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

[00:00:00] Scott Tinker: this whole concept that we in the modern world have reduced our emissions why well it's bs right [00:00:09] Speaker 2: we outsourced it to them completely there's no renewable energy there's no such thing as [00:00:14] Scott Tinker: renewable act no that's a myth you have to have these collection systems and those come from the earth they're mine 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 it's not going to help the climate you're hurting the environment because wealthy nations can afford to invest in [00:00:36] Speaker 2: 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 adapting and what allows you to do that wealth scott tinker welcome to trigonometry thank you it's great it's great to have you here uh 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 [00:01:20] Scott Tinker: studied that and worked in the technical side of the oil and gas industry for 17 years built 3d reservoir models and hung off of big cliffs and around the world 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 in that role came to begin to appreciate kind of 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 with a 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 who i am today and what i do so i i've transitioned well arthur brooks he had a great book right he talked about the two curves from strength to strength that first curve for me was a technical scientist the second curve as an educator [00:02:35] Speaker 2: that's carried me along for a while all right well educate us uh 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 the western country if you live in the city in the western country is every second car is electric uh we're making this great energy transition everything's wonderful renewable energy everywhere you know you see sun panels and uh all of this stuff right um but that's [00:03:10] Scott Tinker: not quite the reality of the world is it not the whole world no yeah two of my favorite words transition and renewable you know but uh we're not and they aren't okay and and i i said i said that in a ted talk actually to 1100 kids i went through well 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 a wind turbine comes from the earth a battery comes from the earth it's mine and then it's manufactured in these collection systems collects the sun light heat and 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 [00:04:02] Speaker 2: energy no such thing as renewable energy no that's a myth we've carried forward in our [00:04:08] Scott Tinker: schools and 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 they're mine other kinds of energy are 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 uh coal train in wales actually commercial coal power train you burn coal which nature took carbon plants and made it really really dense for us so you get a lot of energy when you burn that coal heat boil water make 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 refine 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 and 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 of energy more hydrogen in it and then finally uranium and thorium the nuclear so this this energy density transition has been happening naturally for a couple of centuries now and that's where energy in the world is headed okay it's uh it's tough to negotiate with physics and we try all the time politically but 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 um 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 another three billion and then the lucky one plus billion of us who were born one lottery right and and so we have moved through our our mix of energy has changed from dominated by coal less coal now than most the modern world oil is actually percentage-wise decreasing natural gas and nuclear increasing in the modern world and solar and wind and i'm i'm fine with those by the way i'm not anti-solar and wind that's a diverse portfolio is a good thing you know 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 [00:06:58] Speaker 2: options now scott can i interrupt you there i want to come back to you tracing all the street yeah but you said something that to a lot of people who are not aware of any of this will sound um it's almost unbelievable it's like renew what we call renewables which you you say i mean it's not renewable i call them solar and wind so solar wind yeah they will not replace for denser form of energy [00:07:23] Scott Tinker: no why not um you simply can't 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 so you have to 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 uh vaslav smil is a very bright energy guy out of canada and he created a i when i'm talking about density before i was talking about you know per unit weight how much energy in a in an ounce or a pound of something you can't weigh the sun and the wind so he came up with something called surface power density which is uh area watts per meter squared so the s 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 you 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 okay and and it happens every day um 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 tesla s let me say that again a tesla s a thousand pounds of battery on that floor bed seven thousand cell phones in one car okay so that's the dent it's the physics it's not judgment it's just physics so you 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 a bad thing lift the world up you just can't do it so they'll be a part of a portfolio and look i've installed solar in gunchukwa colombia in the arwaco village of gunchukwa 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 three and a half kilowatt solar array and we put light bulbs in mud huts and ceiling fans and a refrigerator freezer for some medicines okay that's great that gets them started but it's light bulbs in a mud hut we would call that a brownout it's not electrified it's light bulbs so then this progression constantin 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 that's dense in fact if you look at it by weight i'm going to say this uranium and thorium which run 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 coal or gas it's a gas it's a thermal process when you think about the density of a uranium pellet and we i visited many nuclear reactors and stuff them into these fuel rods fuel assemblies a uranium pellet about one centimeter and half a 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 yeah and gasoline you know how much hay it would take so this is why the density wins this is this is why to power 8.3 billion people and growing to some point it's going to take a remarkable amount of dense energy to do that and it's always on a nuclear reactor is always running it doesn't shut down at night or when the wind stops flowing so the two reasons are density takes [00:12:42] Speaker 2: too much stuff and intermittency all right and i interrupted you so come back to the story about the [00:12:48] Scott Tinker: three portions of the way and you're thinking man this guy can't answer a question like this it's good it's not only because i keep interrupting him you know please do yeah um 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 percent coal oil and gas and coal has gone down in that mix as a percentage oil is going down as a percentage gas has increased and you got 20 percent 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're 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 gas 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 uh is kind of a transition the percent and one is an addition in the fuels that we're using we're adding more forms of energy to power the world and that's important to understand you know when kids young people who've been taught other things see this graph of everything increasing they just you know they just can't believe it they think people are telling them a myth or something they can't believe we still have so much coal oil and gas in the world 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 by a lot and they consume more coal than the rest of the world combined times 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 okay 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 okay why well it's bs right we outsourced it to them completely we have just said hey [00:16:09] Speaker 2: you make our crap and we'll be green it's a shell game right because there's only one atmosphere [00:16:17] Scott Tinker: 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 emitting especially china and now there's 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 you know we've reduced our co2 emissions because you don't make anything anymore texas makes your stuff every so this is this is really a very really important concept which you're if you're concerned about climate is 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 they're 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 in 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 and asia combined are three quarters of the world's population three quarters they only consume half the world's energy and they make a third of the world's gdp that's poverty three quarters of people half 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 seven billion people are living in some state of energy poverty today from nothing to not reliable and not affordable to them seven billion people [00:18:37] Speaker 3: a missed call costs 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 quo q uo the smarter way to run your business communications quo lets you and your entire team share one business number handle calls and texts 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 the whole thing runs from wherever you are no hardware or office is required and quo's ai works in the background handling the admin you don't have time for automatically logging calls generating summaries and flagging next steps 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 quo 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 quo for free and get 20 off your first six months when you go to quo.com/trig that's q uo.com/trig quo 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 only consumed this amount of energy etc etc what do you think of britain's net zero policy yeah [00:20:24] Scott Tinker: so when the iea put out their net zero report five years ago this summer and it was a road map for global energy and it it led to glasgow the cop in glasgow i think it was cop 26 a road map um i put out a piece that right then that said the road to glasgow is paved with bad assumptions you know it was i think it ran in the hill or something in the u.s they made a term a huge number of bad assumptions in that but the biggest one the most egregious the most disingenuous actually because fati biral who runs the iea is a smart economist and he knew 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 our it's not it's way off already and then within that they took coal oil 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 [00:21:37] Speaker 3: come back to that okay 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 [00:21:48] Scott Tinker: something so basic and obvious now you're asking me to understand human nature i tend to deal with data and facts i to the best i can there's 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 we have to 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 he meets with them all the time and they put out reports about their progress towards net zero paris happened the paris accords which haven't happened you know those their promises so uh maybe political pressure maybe it was aspirational they say it was a scenario you know and 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 underpinned 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 road map 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 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 health care 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 um 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 wonder 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 u.s 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 this is very i'll talk about this tomorrow and i when i close the conference here you can't just have this binary are you for the environment are you for energy or there's something else in there the economy energy underpins 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 and we have the biggest economies we're not hurting the environment we're 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 this is not trivial this is one of the most important things that i think the citizenry is not the world is not a good understanding about the policies that are intending to be green whatever that word means so you know energy the environment the economy the environment and it flows that way you have to have this energy security abundant affordable light of energy to have a healthy economy to clean up the environment the worst environments in the world i've ever seen are where it's poor i mean the land the soils the water the local air awful because you can't literally they have other [00:26:39] Speaker 3: 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 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 hottest june on record are they right [00:27:14] Scott Tinker: to be worried about the climate yeah again this isn't an 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 and but the aggregate warmth is happening so that's a concern and it's real okay now the ipcc the intergovernmental 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 let's say that again for the young people go look at that ar6 it's public ar6 working group one chapter 12 table 12.12 as 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 water drought and drought and drought and droughts etc okay when you look at the table they run 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 is what hasn't emerged with 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 this 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 and particularly the political and media summaries of those come out with the drama and say it's the worst storm on record uh no it's not it's not it those storm it's hot as hell in london right now even for a texan you know or a michigan guy uh that's an unusual warm for the end of near the end of june right 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 their 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 mansion'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 conversations typically go i'm upset what can i do where can i see more of this and then they start asking what start asking what would what should i do what what would you do for a job i say what well what's your biggest concern and they'll say something go work for that company then huh go work for a big power company or exxon mobil are you kidding yeah if you want to make real change go and work there and change it from within you'll have a lot more influence from within and you'll you'll learn a lot too because there's 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 i was raised in the cold war 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 gonna 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 when you and and i'll i'll pull a class how many it 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 he said humans we're 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 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 you have to start looking at the information and again not not some group it's paid to tell you something else go look at the ipcc report itself and their summary table 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 u.s is going to be a little bit of a narrative that we're talking about today it shouldn't go away it's one issue but so is the land the air and the water the pillars of the environment the land the air 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 there are 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 [00:35:33] Speaker 3: its energy portfolio um there's going to be young people i really hope there's young people watching [00:35:39] Scott Tinker: you scott it's constantin they will be watching you massively overestimate i'm counting on you your kids are the age of my grandkids man [00:35:53] Speaker 3: 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 the world mikhail thorup operates in he's been living as an expat for over 25 years visiting more than 110 countries and calling nine of them home he founded expat money nearly a decade ago to help others do the same when he helped someone build an international plan b the knowledge he brings is entirely first hand every recommendation comes from something he has already done himself expat money works specifically with freedom-minded families and investors who want to reduce their exposure on any one government or any one system second residency second citizenships offshore banking international real estate legal structures that spread your life across borders mikhail has put together a free report called plan b residencies and instant citizenships it covers five routes to a second passport including one that almost never gets discussed how a foreign residency functions as genuine political insurance which countries actually make sense depending on what you're trying to protect and what it realistically costs go to expat money dot com slash trigger or click the link in the description of this episode to download the report there's no charge no catch that's expat money dot com slash trigger what would you say to them because i i took i talked to someone and i have friends who are now you know in their 60s 70s and 80s and they say to me francis my 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 it's they don't 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 [00:37:47] Scott Tinker: counselor um i want to let's talk about population just for a second and then i'll come back and try to answer that succinctly yeah 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 just blew me away so we had these two a canadian and a university professor from ut actually austin the fertility rates globally are plummeting okay india went below replacement fertility rate two years ago 2.1 is replacement 2.1 kids per woman the only place it's still increasing their fertility rates is africa and that's coming down quickly and a few other countries south korea below one etc so population demographics are interesting we were headed toward 11 billion people we're at 8.3 today i'll do it this way 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 going to peak the global population is going to peak around 9 billion people in 50 years or less 2075 peak and then it doesn't plateau we don't go to 9 billion and chill out for hundreds and hundreds of years it plummets the math of that fertility rates plummets and we go back to 2 2 billion people on earth in less than 200 years okay took 200 years to go from a billion to eight back to 2. 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 fear or what they're bringing their kids into in the world that's more the wealthy 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 we put solar the indigenous village of gunchuka the arwako 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 indoor smoke pneumonia cancer okay so they need the kids they they die that's not happening in the law of the world anymore and there are other reasons too so as 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 to 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 got dead in 15 years i said well what's going to kill you huh climate is 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 way 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 um 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 extreme drought could harm big regions but it's not going to kill 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 bsing 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 right and take the take the time to do that a little bit it's all there and maybe maybe mitigate your own fears if i have a fear of flying some people terrified of flying or spiders or heights or public speaking we all go if i have to do that thing i have to live with the spiders or fly a lot or public speak i'm going to 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 [00:43:47] Speaker 2: proportional to their impacts well this is what you're describing is a um 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 uh quote unquote uh 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 wanted to ask you 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 in one of your speeches here at ark was the fact that india is only a quarter as rich as 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 as quickly as possible yes right that being the case you 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 they're talking about and nuclear as well of course so this idea that 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 yeah based on that alone the fact that india will want to catch up that alone would make make it impossible to reduce our co2 is that fair first of all that's a great [00:45:41] Scott Tinker: summary okay yeah very fair if i'm narendra modi absolutely in fact around narendra modi 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 with energy consumption and economy literally if you slide into your left three decades it looks just like china [00:46:06] Speaker 2: 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 uh 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 uh contributes or causes the different things no it our emissions are causing more warming more warming yes do you do you have a percentage estimate on the how much of the warming comes from human activity not my own research [00:46:51] Scott Tinker: no yeah but of that degree c degree degree and a half yeah 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 [00:47:03] Speaker 2: witness an explosion in energy consumption yes and b human energy consumption contributes to warming we're going to see warming yes the planet will keep warming yes over time but the the best estimates [00:47:17] Scott Tinker: constantin are 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 wood hay coal oil less carbon methane less carbon uranium thorium and eventually fusion which is hydrogen isotopes of hydrogen no carbon so we're doing that naturally when we get dense and india is building nuclear reactors right and they should i would love for india to build a lot of nuclear electricity because they could decarbonize much faster like france did than going the coal route right they're doing some coal because they have it yeah but go you know they can they can skip that long cycle if they just accelerate [00:48:17] Speaker 2: 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 um from all the evidence that i've seen nuclear on an averaged out basis is the safest form of energy that we currently have yes the 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 um you get a situation where an entire area of land is just like the the area around chernobyl for example you can't go in there and then people will won't be able to live there for thousands of years and you have a few of those and you know you've got a real real problem interesting [00:49:08] Scott Tinker: though on that just real quick uh-huh nature moved back to the region around chernobyl because there's no humans oh yeah yeah it's the safest place for animals in the world and they don't have seven heads and nine legs they're they're just normal so i think humans actually will be back in there much [00:49:25] Speaker 2: sooner okay yes nonetheless i i think to most people the idea of you know we build a nuclear reactor in our country and it explodes understandably scary but 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 dam collapse in china which we've never heard about versus big boom oh visually powerful [00:49:51] Scott Tinker: but also it's like 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 yeah weaponry nuclear power link it's not [00:50:12] Speaker 2: irrational is it because i mean nuclear reactors can be used to produce they they do produce plutonium [00:50:20] Scott Tinker: yeah it's a byproduct of the 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 [00:50:34] Speaker 2: of course not yeah i guess what i'm getting at is with nuclear um there is a high low probability high risk uh no low probability high impact yes event that's that is in people's minds a lot take a country like a country like britain in the us there's parts 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 is very different conversation right so uh what can you tell us about nuclear what it might be like in the future and also the other forms of of technology particularly hydrogen that you mentioned where are we with all [00:51:18] Scott Tinker: yeah yeah progressing towards those uh start with hydrogen hydrogen is element number one on the periodic table it's lighter than helium so it's a it's a tough little booger 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 a 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 was hydrogen okay so but you have to make it and the two easiest ways to make it are to split the methane molecule ch4 the water molecule h2o and then you get your hydrogen um so you do something to natural gas or to [00:52:11] Speaker 2: water and you get the hydrogen put energy into them split it and you get the hydrogen okay but [00:52:16] Scott Tinker: 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 uh 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 no yeah it's not it can't compete yet it's not cheap enough and why do you think it will um 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 we literally 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 and at 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 it needs to come down to about a buck buck fifty a 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 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 um very different inputs to that uranium 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 the ones relatively little so very safe known process it's the fear yes the boom is scary um the technologies now have 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 uh you know weaponized natural gas with europe etc so all wars have some energy component to them so that's that's real nothing there's nothing perfect you can wipe out a solar array too pretty easily or a wind farm and take everything down so uh 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 it's bipartisan young people are not scared of nuclear you ask young people no emissions dense electricity how about nuclear go for it they weren't trained to be scared of nuclear like i was 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 the middle east even has reactors now the uae has four working nuclear reactors large-scale gigawatt nuclear reactors today it's it's coming and i think the west needs to get on board and get back after it fusion which is a different technology um is getting closer most of us used to laugh and say it's 30 years away and always will be you know but it's not now what is [00:55:59] Speaker 3: nuclear fusion here's something nobody tells you about getting older you can eat well exercise do everything right and still feel like your body is running at about 70 percent tired after lunch sluggish after meals not ill exactly just not quite right a lot of the time it comes down to digestion whether your body is actually breaking down what you're eating and absorbing it properly if it isn't the protein the 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supplies last you cannot get this on amazon you cannot get it in stores this offer exists in one place the link in the description the code trigonometry that's it so if you're already thinking about trying it this is a sign go to bioptimizers.com/trigger or click the link in the description use code trigonometry and grab it before it's gone what is nuclear fusion what is it yeah it's the it's the [00:58:04] Scott Tinker: colliding of of uh radioactive isotopes so it instead of splitting something to make heat it's fusing something to make heat the sun is the best fusion reactor we know oh wow okay and so it is literally fusing these things and creating a tremendous amount of heat the challenge is constraining the heat for those really interested i did we did a pbs show one of our episodes was on fusion two really smart people so the challenge there is containing the heat how do you contain the reaction and the heat and there's two big approaches to that i will uh and that heat is used to do what boil water make 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 it's almost the perfect energy if there's gonna if if i had to pick one about everything we've talked about it's the closest to being the answer to unlimited heat to make electricity and heat for other processes the challenge is 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 six seven eight hundred nine hundred eleven hundred degrees to make some of these things that modern societies run on so nuclear fusion has the potential if you arc it to make that much heat so you literally transition away from carbon that's 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 scott yeah so this doesn't have waste the fusion it's it's it's steam um fission does have two sorts of ways there's 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 particulate emissions like from a coal plant the waste out of fission is called fission products they're they're various forms of radioactive things about 95 of the energy is used and about five percent of these fission products uh a little piece of plutonium but the rest of them you have to manage you have to what they typically do is they they solicify those what does that mean uh they blend them with silica okay so they become an 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 u.s or they're put into 30 40 foot thick concrete slabs today in france in our first film we take you inside the nuclear reactor and show you that the dry cask going down into the concrete slabs where 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 into shale and other kinds of rocks and holding them there forever um 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 got to 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 or co2 from from burning uh gasoline and other products and methane or or the amount of of batteries we're going to 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 wind turbine blades gigantic we bury them we don't recycle them really yeah why not they're not made of recyclable material one they're starting to be but it's the economics again constantin 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 there's an energy and cost to all that process it's just cheaper to make them new that's it's just cheaper i mean big box stores are dumping new tvs from last year's model because it's cheaper to dump them and they're not going to 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 i'm all for recycling reuse and reprocessing but we got to get it affordable that's why we don't do it for the most part so you're sitting here you know the nuclear has those fission products fusion it's just sounds too good to be true almost you got to contain the heat of that reaction it is a little it's a little teeny sun you know and then you got to contain that heat um yeah those are that's technology and other things that geothermal we haven't talked about it's a 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 bite 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 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 [01:05:16] Speaker 2: geothermal is coming too and in the interim though the planet will get warmer and we're gonna have to [01:05:22] Scott Tinker: 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 hundred thousand years there's a glacial interglacial cycle in fact a serbian physicist named milenkovich worked this out in house arrest for 20 years by hand he figured out why though the 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 u.s michigan and new york city and minnesota and montana in one to two thousand feet of ice canada is gone that lasts about 80 000 years and then for about 20 000 years that ice retreats and we get more arable land and that 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 way lower than it was just 90 you know just 20 000 years ago 25 000 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 nine thousand years so here we are everything that we talk about the stone age the bronze age industrial revolution has happened in these last eight nine thousand years beautiful interglacial you can't stop that milenkovich cyclism the ice will come back or within a few thousand years of it statistically here comes the eye and we're going to have a whole different challenge more humans die when [01:08:07] Speaker 2: 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'd start to get actually worried right that's a big one [01:08:16] Scott Tinker: that's when you're like oh this is real climate that's when it that's a big one and it's it'll happen right this will happen you can't stop it now you might be able to put greenhouse gases in i'm being this will sound facetious it's not but i'm just playing cypher put some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere you know trap some heat do other things to keep the war keep it warmer and try to [01:08:39] Speaker 2: hold that back and we'll see what what about this what about this the the real the 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 affects the ocean affects this so yeah the the rate at which it gets warmer accelerates and you never get to to the decline and in or the slow down in temperature increase that you talked about [01:09:11] Scott Tinker: um i think it's runaway impacts of that warming so the rate of warming won't necessarily increase steeply keeps getting warmer but it's it's what does that do does it does a big ice sheet calf off of greenland and plunk into the ocean like an ice cube in our water so what happens then because 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 um 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 hundred thousand years those are high frequency glacial interglacials ten of those have happened in the last million years okay ten we can see them and human-like things have been around for all ten of them you know we didn't have modern technology but they would come closer to the pole or to the equator in cold times and then they would go back and as land opened up again they'd migrate across from russia the illusions to the u.s you know this this all humans like to survive most species do so we tend to adapt to these changing things um we're not going to 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 done or new orleans and build walls and keep the ocean back you can afford to do those sorts of things but 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 rise isn't much so they got to adapt to that adapt to storms to droughts and things and and what allows you to do that wealth okay this is where the inequity truly exists in the world today the emerging economies 4 billion people developing economies 3 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 inequ if there's a global inequity it's that 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 not in population necessarily in wealth so that everybody can afford the kinds of things that that we have and everybody knows about them the first thing you get i've dropped a solar panel in maasai country in kenya 40 watt panel cell phone it's in our film yeah they have to have it because it's called them copa that's how they pay for their one hour of electricity that day but they're connected to the world now and a little tv on a battery i mean we're literally put in this solar panel in comes 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 verse godzilla and these two monsters were doing battle on the tv screen and these little kids on the couch who probably had never seen this their 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 i tell them it's not real you know because they're not 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 and we went around and looked at all that circumstance and how you lift people up with energy and their and their economies to where they have the kinds of things the good things and some of the bad that we do constantine and francis so i think it's very important to not some of 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 [01:14:29] Speaker 3: 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 [01:14:40] Speaker 2: scott answers the 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 net zero 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 [01:15:04] Scott Tinker: that we really should be yeah my mind always goes to my own interest and 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 edgy 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 i 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 [01:17:00] Speaker 2: 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 oil actually derived from years of squashed 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