Are we giving up on climate change?

[00:00:00] We're going to lower your energy costs by 50% within one year. We're going to drill baby drill, we're going to get those prices way down. This is the Debunking Economics podcast with Steve Keen and Phil Dobbie. Well Donald Trump is of course a famous climate change denier, so what impact will drill baby drill have on the planet? Or is he just playing to the crowd, a crowd that either doesn't believe in it either, or thinks the price to pay is too high?

[00:00:29] In short, is climate change no longer a priority? We are obviously busy trying to make ends meet, whilst engaging each other in pointless wars and killing each other. So how did it all go so wrong? That's this week on the Debunking Economics podcast. In the middle of last year the World Economic Forum published a report showing that the momentum for energy transition was slowing, they said, because of global volatility.

[00:00:59] That was of course because of Vladimir Trump becoming president, that would be a big chunk of it. Now we have the world's most powerful man and the world's biggest climate change denier all rolled into one. And his executive orders are rescinding the clean power plan, watering down emission standards for power plants and immediately reviewing existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources.

[00:01:26] So that's what he's doing. So the issue is Steve, oil is cheap isn't it? I mean investing in other technologies, when you have all the infrastructure in place to burn stuff. I mean renewable companies say their costs are lower than fossil fuels, but I think that may or may not be right. We can talk about that, but that probably ignores the fact that there's a whole load of existing infrastructure. So companies are always going to sweat the assets.

[00:01:51] So if we look at what's the cheapest right now, it almost certainly is still fossil fuels because we have infrastructure set up for it. Oh, and not just that. It's also because oil is the densest energy form we found outside of nuclear power. And then this is people don't actually appreciate it. You know, you go to the petrol station, you put petrol in your car, you drive down the road, you don't even think about it.

[00:02:14] But if you decided to explode that petrol in your petrol tank, you realize how much energy you're using in an incredibly compact form. Whereas batteries is as much as without the storage capacity of things like lithium batteries over time, their energy density is about one tenth. So you're saying it is. So you're saying oil is cheaper then?

[00:02:36] So no, it's much more complicated than just that, because once you've got it out of the ground and got it in the form of petrol in your petrol tank, then it's incredibly dense energy form. I'm not I'm not I don't know the actual numbers, but it's at least 10 times denser than the energy stored in batteries. You know, you've got it, you know, and you've got an empty you've got a tank.

[00:03:00] OK, with a couple of kilo of steel, most likely, maybe more than a couple of kilo, but not a lot. But if you're going to do the storm, the similar amount of energy in kilowatts to move your car from point eight X to point Y, then you're going to put it inside lithium batteries, which which are not hollow. They've got a fair bit of metal and other technology as well.

[00:03:22] They weigh a lot in the density once we've even got the structure there, the density of energy in your battery pack compared to the density of energy in your fuel tank. You know, it can get an oil fuel tank is at least a factor of 10, possibly higher. So that's one of the issues that that that makes it fine once you've got it out of the ground.

[00:03:45] But that's where the real with really exciting potential possibilities come forward, because to get energy out of the ground, you've got to use energy. And that's that's a classic. I think the concept was first invented by Charlie Hall, who's still alive and kicking and probably going fly fishing as we speak, or maybe not. He's probably going to bed by now. I'll go fly fishing when he wakes up when he hears the show. Charlie invented the term AROI, which stands for energy return on energy invested.

[00:04:14] And if you go back to the early days of oil mining, and I'm talking back, you know, the figurative days of the Beverly. Well, when the Beverly Hills was actually realistic in a sense, when the first mines went down, I think, in Philadelphia or the first oil wells, you drill the hole, which would take a bit of whatever energy they formed.

[00:04:40] And I presume they had. I don't even know how they drilled the first ones, but you could have drilled it virtually manually, get down 50 or 60 feet, hit an oil reservoir and the stuff spurts out what they call a gusher. Yeah. Now you've got to have a vessel in the you know, let's let's talk about the optimism of the Trump administration. Oil drills in Antarctica and oil drills in the Arctic.

[00:05:06] And you've got to go down a couple of kilometers, hit bedrock and go a couple of kilometers further down with an incredibly sophisticated drilling technology. And finally, they hit the hole then. And maybe to some extent, you're now pumping the stuff. It doesn't come up under its own pressure from from existing wells.

[00:05:23] They're running out. So the amount of energy you've got to put to get the energy out used to be for oil something of the order of 200 to one for each barrel of oil you use to mine, to drill the oil. Well, you've got 200 barrels back now because of the level of technology that's necessary and energy involved all around to get it somewhere to transport it in huge ship, tankers and so on, locate it, refine it, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:05:51] Your energy returns dropping down into the teens, the 10s and 20s. And there's a strong argument from Charlie Hall's work that once you get down to a ratio of about five, you can no longer have a sophisticated civilization because you're putting all your energy into getting energy out. You have a trivial amount left over you can actually do productive work with. Yeah. Of course, the more energy you need to get that energy, the more energy you need to get that energy. You see what I mean? And it's sort of like it. And then ultimately, yeah, you go.

[00:06:20] I mean, if you go back to the. Our demand for energy is brought on by our demand for energy and so it just steamrolls. Yeah, it's an essential part of the feedback to enable us to have, I mean, I'm using a word free energy in a sort of thermodynamic sense. And energy you can use for other purposes, a store of energy you can then employ to do other work. It's the need of energy to get energy in the first place. Right.

[00:06:46] And if we go back to the, this is going to be going on here a bit, but if you go back to the agricultural days, I always do, yeah. 200 years, 200, 300 years ago, a major part of the reason why people, the majority of people were in farming was that that was the main source of energy. And you had, you know, 70% of the population involved in farming enabled 30% to be not involved in farming.

[00:07:09] Now we're down to the stage where it's 2% involved in farming to allow the other 98% to not be involved in farming. But if we go to the stage. Of which an increasing percentage, by the way, are going to be involved in arming. I think you were right. That was a Freudian slip if ever there was one, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's the dilemma. And if you ignore that, you ignore that at your peril. Right. And of course, we are ignoring it. Well, yeah. But then is it, I mean, if we are ignoring it, are we foolish too?

[00:07:36] So here's Donald Trump saying, you know, he wants more fossil fuels. But if, I mean, hence my question, is it still, is it cheaper than renewable energy? Yeah. And will it always be thus? So the answer to the last question. Until we get down to that, your point about where it's, you know. Yeah. It definitely won't be cheaper at some point when you, if you, you're never going to,

[00:08:02] one of the lines about the Stone Age is the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones. And we found an alternative form of technology. But the fossil fuel age won't run out when we run out of fossil fuel either, because there'll be fossil fuels located in such depths, in such difficult situations, so hard to find, so difficult to drill for, and then expensive to ship and so on, that the amount of energy we use to get that resource will be less than the amount of oil we'll get out of it. Yeah.

[00:08:31] And there are some circles of colleagues of mine that keep me in touch with us. Some of them are claiming that the North Sea is already at that point. In other words, the amount of energy you put in to get oil out of the North Sea is such that you are not getting any net energy back. You're changing the form of the energy to some extent, but you're not getting any new energy, net energy back out. And that is an energy to be usable.

[00:09:00] The source of energy must give you more output than you need to put in to get it. And if we get past that point, then it doesn't matter. There's no point drilling for it. So, OK, but there's still an incentive. We're just looking. We forget about the planet for a second, which seems to be the... Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, I joined everybody else. Yeah, I mean, it seems to be the way now. Who cares about the planet? Well, it has. What's the planet ever done for us? It has gone down the pecking order a bit, hasn't it? So, Donald... But, I mean, even so, here's Donald Trump saying, well, OK, he wants lower energy costs.

[00:09:29] It's actually part of his, you know, inflation-proofing the country. If America can have lower energy costs, then that'll bring down prices for Americans and ultimately bring down the price of eggs, which are now $5 for a dozen. That's... I can see why Americans are getting upset. If you look at egg prices, which everyone keeps on getting... All this stuff he's doing, what about eggs? Well, because eggs have gone from about $1.12 before the pandemic up over $5 now for a dozen eggs. So, you can see why everyone's getting upset.

[00:09:59] Anyway, that's me rambling on instead of you. Well, that's actually useful ramble. But the... If he's got this idea that he's going to have cheaper energy... I mean, if you're an investor in America in energy, you're not going to want to sell it at Donald Trump's, hey, let's make it cheap to beat inflation local price, because energy is traded on an international market. Surely, if they just extract more oil, all they're going to do is affect the global oil price, aren't they?

[00:10:28] Well, in fact, this is another issue about oil. And remember the old... There's a great old... Was it Mobile? Commercial of United Aussie? Oils ain't oils. You're talking about lubrication oil in that particular advertisement case. But, yeah, the different grades of oil have different refining needs. And, again, this is stuff I'm not an expert on, but I see friends who are, who write these things. And apparently most of the oil that America's getting out of fracking,

[00:10:57] they can't actually refine in their own country because their refineries are set up, I think, for a heavier grade of oil. They're all coming out of... You know, when you talk in terms of heaviness, you're talking about how many carbon atoms there are per... for the hydrogen atoms. And if you go from methane, you've got one carbon atom and four hydrogen. You go up to the next one, you've got... I think it's ethylene, I'm not sure. So two carbon atoms and six hydrogen and so on.

[00:11:24] So the heaviness relates to how much carbon there is inside there. And there are also issues about the level of sulfur inside the fuel and all this sort of jazz. But anyway, the American... When you set up a refinery, you set it up to suit not just a specific... a range of oil grades, the optimum efficiency for the whole system. And outside a certain range, you simply can't process that stuff. You're set up for, you know, something with 10 carbon atoms. You get something with two.

[00:11:51] You're fracking your techniques to catalyse and so on aren't going to work. So the American refineries are apparently set up for a heavier grade of oil and they've got to export their shale oil to get it refined elsewhere and back again. So inevitably, they've got to export a lot of what they're producing. But even so, even if they were refining it locally, unless they had some sort of price controls, which I guess, you know, they do that. But why would you invest in serving your domestic market if you could make more money investing in higher prices overseas?

[00:12:20] It just makes no sense to anybody. Yeah, well, making no sense seems to be a career move these days. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, none of it makes any sense. So he's not going to succeed in this then. His plan, let's make fossil fuels cheaper by having more of it locally. I mean, if he wanted to, of course, he could say, well, okay, let's build oil refineries for our shale oil. Let's ramp it up big time. Let's invest in destroying the planet.

[00:12:49] Let's put a bit of government money behind it. But, I mean, that would be a huge investment, I suspect. Oh, you're building an oil refineries. You're talking in the billions. Each time you talk about a refinery. So, yeah, it's a huge investment to do and it takes time and you've got to have the right engineers available. So all these things are things which American capitalism has run down over the last 40 years by, you know, caring more about share buybacks than it does about investment.

[00:13:12] So, you know, getting MVAs to run an oil refinery would be an amusing experience for those watching from the outside at a safe distance. So the argument often given is that we will always need oil, we'll always need fossil fuels because we need that base load. And we're not going to get that with renewables. Renewables sometimes create too much energy, sometimes they don't create enough.

[00:13:39] And the interesting thing is that sometimes there is too much renewable energy and you have negative power prices. Do you remember during the pandemic, oil went negative because these oils… It was destroyed. Nowhere to store it. So you couldn't ramp down the production facility. So, yeah, so the price went negative. But, I mean, actually in renewables, that could be a good thing, couldn't it? Because that would be the drive for more investment in alternative storage technologies.

[00:14:08] So if we had an oversupply of renewables at certain times of the day, then you'd say, well, okay, it's costing… It's, you know, we're not making any money out of this. What we need to do as the provider or an opportunity for somebody else to take that energy at a negative price and say, well, this is great. This is subsidising our investment in storage capability, whether it's batteries or whether it's… I think if you're relying upon negative prices in a market system… You think that's a problem? It ain't going to be sustainable, okay?

[00:14:38] It'll get away from it for a while. But negative prices don't do much for the person supplying it with… Supplying it with it. You know, you need to get to the point where you can make positive prices out of everything and still have a functional system. But if you… Well, I mean, I can see the reason for that argument. But if you say, well, okay, let's produce enough renewable energy to service the needs of most of the country most of the time, you are going to hit spots. You know, if you're doing that, so you can say, well, we don't need the baseload because we can do that ourselves.

[00:15:06] The only way you're going to hit the baseload is by making sure you've got an overcapacity. And if you've got an overcapacity, you are at some point going to have to say, well, we can't sell this stuff. We might as well give it away. Now, there's a real problem. I mean, I'm an informed amateur on the outside of the energy world, okay? But for a start, you've got to say, well, just how much of your energy is provided by renewables now and what would be the need to replace?

[00:15:33] And the answer is about 85% of our energy still comes from non-renewable sources, from fossil fuels fundamentally. So the renewable, so-called renewable, which is both… You know, in that we lump together hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear. That only bumps around about the 15% to 17% node. So if we don't have the oil, we lose 85% of our energy capacity. And that's the end of Western civilisation.

[00:16:01] And this is as it stands at the moment. And that's one of the reasons that people like me on Lombor can go on and prattle on about how we've got to get the energy right. And focusing on the cheapness of fossil fuels relative to renewables, which have unreliable elements. You can't get the load right. You can't get the frequency of the electricity coming out of it. All those sorts of things.

[00:16:28] But the thing is, we're two problems with relying upon fossil fuels. And this comes back to the point we were talking earlier about giving up on climate change. Necessarily adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And you're also reducing the stores at such a rate that at some point it will be too expensive in energy terms to try to get energy out of fossil fuels. So those are the two dilemmas.

[00:16:55] On top of the fact we currently rely upon fossil fuel energy sources for 85% of our energy needs. And also things like you need these things to make concrete, to make a whole range of products. We rely on plastics. All this stuff you need fossil fuels to make. You can't. Well, one of these days will work out a way of making artificial plastic, sure.

[00:17:22] But at the moment you need carbon-based fuels to make a huge part of the product range in which we take for granted in a capitalist economy. Right. But do we need it in such large volumes, I guess, is the question. And there has to be an alternative, doesn't there? But I want to talk more about this idea of storage, though.

[00:17:40] Because I feel like that is, you know, if you're going to make steps forward, how you store excess capacity given the peaks and troughs of demand for any system is important. You know, whatever you're talking about, whether you're talking about rail traffic or road traffic or energy supplies, it's the same, isn't it? How do you cope with the peak? Because coping with the peak is what creates the cost. You have to build capacity for the peak.

[00:18:07] So how do we do that if we're looking at renewables? Because in a way it's sort of a bit easier, isn't it, with oil because it can just easily be stored. It just sits in a tank. So we'll look at that when we come back on the Debunking Economics podcast. This is the Debunking Economics podcast with Steve Keane and Phil Dobby. So, Steve, is this idea of coping with peak, is that one of the biggest problems?

[00:18:37] I take your point that, you know, we are a long way from having to worry about this because 85% of our energy needs are still met with fossil fuels. But if we want to correct that so that we can, I don't know, survive. Just an aspiration I have. What a foolish idea. What a survival done for us. Well, and preferably not on Mars either. So anyway, I'm sorry, I even brought that up. The conversation is going to go off our whole tangent now.

[00:19:03] But if we obviously want to get rid of fossil fuels as much as we possibly can, we are going to hit this peak and trough answer with renewable energy, aren't we? And how do we get over that? Well, again, the whole area of storage is much more complicated than people think. Battery storage is feasible. But if you look at this as a disputed area, I've got people like Simon Meitschow who argue that the amount of energy we need to store in battery format

[00:19:33] to be able to use solar and wind, so-called renewable energy sources, as a complete replacement for what we're doing now. Well, he's calculated that far because I think he allows something like about a unit of months of energy storage. He gets disputed from people who say we can get away with a week of energy storage or a couple of days.

[00:19:54] But the volume of materials necessary, again, because of the low-density issue of battery storage compared to having it in an oil tank, potentially exceeds what we have available on the crust to actually mine those minerals. So we have all these issues that most of us don't think about because we don't have the training to think about them. And that's things like the frequency.

[00:20:23] If you're using it, you're getting electric power out. Then you need to main stuff at the 50 hertz, 50 cycles per second frequency that we have set our infrastructure up to cope with. And then if you have – that's easy to do when you've got it coming out of one gigawatt or two to five gigawatt power station,

[00:20:44] where it all comes out with everything is controlled by very powerful machines to regulate the frequency and the amplitude and maintain consistency and so on. Then when you go to having thousands of people's rooftop solar, each coming out at different timings in that cycle, there are enormous energy engineering issues in trying to tie that all together. It can be done, but it's far, far more difficult than people think.

[00:21:14] And it would be nice if we started down it, wouldn't it? So, I mean, that is scary, though, if we say that the ability to store with batteries just is a fanciful dream because there's just not the minerals in existence to cope with the demand we would create for it. That's one – I mean, this is a disputed area. So you have Simon Maitre on one side saying that – I think a guy's name is Stephen Hoxtra. I'm not sure, but a Dutch academic arguing the opposite, and they're fighting over this issue.

[00:21:43] And it is a critical one for the future in the sense that if we think we're going to go down that direction and Simon is right, then it's a dead end. If Hoxtra is right, then, OK, we can keep on doing it. But we still don't know. There are other alternatives, of course. I mean, you know, there's like pump storage. So you pump water up into a reservoir and then use hydroelectricity to let hydroelectricity down, anything to drive the turbines, which obviously is a very inefficient way because you're pumping water back uphill.

[00:22:12] In fact, from what I've seen, again, talking with engineers, that is probably the best form because it's easily reversible. It's – the thing is then you need to have, you know, storage facilities, six things we think we call them mountains, which are going to enable you to have one, you know, one dam high, one dam low, and then pump up between the two and store sufficient power to mean that the amount of the high can transfer down to the low

[00:22:38] and give the energy needs for whatever civilization, component of civilization you've attached to it at the bottom. All these things are huge engineering tasks. The Snowy River scheme all over again. Look how it built a nation, Steve. So it's an opportunity there. It's not going to happen in the United States, of course, and it's not going to happen in the Netherlands either. They might have a bit of difficulty with it, but places are in Scotland. The mountains here are huge. You've got to get down to eye level to be able to see them, but they're there somewhere. So that becomes a problem.

[00:23:06] But is it the role then of – in all of this, is it the role of government to say, well, okay, we need to step in. Maybe there's an opportunity for free enterprise to build, you know, new initiatives that are green energy related. But the role of government is to look after storage. And the reason I mention that is because – let's look at gas, for example, in the UK.

[00:23:29] We lost a lot of gas storage because when the gas industry went from being British gas to being private companies, Centrica inherited this huge gas storage underneath the North Sea and they closed it down. And why wouldn't they, of course? Because they have no incentive, no commercial incentive to keep stuff stored. Because if you have an efficient storage system that's coping with your peaks and troughs, you can't charge more at peak time.

[00:24:00] So there's no incentive on them to do that. It's almost got to be the government. And I feel like if the government was to say around the world, well, okay, we're going to look at the storage issue here for renewable energy. We'll find a way of equalizing things out so we can cope with the troughs because we'll be servicing them with the needs from the peak. That also gets there over the other issue that if you've got a whole load of people doing different things to try and service our needs,

[00:24:27] who's actually there saying, well, actually, we haven't got enough or we've got too much? How is it all regulated? You may say, well, okay, we're going to leave it to private enterprise to try and meet our needs for replacing that fossil fuel industry. And you may say, okay, so we've got an 85% to replace. And everyone goes full at it that's commercially viable until you reach about 60%. And then people start to lose interest. Who's actually policing reaching that goal?

[00:24:56] And it seems like one way of doing that would be to say, well, okay, let's provide the storage capability so that at least we have a handle on where we are in that percentage. And we are reducing the – and we're buying from suppliers who oversupply at certain times. And so we're helping their commercial models. Is that the best way for the government – you see what I'm getting at? Is that the best way for the governments to get involved? Yeah, but it's not going to happen under the current administrations, is it?

[00:25:21] I mean, this is the point that Avner Offa covers in his – the public-private divide. There's a point at which the returns on some industries are so far in the distance that if you're trying to do it for a profit and you've got to also borrow the money to do it, you're not going to do it because your returns simply aren't there. And that applies to long-lived things like we used the example of sewage in an earlier discussion, but equally for power storage and so on.

[00:25:49] And those are the things which – the length of time it takes to build the facility versus the time you get a return from charging a market price is going to mean it doesn't get done in the first place.

[00:26:03] And those are the sorts of things where you want the government to be doing stuff where the return is too far in the distance and where organisations that have to borrow money, which does not include the government, will face far too large compounding effect of interest over time, whereas the government doesn't – can create the money. This is what Ford and Edison made in the case for the muscle shoals. It's hydroelectric scheme way back in the 20s.

[00:26:28] If you get the private sector to do it, you have the compounding of interest over time, which makes it uneconomic. And most of the gain goes to people who do nothing to build the actual facility, do it with the government. The government can create the money, which Edison and Ford both understood, unlike modern capitalists. And therefore, you'll get it done. So it's two things. The long time to return, which rules out a lot of private sector involvement.

[00:26:54] And then secondly, the fact that you don't have to pay interest on government-created money to build things like the muscle shoals. Hydroelectric – any of the plants we're talking about now, you could do it that way. But in the political environment, that simply isn't going to happen. But most of the energy, of course, in the United States is from private investment and private enterprise.

[00:27:17] And in the U.S., well, Europe is paying double what the U.S. is for its energy, which obviously is a – and Donald Trump wants it. Long may that continue as far as he's concerned. More of it. Cheaper and for good reason. Because obviously, paying double for your energy is a massive drag on your comparative productivity, doesn't it? I mean, that – That comes back to my old cliché. It's getting to be old now.

[00:27:46] Labour without energy is a corpse. Capital without energy is a sculpture. So energy is absolutely critical input. And if you get energy at half the cost of somebody else, you have an enormous advantage over them. An enormous advantage, though. I mean, when it's so crucial. So Europe's never – I mean, in this brave new world where, you know, it's every – the real – I mean, Donald Trump obviously wants to make all prices very clear. He doesn't want subsidies.

[00:28:13] So if Europe is facing higher costs because of energy and so it feels like it perhaps needs to subsidise or introduce tariffs, Donald Trump's going to go, no. That's not going to be the way. You've just got more expensive goods. We're going to produce everything for the world because our energy is cheaper. I mean, that's ultimately the conclusion to what he's saying, isn't it? Definitely back in the day of national rivalries and the globalisation is dying a fairly painful death at the moment. So, yeah, it's national competition.

[00:28:43] Pardon me. I'm just finding it hard to cope with everything these days, taking over Canada, taking over Greenland, taking over Mexico. I'm wondering if I'm back in the 19th century. And Panama. And Panama. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that's just the list so far. Obviously, it's a work in progress. And the other Gulf of America. Yeah. Yeah, no. Fantastic. And then all the tech companies follow on and start changing on Google Maps, et cetera. Yeah, yeah. Because presumably they're running scared. I mean, it is a bizarre world.

[00:29:09] But in amongst all of this, even before Donald Trump came on board, we were still easing our way a little bit. I'm going to talk in a second about the Energy Transition Index, which is how we measure how each country is progressing. And look, things have definitely slowed down. So have we lost interest? We'll look at that in just a second. So, Steve, if we look at the Energy Transition Index, which looks at how various countries are moving to more sustainable energy systems, it's published by the World Economic Forum.

[00:29:37] So if we look at 2024, the score, doesn't matter what the score is, but the higher the score is, the better. And the change since 2015, I think, is the important one. So Sweden, well in the lead, quite a hilly country, lots of water. So they've got a bit of a natural advantage. They scored. They are the number one ranking. 78 is their score. Since 2015, they've gone up 5.2. If you look at the UK, 66.

[00:30:06] It's in 13th place. And since 2015, it's moved up 1.3. Now, the UK would say, well, we're quite progressive in this sort of stuff. We're putting money into it. But they are moving very little. The United States, obviously, 64. They're in 19th place. But actually moved 3.6 places since 2015. But, you know, there has been a green energy plan, of course, in place there. So, yeah, it feels like everything has slowed down. I mean, these are, you know, pretty.

[00:30:36] Finland is one of the best, actually, for moving forward. 75, it's scored. It's moved to 8.3. So, actually, it's progressed. That and Estonia are the two countries that have progressed the most. But most of them, just very incremental change. It's like we don't care anymore. Well, we haven't ever cared. And this is the – if you look at who's won the debate over whether we do anything on climate change, the denies have won. So, you know, I've given up in arguing over the whole issue because you're trying to persuade people

[00:31:04] to do something differently than what they're doing at the moment. They haven't changed. So, you say, you're going to hit a brick wall. You're going to hit a brick wall. You're going to hit a brick wall. Okay. I might go buy myself some shock absorbers for hitting the brick wall. It's got to that point. And there's certainly the election of Trump and what's happening with Starmer go for growth in the UK, the European Union's paralysis ever since they stuffed up their cheap energy from Russia. You look at all and think, okay, we tried to warn you.

[00:31:34] You don't believe it's happening. That's fine. We're on the same planet, which is a problem. But we're going to do our best to survive what you're about to experience. And that's the attitude I can find amongst climate scientists in general. It is both outrage and resignation at the same time. Yeah. Well, Mario Draghi did try and tackle this a bit, didn't he? In his report, which wasn't on energy, it was about improving competitiveness, European competitiveness, particularly against the United States. How timely was that without him knowing actually what was just around the corner,

[00:32:03] because it was the early part of last year. But he did talk about issuing $800 billion a year increased investment in energy by Europe and through the issuance of European bonds, which is the idea that Europe might actually work together as against each other. Because the big problem they've got, and this was a point he highlighted in his report, every country's got its own energy policy. It makes its own energy purchases. It builds its own energy infrastructure.

[00:32:30] So there's no economies of scale and no cohesion through all of that. So actually, if they developed a cohesive plan, funded it by the issuing of European bonds, then they could make headway. And maybe, I feel like Europe, they're certainly talking about that sort of collective action for defence, because that's the sort of immediate risk. But hopefully, if they do that, they'll look at energy in the same way as well.

[00:32:56] So we actually have a more united Europe, which actually might be a good thing when we can argue the toss over the euro. But the idea that there's a more common approach, a more commonality, and more shared funding across Europe would be a positive thing for European productivity, for European defence, and for European energy, wouldn't it? You're standing for Parliament. I am standing while I'm saying this. But I mean, this is my big hope.

[00:33:24] It's got to be the hope, hasn't it, that Europe pulls itself together across so many levels. Yeah. Sorry, just a duck. There's a pig flying by outside. Well, I'm sorry. I just don't mean... There's this disease of cynicism when you're well informed upon something everybody else is ignorant about, and that's the issue of people working in climate change right now. And, yeah, everything we needed to do, we should have started in 75.

[00:33:54] It's now 2025. That's actually when the limits to growth said we should... If we redirected everything starting in 1975, we could have a smooth, sustainable future. And, you know, it's when it said delay it for 25 years and the same projects, policies will not work. We've delayed it for 50. And therefore, when we realise that, in fact, carbon dioxide does raise the globe's temperature, that the climate is different to the weather,

[00:34:22] that the climate, when it changes, will mean everything which we have is in a sedentary location now is going to be in the wrong location and exposed to energy from the biosphere, which was not built to cope with. Too late. We're going to find out the hard way. We will find out the hard way because we don't believe it. So there was the Department of Energy Security and did a net zero public attitude tracker, or does. These are the figures. This is in the UK.

[00:34:49] From summer 2024, so these are UK numbers, 80% of people said that they were very or fairly concerned about climate change. Yeah. It's a high number, but down from 85% in 2021. So 85% down to 80% in just a few years. Many are saying it's not worth making changes if other countries are not doing the same. So that's gone from 32% to 35%.

[00:35:16] So, you know, decreasing concern. More is someone else's fault. And then we just don't trust what we're being told. So 57% trust the government on providing accurate information on climate change. Just 57%. So, you know, only just the majority. Only 43% trust newspapers and websites. And perhaps, understandably, only 18% trust social media. Well, you'd assume that's gone down now since Elon Musk's taken over X.

[00:35:45] 32% believe that the media exaggerates the impact of climate change. And that has been rising. Just feedback from journalists I'm actually dealing with. They've told me that it's actually impossible to get the editors to worry about climate change. So working journalists trying to get stuff published on climate change find that their editors say, no, the public's not interested. So ironically, people think the media is exaggerating it.

[00:36:15] It's almost impossible to get, you know, an article. Well, not impossible. You get a few articles turning up on climate change and so on. But, in fact, the public's interest has disappeared just when it's about to become critically obvious that, hey, this is a big news story. It's because they've been going on and we're not seeing any progress. And so everyone's been getting worn down by it like you are, obviously. So are there quick wins, though? So the idea, for example, of going nuclear.

[00:36:41] Does that, you know, that's one Labour undertaking that they want to push ahead with in the UK. So they want to cut the red tape. Actually, I find that a bit of worrying, actually, cutting red tape on things that involve splitting the atom. But there we are. I feel like there should be quite a bit of red tape around that. But that is, I mean, that is very much the, you know, the focus. We'll just build more nuclear, as France has, for example. Is that a sensible step forward? Well, again, it's a sensible step forward. But how fast can it be done?

[00:37:10] I mean, the analogy is that my pro-nuclear engineer followers, and I've got quite a few of them, push is that we need to treat putting out nuclear power in the same way we treated putting out warships during World War II. When World War II began, America had virtually nothing resembling a decent fleet. They then started pumping out ships at a ludicrous rate, what are called the Liberty ships from memory.

[00:37:38] And a dramatic decision to produce them on an industrial scale, and that was done. The same thing is needed for nuclear. But, of course, it's just as far away from that as we are from understanding the energy-invested issue in oil. So we're flying blind. And it needs heavy investment. That's the problem, isn't it? Yeah, it's a gigantic investment.

[00:38:03] The regulatory issue, and again, this comes down to how much people's knowledge is based on past experiences like Chernobyl, like Three Mile Island. The modern nuclear reactors are designed in such a way that if they fail, they stop operating. They don't melt down. So there's a whole range of areas where the regulation was necessary for earlier technology, and it's not necessary now.

[00:38:32] So that's one area where I support a fair bit of the deregulation push, one of the few. But it's still, even if you're the most optimistic, you've got to be turning these things out like we did warships in World War II. And we're miles from doing that. So in that sense, even though it's got all the issues of fragility and unreliable power sources, daylight versus wind, it's faster.

[00:39:01] If we need to make a rapid replacement for the energy we're getting from fossil fuels, if we finally realise it's necessary, the fastest way at the moment is the solar and wind. But the sustainable way in the future, according to my engineer friends, is nuclear. And, you know, the thing about doing nuclear is you need a functional society to do it. And I'm wondering how long we're going to have that.

[00:39:27] Well, I don't think we do, do we, as the last only a month, as the last or five weeks has shown us. It's very easy for the world to become very dysfunctional very quickly. And things that are very, very important are sideswiped by a power grab and a finance grab by people with money. It's a scary place. Another conversation for another day. All right. We'll leave it there. Okay.

[00:39:52] And look, next time we're going to be put right on the production processes. Oh, yes. So we've got Brian, have we? Yeah. Good. Okay. Brian Hanley, who says every time we talk about production, we've got it all wrong. So he'll explain it all to us next week on the Debunking Economics Podcast. We'll see you then. Okay. Bye. The Debunking Economics Podcast. If you've enjoyed listening to Debunking Economics, even if you haven't,

[00:40:21] you might also enjoy The Y Curve. Each week, Roger Hearing and I talk to a guest about a topic that is very much in the news that week. It's lively. It's fun. It's informative. What more could you want? So search The Y Curve in your favourite podcast app or go to ycurve.com to listen.