Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Robert Bryce discuss the topics from his latest book, “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations,” the current audacity of the zero-emissions agenda, its effects on the developing world, the feasibility of coal and nuclear power, the catastrophic problems related to wind and solar power, and the positive vision for the future we can all share, should our institutions finally drop the doomsday narrative.

Robert Bryce is an author, podcaster, and film producer. He has been writing about energy, power, politics, and innovation for more than three decades. He is the acclaimed author of six books on energy and innovation, including most recently, A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. Bryce has given more than 400 invited or keynote lectures to groups ranging from the Marines Corps War College to the Sydney Institute as well as to a wide variety of associations, universities, and corporations. His articles have been published in dozens of publications including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Real Clear Energy, The Hill, and Guardian. Bryce has also appeared on a panoply of media outlets ranging from Fox News to Al Jazeera.


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Roberts latest book: “A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations.” https://www.amazon.com/Question-Power-Electricity-Wealth-Nations/dp/1610397495

FREE to watch: “Juice: How Electricity Explains The World,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYMXNn56kTo

Today I'm speaking with author, podcaster, and film producer, Robert Bryce.

We discuss topics from his latest book, A Question of Power, Electricity and the Wealth of Nations, The current audacity of those pushing the 0 emissions net 0 agenda.

How those policies really affect the developing world and the poor in the West.

The feasibility and necessity of coal and fossil fuel and nuclear power now and into the foreseeable future, the catastrophic practical and environmental problems related to wind and solar, and a positive vision for the future we could all share voluntarily should our institutions finally drop their fear-mongering, tyranny-inducing doomsday narrative.

Let's start, well we can start wherever you want, but perhaps on the renewable energy front might be a good place to dive in.

Sure, and so well glad to talk about all those.

I mean those are all I'm passionate about those issues, those are my purpose, and so also just point out on my latest sub stack, I don't know if your team sent it to you, but the title was let them eat solar panels.

And the gist of it is that the US Export-Import Bank just funded a $900 million loan for a solar project in Angola.

Jordan, 60% of the people in Angola don't even have electricity.

Why, in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we're funding a solar project?

And the Ex-Im Bank's press release said to help Angola meet its climate commitments.

Yeah, well, you can be absolutely certain that the primary concern of the Angolans is to meet their bloody climate commitments.

You know, it's so interesting watching the leftists in particular on the environmental front rampage down this pathway because they're the same ideologues who constantly conspire to accuse conservatives and classic liberals of being colonialist in their endeavors.

And I've never seen a more colonialist endeavor in my entire life than the attempt to impose climate concerns on the developing world.

It is something bloody miraculous to see.

And to see the leftist sacrifice the poor to their idiot planetary concerns is an absolute bloody nightmare as far as I'm concerned.

So this situation in Angola sounds like it's tailor-made for that kind of idiocy.

So how is it the case that a solar power plant can become the number 1 concern on the international development front for Angola.

But this has been something that's been ongoing now for years where the World Bank and the other multilateral bilateral lending institutions are refusing to fund any hydrocarbon projects in developing countries.

And this latest example is the Angolan story where and President Biden bragged about it during a high dollar fundraiser.

He spoke at a high dollar fundraiser for the League of Conservation Voters in early June.

And he bragged about this saying, we're building a huge solar plant in Angola.

The average 60% of the people in Angola don't have electricity at all.

And you're bragging about, and the Export-Import Bank brags in their press release about we're helping Angola meet its climate commitments.

And this is a country that has enormous natural gas and oil wealth.

They should be allowed to burn those hydrocarbons.

This is, it's green colonialism, carbon imperialism, green colonialism, and numerous leaders, numerous analysts have pointed this out, but I just find it anathema.

I mean, electricity is the key to better life for everyone, everywhere on the planet.

And this is effectively telling the developing countries and 1 of the most desperately poor countries in Africa, no, you can't burn hydrocarbons.

It's, I think it's, I actually think it's criminal.

It's criminal levels of stupidity to do this to the developing world.

And so, so tell me, let's go into your background a bit so that everybody who's watching and listening knows a little bit about you.

So why don't you run through your biography and tell us all about how long you've been writing and how you've done your investigations.

Well, first things first, I'm a proud father.

We're empty nesters, which is a beautiful thing, but we have 3 great kids, Mary, Michael, and Jacob, and they're all thriving.

I wrote my first book on Enron, which came out in 2002.

I started my career in newspapering at the Austin Chronicle here in Austin in the late 80s.

That 1 thing led to another, led me into the book business.

My book on Enron was called Pipe Dreams, Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron.

Came out now 20 and a half years ago, and I'm still writing about Enron, in fact, these days.

So now 6 books later, my latest is A Question of Power, Electricity, and the Wealth of Nations.

Been very fortunate to have the same publisher, Public Affairs, the same editor, Lisa Kaufman, same agent, Dan Green, all have been incredibly supportive and helpful along the way.

So I consider myself incredibly fortunate, Jordan, to be able to write about, think about, do a lot of public speaking on energy and power.

These are the world's biggest industries, biggest and most important businesses.

And particularly now where there are so many political issues around all of these things and so much focus on climate and renewables.

And I think there are some positive trends, and I want to talk about those.

But I see a lot of bad policy happening, and particularly in Europe and here in the US, where Europe has just driven itself into the ditch.

And I mean, the rest of the world seems hell-bent on copying, let's say, Germany, which has had the most catastrophic energy and environment policies that you could possibly produce, short of shutting down the entire grid, not least because their energy prices are now 5 times what they should be.

Their energy provision is now unreliable.

They are dependent on Russia and other totalitarian states for their energy provision.

Energy is so expensive that electric car manufacturers are moving from Germany to China.

Germany is de-industrializing because the energy prices are too high.

Plus, and this is the kicker, They're actually polluting more per kilowatt than they were 15 years ago because since they've shut down their reasonable sources of electricity Including nuclear which they import anyways from France They're now turning to burning lignite for God's sake which is the dirtiest form of coal and so

You just, I'll give you 1, I'll make you even 1 better.

So you mentioned Lignite, and the company, it's RWE, if memory serves right, is the big utility.

So they're expanding a Lignite mine so they can provide more lignite, which is a low rank coal, emits more CO2 per kilowatt hour than any other form of power generation.

And to expand the lignite mine, Jordan, they took down a wind project.

I mean- So the irony is just remarkable, but to your point, yes, Germany has, more than any other country in Europe, has driven itself into the ditch.

They did it to themselves, and they're patting themselves on the back.

Yeah, well, the response seems to be, well, we didn't do stupid things fast enough.

Let's drive ourselves faster into the ditch.

But yeah, I mean, the coup de grace was them shutting down their last nuclear plants when they knew they were short natural gas, they knew they were no longer going to be able to import as much gas from Russia.

They went into the global LNG market and they snapped up as many LNG cargos and future contracts as they could.

Well, not only are they burning more lignite, more coal to your point, but they also priced out a lot of developing countries from importing liquefied natural gas, principally among them Pakistan, which is remarkable because Pakistan in February announced we're done with the LNG business We're going to burn we're gonna burn coal.

And so the Pakistanis are now saying we're gonna expand our coal-fired capacity So it's not just that this is affecting Germany.

It's having knock-on effects in the developing world.

Well, you know, when the German Chancellor came over to visit our idiot country, and he asked Trudeau if there was any possibility of increasing liquid natural gas imports from Canada, and of course Trudeau has done everything he can for the last 10 years to absolutely devastate the Canadian oil and gas industry and to make the export of liquid natural gas impossible.

And so Trudeau said, well, we can't make a business case for that, which is exactly the same bloody thing that he said when the Japanese leader came and asked for the same thing.

And the reason that he can't make a business case for it is because his government has produced policies that have made the export of Canadian fossil fuel resources, which are among the cleanest in the world, impossible.

And so I really don't understand how the hell this can be happening in Germany.

I mean, I'm not a cynic, although, you know, whatever naive optimism I had about the political process has certainly been disabused.

But everything that is happening in Germany is so stupid on the energy front that it's a kind of miracle.

Especially because, you know, you could give the damn devils their due if they were able to say, well, we made electricity 5 times as expensive, but we've cut emissions by a certain proportion and here's the net environmental benefit, which all of which I think is complete BS by the way.

But if they could say that, well, that would be something.

But for them to also have to say, oh, well, we've made electricity 5 times more expensive and unreliable, plus we pollute more.

You guys failed on every bloody front, including the ones you set up as your own principles, and yet nothing seems to happen.

And as you said, you know, Biden can come out and and and flourish his agreement with Angola to produce a kind of electricity they don't need at a tremendously elevated price while engaging in this neocolonial enterprise.

Like, I can't believe we can be this stupid.

I can't understand how this could happen.

So obviously Germany is this classic example of what not to do.

What's remarkable is what's happening here in the United States where California is following this example straight into the ditch.

And more than any other state in the US, California has emulated these policies of mandating renewables, of shutting down base load power plants.

They shut down the San Onofre nuclear plant a few years ago.

They almost succeeded in closing Diablo Canyon.

That was Newsom, I think finally sobered up and said, no, we need this plant.

Forget that it's nuclear, it's 9% of our electric generation production in California.

For all of the effort and all the money that California has spent, they've seen no reduction in their overall emissions from their electric generation sector.

Further, they have seen their electric prices rise faster than any other state in the United States since

And I've written about this on my sub stack.

Schwarzenegger signed a renewable energy mandate in 2008.

Since then, California's electric rates had gone up at a rate 3 times faster than that of the average in the United States.

It's unconscionable what they're doing, Jordan.

And this is in a state that is dominated by the Democratic Party, the liberals who say they care about the poor and the middle class.

And yet this, and this is what as my late brother John Bryson just grills my cheese.

California has the highest poverty rate in America, Jordan.

And yet they are sticking it to the poor and the middle class in a big way.

And where the peak electric rates in California now, 40, 50 cents a kilowatt hour.

I mean, this is fine if you live in a nice house that's on San Francisco Bay, but the low income people don't live there.

They live inland where they have to use air conditioning.

So all of this climate, I have to say it very clearly, nearly all of this climate policy, whether it's mandates for electric cars

the renewable mandates, rooftop solar, it's ruinously regressive.

I've been absolutely stunned to watch the left in their rampage to sacrifice the poor, to fail to save the planet.

You know, it's almost as unconscionable to me as the fact that the left again climbed in bed with the pharmaceutical companies so radically on the pandemic front.

You know, I mean, There's lots of things to be said in relationship to the so-called pandemic, which I also don't believe in, by the way, because I think it was a pandemic of totalitarian overreaction and not a pandemic of illness.

But the fact that the left itself was so supportive of the pharmaceutical companies was something just absolutely staggering to see.

And to see the left go after the poor so assiduously.

My understanding is this, you tell me what you think about this, is like if you really cared for poor people and you wanted their lives to improve, the best thing you could possibly do, as far as I can tell, is to drive energy costs down to the lowest possible level and to make energy provision your number 1 priority everywhere, especially in the developing world, but also for the poor in the West.

And the reason for that is that there's no difference between energy and work, and there's no difference between work and productivity.

You might respond, well, the planet has too many people on it.

And if you make people rich, then the rich people destroy the environment faster.

But both of those things are nonsense because we've seen a massive increase in population over the last 40 years and all the bloody doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich, who has more sins on his conscience than anyone else I can possibly think of, has said that by the year 2000 we were going to be out of commodities and everybody was going to be starving to death and we're not out of commodities and they're a lot cheaper and we have more food and people only starve to death for political reasons and as we've got more people we've actually got richer so that's all bloody complete backwards nonsense and then not only that is that the data that I've looked at, and I've looked at it with Bjorn Lomborg or through his eyes, is that if you can get people in the developing world up to about $5, 000 a year in gross domestic product on average, they start taking a long-term view of the future and start becoming concerned about local environmental issues and will take that burden on to themselves so that top-down centralist globalist utopians don't have to enforce all this idiocy on them.

You know, have I gone down some bloody right wing rabbit hole?

Or is this, is this just the stark truth?

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So I think the key for me, Jordan, in all of this discussion is electricity availability.

And this is, yes, energy in general matters, but More specifically, it's electricity.

And let me get on 1 point that I think is critical.

When we talk about compassion, we talk about humanism, because my favorite line these days is, energy realism is energy humanism.

And if we're gonna be realistic about energy and we're gonna be energy humanists, we have to look at the lens of energy and energy availability in particular and how it affects women and girls.

Electricity frees women and girls from the pump, the stove, and the wash tub.

You remember the new dealers here in the US when they wanted to bring electricity to rural areas.

Many of these politicians, George Norris, Sam Rayburn, George Norris from Nebraska, Sam Rayburn from Texas, Lyndon Johnson from Texas, they had seen their mothers wash clothes by hand.

They wanted them to be liberated from the wash tub.

They'd seen this kind of back breaking labor.

There are something like who's the Swedish demographer, He recently died.

He estimated there were 5 billion people in the world today, walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand.

He did that amazing video, I think he gave a TED Talk where he was talking about his grandmother and his folks had bought a washing machine as his grandmother came over.

When they first time they used the washing machine and she wanted to start it, right?

He said that in fact, he said, the washing machine to my grandmother was a miracle.

So when we think about electricity and energy availability, this is the key for women and girls.

Because if they don't have it, they are effectively slaves to the household chores.

And so, how's Rosling's 500000000.0 people in the world today are walking around in clothes that have been washed by hand.

That means there are 2 and a half billion women and girls who are washing those clothes by hand at every minute, every hour, every day that they're washing clothes by hand.

They're not in the library, they're not in school, they're not able to get a job outside the home.

this- They're also not contributing their brain power to the rest of us.

Can you imagine the economic value of 2 billion brains that are occupied in menial labor that could otherwise be freed up?

I mean, there's 2, 000 women in that group that are 1 in a million.

And the fact that we're locking up that degree of neural architecture in these menial tasks to not save the planet while we're making electricity more unreliable and more expensive, it's just, it's absolute, it's beyond incompetence into the realm of absolutely criminal, as far as I'm concerned.

just- Well, it's an excessive focus, I think, on the, look, here's my line, climate change is a concern.

We have to balance our action on climate with our other issues.

But the overall point I think that is absolutely essential is that regardless of what we think, what you and I think about CO2 emissions and how many parts per million is the perfect number, If we're facing more extreme weather, hotter, colder, more extreme, longer, I mean, it's been crazy hot here in Texas.

Well, if that's the case, we're gonna need a lot more energy, not less.

We're gonna need a lot more reliable energy, not less.

And yet the trends are for this effort to rely more on weather-dependent renewables.

So if we're facing, that's the other part, Jordan, if we're facing more extreme weather, why in the world would we make our most important energy network dependent on the weather?

I mean, It's like on the face of it, it makes no sense.

I mean, I don't want to get too technical.

And so I'd like you to push back on me as much as you could.

So this is what I've watched in the course of my lifetime.

So in the 1970s, we were going to run out of fossil fuels.

And that was a big bloody catastrophe for everyone for about 6 years after 1972 and the energy crisis.

And that turned out to be complete rubbish.

We're not running out of fossil fuels And we won't.

Partly, I mean, I think it was Exxon 2 weeks ago announced that they had a new fracturing technology that could double the known store of fossil fuels in the US.

Which is like, should have been front page headline news everywhere because, oh my God, we have twice as many fossil fuels as we thought.

And you Americans have become absolute bloody magicians at extracting out fossil fuel from these huge reserves that you have, like the shale beds, and it's not going to run out.

And that's partly because as the price goes up, people's incentives to extract out even more of the fossil fuel reserves we know are there increases and the technology geniuses just get better and better at doing it.

So we're not going to run out of fossil fuel.

The next thing that happened in the 1970s is global cooling.

And then the next thing that happened was global warming.

And then that turned out to be not true enough to be sustainable.

And somehow the narrative switched to, oh, well, it's climate change now.

So now you have a get out of jail free card for all of your idiot policies because of the climate is changing.

Now I've looked at the data on hurricane frequency, for example, There's no evidence whatsoever that hurricanes are increasing in frequency.

And to the degree that they're more expensive, it's only because people are building more and more expensive properties in hurricane-prone zones.

Then we also have Bjorn Lomborg's data showing that even if we accept the IPCC's climate predictions, and I don't necessarily think we should, that we will be, you know, some degree poorer than how much richer we would have been 100 years from now.

And so he thinks we can handle that no problem with an iota of intelligence and some, but then I'm wondering too, you tell me what you think about this.

Now the world has greened 15% since the year 2000 And that is a lot.

It's an area of leaf twice the size of the continental U.S.

And, interestingly enough, it's greened in exactly the areas that the climate catastrophists told us would be at most risk.

Because they presumed that the semi-arid areas, the arid areas would expand out into the semi-arid areas and the deserts would grow.

The Sahara is actually shrinking, especially on the south end, and The reason it's shrinking is because more carbon dioxide has allowed plants to thrive.

And when they thrive, they can close their breathing pores, which means they don't need as much water.

And now they're growing in semi-arid areas all over the world.

Well, let me interrupt because I think I'm not familiar with all the data you're throwing out there.

And here's how I keep my sanity, Jordan, is that I don't get into the, you know, what is how many parts per million is the right number?

You know, we can argue about the climate science.

Look, if we're going to agree that we need to do something, what's the best policy, right?

What do we if we accept that we are facing some risk?

So I've been saying now for more than a dozen years, natural gas to nuclear.

And this is the part that just, as I said, grills my cheese, chaps my hide on this Angola deal.

And it's on my sub stack, robertbreistatsubstack.com.

The Export-Import Bank of the United States is not funding a natural gas-fired power plant in Angola, even though Angola has trillions of cubic feet of available natural gas.

Instead, we're funding a solar panel project.

So if we're serious about reducing emissions and bringing more people out of the dark and into the light, which I think is incumbent on the wealthy countries to help developing countries do that.

Natural gas resources globally, Jordan, are just, they're not abundant, they're super abundant.

They're geographically widespread and there is an enormous amount of stranded gas.

Look at the huge offshore fields that have been discovered off of Africa, Tanzania, other countries, including Angola, enormous natural gas resources that have barely been tapped.

Well, some of that gas is gonna be exported into the global market, into Europe and advanced countries or developed countries.

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375. Sacrificing the Poor to NOT Save the Planet | Robert Bryce