Climate Change: What the Data Actually Shows with Geologist Scott Tinker

This whole concept that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions, why? Well, it's BS, right? I would source it to them. Complete. There's no renewable energy. Unless such things are in your land. No, that's a myth. You have to have these election systems in those companies. They're mine. For 20 years, Europe has been flat economically. You have to look at that and say, "Intentions outcomes. If your industry is your closing, your people are leaving, it's not going to help the climate. You're hurting the environment because wealthy nations can afford to invest in the environment. In the interim though, the planet will get warmer and we're going to have to adapt. Yes. That's inevitable. We are, and what allows you to do that? Well. Scott Tinker, welcome to Schicconortry. Thank you. It's great to have you here. We want to talk about energy. It's a really important conversation. It's one we've covered from different angles, but you're someone who's got a very sensible, pragmatic, rational approach there, which is why it's great to have you on. Before we get into all of that, tell us a little bit about who you are, your background, how you've come to be sitting here with us. Sure. Well, I'm a geologist by training and studied that and worked in the technical side of the oil and gas industry for 17 years. Built three-year reservoir models and hung off of big cliffs around the world and did field work and that kind of stuff. And then 25, six years ago, I went to university, University of Texas at Austin. To run a research unit that I built into a pretty big thing, 250 people, global energy, environmental, economics, blending research around the world. And that role came to begin to appreciate the interplay between energy and the economy and the environment and how those balance around the world. And then along the way, if the started making films or the filmmaker, we can get into all that, but that eventually ended up in 60 countries around the world, not in airports, actually deep into them and seeing how the whole world lived. And that's kind of influenced the way I'm today and what I do. So I have transitioned, well, Arthur Brooks, you had a great book, right? I talked about the two curves from strength to strength. That first curve for me was a technical scientist. The second curve is an educator. That's carried me along for a while. Alright, well, educate us. What I wanted to ask you is, first of all, to break down the reality of energy patterns and consumption around the world. Like what is going on? Because if you live in a western country, if you live in a city in a western country, every second car is electric. We're making this great energy transition and everything's wonderful, renewable energy everywhere. You see sun panels and all of this stuff. But that's not quite the reality of the world, is it? Not the whole world. No. To my favorite words, transition and renewable. But we're not and they aren't. And I said that in a TED talk, actually, 1100 kids. I went through what we started with food, cow and kale. To understand energy density and took them through different forms of energy and how some you just get a lot more bang for the buck. But all of them come from the earth. A solar panel comes from the earth. When turbine comes when the earth, the battery comes near, it is mine. And then it's manufacturing these collection systems. Collects the sun, light, heat and the motion of the wind. And it's converted into electricity. But those wear out. And then we dump them into landfills and we do it over and over. So there's no renewable energy. It's less such things from your energy. No, that's a myth we've carried forward in our schools. And the sun and the wind are there, but you can't put sun in your car. So you have to have these collection systems and those come from the earth. Their mind. Other kinds of energy or denser. Coal came along. At first it was wood and then the sun was the first form of energy. It grew the hay that our vehicles of the day used, oxen and horses. And then we killed whales to get their oils for lighting our homes. And then coal came along. 1805, the first coal train in whales actually. Commercial coal power train. You burn coal which nature took carbon, plants and made it really dense for us. So you get a lot of energy when you burn that coal. Heat. Boy water makes steam, turn a turbine, run a generator. Light. And that changed the modern world. Then oil. Hydrocarbons. Carbon and hydrogen, not just carbon and coal. Even denser. We're finding that put it in our vehicles. That's why we can travel so far, the horse and the oxen had to eat a lot of hay. A lot of hay to go 500 miles. A good tank of gas will get you that far. Then methane, natural gas came along. CH4, more hydrogen than carbon. It'll sound weird, but methane is denser than oil by weight. So it's a much denser form energy, more hydrogen in it. And then finally uranium and thorium. The nuclear. So this energy density transition has been happening naturally for a couple of centuries now. And that's where energy in the world is headed. It's tough to negotiate with physics. And we try all the time politically, but physics eventually wins and so does economics. So that's this. If there's a transition, it's toward that. Okay. Now globally you asked. The wealthy world. Let's just break the world into three parts. The emerging economies about half the world, four billion people. The developing economies and other three billion. And then the lucky one plus billion of us. We're born one lottery. And so we have moved through our mix of energy has changed from dominated by coal. Less coal now than most of the modern world. Oil is actually percentage wise decreasing. Natural gas and you're increasing in the modern world and solar and wind. And I'm fine with those. By the way, I'm not anti-solar and wind. A diverse portfolio is a good thing. Optionality like stocks or real estate options in that portfolio matter. But they're not going to replace the dense forms of energy. So the rich world has this set of options now. Can I interrupt you then? I want to come back to you tracing all the street. But you said something that to a lot of people who are not aware of any of this will sound. It's unbelievable. I call them solar and wind. They will not replace for the dense form of energy. You simply can't do two reasons. Two big reasons. A lot of reasons. Two big ones. You can't mine enough to create the collection systems of solar panels and wind turbines. Which wear out in 15 to 20 years and see if they keep building them because we don't recycle them. You just can't mine enough to do that because the sun and the wind are so low density. It takes a tremendous amount to collect the energy we need to power the modern world. So Voslav Smil is a very bright energy guy out of Canada. And he created a. When I'm talking about density before I was talking about, you know, per unit weight. How much energy in a. in a ounce or a pallet of something. You can't weigh the sun and the wind. So he came up with something called surface power density, which is an area. Watts per meter squared. So the wind has a very low surface power density. Very low. It takes a lot of area to collect energy from the wind. The sun is a little better. But I'm talking about one watt per meter squared or six. Not hundreds to 500 to approaching a thousand. But what you get from the dense forms of energy. So you literally can't mine and replace enough of that stuff. That's the one reason. The second big reason is there's this weird thing called night. And it happens every day. When night happens or clouds, you have to have something else there. Because we like our electricity 24/7. And when the wind goes away, you have to have something else there. That's called intermittent. So the something else there is either a redundant system of natural gas power plants to fire up. Or now ever increasing giant batteries. Which have a lower density by weight than Dung. Okay. Dung, cow Dung is about 40 times denser than a lithium ion battery by weight. So we're charging these giant batteries, which have very little energy density. Very low. That's why it takes a thousand pounds of battery to run a nice testless. Let me say that again, a testless. A thousand pounds of battery and net for a bit. Seven thousand cell phones in one car. So that's the physics. It's not judgment. It's just physics. So you're not going to be able to power the whole world, particularly as the emerging and developing world come into hopefully wealth like we have. They're going to require more energy, more and more energy. And that's a good thing. Not about that. Lift the world up. You just can't do it. So there'll be a part of a portfolio. And look, I've installed solar in Guinchuku, Columbia, and the Arwako village of Guinchuku, Indigenous people. That's all they could have. There's no wires, there's no roads, there's no pipes. First electricity to them was a 3.5 kilowatt solar array. And we put light bulbs in mudhuts and ceiling fans and a refrigerator freezer for some medicines. Okay. That's great. That gets them started, but it's light bulbs in mudhut. We would call that a brown out. It's not electrified. It's light bulbs. So then this progression constant has to happen and that requires very dense energy. Okay. And that's where you're headed toward methane, hydrogen, and nuclear, both fission and fusion. That's dense. In fact, if you look at it by weight, I'm going to say this, uranium and thorium, which run of fission reactors. Okay. That radioactive breakdown creates a bunch of heat, a lot of heat. And that boils water, makes steam turn a turbine run a generator. It's exact same process as burning cold or gas. It's a thermal process. When you think about the density of a uranium pellet and we visited many nuclear reactors and stuff them into these fuel rods, fuel assemblies, a uranium pellet about one centimeter tall and half a centimeter wide has as much energy in it and be enough to drive a car from New York to LA and back to Dallas, Texas. One pellet. That's how much energy is in there. You know how much gasoline that would take a lot and gasoline, you know how much hey it would take. So this is why the density wins. This is why to power 8.3 billion people and growing to some point, you're going to take a remarkable amount of dense energy to do that and it's always on. The nuclear reactor is always running. It doesn't shut down at night or when the wind stops blowing. So the two reasons are density takes too much stuff and intermittency. All right. And I interrupt you. So come back to the story about the three portions of the way and you're thinking, this guy can't answer a question like this. It's good. I keep interrupting. So in the world today, you've seen a very slow transition. If there is one, the transition is in the mix of energy that we're using. The percentage of each fuel each year. It's called primary energy. 60 years ago in 1965, that was mostly coal, some oil and a little bit of gas. Some dams and a few other things. Dominated by those. Today in the world, it's about 80% coal oil and gas and coal has gone down in that mix. As a percentage, oil is going down. It's a percentage gas has increased. You got 20% of everything else, mostly nuclear and hydro, some solar wind and biofuels. So there's a transition globally in the mix of energy we're using each year and it's very slow, very driven by physics and economics. It's nice. We have more optionality today than we did in the past. That's a good thing. But if you get rid of coal oil and gas and nuclear, you're down to less than 20% or less of everything else, fewer options and they're intermittent, some of them. So that's not a good thing. So that's the global transition that's happening. Now, I want to be real clear, that doesn't mean coal and oil and gas have gone down in our consumption. That's the percentage each year. In actual units, because the population grows and we're industrializing, coal is still increasing. Get, oil is still increasing. Natural gas is increasing a lot. Nuclear is hung in there, but it's going to take off again. And everything else is growing too. So you see this increase. One is a transition. The percent and one is an addition in the fuels that we're using. We're adding more former energy to power the world. And that's important to understand when kids, young people, have been taught other things. See this graph of everything increasing. They just can't believe it. Anything people are telling them a myth or something. They can't believe we still have so much coal oil and gas and oil. And it's not going down. And by the way, that's a bad, that's not a bad thing. That's what's lifting up the world. Now, that's global. If you look where those are geopolitically or geographically, very different mixes around the world. Asia now dominates in coal. They are the largest consumer of coal, Asia, Biola. And they consume more coal than the rest of the world combined, time's X. It's very affordable and it's very reliable to them. And what are they doing with that? They're making electricity to make our crap. I promise you if I look in here, it's made somewhere in Asia. I promise. So this whole concept that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions. One thing nobody tells you about long-form conversations is how much disappears the moment they end. It's spending hour with someone sharp. Come out with half a dozen things you need to act on. 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Without having to choose between listening and writing, get it up to 10% off at Lord.ai using the code Trigger. Check out or click the link in the description. Thank you to Lord for sponsoring today's episode. Why? Well, he's BS, right? We outsourced it to them. Completely. We have just said, hey, you make our crap and we'll be green. It's a shell game, because there's only one atmosphere. It's very efficient at moving greenhouse gases around the world, way more efficient than oceans, which is kind of the next big circulatory thing in the world. So we're, if Asia is a meeting, especially China, and now others, CO2 to make our crap, we're not addressing climate change. We're just exporting the problem and pretending to be green. And countries are doing this, companies are doing this, they're buying offsets from who? We're not even real. States do this, California is doing this big time. We've reduced trust CO2 emissions because you don't make anything anymore. Texas makes your stuff. So this is really a very, really important concept, which you're concerned about. Climate is the reality of the energy mix in the world. Asia dominated by coal, Africa. And then in terms of amounts, Asia consumes and primary energy again. Asia consumes half of the world's primary energy day, half in Asia alone. Dominated by China, India's starting to grow. There are a quarter of China today. Half the world's energy because they make our stuff. They make the world's stuff. And then the rest, the world, you look at Africa, which is 1.2 to 3 billion people. Very little energy consumption. It's just getting started. Europe and the US, we consume about a third of the world's energy. We only have 16% of the world's people. 16% of the population, a third of the energy, we make half the global GDP. Energy creates wealth. Africa and Asia combined are three quarters of the world's population. Three quarters. They only consume half of the world's energy and they make a third of the world's GDP. That's poverty. Three quarters of people have the energy, a third of the GDP. They don't have the energy to power their own civilizations in the way that we do. And this is a really important dynamic. So 7 billion people are living in some state of energy poverty today. From nothing to not reliable and not affordable to them. 7 billion people. A miscal cost you more than just a call. It costs you the company. the referral and the reputation. The businesses that grow fastest aren't necessarily the best. They're often the most reachable. Today's episode is brought to you by QUOQUO, the smarter way to run your business communications. QUOLE is you and your entire team share one business number, handle calls and text from a single app on your phone or computer and keep the full conversation thread visible to everyone. No more, did anyone get back to that customer? Because everyone can see exactly where things stand. You can keep your existing number, add teammates or new lines as you grow and a whole thing runs from wherever you are. No hardware or office is required and close AI works in the background. Hadling the admin, you don't have time for. Automatically logging calls, generating summaries and flagging next step so nothing gets buried. It can even respond to customers after hours. So your business stays responsive when you're not at your desk. I've looked at what QUOQU does and it's genuinely the kind of system I'd want in place if I were running a business that relies on customer contact. It's not complicated, it just works. Try QUOQ for free and get 20% off your first six months when you go to QUOQUO.COM/TRIG. That's Q-U-O.COM/TRIG. QUOQUO. No missed calls, no missed customers. We've touched on it a little bit about the green movement and virtue signaling about, you know, we've got to consume this amount of energy, etc., etc. What do you think of Britain's net zero policy? Yeah. So when the IEA put out their net zero report five years ago this summer and it was a roadmap for global energy and it led to Glasgow, the COP in Glasgow, I think it was COP 26, a roadmap. I put out a piece that right then that said, the road to Glasgow is paved with bad assumptions. It was, I think, around in the hill or something in the US. They made a huge number of bad assumptions in that, but the biggest one, the most egregious, the most disingenuous actually, because Fatih Birall who runs the IEA is a smart economist and he knows. The most egregious of that report was that global energy consumption would decrease. This was 2021. Global energy consumption would go down in what world? It's way off already. And then within that they took colloid and gas down to nothing and grew biofuels and bio energies and solar wind to these wild numbers by 2050. None of it is happening. Scott, can I just, and we'll come back to that. The question I'm thinking is, why if he's such a smart guy, if he knows it's such an obvious lie, he knows he's going to get found out. He's obviously smart. Why would he lie about something so basic and obvious? Now you're asking me to understand human nature. I tend to deal with data in facts. I, I tell the best I can. There are a lot of opinions about that, but there were a tremendous amount of pressure at that time. If you go back to that time to push for climate, climate change, we have to do we have to, and the IEA is paid by several countries, mostly Europe and the US. And so his bosses, if you will, were European leaders. And there was an interesting circle going on, and he meets with them all the time. And they put out reports about their progress towards net zero. Paris happened. Paris Accords, which haven't happened, you know, those promises. So maybe political pressure, maybe it was aspirational. They say it was a scenario, you know, and there's instead of a forecast, well, everybody took it as a bloody forecast, you know, you can call it a scenario. And it is a scenario. It's not underpin necessarily by rigorous information and data and understanding. Otherwise, you wouldn't decrease global energy consumption. So this is what it would have taken to get to net zero. But people used it as a roadmap. And many countries here started going down that road and you asked about the UK, Francis. So, you know, what is, why is the UK continue to follow that? I mean, what is Ed Miliband thinking? I don't know. I don't know because most of the world today, well, a big chunk of the world, if you were to list the top 10 challenges in the world, go around the world and do it. And I visited a lot of the world. Climate wasn't high on the list. Food, shelter, education, water, healthcare, rights of women. A lot of a lot of important issues on there. Climate didn't make that high up on the list. Western Europe and the US is where it seemed to have gotten overweight, if you will. Given that, people started functioning in a way, some call it greenwashing, some call it virtue signaling. I think, I don't judge the intentions. Maybe the intentions are very real to do your part. But you do have to look at the outcomes. And when the outcomes show Germany who led with, I won't pronounce it right, but energy Wanda, their new energy in 2007. And Europe followed. When you start going down that path, you start looking at the impacts of that, economic impacts. Starting in 2008, the US continued to grow our GDP. China was on a steeper slope. Europe went flat for 20 years. Europe has been flat economically. You have to look at that and say, intentions, outcomes. If your industries are closing, your people are leaving and they're going places where they can afford to operate, it's not going to help the climate. Let me say that again. If your industries aren't functioning and your wealth is decreasing, you're hurting the environment because wealthy nations can afford to invest in the environment. This is a very important, I'll talk about this tomorrow. When I close the conference here, you can't just have this binary, are you for the environment or are you for energy? Or there's something else in there, the economy. Energy underpin's healthy economies, healthy economies can afford to clean up the environment and we do. The cleanest air in the world is where it's rich. The cleanest water in the world is where it's rich. And we have the biggest economies. We're not hurting the environment. We're protecting the environment through wealth. So if you're imploding your own economies, you're actually running counter to what your intentions were. And this is not trivial. This is one of the most important things that I think the citizenry is not understanding about the policies that are intending to be green, whatever that word means. So energy, the economy, the environment, and it flows that way. You have to have this energy, security, abundant affordable wealth, energy, have a healthy economy to clean up the environment. The worst environments in the world I've ever seen in a word's pour. I mean, the land, the soils, the water, the local air, awful because you can't literally have other priorities. Scott, there's going to be a lot of people watching this, particularly young people. And I think it's really important to address their concerns. Yes. Because when people kind of mock them, I don't think particularly my generation and your generation, the younger generations are terrified. Yeah. They talk about climate change. And to be fair to them, every time I seem to switch on like my laptop or I read the news and I see what's happening in the UK, record summer, hotish June on record, are they right to be worried about the climate? Yeah. Again, this isn't, this is not a binary answer. Yes, climate. The world is warming. Overall, slowly, about a little over degree C in a century. And it's continuing to warm and humans are influencing that. We're putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We've gone from 270 parts per million to 420 parts per million. And that's increasing. And it will, for a while. So it is getting warmer globally. It doesn't mean you're going to have, not have cold winters. But the aggregate warmth is happening. So that's a concern. And it's real. The IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, which is the big climate confab of the top climate scientists in the world with the UN, stood up by the UN, has met 30 times. And they put out reports. They're called AR reports. AR6 was the last major report they wrote. Let's separate warming from the impacts of that warming. Let's think about what can hurt both humans and the environment, the extreme weather events. So when you start to look at the data on those and the IPCC report is very honest about it. AR6. Okay, working group one. Chapter 12, Table 12.12. Say that again for the young people. Go look at that. It's public. Aar 6, working group 1, Chapter 12, Table 12.12 is a summary table of all the extreme weather impacts that we can concern ourselves with. Storms, major storms, frequency and intensity, fires and fire weather, drought and drought intensity, ocean acidification, rates of sea level rise, etc. When you look at the table, they run today's impacts and they look at the historical past and they say, "What has emerged from history?" From statistical history, with what they're showing is what hasn't emerged with confidence. So the white in that table says, "This has not emerged from the historical norms with confidence." Most of the tables white. And then they run it on their most extreme at the time, scenario. Okay. The 8.5, RCP 8.5, it's called. That's the most extreme warming scenario, which by the way, the IPCC itself has said, "Now won't happen." A brand new paper out this year saying, "That's much lower. That's not going to happen." Okay. But they ran these table in that most extreme scenario. What would happen in 2050? And what would happen in 2100 with these weather events if we keep just getting hotter? Almost the whole table stays white. With confidence, they don't emerge from historical norms. Those things I just talked about, it gets warmer. The oceans get a little more acidic, and you see a little bit more rainfall. Okay. So when the summaries of those, particularly the political and media summaries of those come out with the drama, and say, "It's the worst storm on record." No, it's not. It's not. It's hot as hell in London right now, even for a Texan, you know, or Michigan guy, that's an unusual warm for the end of June. It's been this warm in June before. I promise. I haven't looked it up, but I could go back and find your records and you've had this kind of heat before in June, sometime, and probably sometime before that. Okay. They haven't emerged from the past. So when I talk, I speak at a lot of universities, and I have young people come to me, often very concerned. The biggest concern is, why haven't I heard what you're telling me? I don't know. Why haven't you? I'm upset by it. I understand. It's upsetting if all you've heard is one component of this. But we've got to be not just completely factual. We've got to try to be factually complete. I said that to Senator Manchin's climate hearing five years ago. Factually complete is hard. So they're hearing factual completeness now, and it worries them. And a lot of them say, the conversation is typically go, I'm upset, what can I do, where can I see more of this? And then they start asking, what should I do? What would you do for a job? I say, well, what's your biggest concern? And they'll say something. You'll go work for that company then. Huh? Go work for a big power company. Exxon mobile. Are you kidding? Yeah. If you want to make a real change, go and work there and change it from within. You'll have a lot more influence from within. And you'll learn a lot too, is there a lot of data information? So there's a lot, and they do. Some of them go do that and they come back years later and said, thanks for the advice. It was very powerful. Now I'm going to go work for an NGO. I'm armed with information, better information. So I think the young people have been indoctrinated. I was, I'm old, okay, been around a while. I was trained to be terrified of, I was raised in the Cold War. I was trained to be terrified of nuclear. In kindergarten, we would do drills where we would get under our kindergarten desk preparing for a nuclear attack. Very scientific. Because I knew that desk would protect me from even at six I knew. Maybe not. You know, I'm going to be real safe here. But that's what I was trained. I was trained. Young people today have been trained to be terrified of climate change. And you and I'll pull a class. How many happened? A young man said, why does any of this matter? We're all gone in 15 years anyway. I said, what do you mean we're all gone? Humans were gone. We're toast. He goes, it's an existential threat to humanity. I said, you think in 15 years the human race is gone. He goes, yes. I'm not supposed to do this. I said, how many think that? Half of the hands in the room went up. Wow. I went home so depressed. Because this was nine years ago in a big university. We're all still here. Okay. So the language matters a lot. And the training matters a lot. But that's a very real fear. So when you have that kind of fear, you have to start looking at the information. And again, not some groups is paid to tell you something else. So look at the IPCC report itself. And there's some retable. AR7 is going to come out soon. My guess is that table won't be in it. Because it's getting ever more focused on a narrative. But that narrative, that extreme event narrative is going. It's getting less and less noisy. Less and less and less noisy. In fact, it really isn't even making the radar of some of the big political conversations. In Western Europe and the US today. It shouldn't go away. It's one issue. But so is the land near on the water. The pillars of the environment, the land near the water and the atmosphere. They all are important. And you have to balance those things. You can't have it all. There are trade-offs between these things. You literally, if you want all solar, you hurt the land. All right. They're trade-offs as we go around. So it's an optimization problem. We're trying to optimize the different parameters depending on what resources you have, what your educational levels are like, what your political system is like. Every part of the world is different when it comes to dealing with its energy portfolio. There's going to be young people. I really hope those young people watching the Scott. It's constant and they will be watching. You massive little rest of my world. I'm counting on you. Your kids are the age of my grandkids, man. The people who watch this show have generally done more thinking about how governments operate the most. But there's a difference between understanding the problem and having actually built insulation against it. That's a world Michael Thorough of Operation. He's been living as an expat for over 25 years, visiting more than 110 countries. And according to nine of them home, he founded expat money nearly a decade ago to help others do the same. 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What would you say to them? Because I talk to someone and I have friends who are now in their 60s, 70s and 80s. And they say to me, Francis, my kids don't want to have kids. Because they're worried about the environment. They don't want to bring up kids. What would you say to young people in their 20s or in their 30s who are terrified of climate? And as a result, they're not going to have children. They're not going to do this. They're not going to do that. Again, I'm not a counselor. I want to. Let's talk about population just for a second. And then I'll come back and try to answer that succinctly. I host this PBS show with two guests. And we did one on population after I read a piece in the New York Times, which is Blooming Away. So we had a Canadian university professor from UT, actually, Austin. The fertility rates globally are plummeting. India went below replacement fertility rate two years ago. 2.1 is replacement. 2.1. Kids per woman. The only place that's still increasing the fertility rates is Africa. And that's coming down quickly in a few other countries. South Korea below one, etc. So population demographics are interesting. We were headed toward 11 billion people where at 8.3 today, I'll do it this way. (laughing) And now we're headed toward 10 billion. And then it was 9 billion. It keeps getting lower and closer. The latest demographics say we're gonna peak. The global population is going to peak around 9 billion people. In 50 years or less, 2075. And then it doesn't plateau. We don't go to 9 billion and chill out for hundreds and hundreds of years. Climates, the math of that, fertility rates, climates. And we go back to 2 billion people on earth in less than 200 years. Took 200 years to go from a billion to eight, back to two. This is a choice. Some wonderful books on this. It's happening globally because of choice. Women, couples are choosing not to have kids. And there are a whole variety of reasons. Okay, it's not summer climate for you or what they're bringing their kids into in the world. That's more the wealthy world. Some are, it's expensive to have kids and raise them. Some are, I don't need as many kids. We used to need them for agriculture. Kids died. In the village I described where he put solar, the indigenous village of Gantuku, the Awako people. Half of those kids will die before they become 18. Today's world, from a tooth infection or dysentery. Something that wouldn't kill us or breathing into our smoke. Nomonia cancer. Okay. So they need the kids. They die. That's not happening in a lot of the world anymore. And there are other reasons too. So as this wonderful books march around the world looking at this, we're choosing not to do that. I can't tell you not to choose not to have kids because of climate fear. If that's real in you, that's in you. All I can do is share the information with you and say the impacts of climate change. When I asked that young man who said, dead in 15 years, I said, well, what's going to kill you? Climate is, no, no, no. Climate doesn't kill. Climate is a 30 year moving average of weather. That doesn't kill. What's going to kill you? What's going to kill the human race? Storms. Not really. Storms, the deaths from climate have gone away down by the way. That's the data. But storms kill a few people, especially in poor countries who don't have the protection. Heat. Cold kills a lot more than heat. That's just the reality. Those who can control their climate don't die from heat. Those who can't have learned to live with it and a degree more isn't going to kill them. It's already 40 degrees C, 41. Drought. Stream drought could harm big regions but it's not going to wipe out humanity. I mean, we just went through these a step at a time and they're kind of, you could kind of see the tensions coming down. Okay. Here's a guy that's not BS in me with the data. Here's the data. And these are important issues. And there are some really other important issues too. So all we can do is try to be as factually complete as we can and have young people arm themselves with information and take the time to do that a little bit. It's all there and maybe mitigate your own fears. If I have a fear of flying, some people terrified of flying are spiders or heights or public speaking. We all go, if I have to do that thing, after living with spiders or fly a lot or public speak, I'm gonna go probably learn how to mitigate my fear around that because it may not be rational. People do die from plane accidents, but it's a lot fewer than driving or bicycling. People do fall off cliffs, but it's not very many. And very few people have ever died from public speaking, but it's the largest fear. Some people would choose death in the polls over public speaking, literally, as their largest fear. Public speaking over death. So we go take the, we educate ourselves and we need to do that with other things as well, including climate. It's very important. And that way we can have dialogues that will address these issues proportional to their impacts. - Well, this way you're describing is a, correct me on any of this if I get it wrong, but I think what I'm hearing is the way that generations now successfully have been taught to look at this issue is very one dimensional. There's only one variable that we're optimizing for which is saving the planet, quote unquote. The level of fear that's been attached to that is vastly disproportionate to the nature of the threat. - Correct. - And on top of that, you know, one of the things that I want to talk about in the interest of being factually complete is you talk about how Asia is consuming so much energy now, which of course they have to because they have much of the population. But one of the things you talked about in one of your speeches here at ARC is the fact that India is only a quarter's richest China. And if I was the Indian Prime Minister, I'm not, but I can only imagine that his number one mission is to get India as rich as China and beyond. It's quickly as possible. - Yes. - Right. That being the case, you've talked about the fact that the world still consumes more coal than it ever did, more oil than it ever did, more gas than it ever did. And I don't imagine the Indians are covering Indian solar panels and wind turbines. I imagine they're desperate to get their hands on the good stuff, on the dense stuff that you're talking about and nuclear as well. - Yes. - So this idea that we are going to reduce our CO2 emissions as a globe in the next 50 to 100 years just seems completely ridiculous to me. Based on that alone, the fact that India will want to catch up. That alone would make it impossible to reduce our CO2. Is that fair? First of all. - That's a great summary. - Okay. - Yeah, very fair. - That is absolutely. In fact, around the, around the, with this 1.4 billion people, more population than China now consumes a quarter of the energy because our economy is a quarter. It's right where China was about 28 years ago on slope and then China went boom, where the energy consumption in economy. Literally if you slide into your left three decades, it looks just like China did. So they're going to do that. - Right. So we're about to witness an explosion in energy consumption. - Yes. - In India. - In India. And therefore the globe, because India is so much of it, right? - Yeah. - That being the case, it's interesting to me. You talk, look, there are people who say, you know what climate change is just, it's happening, it's got nothing to do with human activity. You don't say that. You say human activity contributes. - To warming. - To warming. - Yeah. - Contributes are causes the different things. - No, our emissions are causing more warming. - More warming. - Yes. - Do you have a percent adjustment on the, how much of the warming comes from human activity? - Not my own research. - No. - Yeah, but of that degree, see, degree, degree and a half, that we've warmed in the last century, a significant part is from human emissions. - Okay, so taking those two things together, A, we're about to witness an explosion in energy consumption. - Yes. - And B, human energy consumption contributes to warming, we're gonna see warming. - Yes. - The planet will keep warming of a time. - But the best estimates constant dinner are about another degree and a half. - Before the decline in population starts to mitigate the problem. - And the mix of energy goes towards methane, hydrogen and nuclear, which is much lower emissions. So we're seeing, we're leaving the carbon world naturally. We're decarbonizing. Naturally, would hay, coal, oil, less carbon, methane, less carbon, uranium, thorium and eventually fusion, which is hydrogen, isotope of hydrogen, no carbon. So we're doing that naturally when we get dense. And India is building nuclear reactors. And they should, I would love for India to build a lot of nuclear electricity, 'cause they could decarbonize much faster, like France did, than going the coal route. - Right. - But doing some coal, 'cause they have it. - Yeah. - But go, you know, they can skip that long cycle if they just accelerate their methane and their nuclear. Okay, so this is a very good point of which to talk about nuclear then, because I think with nuclear, from all the evidence that I've seen, nuclear on an average down basis is the safest form of energy that we currently have. That more people have been killed in one dam collapse in China. than have been killed by all the nuclear accidents in human history. Right. However, the big concern with nuclear is you get a situation where an entire area of land is just like the area around Chernobyl itself. You can't go in there and people won't be able to live there for thousands of years. And you have a few of those and you've got a real problem. Interesting though on that just real quick. Nature moved back to their region around Chernobyl because we're no humans. Oh yeah, it's the safest place for animals in the world. And they don't have seven heads and nine legs. They're just normal. So I think humans actually will be back in there much sooner. Okay. Yes. Nonetheless, I think to most people the idea of, you know, we build a nuclear reactor in our country and it explodes, understandably scary. And part of it is you know, we're not very good at visually seeing the impact of burning coal and how many people that kills and it kills a lot of people. Right. Or a dime collapse in China which we've never heard about. Versus big boom. Oh, visually powerful. But also it's like. And tying that to nuclear weapons. Yeah. There's this irrational tie between nuclear electricity and using the plutonium that comes out of the fission products from that and enriching it and making it better for nuclear weapons. So there's this sort of weaponry nuclear power link. It's not irrational, is it? Because I mean, nuclear reactors can be used to produce. They do produce plutonium. Yeah, it's a byproduct. It's a process. But still a lot has to happen to that plutonium before it comes weapon grade and then to get to where you can make a weapon. It's not irrational. No, there's a chain there that could happen. Right. But it's nuclear power plants aren't making nuclear weapons. No, no, no, of course not. I guess what I'm getting at is with nuclear, there is a high low probability high risk. No, low probability high impact. Yes. Event that's that is in people's minds. A lot. Take a country like Britain in the US, this part of Texas, you could blow up a nuclear reactor. Nobody would notice, right? It's so vast and so not densely populated in parts, right? Right. In the UK, very different conversation. Right. So what can you tell us about nuclear, what it might be like in the future? And also the other forms of technology, particularly hydrogen that you mentioned. Where are we with all that? Yeah, progressing towards those, start with hydrogen, hydrogen, there's element number one on the periodic table. It's lighter than helium. So it's a it's a tough little burger to keep track of. But and you have to make it. Now there's some natural hydrogen. But we haven't explored for it much to use it. You have to make it, but it's a remarkable fuel and it can be used as electricity carrier. So a fuel cell is run on hydrogen and that's basically electricity carrier run like a battery or you can burn hydrogen. I mean the Hindenburg's hydrogen. Okay. So you have to make it in the two easiest ways to make it or to split the methane molecule, CH4, the water molecule, H2O, and then you get your hydrogen. So you do something to natural gas or to water and you get the hydrogen? Put energy into them, split it and you get the hydrogen. Okay. But there's energy in. Are we doing this already? Yeah, you can do it. One's called hydrolysis and one is called steam reforming of methane. We do it. We don't do it to get large-scale fuels from them, but we have to have hydrogen for a lot of processes in the world. So we those. So why don't we use it for energy yet? It's expensive. Okay. So it's not cheap enough. Yeah, it's not, it can't compete yet. It's not cheap enough. And why do you think it will? The dynamics of energy when always, here's when transitions happen when something better comes along. Right. Okay. What's better? Well, a fuel cell might be better than a battery. If it's cost-competitive, it's always the economics that the economics that kick in, we don't recycle because it's too expensive to recycle so we just make new stuff. And it's always the cost that drives these transitions at the end of the day in set scale. Oh, a few local people can afford solar panels and wind turbines. Maybe hydrogen fuel cells, but not at scale. So this is the driver of that. He needs to come down to about a buck, buck, 50 kilogram hydrogen to compete with other things in most places. We're not there. That's why people are starting to look for natural hydrogen now. So there's hydrogen. That's a nice thing, methane, hydrogen, and then nuclear. Two processes to make electricity from nuclear. One is fission, splitting, one is fusion, you know, colliding. Very different inputs to that. Your AM thorium, hydrogen, other isotopes. We already have fission. That's a well-known. It's been around 70, 80 years. We put nuclear reactors on battleships and in submarines. We float them around the oceans. They're running on nuclear reactors, those relatively little. So very safe known process. It's the fear. Yes, the boom is scary. The technology's now, I've gotten almost inherently safe. They literally shut themselves down if the heating starts to happen. Warfare, I mean, Russia went after Ukraine's reactor. This is kind of an energy war in some ways. You know, even weaponize natural gas with Europe, etc. So, all wars have some energy component to them. So that's real. There's nothing perfect. You can wipe out a solar ray too pretty easily or a wind farm and take everything down. So, you know, that's kind of nuclear is coming. China is leading, of course. They're building more nuclear reactors now than any other country combined. Take China's nuclear reactors under construction. They're more than the next 20 countries combined. Russia's third. India's second. The U.S. isn't even on the top 20 list. We will be again because it's bipartisan. Young people are not scared of nuclear. You ask young people. No emissions, then electricity. How about nuclear? Go for it. They weren't trained and be scared of nuclear. Like, I wasn't. They're good with it. And they should be. So, I see a nuclear, let's call it a renaissance. It's coming again and it's being led by China. And even the Middle East even has reactors now. The UAE has four working nuclear reactors, large scale, gigawatt nuclear reactors today. It's coming. And I think the West needs to get on board and get back after it. Fusion, which is a different technology, is getting closer. Most of us use the laugh and say, "Yeah, it's 30 years away and always will be." But it's not now. What is nuclear fusion? Here's something nobody tells you about getting older. 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And so it is literally fusing these things and creating a tremendous amount of heat. The challenge is constrain the heat. For those really interested, I did, we did a PBS show. One of our episodes was on fusion, two really smart people. The challenge there is containing the heat. How do you contain the reaction in the heat? And there's two bigger approaches to that. and that heat is used. Do what? Boy water, makes steam, turn a turbine, run a generator, and make electricity. So it's just a different way to create heat. But the cool part about it is there, it's completely inherently safe. You're not splitting things, you're fusing them. So it literally shuts itself down. Okay. It's almost the perfect energy. If there's gonna, if by the pick one of everything we've talked about, it's the closest to being the answer to unlimited heat, make electricity, and heat for other processes. The challenge, and it really important, I think, if you look at the end use energy we talked about earlier, only 20% of the energy in the world end use is electricity today, and it's grown to 20%, 80% is other things, heat molecules for industrial processes, making cement and steel, and fertilizers, and plastic, and all the stuff we do. So, as that electricity grows, nuclear, fission, and fusion can be part of that, but it takes so much heat to make cement and steel, you can't do it with solar and wind. You have to burn something. 6,7,80, 900, 1100 degrees to make some of these things that modern societies run on. So, nuclear fusion has the potential, if you are to make that much heat. So, you literally transition away from carbon. That's the ultimate decarbonization transition is to those very dense always on sources of heat, which is a nuclear fission or fusion reactions, and it's high tech. - What about nuclear waste? - Yeah, so this doesn't have waste. - It's fusion. It's steam. Fission does have two sorts of ways. The big towers, you see these conical towers, that's just steam. That's just the steam off the boiling water. That's not CO2 or any other particular emissions like from a coal plant. The waste out of fission is called fission products. There are various forms of radioactive things. About 95% of the energy is used, and about 5% of these fission products. A little piece of plutonium, but the rest of them, you have to manage. You have to, what they typically do is they, you know, they solicify those. - What does that mean? - They blend them with silica. So, they become a molecule that's locked up, still very hot and radioactive, and then they put it in canisters, and those canisters are then put into dry casks, which you see mostly on the surface in the US, or they're put into 30, 40-foot-thick concrete slabs today in France. In our first film, we take you inside a nuclear reactor and show you that the dry casks going down into the concrete slabs, or they're hot and radioactive, and they're stored forever. And now they're looking at geologic solutions. So putting them down in the earth in their shell and other kinds of rocks and holding them there forever. I say forever, they're radioactive for 20, 30,000 years. They're not hot for that long, they're hot for a couple hundred years, before they wouldn't melt themselves and they'd be safe. So I'm not making light of that. There's a real, you gotta manage that waste, but the amount of waste is very small, for the amount of energy that comes out. I think in the film we show, one human's use of nuclear power is like the size of a coin. That's the waste that comes out of a human's lifetime use, the size of a coin. There are a lot of humans, but compared to coal ash and particulates, or CO2 from burning gasoline and other products and methane, or the amount of batteries we're gonna be dumping into the earth, which are toxic from our cars and our backing up our solar and wind. Solar panels that are getting dumped in the earth and they have toxic components in them. We don't recycle them, we dump them in the earth. When turbine blades gigantic, we bury them. They don't recycle them. - Really? - Yeah, well, they're not. - They're not made of recyclable material, one, they're starting to be, but it's the economics again, constant in it. It costs more money to grab the key things out of a battery and dump the rest, the key things out of a solar panel and dump the rest. There's an energy and cost to all that process. It's just cheaper to make them new. That's just cheaper. I mean, big box stores, they're dumping new TVs from last year's model, because it's cheaper to dump them and they're not gonna sell them than to make them new. It's nuts. This is a human waste thing that we should get our heads around. I'm all for recycling, reuse, and reprocessing, but we gotta get it affordable. That's why we don't do it for the most part. So you're sitting here, the nuclear has those fish and products, fusion, it just sounds too good to be true almost. You gotta contain the heat of that reaction. It is a little teeny sun. And you gotta contain that heat. Those are, that's technology. And other things at geothermal, we haven't talked about, there's big deal. The earth is hot, the further you go down in the earth, the hotter it gets. So a lot of new things are coming. This administration, the Trump administration is really big on geothermal. So was the prior administration, the Biden administration, Jennifer Granholm, Chris Wright, good friend. Big on geothermal. Two kinds. One, if you get enough thermal gradient, you can literally use that hot water to make electricity. Shallow geothermal. Think of a heat pump in your home. You can circulate 50, 60 degree water. And it will cool your home in the summer. Or you can add a little heat to it to warm your home, home in the winter, but you don't have to add very much. So geothermal is a wonderful form of climate control in homes. A little bit more expensive in most places and other things today, but it won't always be. So geothermal is coming too. And in the interim though, the planet will get warmer and we're going to have to adapt. Yes. That's inevitable. We are adapting. We've been, I mean, humans have been adapting since we were knuckle-dragging two million years ago. Human-like things, you know. We've been adapting. I mean, it's really important, a little geologic moment. About every 100,000 years. There's a glacial interglacial cycle. In fact, a Serbian physicist named Malenkovich worked this out in house arrest for 20 years by hand. He figured out why. Though it's kind of fun. The earth's orbit around the sun changes in shape. And the earth wobbles on its axis and tilts on its axis. When you conflate those three things, the earth gets closer to and farther from the sun. When it's a little farther, ice age happens. We literally see ice come down from the North Pole and it covers in the US, Michigan, and New York City, and Minnesota, and Montana, in 1 to 2,000 feet of ice. Canada's gone. That lasts about 80,000 years. And then for about 20,000 years, that ice retreats. And we get more arable land. And so that's a glacial interglacial. We're in an interglacial period now. It started about 18,000 years ago. It started to warm. The ice retreated. And by the way, when the ice is locked up up there in the poles up here, sea level drops about 300 feet globally, vertically. The Gulf of Mexico used to be a way lower than it was, just 20,000 years ago, 25 times. The ice melts. The seas rise. Ice retreats. Arable land. That's what we have today. We're in a beautiful interglacial cycle today. It takes, for those first 7,000 years, sea levels are really rising. Because it's rising about a centimeter a year. And now it rises like a millimeter or less a year kind of for the next eight, 9,000 years. So here we are. Everything that we talk about, the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, industrial revolution has happened in these last eight, 9,000 years. Beautiful interglacial. You can't stop that, Mollinkovich cyclicity. The ice will come back. Or within a few thousand years a bit statistically. Here comes the ice. And we're going to have a whole different challenge for humans to die when it's-- Well, I was going to say, if you want to be concerned about the climate changing, the ice being over New York. That's when I started to get actually worried, right? That's a big one. That's a big one. That's when you're like, oh, this is real climate. That's when it's a big one. And it'll happen. This will happen. You can't stop it. Now you might be able to put greenhouse gases in and being whistle-sounding facetious. It's not. But I'm just playing scythe. Put some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Trap some heat. Do other things to keep it warmer and try to hold that back. and we'll see what people do then. - What about this, the real reason I think smart people are concerned about climate change is this idea of runaway climate change. The idea that if you make things warmer, that causes other changes in the environment, the effects, the ocean effects. So the rate at which it gets warmer accelerates and you never get to the decline or the slowdown in temperature increase that you talked about. I think it's runaway impacts of that warming. So the rate of warming won't necessarily increase deeply, keeps getting warmer, but it's, what does that do? Does it, does a big ice sheet cav off of greenland and plunk into the ocean like an ice cube in our water? So what happens then? 'Cause right now it's locked up on land, okay? And if it plunks into the ocean, that can cause more dramatic rates of sea level change. For example, do you get some feedback loops? There's something called snowball earth that's happened twice in Earth's history where literally the earth was covered in ice, the whole earth, snowball earth. The thing I'm talking about, those 100,000 years, those are high frequency glacial interglacial, 10 of those have happened in the last million years, okay? 10, we can see them. And human-like things have been around for all 10 of them. We didn't have modern technology, but they would come closer to the poll, or to the equator in cold times, and then they would go back and as land opened up again, it migrated across from Russia, the illusions to the, you know, this all humans like to survive, most species do, so we tend to adapt, to these changing things. We're not gonna stand there as the seas right now. Small islands, small island nations, that's hard. If they're poor, they can't adapt. If they're wealthy, they can do like Holland is down or New Orleans, they'll walls and keep the ocean back. You can afford to do those sorts of things. Small island nations, if seas continue to rise, and they will at some rate, and they have been for 18,000 years, and we're accelerating that a little bit, not much, by the way, the acceleration that rises a much. So they got to adapt to that, we'll adapt to storms, to droughts, the things in. And what allows you to do that? Wealth. Okay, this is where the inequity truly exists in the world today. Emerging economies, four billion people, developing economies, three billion, they can't adapt like the lucky billion can. They don't have the wealth to do that, and they should. This is the inequity, if there's a global inequity, it's that the wealthy people can afford to make these kinds of adaptive changes. So we've got to get them wealthy. We've got to get them wealthy. We have to accelerate economic growth. That'll be the conclusion of my talk tomorrow. The irony in all this is you, in order to go from energy to the economy, accelerate growth, non-population necessarily, and wealth, so that everybody can afford the kinds of things that we have. And everybody knows about them. The first thing you get, I've dropped a solar panel in the Sy country in Kenya, 41 panel, cell phone. It's in our film. Yeah, they have to have it because it's called M. Copa. That's how they pay for their one hour of electricity that day. But they're connected to the world now in a little TV on a battery. I mean, we're literally put in this cell panel. Incomes this little thing. And there's the cell phone and a little TV and the first film that came on was one of the more modern Kong vs Godzilla. And these two monsters were doing battle on the TV screen and these little kids in the couch who probably had never seen this. They're their eyes got real big. And I was saying through double translation, tell them it's not real because a giraffe had just walked by where we were literally there goes a giraffe. And here's Kong and Godzilla Godzilla doing battle and a tell them it's not real, you know, because they're like, you haven't seen those here. Can you imagine that? Right. Your first exposure. Right. It's something like that. And and that's where I'm very passionate about energy poverty. And made a film about it called switch on. We went around and looked at all that circumstance and how you lift people up with energy. And they're in their economies. To where they have the kinds of things, the good things and some of the bad that we do. Constantinier Francis. So I think it's very important to not. Some of the our intentions and our proposals are holding people down. Instead of bringing them up. The way to make this change and it's a continuum from poverty, severe to wealth isn't to stretch it more. It's to bring this to this and everybody move together. Let's go. We can do that. That seems a perfect place to end the interview. What a pleasure. It's been the final question is always the same. Scott, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Before Scott answers a final question at the end of the interview, make sure you go to TriggerPod.co.uk where you'll be able to see this. What will go first? Nizero or Europe? If you were stood in front of Parliament in the UK or any other European country, what would be the simplest bit of data or anecdote you would use to convince them about investing in nuclear energy? What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Hmm. Yeah, my mind always goes to my own interest in biases, which is education. I think we're really not talking about how to improve our critically thinking, complete education, even in the wealthy world. I think we've left some of that behind and we need to find a way to have civil dialogues again. To as Aristotle said, be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. That's what it's all about. We have to be able to have these conversations, even if I don't agree, entertain, don't agree so that we can advance and learn. If we create situations where some ideas are not welcomed, we've we're going backwards. And that's especially important as AI comes into the picture we haven't talked about AI. It's going to play a big role in the energy world, the economics and environment world and But we have to continue the eye part of that. Okay. We can't go all A. Artificial humans have to be involved with with all of that. Because we're the only ones who really understand if it's putting out nonsense. And it will put out nonsense. So I would say as we think about AI, just keep the human component very close to that, accelerate what we do, make it better, but never replace it. Scott, thank you so much for coming on. Head on over to TriggerPod.co.uk, where we put some of your questions to Scott. Is all actually derived from years of squastal vegetation from 200 million years ago. We were taught this at school and it was often repeated, but I've never had someone explain it to me in a way that makes sense. [MUSIC]