“Climate Change Is NOT An Existential Threat” — Steven Koonin

[00:00:00] Steve: You are killing the economy by an unreasonable focus on decarbonizing energy, raising costs, making it unreliable, and really shunning the manufacturing activities that you need. Storms, floods, droughts, it's all more or less business as usual. So the climate is not broken. The bottom line, first of all, is that climate isn't everything, but it's not nothing, all right? It's an issue. We need to deal with it. But is it existential? Absolutely not. Basically, it says the world is getting a lot more realistic about just how difficult an energy transition is [00:00:40] Speaker 2: going to be. What would you have us know about the science as it stands today? And you, of course, have been part of a major panel that's put together a major paper in America that has rattled around the world quite a bit. What are you now saying about the science? What should you know? [00:00:54] Steve: Well, you know, the bottom line, first of all, is that [00:00:57] Speaker 2: Steve, thanks so very much for giving us your time and for being in Australia for Aspire. [00:01:14] Steve: Well, it's wonderful to be here and get a sense of the country, talk with you and talking to people [00:01:18] Speaker 2: at the Aspire conference. Thank you. Well, you're heading up our discussion about something that really matters as we consider Australia's future. One of the five great issues. We've got to believe in ourselves. We've got to worry about our children and our social fabric because they're not doing as well as we'd like them to. We're worried about housing. We're worried about immigration, family formation, because young people are feeling that they'll never own a home and it's really affecting them. But then there's the massive issue of the so-called energy transition and for Australia, defence and security. These are all Australian chapters of issues that are playing out right across the world at the moment. And on the energy one, if we could begin, none of us take the issue of our climate lightly. That's the first thing to say, I think. Having said that, we're also confronted with the conundrum that it turns out that energy transitions are explosively expensive. It's just not, it's just simply misleading to say renewables are cheap because the wind and the sun don't send a bill. And we're developing unreliable energy systems because they will be if we keep going this way. They will be expensive. And not only will that impact our existing economy, it's going to crimp our future economy. How do we balance all of this up? You've had a lot of experience in this area. [00:02:44] Steve: Well, the issue is balance. You know, for the last 20 or 30 years, the world has emphasised only one dimension of energy, namely the carbon dioxide emissions, which are influencing the climate. But they've completely forgotten about the issue of reliability and affordability. There are events, like the Ukraine invasion, where gas was cut off to Europe, that in fact remind people, hey, unless you have reliability and affordability, you really can't talk about environmental impacts. And I think that sense of trade-offs is starting to get through to people and influencing how people talk about the energy future. [00:03:26] Speaker 2: So many young people in particular, and we're keen to aspire to reach young Australians who are worried about their future. On the one hand, they're saying we've got a cost of living crisis and Australia's living standards are slipping quite quickly compared to other rich countries, amazingly, despite all of our advantages. And on the other hand, they want to save the planet, which Australia arguably can't do. But they say morally, we've got a great responsibility. In any way, it's going to be cheaper. I think a big part of the problem is that we can't get the balance, we can't get the trade-offs, and you've alluded to it, because of the way the debate's been ram-rated. [00:04:05] Steve: You can't even talk about the trade-offs unless you're informed. You need to be informed about climate science, what we know, what we don't know, what are plausible projections of the climate future. You need to understand about energy, technologies, economics, scale, and then you need to put those together with a values discussion. Excuse me, equities, north-south, intergenerational equities. How effective is anything that you're going to do in really solving the problems? Those are all complicated issues. And unless people take the time to understand the nuances, you can't have a sensible [00:04:47] Speaker 2: discussion or trade-offs. Now, you're a very senior and very highly qualified scientist. What would you have us know about the science as it stands today? And you, of course, have been part of a major panel that's put together a major paper in America that has rattled around the world quite a bit. What are you now saying about the science? What should we know? [00:05:05] Steve: Well, you know, the bottom line, first of all, is that climate is in everything, but it's not nothing. All right. It's an issue. We need to deal with it. But is it existential? Absolutely not. I think another thing people need to understand is that apart from a gentle warming of the globe, about one and a half degrees since 1900 on the land, we haven't seen much change in extreme weather events. Yes, of course, the temperature is going up. Sea level rise shows a lot of variability. It's a little bit faster now than it's been over the 20th century, but nothing out of bounds of natural variability. Storms, floods, droughts, it's all more or less business as usual. So the climate is not broken, some people would say yet. We shall see. Looking forward as to what the climate's going to do in the future, you need to use these very complicated models together with assumptions about what future emissions will be. And even the people who build these models do not much, do not put much stock in their predictions over the next, let's say, 40 or 50 years. It's a very complicated, difficult scientific discussion. That's why I titled my book Unsettled, because in fact, the science is pretty murky as to what the climate will be, let's say, 40 years from now. Because there is a science and then there's the modeling, isn't there? Well, the science embraces observations of the current and past climate systems, then it embraces the modeling. So I would say the whole thing is the science, if you like. Of course, the past climate is really important because it lets you judge how good the models are when you try to [00:06:59] Speaker 2: reproduce the past climate. Because that's the language, you just used the word existential threat. We hear daily, it's an existential threat. But it's worth, you see, I'm not so young anymore. It's over 25 years ago now that I woke up to the front page of a significant Australian paper. In those days, one that would have been seen as a paper of record saying that by 2025, Sydney Harbour Waters will be washing at the doors of the Opera House. Yeah, right. That sort of catastrophization of the language has lost its bite. The waters are not lapping. 2025 has come and gone. Now, I don't want to sound like a skeptic. And there'll be people listening to us and Adaspire who are saying, "Come on, get real. It must be an existential crisis." [00:07:51] Steve: But not even the ICPP says that. IPCC, no. No, it is, you'll excuse me, the politicians and the media and some scientists who have injected this existential threat. And I think you're right, it's lost its credibility. You know, I looked up how fast the water is going up at Fort Denison here in the Sydney Harbour. And the answer is 0.8 millimeters a year or 8 centimeters a century. Yes, it's a little faster recently, but it was just as fast in, let's say, the 1930s. So, the notion that the waters are going to rise up and inundate us is completely discordant with what we actually see going on. Melting ice caps? Melting ice caps. You know, we are in what's called an interglacial, just from the progression of the ice ages, if you like. And yes, it is entirely natural that the ice cap in the Arctic should be disappearing, although for the last 20 years, we haven't seen much change in sea ice. So, look, the climate changes. It changes in response to natural phenomena, but also in response to growing human phenomena. One of the challenges in the science is to disentangle those two and understand really how it's responding to growing greenhouse gas concentrations. [00:09:20] Speaker 2: I went on a bit of a fishing expedition recently to get to the bottom of the issue of the polar bears disappearing, and I found that it was far more complicated than a throwaway line about polar bears being threatened. In some areas, polar bears' numbers are building. In other areas, they're slipping. There is no [00:09:37] Steve: uniform story. Yeah. For a lot of these higher-level phenomena, climate is only one factor. Another one which I know is salient here in Australia, certainly also in California, is the issue of wildfires or bushfires. And those are a natural occurrence in any ecosystem that produces vegetation. But the fires, how often they occur, how destructive they are, really depend on other human factors. How have you managed the vegetation? What structures have you built out in the bush can then burn? And I think people are starting to realize it's a lot more than just the climate's getting hot and dry, and [00:10:18] Speaker 2: therefore the fires are becoming more common. Just on how much of a threat climate change actually is, I guess our first and most basic need is food. I'm a farmer. We've seen for some, the last 10 years, the world's farmers have produced enough food each year for 10 billion people, roughly. The fact that people go hungry or they're malnourished is not because of a lack of food. It has to do with corruption, broken infrastructure, distribution, food waste in the West. But production of food seems to be less, not more of an issue, particularly, frankly, as we face the real prospect of global [00:10:57] Steve: population leveling out and then starting to drop. Right. So, um, agricultural yields over the last 50 or 60 years have soared around the globe and also here in Australia. And if you ask why that is, a lot of it's got to do with agricultural technologies, genomics, cultivation, and so on. But even NASA in the U.S. says a big part of it has got to do with more carbon dioxide. You know, carbon dioxide is plant food and whatever ill effects you might think carbon dioxide has on the climate is certainly boosted agricultural yields. You know, inside a greenhouse, a hothouse, we keep the carbon dioxide levels above 1,000 parts per million. In the ambient atmosphere now, it's 430 parts per million, up from 280, uh, before 1900. So, yes, agricultural yields have gone up enormously and carbon dioxide [00:12:01] Speaker 2: levels are a big part of that. So the greening of the planet, the expansion of forests and such. [00:12:06] Steve: It's real. And what will that do to climate? Uh, well, um, it certainly helps in the carbon cycle, not enough to absorb the, uh, all of the carbon dioxide we're emitting every year. About half of it gets absorbed. The other half stays in the atmosphere. But satellite observations over the last 40 years show the Earth is palpably greener than it was when we started. [00:12:28] Speaker 2: And does that greening effect, uh, as a farmer, we often think, um, that it attracts, uh, uh, more vegetation attracts more rainfall in itself. [00:12:37] Steve: Yep. That, that certainly is an effect. Although, [00:12:41] Speaker 2: um... Could have a reducing of desertification. [00:12:45] Steve: Well, we see the deserts shrinking somewhat. The Sahara, for example, is shrinking. I don't know about here in Australia. But like everything else, it's complicated. Yeah. And we're looking at relatively small effects in a complicated system we don't understand so well. [00:13:01] Speaker 2: So Dale Ferguson, uh, who, um, is also contributing to Aspire, has recently said that he now fears war more than he does climate change. And if we have serious war, of course, that will, you know, result in, um, climatic, I would have thought, or environmental disasters at every level. Um, and I was very interested the other day to talk to quite a senior former public servant who'd worked in international affairs in this country. And I know that he's worried about climate change, but I said, what do you think of Ferguson's prospect, uh, perspective? He said, I'm with Ferguson. I'm more worried about that than, than I am about climate change. I thought that was a quite profound thing. Um, the environment in which we're operating, it does highlight, doesn't it, that we tend to respond to what we think the emergency is and it distorts the public debate. We have trouble again [00:14:03] Steve: with that thing called balance that you touched on. Yeah. I think we are wired as a species to pay attention to the most immediate threats. And climate is a long-term gradual, uh, change and, and hence a longer-term threat. But there are many more immediate threats. Um, you know, we in the developed world, Australia, EU, US, have the luxury of having abundant energy, abundant food, and so on. But about half the world's population, 4 billion people, don't have adequate energy. And for them, the existential threat is, can I get adequate energy to have the simple, uh, accoutrements of modern living? And so for them, I think climate, uh, is just not on their radar screen at all. I like to say, it's like telling someone who, uh, is famished, don't eat that steak because of cholesterol, right? One's immediate, short-term, the other is long-term, distant, vague, uncertain. Another interesting comment that's been made to me, [00:15:11] Speaker 2: and it certainly seems to be the case, is that Australia is now more concerned about climate than most like nations around the world, which is an interesting thing, uh, because I think it's distracting us from an honest debate about the trade-offs and something that's very important. If we damage our economy now, given that Australia cannot alter the trajectory of climate change going forward, that's something that's going to be visited on us. Our own former chief scientist has told us that. We may very well find that we also then have difficulty paying for the costs of adaptation. [00:15:54] Steve: Yes. You, it's easier to adapt when you're richer. Yes. And in order to be richer, you need more energy. [00:16:00] Speaker 2: Which is your point about the poorer people in the world. That's right. And if you cripple [00:16:03] Steve: your energy system, you will not be able to adapt. Let me talk a minute about this, what I would say is the cooling of the climate fervor in Europe, the US, um, Japan. I mean, if you look at Davos, it was hardly on the agenda. You have very formerly green institutions now talking about climate realism, climate pragmatism. I'm a great fan of, uh, what's called the issue attention cycle. Anthony Downs in 1972 said that issues of public importance, particularly environmental ones, go through five phases. The first phase, the issue is widely discussed among experts, but is not there in public prominence. So think about the early '80s with climate and greenhouse gases. And then phase two, the issue bursts into public prominence with great enthusiasm for solving it. And there, think about, let's say from 1990, uh, Al Gore's film, uh, and all the way up until perhaps the Paris, uh, conference in 2015. We're going to solve it. Here's the problem. We understand it and so on. Phase three is that suddenly everybody realizes how disruptive and expensive it's going to be in order to address this problem in a material way. Fervor cools. Then there are a couple of other phases. But Downs was writing about local pollution, uh, 50 years ago. But it applies perfectly to what we're seeing now with the climate. And so you see people backing off from very aggressive emissions reduction regulations. You're seeing the public getting fed up with the disruption that, uh, it's causing. You see the private sector backing off from commitments in the U.S. to build electric vehicles. Uh, green hydrogen, uh, commitments are disappearing. Basically, it says the world is getting a lot more realistic about just how difficult an energy transition is going to be. [00:18:15] Speaker 2: I am a farmer, very, very interested in agricultural policy and in the business of feeding people, lifting them out of poverty and so forth around the world. And we've done a better job of it than we give ourselves credit for since the second world war. When I think there was a great determination on the part of the Western nations to no more wars, no more holocausts. We won't turn our backs on injustice. The green revolution in this area here lifted countless numbers of people out of poverty. But I've felt for a very long time, since I was a university student, that we're overly dependent on fossil fuels. Different argument to the climate change one. But they are finite resources. Uh, and the search for alternatives where they make sense, seems to me to have many benefits. The problem is, of course, that there's no suggestion that any form of energy, uh, that we've devised a way to use is going to go into decline. We're using more timber than we ever used. We're using more charcoal, more coal than we ever did. We're using more oil. We're using more gas. It only seems to go one way. And so the world is using more of these things, all of them. [00:19:27] Steve: As my, uh, friend Dan Juergen likes to say, it's not an energy transition, but an energy addition. And the addition of, uh, low emission or emission-free sources is not keeping up with the growth in energy demand. And so we're using more and more fossil fuels just to satisfy growth, mainly due to the developing countries, but also, uh, now in recent years, the data centers and AI in the developed [00:19:55] Speaker 2: world. This is a very big issue, I think, because, uh, we are killing our manufacturing base in Australia. We were quite good at it once we killed it. It's evaporating what's left of it like a stone. A lot of it's energy costs. It's not just energy costs. We don't run a very efficient labor a market either. But, um, the reality is that we are crippling our own wealth-creating industries at the moment. It's happening. There's just no getting away from it. The government tries to deny it, but it's true. It's happening. And if we're not very careful, we will do that very thing. As I mentioned earlier, young people are worried about the environment and they're worried about the cost of living. Will I ever own a home? Well, that's a matter of wealth, of national prosperity. These new industries are highly energy intensive. To be part of the next economic and industrial [00:20:52] Steve: revolution, we'll need more and cheaper energy. Absolutely. You know, you could become a gigantic version of Ireland, for example, which has seen great economic progress, but they don't manufacture anything. And they import everything. They don't use much energy. But I don't think this country could manage like that. You know, Australia has the lowest percentage of manufacturing in its economy of the [00:21:19] Speaker 2: OECD countries. Yes. I am aware of that. I'm very painfully aware of that. You know, the high-level [00:21:25] Steve: question I would ask, I mean, I know what you would say, but I would ask the general public, what do you think you're doing? You are killing the economy by an unreasonable focus on decarbonizing energy, raising costs, making it unreliable, and really shunning the manufacturing activities that you need. We see the same thing happening or happened already in Germany. Yes. The UK is well down that road as well. And I think there's a great danger that the US is headed in that direction. An Australian entrepreneur [00:22:00] Speaker 2: I had on the show quite recently, a very knowledgeable man now working in London, and he made the observation that Germany, Britain, and Australia are the countries that won't get the digital revolution boosting their wealth because they've mucked up their energy policies. Right. Right. And I say to the young people, because I know a lot of them will be listening to this and listening to this at a spa, you've got to take this seriously. You've got to keep your calm, recognize there are trade-offs. We are doing ourselves immense damage and we may do more damage. You know, I can't blame the young [00:22:35] Steve: people. I look at my own evolution and thinking when I was in my twenties, I didn't understand any of this. I had no sense of how important energy was, the relative status of different countries around the world. They really need to be educated about these things. And then you can have a sensible discussion [00:22:54] Speaker 2: about trade-offs. You mentioned the incidences of natural disasters not rising. That's counter to the common impression. Indeed. There really is a view that bushfires are up, tornadoes are up, cyclones are up. You're a very knowledgeable person. They're really not going up in [00:23:12] Steve: the way that people are told? It depends, of course, on which of those you're talking about. But if you look, let's say cyclones, tropical cyclones in the southern hemisphere, no change at all over the last 50 years. Yeah, there are some ups and downs, but the long-term trend, nothing. Cyclones globally actually down slightly. Sea level rise again, ups and downs. The sea level rise in Australia is influenced more by the dynamics of the Pacific Ocean, which are going back and forth over 30 or 40 years, rather than the general warming. So, yeah, the UN panel, in its most recent report a few years ago, has globally a table in Chapter 12 that shows whether we've seen trends or not in about 30 different climate impacts. And the answer is, for most of them, no. No detectable trend. There are many other aspects of this [00:24:13] Speaker 2: debate where you see rank hypocrisy, frankly. We're just offshoring a lot of our emissions. Yeah. We're about to lose, because they're all on life support. The taxpayer is actually keeping some of the few industries we have left going with taxpayer dollars. So we are subsidising smelters, for example. We're going to lose them if we don't change our energy costs. There's a limit to how long the taxpayer, especially if we keep weakening them, will be able to afford those things. They're not going to shut down globally. They're going to go somewhere else. Then we're going to involve the emissions in bringing those products back here. [00:24:46] Steve: It's even worse than that, because three-quarters of your exports, by dollars, are coal and gas. Yes. Okay? If you really believe that fossil fuels were the devil's work, you'd stop that. And then you're going to lose 6% of your GDP, which is what… And how are you going to replace that? [00:25:04] Speaker 2: Well, exactly. And the people who most want to shut those industries down are also the people who insist the government must spend more on social programs. [00:25:17] Steve: So this is the whole issue of trade-offs, and nobody really talks about the big picture. It's very difficult to do that politically. You would know better than I. But again, the public needs to understand. And the media don't help in that, trying to educate the public. [00:25:35] Speaker 2: I think that's right. Now, to move to what we actually need, I'm not against renewables where they make sense. And my understanding is… And I'm not too bad at these things. I'm not a scientist or an engineer. But I'm not bad at assessing who's trustworthy on these issues. There is no chance of us getting to 82% renewable energy supplying in this country and having it reliable and affordable. It's technically not within our grasp, and yet the government insists we can do it. In fact, around 35-40% renewables looks to be about the maximum you can put into a grid. [00:26:12] Steve: Yeah. You know, I'm maybe a little bit more strident than you've just spoken. I like to say renewables can be an ornament on a reliable energy system, but they can't be the backbone. And it's worth spending a minute trying to understand why that is. The wind and solar produce electricity cheaply when the wind blows and when the sun shines. And that's great. The problem is… There are actually two problems. One is… The main problem is that they're not reliable. You can't control when the wind blows or the sun shines. And there are, just from the fluctuations in the weather, there are periods of time, sometimes weeks or months long, where they don't produce. The Germans have a word for it that's called dunkelflaute, which means dark stillness. I gather that's understood here in Australia. And because the electricity needs to be reliable. In the States, it needs to be reliable. One part in 10,000, you know, a couple hours a decade, it can go down. Because of that requirement for reliability and the dunkelflauten, you need a backup system. And the backup system could be gas, could be nuclear, could be giant batteries. It needs to be as capable as the wind and solar to begin with, since it needs to run for weeks at a time. Fine. That raises the cost. Even if you're not using the gas or coal plants, you still need to have them available for the rare times that they're needed. So the cost goes up. And then you ask the question, why do I have the wind and solar if I have to keep this backup system running? So that's why… That's the first problem. The second problem is the grid in this country runs at 50 cycles. That means 50 times a second electricity is flowing back and forth. If you hook generators up to the grid, they need to be in sync with that flow. They need to push when they need to push and pull when they need to pull, 50 times a second. The way in which you keep the entire grid synchronized is by heavy spinning metal. A gas turbine, a steam turbine in a coal plant. Hydro turbines. Unless you have that heavy spinning metal, the grid can start to become discoordinated or even destroy itself. Wind and solar don't have that heavy spinning metal. And so you have to handle that with modern electronics. We haven't really figured out how to do that synchronization yet. [00:28:56] Speaker 2: And the other thing that strikes me about renewables is that they're not really renewable. So we've had a debate about nuclear energy. It's illegal to have that. Yes, I understand Australia. It's extraordinary. There's a contorted historical reason for that. However, it's been pointed out to me that if you say our CSIRO did a whole lot of work around them having an atomic plant, a nuclear plant having a 30-year lifespan, but in fact, it's 60, and with a bit of [00:29:24] Steve: refurbishing, you probably double it. At least 80, 90. We do that in the States. We've got a generation of plants that have reached the 50-year limit and are continuing. [00:29:33] Speaker 2: So let's just say for the moment it's 60 years. Renewables, your solar and your turbines, over that 60 years, you're going to replace every one of them three times. I would have said exactly the same thing. Yes. So that's hardly renewable. Right. I mean, you've got to make them overseas. We're not going to make them here. [00:29:51] Steve: With dirty coal, that's emissions. Environmentally damaged rare earth extraction, you've got to get [00:29:58] Speaker 2: them here. You've got to put them up, you've got to maintain them, and then you've got to replace them. [00:30:03] Steve: And if you believe the climate's going to get worse with storms and hail and everything else, why are you putting these massive structures out in the weather? They're going to get damaged. [00:30:13] Speaker 2: They depend on the weather, so you can't take them out of the weather. So we're weather dependent energy. And then people say, "Oh, but batteries." By the way, 30% of Australians, according to one survey, think batteries generate electricity. Oh, really? Yes. Education, literacy. Well, this is the problem. It's a debate which will determine our future, and we have to broaden it and deepen it. We must do that urgently. And I'll say it, the legacy media in this country, with few notable people. I've done a job on it. I find it amazing. I don't know what they teach people in journalist schools now. Investigative skills, curiosity, critical thinking. I don't know what's happening. Because with what I know, and you'll know more than me, with battery technology, you're going to replace them even more often than the solar panels and the turbines over the life of, say- [00:31:08] Steve: Depends how long you- how often you cycle them. But I like to say it's molecular mayhem when you charge and discharge. So the materials need to be very rugged. We don't have that yet. Yeah. No, it- plus, you know, the batteries- we've had two or three battery fires in California over the last couple years. They're nasty, vicious events. The batteries have a lot of energy in them. When the fires happen, they're very difficult to put out. So I would not be betting on batteries all that much [00:31:40] Speaker 2: for- for this kind of grid reliability. Yeah. Batteries in motorcars aren't very nice. Either there's a downside or two there that people are not talking about. I wonder how bridges and tunnels will go if the whole fleet's electric. Right. What happens if you get a fire on a major bridge or in a tunnel? Or how about in a parking structure where you're very difficult to get to the aerobiles? There's an important point driving this. I happen to know that the state governments, although many of their instrumentalities, are actually worried about this and they're looking forward to research- have it researched. Nobody's talking about it publicly, but we should be. [00:32:17] Steve: Of course we should. There's also the weight issue. The electric vehicles are heavier. The tires wear out. So they generate more tire grit, uh, as they drive. Uh, and then, you know, as part of the disruption, I assume you have a tax on petrol here that has helped pay for the roads and so on. But if you're not using petrol, you're going to lose the revenue, uh, as electrification becomes more common. [00:32:41] Speaker 2: And then you get the argument, oh, well, that we can't tax electric vehicles. We need to provide every incentive for people to get into them. So what actually happens there, of course, is that the people who can't afford electric cars subsidise the wealthy people who can. This stuff, energy policy as it's unfolding in Australia, and you can see it in the way people vote. In the wealthy suburbs where they can afford luxury beliefs, they're determined that we should try and save the world single-handedly. You get out into Tradiebilt and into real Australia, they're now being asked to subsidise the wealthy. That's what's happening. It feels philosophically a Labor government that is actually, despite what they say, and despite their, you know, soak the rich sort of policies in some areas, slamming lower [00:33:31] Steve: and middle income owners. That's what they're actually doing. It's easy to be green when you're wealthy, when you're not so well off, you've got other priorities. Again, that's reproduced not only domestically in countries, but internationally as well. So I think, you know, we are not going to reduce emissions anytime soon globally. And we had got to put our energies into understanding adaptation [00:34:00] Speaker 2: better than we do. There's a lot of wise heads saying that. But before we go there, seriously, what does a good energy mix look like? Because I am a great believer we should diversify. And I also believe that Australia, it's no secret here. I mean, I believe we should embrace nuclear. And I think that the debate has been a terrible reflection on the maturity of our leading legislators, our leading public servants, I'm going to say it, some of our scientific organizations, and especially the media. They stand indicted. Our children will look back on the debate and say, you weren't taking us seriously. You were using emotion to clob your opponents. You are not confronting them with the difficult choices we [00:34:43] Steve: have to make. You know, what constitutes a good mix really depends on circumstances. So it's different in different countries. You know, at one limit, Norway has got a tremendous amount of hydropower. And so the mix for them is different than it is, let's say, for India, where there's a lot of coal, they're more energy-starved than the Norwegians, and so on. With respect to nuclear, I talk to a lot of energy experts around the world. And just about everybody I talk with believes that fission, nuclear power, has to be an important part of our energy future if you want to reduce emissions. If you don't want to reduce emissions, you've got gas, you've got coal in this country. Yes, you can put in renewables, but you need the backup as we've talked about. So it's circumstance dependent. It also depends on how much do you want to pay, right? How important is reliability to you? Well, the idea of not having [00:35:45] Speaker 2: reliable power in an economy like Australia's is extraordinary. I suppose, nonetheless, there will be listeners saying, well, we're just not thinking enough of our children and our grandchildren. I would say the economic damage we're doing to them will be what they question most, frankly. But we shouldn't [00:36:07] Steve: take their concerns lightly, Steve. No. I think, again, it's a question of perspective and maturity. You know, I was teaching young people at NYU. They were in their, let's say, mid-20s. Factual, about climate, about energy. They would come out of 10 weeks of lectures with their eyes open and a much more mature understanding perspective on the big picture. And that's what I think we really need to do for young people. You know, the bottom line view, I think, is that you can't think about sustainability missions unless you've got reliability and affordability. And we have somehow not communicated that to the great majority of the public. What has happened in the West that we've so [00:37:00] Speaker 2: lost sight of the needs of the disadvantaged? You don't have to be very smart to realise that unless we can reduce energy poverty, many people who are in poverty will not escape it. And many people who have been coming out of poverty will find that they're pushed back into it. There was a time when the West really cared, but there doesn't seem to be much leadership on it anymore. We're very self-obsessed. And I would say that applies to Australia. We provide the means for many other people with our rural resources and with our food exports for them to live well. They're all energy-intensive activities, but they deliver a huge and important good to people who don't have what we have at the same time as we [00:37:46] Steve: want to denigrate them, mock them, close them down. Yeah. Nobody says you have to be consistent in these things. I think, you know, with respect to the young people, you would think that they would have become more cosmopolitan with travel and communications around the world and so on, but they're not. And maybe critical thinking, curiosity, what's it really like to live in one of the sub-Saharan African countries and have power maybe three hours a day or have to cook over wood and with all the smoke in the kitchen that that entails? You know, I think it's a lack of curiosity. [00:38:29] Speaker 2: It's a big issue. You've commented, I think, to the effect that the whole climate change debate has taken on something of the aura of a religion. And I'd be interested to know what characteristics you think this religion has been, why you would see it as a religion and what characteristics it's displaying. [00:38:53] Steve: Yeah. You know, there are like all religions. There's a sacred text, and that's the IPCC reports, the UN climate reports. But nobody's reading it. But nobody reads it, but they all like to cite it as justification. There are heretics, of course. There's penance that you get to do by recycling your rubbish or driving an electric vehicle. And it, you know, perhaps displaces the more traditional religions that we've got, the Gaian religion now, perhaps displacing the world's established religions. It's easy to believe in. It's got promises of future nirvana at the expense of making some current day sacrifices. There are a lot of similarities. Again, I'm just a physicist. What do I know? But I think you can see these things. [00:39:54] Speaker 2: Does it offer love and forgiveness and human flourishing? [00:39:57] Steve: Well, not necessarily. Not the latter. Human flourishing, not. Okay? Because, again, to the extent that it makes energy more expensive and less reliable, it is anti-human, not in favor of human flourishing. You've been very generous with your time and you've got a lot on. [00:40:21] Speaker 2: If you were listening to this program and you're thinking, I need to know, I should know more than I do, where would you steer them? Apart from wise conversations like this one. [00:40:33] Steve: Yeah. Right. Well, you know, five or six years ago, I wrote a book about climate science and expanded it last year to include energy issues. So while we sold so many copies, I don't need to hawk my book anymore. I think that many people have found it to be a great place to understand the issues. My goal was to inform, not to persuade when I wrote that. I think that's one. You can find a lot of material on the web. What I would say is open up your aperture a little bit. There are many credentialed people who understand climate and understand energy whose voices have not been heard. And so I would seek out some of those. With respect to climate, there's plenty of data out there. And so when there's some media story that says this is the worst thing that's happened since 1980, the thing I tell my students in my own inclination is, well, what about before 1980? And you're often surprised to find out unprecedented does not apply. And that if you go back far enough, you've seen the same thing in the past. So that's another way of getting some information. Look at the data yourself. It's not that [00:41:52] Speaker 2: hard. It's plenty out there. We still hear every other day, my final sort of question, the scientific [00:41:58] Steve: community all agrees. Seems a bit simplistic to say that. Yeah. Agrees on what? All right? Agrees that the climate is changing. Everybody agrees with that. Agrees that carbon dioxide is going up in the atmosphere because of fossil fuels predominantly. Everybody agrees on that. Agrees that it exerts a warming influence on the planet. Yes. But that's about where it stops. Extreme weather events are becoming more common. No agreement on that. And in fact, as I've said, the data say otherwise. Agree that this is an economic catastrophe, no, by no means, nor is it an existential threat. Well, Steve, by the time this goes to air, [00:42:43] Speaker 2: hundreds of Australians will have heard you at a spa and read about what you've said and what have you. But there'll be many, many who will tap into this conversation as well. And I know, because they'll tell me, quite a few of them will listen to it more than once because you've given us terrific content. [00:42:58] Steve: Aghanani, thank you very much. Well, thank you. I'm, you know, I'm an educator at heart and my goal is to inform people. They can make decisions, but it's better to be informed when you make them than not. Amen.