It didnt capture the full scope. To my first question in the buck which is apocalypse never, it is a very definitive statement that it implies certainty. I describe the Current Situation as landmines that are complex and largely unpredictable. Are you confident when you say apocalypse never . Guest well, thanks, andy. The argument is that Climate Change is real but its not the individual and it isnt the most serious environmental problem. In the extremism and exaggeration that the warnings of the pandemic were pricey and including coming from the coronavirus and hygiene and small farmers. So not to say that its impossible, but to say lets get our understanding of fixed rate. One of the most shocking things people dont know and i think this is where the news media deserves a lot of blame for this, as for the natural disasters over the last 100 years, they declined 80 to 90 over the last 40 years. There is no scenario in the report, and ive now written them all, for the number to reverse itself, so there is really no basis for thinking that we are going to see this weekend sees the biggest problem that we have ever faced. That would imply we have some mechanism for the death toll to reverse itself for the damages to increase or for there to be some collapse in food producti production. 25 more food than we need and according to every major report and just kind of basic understanding, the surpluses should continue to rise so long as the countries have access to fertilizer contractors, irrigation and other elements of modern agriculture. So yeah i mean never say never. Searching the aliens could invade a. It is a bit of a defiant and asserting as much as it is saying that it will never be an apocalypse. Guest . I see the floor is kind of brittle but also where you see the books at most visible. The. I know there is a lot in your book that i like. Went from 1988. Its a more nuanced reporting. Look at the landscape and theoretically what could happen. It is no contest to. And yet maybe you could articulate how you move to sort of a roadmap. The road not far nuclear to the expansion so what is your sort of clarion call to the world on how you actually get this done . You only get one or two words for a title. But it is basically the human civilization defense of Human Development and human progress. It points out that scheuer, air pollution arises as the nations industrializing urbanized but we also see now they peaked in the mid70s and in the United States nearly 15 years ago and the peak in the developing economies i dont know, ten years. Some people think they peaked already. So the temperatures are very unlikely to get out of 3 degrees of the industrial level. Obviously theres some uncertaintthere is someuncertaie Nobel Prize Winner for his work on Climate Change said the optimal level was 4 degrees when fossil fuels were properly accounted for. I do not actually inside that in the book, but the overall direction and trends that im pointing to more positive. It peaked in the 2,000 in the area almost the size of alaska. I point to the fact one to 2 million still use wood for fuel. One of the threats to wild animals as they continue to teach them. And that goes for wild fish and many of things the groups have advocated so the renewables required three to 400 times more land than th in the grass plantr nuclear plants. Burning coal is better than zoning board. And tracking for natural gas. People say to me are you for natural gas or against. One favor im against it when it replaces coal or nuclear. My view eventually things are going to be 100 nuclear. When will that be . It could be as early as 2100. Probably not, more like 2200. But its no more ridiculous to think that we will be a less fossil fuels we are 90 almost in the primary energy. So i dont think that its far too much. Remember, Nuclear First and foremost in the technology we used to make the most powerful weapons that humans have ever made is the ultimate weapon. It is the primary use. 75 years. We then had a powerful Spinoff Technology which is the only way to basically shrink the Energy Footprint to close we are even be uranium i dont see it as farfetched. A far bigger concern than Climate Change is the future of Nuclear Energy. In the midst of a genocide theyve declared himself dictator for life, so as soon as the country is building plans for russia or china and bigger in the spirit and i always point out the line between soft power and hard power runs through so for me, nuclear is special and different and that stands for gas and coal and i do think once we come to grips with that and remind ourselves of it we will be able to turn back. Host particularly it was a standards negotiated in ways if you are involved in the industry so that is another target for the state but its also. Kind of like what youre saying a minute ago in the menu its easier to have the yes or no march like that i think is a way to look at the future in the United States. My wife and i disagree. For political reasons but i think of as a policy that the economy is struggling most and thats included in the subsidies eventually given what we just said about arguing from the edges, then where is the point you can start to build an American Energy future that has some of the aspects that youve called for in the book of . Guest the idea that the United States should compete on energy is the right one. You see those like Russia Building Nuclear plants to replace the combustion of natural gas per click to export natural gas and partly so they can become the leaders in building these plants we have a lot of experience with the current environmental. With the shock of having created such a radical technology. Its the most revolutionary technology that is shocking in its power. That is the main event is the change in public consciousness. We are starting to see it. Britain is considering building six reactors and the next one would be standardized. In terms of moderation one of the characters. One of them as a spokesperson for extinction and rebellion. I ended up by noting that in the conversation she told me she was pro nuclear basically two weeks before it was released, i ended up hiring her in britain and i think that is a testament to the fact it was articulate and modern path to the expanded natural gas and Nuclear Solutions to Climate Change which frankly republicans have always been fine and even now most democrats when pressed on it would agree these are two fuels we need to build Climate Change. Host how much resistance have you faced and many others that look at the portfolio of Global Warming to have that on the mix of, how much do you see as a counter argument . A lot of what i see is about the capacity and centralized capacity. Is that the enemy of the argument . Guest . Three years ago the dominant idea from the left was 100 renewable as for those in stanford. Now Mark Jacobson described it in part because he sues the mutual agreements youve seen me wrestling with it for several years on why if the left is so honest about Climate Change and why would it want renewables which is a large impact it was driving me bonkers. We finally got to the bottom of it and obviously one big part of this it doesnt explain it all because progressives are more concerned than conservatives, so it cant be a uniform fear that this would in all of us. Clearly it is ideologically motivated from this jargon based on the gu ideas of the british economist who said we would always overpopulat overpopulaten brazelton damaged. Also not disproved once hes been disproven every year since he was writing if there were nearly 8 Million People on earth and all problems almost all thes the result of having to be successful as a species. And they take up too much so i tried to get at what is behind this idea that there is something fundamentally wrong in the way that we live and im looking at three factors in the book of money, power and religion and ultimately if we see secular people more than traditionally religious people gravitate towards environmentalism is serving the same needs that religion has traditionally served in terms of providing a kind of spiritual transcendence with a sense of immortality and as they claim activists were whatever it might be. And i think that we see that with the power and they morality. So it seems to me there is no interest with the new deal of learning from past efforts to have the green new deal. I dont think that is coincidental. I think what is being advocated is the kind of morality in other words it should be good at times and places and so i see whats happening with advocacy if it looks like the religious movement then of course i found it to delete a bunc bunch of sco support that. I think the anxiety about the global system, the sense in which it is coming to an end is driving a lot of the things i get a particularly among the progressives and the. Host do you think globalization is coming to them and . Guest i donand . Guest i dont think it is coming to an end ver and i think that it is in crisis. Every Major Institution in our society is in crisis. I was discussing the other night the thing everybody believes about the pandemic and first few weeks about washing your hands is the most important that we really do need to wear masks. Now the thinking is masks are of essential importance and washing your hands sure that they dont know of any cases that might transfer. The World Health Organization i dont think from the boat they are a discredited organization and the white house is a discredited institution. I also say this the times doesnt have the credibility that it once had. It doesnt read like a newspaper. Im struck and im sure you are, too. How many stories only have one side of the story i just read a piece that quotes the company was the critical of renewable at all. That is the standard now. If these institutions are in a crisis of credibility and trust, i dont think that means they are going to go away. They will need new leaders who have a different worldview and are more comfortable expressing the fact that we dont know if thethey were going off but you might want to wear them. We are worried about them. We are all economic nationalists i think without kind of even thinking about it. But these institutions were ultimately going to need to be kind of regenerated by the leadership and ideas. Host i do want to get to ecology that something you said brought to mind a concept that i focused on when the Keystone Pipeline argument has been and i was writing pieces that said studying the pipeline is fine but oil will find its way to. I was looking for words like cooperation of likeminded sustainable Human Experience on the planet, acknowledged diversity and they found in this response there was a paper, a 2003 paper that said ecosystems that are aggressively and it isnt the numbers but its the number of responses that function in the ecosystems of its like to me that was a cool moment its adaptive. Basically you think about the human adventure because in this view the United States and europe and all, geographies, histories and that kind of resolve is fundamentally adapted which gets to your point about the uniform menu if you are not with us you are against us. Oddly when i was biking u was bt the paris climate accord, i realized that actually is, it has all the attributes you want. Its classic, its adaptive, its not determined all the things. It creates a hundred year landscape of change and thats the kind of thing that makes me optimistic about the future and i wonder how that fits with your articulation of the pathway and how an individual would act with response to the diversity does that make sense. Guest that is a great observation. My view on the United Nations i dont think diplomats and United Nations treaty will have much influence over this decision that nations make about food and energy supply. They are based on local geography and also i believe there is a clear trend towards those like natural gas and nuclear on th but on the broadet i would wholeheartedly agree everything i complain about i can find in the New York Times in bloomberg and the most elite media now they are very onesided and at the same time we have twitter and i dont even go to the times anymore i just go to twitter. As an activist and as a journalist, i wrote a column for forbes. I love my relationship with forbes and have had some challenges they are but nonetheless im able to publish articles or more widely read and its because of the traffic on them but i can get a million or 2 million views even though we dont forget the times just because im writing about things people care about. Similarly, on the one hand it is an incredibly polarized society we live in. On the other hand its just a bunch of stuff that isnt clearly left or right issues. It isnt clear traditionally housing is another issue where i dont know if it is conservative or liberal because in california we have the liberal and conservative. I think that theres other elements of that and its not obvious somethings ar some thine liberal or conservative than others and to have it just determined by the polarization. I think that there is more space opening up and i credit social media were a lot of that. Its a little bit like the discussion of medicine and it depends on how you use it and what the dose is. I think potentially social media is clearing some collective mad nice but some can be very creative. Host how do you make information matter in this environment you dont have to question of how many species, how hot, simple answers. Lets get into ecology. He finished a book where they become an amazon where weve both spent time on the extinction headline versus reality. And being much more hypothesis and which is too long on the time scale to care about actually right now and its been more vigorous as you say in the book. At the same time, there is a section on this concept on a very simple formula that could have been wrong at the planetary level, but the recent book i kind of liked it, but i liked about it was this concept of if you leave room for nature even here in the Hudson Valley there is an old quarry is hardly recognizable. But i wonder if you had to specify how much, what does conservation mean and you have a section on that but if you could articulate that, what would the success look like. Guest im going to make one observation before i answer which is that to claim two claiy made that are very controversial that i think are accurate or we are not causing a massive extinction and Climate Change isnt making natural disasters worse. The response to both of them was to the form of hypotheses that i think were just at the signs. So for example, they could cause a distinction. Okay, sure the first of all that is a possibilit possibility posd what is now. Then i heard from other people including some have criticized me, it could be that natural disasters that have killed fewer people had there not been Climate Change. That isnt science hypothesis. One of the challenges we are dealing with is we are completing hypotheses which is an important part of the method with scientific evidence. Host its clear that its changed from the co2. Translating that into a component is what is impossible that the same time it would be impossible to state categorically there is no effe effect. Michael mann and i debated this. The sunny days and seasons with no tornadoes that they found, before Climate Change, too. But with some peoplsome people s the definitive idea that there is no role for Climate Change and where a storm is happening it is impossible to say. Guest the disagreement may be more supportive as they become a part of the reason i wrote this book, a big part is to claims thathe claims that bif people will buy, the earth is dying and half of the public around the world believe that it will make humans extinct, this needs to be pushed back again. Its causing Mental Health problems. Let me give a different example because this is in the news. If the president of the United States were to say aliens are not invading the United States. A reporter says and he says they are not. That reporter could make the same argument as my statement which is to say well, you cant say that for sure. We have navy pilots have reported Close Encounters with what appear to be alien spacecraft. We have Video Evidence thats been released and confirmed by the pentagon and special groups studying it. So how can you be sure the United States is not being invaded by aliens . So as far as the whole philosophical problem that you cannot prove a negative. Unless a burden of proof is showing in other words of the president of the nightsticks wants to avoid panic, which is what was encouraged, by the way, she said i want yo wanted to pad the definition is unthinking behavior. He says they are not invading the United States. He doesnt sing well we cant be sure but it appears to be. So i think you have to explain clearly and then if it turns out that it starts going up because of Climate Change and extreme events which i acknowledge have become severe in some cases, then we know. But we have to have a kind of basic discipline. Host i agree. The thing that i think is completed too much is losses in these events. Theres three things, there is losses and changes and there is Climate Change and how that might change