot predict what everything is going to happen between now and 40 years from now, which these guys seem to think they know.
And therefore, you know, my question right now is, who are the real deniers?
It really seems to me that people who are still so certain that we are the main cause of something that's going to be catastrophic to the Earth's climate when nothing is happening, and yet we're putting all this CO2 into the atmosphere, they are the deniers of reality.
The skeptics are the ones who are more or less saying, we do have to wait and see.
And the political solutions that are proposed, and of course they're completely different fundamentally from the scientific questions, but the political solutions that are proposed, which will raise the cost of energy considerably, and energy of course translates to food, and there are hundreds of,
I think you point out 800 million people In the world who are food insecure, who, in other words, can barely afford the price of food as it is, raising the prices could cause the deaths of huge numbers of people, political instability, potential war.
The consequences of the theory, when translated into political terms, are very, very significant.
And so you'd think that'd be the very highest requirement for proof for something that radical.
But the political solutions seem to be being charged ahead, fueled by what seems to me something akin to superstition.
Yeah, it's really a serious problem.
It's interesting, for example, the government of India has declared that Greenpeace is a threat to their economic security.
And you couldn't imagine how What is, you know, a pretty big environmental group, but pretty much minuscule in terms of its economic power compared to the whole country of India.
But they are threatening their energy future and they are threatening their food future with their opposition to the use of genetics and agriculture, with their opposition to coal and their opposition to nuclear and their opposition to hydroelectric and their opposition to nearly everything except really expensive, unreliable wind and solar energy, as if human civilization could rely on that.
This is a classic case of the so-called cure being worse than the disease, which may not even be true.
It's like, okay, they're diagnosing us with terminal climate disease, and then they're going to chop our head off in order to fix it.
That's how I see it.
Greenpeace says we must end our addiction to fossil fuel while they attack a Russian oil rig in a diesel-powered ship.
And, you know, we didn't have a hydrogen bomb on our boat when we went against the US nuclear tests in 1971 on the first Greenpeace campaign.
We were not hypocritical in those days.
And not only that, one of the main reasons I had to leave Greenpeace back in the day, after 15 years in the leadership, was because they lost their humanitarian soul.
Greenpeace began trying to stop nuclear war.
That's about preventing the destruction of human civilization, which, in other words, we don't want all the humans to die.
Over the years, the movement has drifted into a position of seeing humans as the enemies of the earth, and that's what they're teaching all our children, and that we should feel guilty and sinful and horrible about our lives because we are bringing about the end of civilization.
Or the end of the ecosystem, or whatever it is they think we're going to, are destroying here.
They have this vision that humans are evil and nature is good.
The exact opposite of what ecology should be teaching our children, that we're all one, all part of life, all come from the same evolution.
And it's the same with Lovelock's thinking humans were a rogue species in his earlier years, and finally coming around to recognizing that we are actually part of Gaia.
One living organism on this planet.
We should not be looking at people this way.
Greenpeace doesn't care that two million kids are dying each year from vitamin A deficiency, otherwise they would support golden rice.
But because they're zero tolerance on GMO, they won't even support a GMO that can save two million kids from dying every year, half a million of which are going blind every year.
The biggest cause of blindness in the world by far And the biggest cause of childhood death in the world, by far, is vitamin A deficiency, and they don't care.
So, they don't care what happens if we cut off the fossil fuels.
That's just their ideology.
But if we cut off fossil fuels tomorrow, all transportation, or 99% of it, would come to an end Three billion people would be dead within a very short time it might be even more than that over the long term and there wouldn't be a tree left on the planet because that's what people would be using to cook their food and heat their homes with and in fact run their transportation during the Second World War when Germany was embargoed and had no oil they used gas wood gasification trailers towed behind the buses and
tractors producing wood gas to make their engines run and You'll find in many cases when there's civil strife, all of a sudden people are cutting the trees down illegally because there's nothing else to use for energy.
And so the impact of doing everything Greenpeace and the climate change movement thinks we should do would be the destruction of human civilization and massive destruction of the environment.
Because if you cut all the trees down on planet Earth, that would not be a good thing.
But that's what would happen.
Yeah, it is this concept of human beings as the sinful cancer, the lice or the termites eating the foundations of the planet and so on.
And I think that these are technical problems, they are economic problems, and whatever we can do to grow the economy so that we have the excess wealth to do, as you've pointed out, what's going on.
Out in Alberta, the oil sands, that we have the technology to clean the sand, to return nature back to its inhabitants.
I've toured similar sites as you have, where you go out and engineers have led me around and said, you know, here there was a rabbit hole.
And we dug it up, we moved the rabbits out, and now we're putting the rabbit hole back and putting the rabbits back in.
And that takes a fair amount of excess wealth and the idea that we can somehow continue to use environmentalism as a club that undermines the productivity of our economy and think we're going to end up with anything other disaster seems to me painfully naive.
Yeah, and it's amazing though that this so-called narrative of human destruction of the planet is so compelling.
I don't understand why people almost want to be pessimistic about the future.
When in fact, if you read the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, if you Google three myths about poverty in the world, the world is getting richer.
We've had a place in Mexico now for 15 years and we've been visiting there for 40 years.
That country is phenomenally better off now than it was 40 years ago.
The wealth creation has occurred there and it's occurring in Sub-Saharan Africa.
It's occurring in South Asia.
These economies are growing, and everything Greenpeace says and does is a threat to that continued well-being of the masses of humanity, because in fact, they believe, like Paul Ehrlich does, that the worst thing, and John Holdren, President Obama's science advisor, has said it in the past too, the worst thing that could happen is if we had cheap energy, because then we'll use it to destroy the planet.
Instead, what we do when we have cheap energy We use it to improve our lives and, as you say, then we have the excess wealth necessary for pollution control devices on all our coal-fired plants and for reclamation of disturbed sites.
But, you know, the real trick here is that because now almost everybody is living in an urban lifestyle, even people living in a town of 500 people, they got a shopping mall, they got satellite TV, they're living an urban lifestyle and it's very few people who are living a rural lifestyle And so there's a divorce between the people who are producing the natural wealth of oil and gas and hydroelectric and coal and timber and minerals and all the
other things that are taken from the environment to make our cities.
People living in the cities don't realize that every single built thing has been mined out of the earth or taken from trees.
There's a little wood involved.
Which is the only really renewable part of the whole thing.
But our urban infrastructure, all our roads and buildings, etc., power lines and everything, is all mined out of the earth.
And yet, if you talk to a Greenpeace person or a green politician, they are against mining.
Period.
It's not like there's some bad mines.
There are no good mines.
Because mining is destructive of the earth.
And so the urban population has been convinced that all those people out in the country who are digging and chopping and drilling and growing are destroying the planet and that they are the evil ones.
And they are the good ones because they're living in a condominium in downtown somewhere.
When in fact the only reason those people are digging and drilling out there is to get the stuff those people in the city need because they couldn't survive without all of that.
Yet they are able to transfer the guilt To the people who are actually the ones doing the hard work out in the environment in the snow and rain and heat and dust, getting what they need.
And thankfully, working conditions for people in the resource industries have improved tremendously, where most of them are in air conditioned cabs with rock and roll music in their earphones, going around digging stuff out of the ground.
Yeah, before I went to university, I went and spent about 18 months up north in the wilderness, gold panning, prospecting, and so on.
And I do remember some far radical left greens castigating for me this in school while booting up their laptops.
And it's like, but if there's no gold, you don't have any transistors.
Like, why are you complaining about someone going out to get the resources that you're using to complain about me going out to get...
Anyway...
That's neither here nor there, but I think it's...
If you've not actually spent a lot of time in nature, it's really hard to understand how beneficial civilization is.
I mean, the first thing I did when I came back from spending the winter up near the Arctic Circle in a tiny tent was hug a boiler and kiss a boiler.
And I think I actually may have bended down on one knee and proposed to a boiler.
It's all a haze.
To me, but it was really quite delightful.
Now, one of the things that you have transitioned your thinking on, or I guess you'd say evolved your thinking on, is nuclear power from back in the day to now.
I wonder if you could help people follow that transition in your thinking.
Well, for me, it's a simple question of having made a mistake in the past in our fervor to stop nuclear war and end nuclear weapons proliferation.
We confused nuclear energy or mixed it in with Nuclear weapons, as if everything nuclear was evil.
And today, thinking about it, and for example, take nuclear medicine.
I mean, nuclear medicine uses high levels of radiation for treatment and low levels of radiation for diagnosis.
For millions of people, it is a very important part of modern medicine.
It is not evil.
And the same applies to nuclear energy.
I think we put nuclear energy in the wrong category.
Many technologies can be used for both good and evil.
The machete, for example, is the most important tool for farmers in the developing world.
They clear their land with it.
They cut their firewood.
They plant their crops.
They harvest their crops.
They use it for a million things.
Unfortunately, some people use it for chopping other people up.
And in fact, the machete has killed more people than any other weapon in the last 25 years in this world.
Especially if you look at Rwanda and what happened there.
So you have to differentiate between the beneficial and the destructive or harmful uses of every technology.
And nuclear is no different in that regard.
We do know that nuclear energy is clean, does not emit CO2 or other air pollutants.
We do know that there's a supply of fuel that will last far longer than all of the fossil fuels put together.
People think nuclear waste is something that needs to be disposed of.
99% of the energy is still in that used nuclear fuel and transatomic power and the Russians already have two big plants running on used nuclear fuel on the Caspian Sea.
They just sold two of those to China a couple of years ago and China will be building them.
It's called fast neutron reactors.
They're nothing new.
We've known about how to do this since the 1960s.
And the United States actually had a fast neutron reactor in Washington State and it was shut down in the early 90s for political reasons.
It should not have been because this is the future.
And, you know, nobody died in Fukushima and no one will.
No one got enough radiation there to cause future health problems.
Chernobyl, which was a reactor design that should never have been built, they took their weapons production reactors and cookie-cuttered them all over the former Soviet Union as power reactors when they knew they were capable of exploding.
None of the other reactor designs are capable of exploding in the way that that reactor exploded.
Three Mile Island, no one was killed there either, and no one got enough radiation to be a problem for the future.
So there's been one nuclear accident that killed Chernobyl.
Fifty-six people.
That's the World Health Organization official number of how many deaths they attribute to the Chernobyl reaction disaster.
And of all the three, four hundred thousand people who were evacuated from the area around Chernobyl after they'd been exposed to quite high levels of radiation compared to anything in Fukushima or Three Mile Island, there is no evidence of increased cancer in that population and they have been monitored It's totally overblown what the effect of these few accidents has been.
And yet, 120,000 people died in one hydroelectric accident in China in 1975, compared to 56 in the entire history of the nuclear industry.
And we can make them safer all the time, especially if we build them and Improve on them and then the ones they're building now in Georgia and South Carolina are Improved upon the ones that we built 20 and 30 years ago greatly improved so they're basically failure proof and This is what we'll be doing into the future the more nuclear plants we build the less coal plants we build and this is the size of the mistake we made back in the 70s when the environmental movement
came out against nuclear energy and Was that there would be a lot less coal plants and a lot more nuclear plants in the world today if we had taken the opposite position.
And that would have been much better for the environment and much better for reducing the amount of coal we need to use to make electricity.
Because that coal is precious.
In the future, it could be converted into liquid fuels for transportation when the oil and gas run out.
And the oil and gas will run out before the coal runs out.
Especially if we would stop using so much coal to make electricity and use nuclear energy instead, of which we have 5, 10, 20,000 years supply of fuel.
Now, you touched on the golden wheat, the vitamin A deficiencies, and the millions of children who die and go blind because of a lack of vitamin A. Your position, as far as I understand it, on genetically modified organisms, on GMOs, is that there's no proof of any negative effects.
Of course, there is significant crop increases and harvest yields and so on.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit to people who've Only heard frankenfood, boo, ah, run, scary.
What your thoughts are on the subject?
Well, at least on this one subject, I'm in agreement with every major science, health and nutrition organization in the world.
They all say that the GM foods which are on sale now that are being produced commercially are safe without exception.
There is nothing to be afraid of.
And in a way, GM is the one issue that With nuclear energy, there is radiation.
It can be dangerous.
Nuclear energy has issues.
Climate change is not something we can predict with certainty.
We don't know exactly what's going to happen.
My video went off?
Keep going.
We have a backup video recording, so just keep plugging along and we'll stitch that in.
Whereas with GM, there is nothing that is known to be afraid of.
This frankenfood idea is invisible and non-existent.
There's nothing in the actual food that could be a problem.
And yet they still figure out how to make up as if it could be.
All these scary metaphors are based on Hollywood fantasy movies.
And so that's the best they can do, is to associate...
Scary fantasy words with GM in order to get people to be afraid of them.
There's nothing else.
It would actually be easy to make corn toxic by taking a gene from a toxic plant, of which there are thousands in the world, because plants produce those toxins so that things won't eat them.
And every plant in the world produces tons of pesticides, fungicides, insecticides to ward those pests off.
And that's, for example, why cauliflower...
Sorry, I meant broccoli is a bit bitter and why Brussels sprouts are a bit bitter.
That's the pesticides that those plants are producing to prevent things from eating them.
Well, there's not enough to prevent us from eating them in those plants, but there's many plants that we would just spit out if we put them in our mouth and that stuff's toxic.
So you could put that in corn if you move the gene that makes that in the toxic plant into corn.
Nobody's doing that.
All the scientists who are working on Genetic modification are trying to improve our food from a growing point of view and from now more and more from a nutritional point of view and we'll see more and more of that.
When the seed companies started with GM obviously they wanted to make their customers happy so they focused on the farmer as to what traits they could put in the crops which would be beneficial to the farmer from insect resistance to faster growth and all those sort of things but now there's a lot of focus on the consumer And what traits can be put into foods that will be beneficial to the consumer?
And golden rice is the leading example of that in the world, which could actually bring about the cure for up to two million kids a year and prevent them from dying and going blind.
And yet, you have the anti-GM movement against golden rice claiming it's a Trojan horse for GMOs.
In other words, if it's successful at preventing death of children, It will make GM look good, and that would be bad as far as they're concerned.
So it's completely warped thinking around GM. Every credible science, health, and nutrition organization in the world accepts GM as safe, and yet these people carry on with their crusade of disinformation and ignorance influencing our children, our teachers, and all kinds of mothers in the world that there's something negative about it when there's absolutely nothing, not a shred of negativity.
Well, that's good information to have, and I hope people will follow it up and look that up.
Now, for your...
I guess you've recently released an autobiography.
I wonder if you could tell us a bit about that and ways in which people can contact you if they want to use your company for its environmental advice and stuff like that.
Well, yes.
My book, which was actually...
First published in 2010, but it's updated in a 2013 edition, is called Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout, The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist.
It's a 400-plus page book, but it's an easy read.
It's been really well edited, and anybody can read it.
The first half of it is basically my early years and then my 15 years in Greenpeace and many stories about the campaign's And the evolution of the organization and then the realization that I had to leave because of the way The organization was going,
so there's a transition period where I explain why I left, partly because the humanitarian orientation was lost and people were now perceived as evil, which I do not believe, partly because of specific environmental policies that were being adopted, the campaign to ban chlorine worldwide, which was an entirely misguided campaign and which I could not accept from a scientific point of view.
All of these issues that we see today, the last half of the book, covers every single major environmental issue from chemicals to climate change to agriculture to forestry to energy and covers them in considerable detail with a lot of footnotes.
So, thank you very much for taking the time.
Of course, I think that all people of goodwill and benevolence are really interested in trying to create as sustainable yet enjoyable a planet as we can.
Those who are tempted by old-school thinking almost want to toss them back into the Middle Ages.
For a day or two, just so that they can see how beneficial it is to have technology.
We're worried about things that are negative to the world.
Well, the Black Death and things like that, which wiped out a third of the European population, not that great for sustainability of life itself, at least human life.
So I hope that we can use your example to respect and embrace technology, to value human life, and to recognize that these are economic and technological challenges which we can best overcome with the clearest thinking possible.
Thanks very much, Stefan.
It's been a pleasure to be with you, and any time in the future, I'll be glad to come back.
