Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Keep an open mind, but not so open that your
brain falls out. And there's a lot of stuff going
on in the world of science. But I should put
science in air quotes these days, because it's hard for
me to know exactly what science and what is some
college professor chasing a grant or a MacArthur Foundation genius award.
And so we need honest people out there who really
look at science and look at the intersection of science
(00:21):
and public policy and really tell us, you know, what's
going on, and also tell us what's not going on
that other people actually tell us is going on, but
the right So you know, we have guests on the show,
like like Roger Pilka, and we've had Bjorn Lomborg and
and just so many different people talking about energy, climate,
(00:42):
all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Robert Bryce and I'm so glad to have found and now.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Met doctor Matthew Willicky. And my pronouncing your last name right,
is it we or why? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:55):
But we kind of go both ways. Why leaky Willicky? Okay,
the elite ski and Polish.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
There you go, vilis Key, there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
And matt is the proprietor of a fabulous substack that
I am now a paid subscriber to called Irrational Fear
and you can find it at Irrationalfear dot substack dot com.
And we're just going to talk for a little bit
today about something that it seems like many scientists in
(01:22):
air quotes are afraid to say, and that is, we're
not all about to die because of climate change or
really any other thing. And don't be afraid of every
single thing around you the way they want you to
be afraid. All right, with that stupidly long opening, Matt.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Before we jump into specific articles of.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yours, like why do you have an Irrational Fear substack,
and also tell us a little about you.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Where do you teach, what do you teach?
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, so my background is in earth science.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
I have a PhD in isotope geochemistry from UCLA, and
that's essentially how we look at past climate. You know,
humans are relatively young species, so in order for us
to understand the past climates on the planet, we kind
of look at the rocks, the sediments, ice cores, tree rings.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
We call these proxies. So a lot of those come
from isotopes.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
We look at the rocks, we look at certain chemicals,
and we can say something about past environments.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
And so that was my expertise.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama
and the Department of Geological Sciences, and like you just mentioned,
I started to see that the rhetoric around climate change
was changing really dramatically, and particularly around like twenty twenty,
things just ratcheted it up so fast, and it went
from something we should be concerned about and we need
to study and do more work to the planet's going
(02:41):
to end in ten years. And here's a clock on
the side of a building. And I noticed that it
was having a huge effect on my students. I mean,
COVID was obviously having a huge effect, but the second
most anxious thing in their life when they started opening
up was climate. You know, young women would cry in
my office and tell me they're not to have kids
because they would feel guilty bringing a child into this world.
(03:03):
And so I kind of started saying, Okay, well, I
don't work in climate per se, but I'm affiliated with
it because I provide a lot of the ages of
rocks and things like that to the climate papers. I
review the papers, I review the funding applications, and so
I started to dig in a little bit and I
said well, the evidence must be as clear as day
if everybody, if this is the rhetoric now, And it
(03:26):
just wasn't that clear to me, And I started to
push back a little bit and teach my students that
this isn't all doom and gloom. In fact, if you
look at the human condition, we're in the best place
we've ever been in. I mean, in terms of feeding
are hungry, in terms of raising people out of poverty.
You know, a lot of that is access to cheap
and reliable energy. And they were really refreshed to hear
someone tell them that the planet wasn't going to ignite
(03:49):
in ten years. But my colleagues were furious, and I
realized that I was no longer accepted in the community.
I was a heretic because all of the funding agencies,
all of the journy ernals, they had already taken these
ideological stances, and if you go against this, you were.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Essentially kicked out of the club. Right.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
We talk about academia as being diverse, but it's definitely
not diverse in the in the realm of ideas, because
if you push back against climate change.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
You got kicked out very quickly. I saw the writing
on the wall.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
So I left, and I realized that I don't have
to be affiliated with anybody. I don't have to have
the chains of funding agencies, or the or the burden
of publishing in these in these publications that have taken
these ideological stances. I can be completely unchained and just
freely right. And people will appreciate my expertise from being
(04:37):
in academia, from my background, and they will be willing to,
you know, pay a cup of coffee to get this
information because they just don't trust the media anymore. And
so I saw this avenue and of substack, and that's
kind of been where I've been pursuing ever since.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Let's talk a little bit more macro for a second.
So I read a lot of this stuff, right, I've
been reading about, you know, climate change before the Left
was trying to scare us to death about it. I
find it a very interesting issue in a lot of ways,
especially because my interest, as much as in the science
is is in economics, and I find that climate change
is a way that the Left uses to try to
(05:14):
control the economy and dominate the energy industry and all
this stuff. So I've been paying close attention for a
long time, and I have found the corruption.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Of science in climate change.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
And I wasn't being sarcastic or hyperbolic when I said that.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I think there are a lot of professors who are.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I don't know if dishonest is too strong a word,
but they know they're fudging at least a little because
that's where the grant money is.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So there's that. And then also you had stuff like COVID.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Where Anthony Fauci and those quote unquote scientists who used
to be real scientists, by the way, the same way
that Paul Krugman.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Used to actually be an economist.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Right, these guys wrote this proximal Origins paper saying that
saying that it couldn't have come from a labe, while
simultaneously in emails to each other they were saying that
it could so. For you, as a PhD scientist, what
do you make of this corruption of science?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And why does it matter?
Speaker 4 (06:13):
It's the It's what drives me every single day because
it's the single most important thing in society to me.
I think science is what gives us the modern day
living that we have. It's it's the it's the foundation
of all of the advances and all of the benefits
we have, but if we don't trust in the scientific method,
(06:34):
science isn't a thing, it's not a belief, it's a method.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
It's a process. And if we don't trust.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
In that process and people start to lose faith in
that process, we're not going to gain the same advances
that we've been getting. And the next time we really
have to face a major obstacle, there's not going to
be really any experts out there to trust because everybody's
going to lose faith in everybody else. And I mean
it just that's what really motivates me is what I
call the postation or the bastardization of science right once,
(07:03):
and climate science is the poster child of it all.
I mean, we see that the healthcare industry and COVID
opened our eyes up pretty clearly to the healthcare industry
and pharma and things like that. But climate science has
been on this train for a long time.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
And we talk about.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Subsidies and money going into things like fossil fuels, it's
ten times more that goes into the green energy sector.
So this has been a huge amount of government funding.
And once that money gets involved, then there's no longer
data driven science. It's now become narrative driven science. They
will manipulate or cherry pick or suppress any data that
(07:40):
doesn't fit the narrative, and they will amplify the data
that pushes the narrative, and so they falsely make it
seem as though the science is settled and there is
no opposing views. And if there's people that are trying
to publish, they get in with the editors and they say, look,
if you're going to publish these opposing papers, we're not
going to put publish in your journal anymore. And so
(08:02):
there's back channeling things, and there's all this suppression of information.
It's it's completely gotten out of hand. And a climate
science is the perfect poster child of all of this, because,
like you said, it's perfect for government.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It's it's involved in everything.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
It's what you eat, it's where you travel, it's what
you drive, it's where you work, it's what you consume.
It's a perfect tool that gets involved in every aspect
of the economy, in every aspect of our daily lives.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
And it's just been completely bastardized.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So uh yeah, there's there's there's so much.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
There's so much there.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Let me ask you one more on this, and then
I want to move more specifically to climate science and
some of the stuff that you and that you wrote recently. So, uh,
as I'm thinking about politics infecting climate science, I recognize
we have a new administration coming in and these people
(09:01):
are going to have a very different view of so
called climate change. And you know, I'll tell you my view,
by the way, not that it matters. My view is
the climate always changes, Humans can have an impact, the
impact is not an existential threat, and most proposed solutions
(09:23):
are much much more expensive and harmful than any even
modestly likely outcome from climate. So that's just so you know,
that's where I am. But do you think that with
a federal government coming in that probably has a view
more like mine than like al gorese? Do you think
(09:44):
some scientists in air quotes are going to start looking
to write papers saying we're not all gonna die and
it's not true that hurricanes are getting worse and all
this stuff, because maybe there will be fun for what
coincidentally is honest science.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Yeah, I mean, that's that's that's the hope, right, And
and you know, I don't fault a lot of these
young academics. I you know, you go to graduate school,
you go postdoc, you're making no money, you finally get
a tenure track position.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You're going to kind of keep your head down. You
don't want to rock the boat.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
You know, there's a big self preservation instinct to just
kind of go along and get along. I've got a
big mouth, so I couldn't shut up enough. But that's
obviously why I didn't stay and get tenure. So I,
you know, I have a lot of respect for those folks.
I realize that the system is really kind of messed
up at the moment. But I'm hoping as if the
new administration goes to the funding agencies, to the NIH,
(10:43):
to the NSF and says, you have to get rid
of all of this garbage, ideology, verbage in here. Get
rid of it all so that when a young academic says, hey,
I've got some evidence that pushes back against some of
the things you published, They're not going to go try
to find some little tiny journal somewhere else to publish
it because they know that you're not going to publish.
And so if the new administration can really kind of
(11:04):
get all this ideology out of the funding agencies. I
think the journals will follow pretty quickly. The academic the
institutions are already going along. So my former institution, the
University of Alabama, got rid of all of its DII offices.
The entire state got rid of all of it in
a year after I had left and kind of spoke
up about things like that. And so if the dominoes
(11:28):
start to fall, they're going to fall quickly, right. But
I think it's going to really start with the funding agencies,
because the funding agencies are really the dominators. They control
where the money goes, what the research is, and they've
really taken these ideological stances and until we get that
out of there, but I think.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
The new administration will have a lot of control on that.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
This is government money, it's taxpayer money, and you know
it shouldn't have an ideology, should be data driven.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
We're talking with doctor Matthew Wilicki and his website is
called Irrational Fear. His substack is called Irrational Fear. So
if you just type in Irrational Fear substack, you'll find
it and you should become a paid subscriber.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Like I am, my.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Money's where my mouth is, so you should definitely do that.
So let's talk a little bit about a couple of
your articles, and we got.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
About five minutes left. But I actually think some of that.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Macro science stuff is every bit is important. The status
of the science industry is every bit as important as
this other stuff. And I'm trying to decide which one
of yours I want to focus on right now. I
think I want to go to one as maybe you're
next to last.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
The hidden cost of saving the planet, and it ties.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
In just you know, something I mentioned in passing before
that I think most so called solutions proposed by people
who think we have a big problem are far more
expensive than the problem is ever likely to be, and
they never look at their the costs of what they propose.
So why don't you talk about what you're teaching us here?
Speaker 4 (12:53):
Yeah, so this was really based on this kind of
mantra that we hear constantly pounded into us that renewables
are cheap, renew switching to renewables makes everything cheaper, and
electricity price is cheaper. Well, it's a real simple metric
that you can look. We could just look at the
percentage of total output from things like solar and wind
and compare it to the price per kilowatt hour. We'll
have to do some currency changes, so I just put
(13:16):
it all into US dollars. And if you see that
nations that have adopted more renewables actually have higher per
capita costs for electricity, and that goes across the commercial
industry and residential sectors. And if one thing that we
complain in the US all the time is that we've
lost our manufacturing sector, we need to bring back manufacturing jobs. Well, manufacturing,
(13:37):
by the essence of itself, it's energy intensive. You're taking
and building and making something that requires an intense amount
of energy. Throwing some subsidies to these companies to come
back here but then charging them something like five times
the energy cost per kilowatt hour that China or.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
India does doesn't make sense.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
They're not going to come back here and then go
bankrupt in a few years because of our enner costs.
If we talk about the new administration doing something to
bring back manufacturing jobs, the number one thing is to
make electricity prices and energy prices cheap for industry and
for manufacturing. That is a guarantee to bring back the jobs.
(14:15):
You don't need the subsidies. You don't need to throw
all the tax breaks. At that point. They will come
back because they will be profitable. That's why they have left.
And so, you know, all of this really ties back
to energy and climate policies. The fact that we're losing jobs,
the fact that we're losing huge sectors in our economy.
It all goes back to these policies that are pretending
(14:37):
to save the planet and all in the name of
it's going to be cheaper. And so, you know, I
just want to convince people that, look, I know that
the mainstream media keeps telling you this, but it's a
real simple plot to make. To just look at countries
and the amount of renewables they have and the price
they pay for electricity.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
And if you do that, there's an upward slope.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
The more renewables you have, the higher the electricity, the
higher the electricity costs, the lower the manufacturing and industry sectors.
It all ties together, and it starts with our policies
in terms of climate and energy.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
All right, we have two minutes left, so one comment
and then a follow up question. So the comment is
that Germany is the poster child for doing this wrong.
They've they've phased out their nuclear plants. They've been doing
more and more and more green for years and years
and years. And now Volkswagen just announced their firing ten
thousand people. And they're big chemical companies because chemical, chemical
(15:32):
engineering and that sort of thing very very very energy intensive. Right,
So Germany has always been thought of this kind of
industrial powerhouse.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
And they're crashing. Germany's in recession.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
It's because their energy prices are too high, because they
did exactly what the liberals want to do in the
United States. So I literally have about ninety seconds. What
I would like you to just explain, as you know,
as simply as you can. I think it would not
be obvious to the casual listener to these subjects. Why
(16:03):
renewables should be more expensive? Why energy produced from renewables
should be more expensive. After all, you put up the
solar power and the wind does the rest, and you
don't have to keep putting oil into it, So why
is it more expensive?
Speaker 4 (16:15):
So renewables, by their nature are both energy and material intensive,
So they it takes a lot of energy and materials
to make a silicon wafer and make the solar panels
and all of the metals and concrete that go into
the wind turbines. The second part is that it's not constant,
it's not on off, it's unreliable, so it requires all
of these backup systems in the grid where you're gonna
(16:36):
need all these fossil fuel what we call peaker plants,
because if you have a nice warm day but it's
cloudy and people are turning on their acs and there's
no wind blowing. The Germans came up with a word
for this. They have a whole term where the wind
and the sun doesn't shine, then you're going to have
to fire up all these plants, and so you need
all this redundancy in the system, which makes the system
(16:58):
so much more expensive. Are u that the best system
would be a nuclear based load and then some fossil
fuels and renewables here and there to help with peakers,
But there's no way you're going to produce baseload with
renewables and do it at any sort of affordable price.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And I think this is a key thing that listeners
need to understand. Wind and sun don't always produce energy.
The sun isn't always up, the wind isn't always blowing.
In fact, most places in the world are not very
well suited to either one. Right, most places, you know,
you get to the northern hemisphere where a lot of
people live. I mean, people who are putting up solar
(17:34):
in Minnesota and northern Germany are morons. They're just sacrificing
to their own religion. And you know, same with wind
all right. You know, West Texas is pretty windy and
a lot of open land, but not most places. And
but the key point that Matt just made is it
doesn't run all the time, and so you got to
(17:56):
have other sources of power. And that's part of the
reason renewable is so expensive. And by the way, if
your backup is a natural gas plant, you cannot shut
them down and then start them up again just in time.
You have to run them all the time by the
nature of the way these plants work. And so renewables
are not replacing and let's say natural gas, they're just
(18:17):
adding a very expensive layer on top of it. I'll
give you the last twenty nine seconds because I like
prime numbers.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah, I agree with you one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
I think there's for small applications they could have a
little bit of a purpose.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
But it's absurd to.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Think that we're going to be powering society and things
like AI technology with renewables awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Matt Wylicky's substack is called Irrational Fear Right Irrational Fear
dot substack dot com, or just go to my blog
at roscommensk dot com and you'll find all of this,
including the articles we were just talking about. Got links
to all of Matt's stuff. I'm really glad you're out
there doing what you're doing, you know. And it's also
I got to say, brave of you to take that
(18:57):
entrepreneurial leap away from the guaranteed page and go be
able to you know, be an entrepreneur without the safety.
Now that's pretty cool. Brave or crazy, we're going to
find out. Yeah, there's a fine line between the two.
It's good to meet you. I know you're local, so
hopefully we can get together in person some point.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Great talking to Russ, all right,
Keep an open mind, but not so open that your
brain falls out. And there's a lot of stuff going
on in the world of science. But I should put
science in air quotes these days, because it's hard for
me to know exactly what science and what is some
college professor chasing a grant or a MacArthur Foundation genius award.
And so we need honest people out there who really
look at science and look at the intersection of science
(00:21):
and public policy and really tell us, you know, what's
going on, and also tell us what's not going on
that other people actually tell us is going on, but
the right So you know, we have guests on the show,
like like Roger Pilka, and we've had Bjorn Lomborg and
and just so many different people talking about energy, climate,
(00:42):
all this stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Robert Bryce and I'm so glad to have found and now.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Met doctor Matthew Willicky. And my pronouncing your last name right,
is it we or why? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (00:55):
But we kind of go both ways. Why leaky Willicky? Okay,
the elite ski and Polish.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
There you go, vilis Key, there you go.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
And matt is the proprietor of a fabulous substack that
I am now a paid subscriber to called Irrational Fear
and you can find it at Irrationalfear dot substack dot com.
And we're just going to talk for a little bit
today about something that it seems like many scientists in
(01:22):
air quotes are afraid to say, and that is, we're
not all about to die because of climate change or
really any other thing. And don't be afraid of every
single thing around you the way they want you to
be afraid. All right, with that stupidly long opening, Matt.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Before we jump into specific articles of.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yours, like why do you have an Irrational Fear substack,
and also tell us a little about you.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Where do you teach, what do you teach?
Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, so my background is in earth science.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
I have a PhD in isotope geochemistry from UCLA, and
that's essentially how we look at past climate. You know,
humans are relatively young species, so in order for us
to understand the past climates on the planet, we kind
of look at the rocks, the sediments, ice cores, tree rings.
Speaker 3 (02:09):
We call these proxies. So a lot of those come
from isotopes.
Speaker 4 (02:12):
We look at the rocks, we look at certain chemicals,
and we can say something about past environments.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
And so that was my expertise.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama
and the Department of Geological Sciences, and like you just mentioned,
I started to see that the rhetoric around climate change
was changing really dramatically, and particularly around like twenty twenty,
things just ratcheted it up so fast, and it went
from something we should be concerned about and we need
to study and do more work to the planet's going
(02:41):
to end in ten years. And here's a clock on
the side of a building. And I noticed that it
was having a huge effect on my students. I mean,
COVID was obviously having a huge effect, but the second
most anxious thing in their life when they started opening
up was climate. You know, young women would cry in
my office and tell me they're not to have kids
because they would feel guilty bringing a child into this world.
(03:03):
And so I kind of started saying, Okay, well, I
don't work in climate per se, but I'm affiliated with
it because I provide a lot of the ages of
rocks and things like that to the climate papers. I
review the papers, I review the funding applications, and so
I started to dig in a little bit and I
said well, the evidence must be as clear as day
if everybody, if this is the rhetoric now, And it
(03:26):
just wasn't that clear to me, And I started to
push back a little bit and teach my students that
this isn't all doom and gloom. In fact, if you
look at the human condition, we're in the best place
we've ever been in. I mean, in terms of feeding
are hungry, in terms of raising people out of poverty.
You know, a lot of that is access to cheap
and reliable energy. And they were really refreshed to hear
someone tell them that the planet wasn't going to ignite
(03:49):
in ten years. But my colleagues were furious, and I
realized that I was no longer accepted in the community.
I was a heretic because all of the funding agencies,
all of the journy ernals, they had already taken these
ideological stances, and if you go against this, you were.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Essentially kicked out of the club. Right.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
We talk about academia as being diverse, but it's definitely
not diverse in the in the realm of ideas, because
if you push back against climate change.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
You got kicked out very quickly. I saw the writing
on the wall.
Speaker 4 (04:17):
So I left, and I realized that I don't have
to be affiliated with anybody. I don't have to have
the chains of funding agencies, or the or the burden
of publishing in these in these publications that have taken
these ideological stances. I can be completely unchained and just
freely right. And people will appreciate my expertise from being
(04:37):
in academia, from my background, and they will be willing to,
you know, pay a cup of coffee to get this
information because they just don't trust the media anymore. And
so I saw this avenue and of substack, and that's
kind of been where I've been pursuing ever since.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
Let's talk a little bit more macro for a second.
So I read a lot of this stuff, right, I've
been reading about, you know, climate change before the Left
was trying to scare us to death about it. I
find it a very interesting issue in a lot of ways,
especially because my interest, as much as in the science
is is in economics, and I find that climate change
is a way that the Left uses to try to
(05:14):
control the economy and dominate the energy industry and all
this stuff. So I've been paying close attention for a
long time, and I have found the corruption.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Of science in climate change.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
And I wasn't being sarcastic or hyperbolic when I said that.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
I think there are a lot of professors who are.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
I don't know if dishonest is too strong a word,
but they know they're fudging at least a little because
that's where the grant money is.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
So there's that. And then also you had stuff like COVID.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Where Anthony Fauci and those quote unquote scientists who used
to be real scientists, by the way, the same way
that Paul Krugman.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Used to actually be an economist.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Right, these guys wrote this proximal Origins paper saying that
saying that it couldn't have come from a labe, while
simultaneously in emails to each other they were saying that
it could so. For you, as a PhD scientist, what
do you make of this corruption of science?
Speaker 2 (06:11):
And why does it matter?
Speaker 4 (06:13):
It's the It's what drives me every single day because
it's the single most important thing in society to me.
I think science is what gives us the modern day
living that we have. It's it's the it's the foundation
of all of the advances and all of the benefits
we have, but if we don't trust in the scientific method,
(06:34):
science isn't a thing, it's not a belief, it's a method.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
It's a process. And if we don't trust.
Speaker 4 (06:39):
In that process and people start to lose faith in
that process, we're not going to gain the same advances
that we've been getting. And the next time we really
have to face a major obstacle, there's not going to
be really any experts out there to trust because everybody's
going to lose faith in everybody else. And I mean
it just that's what really motivates me is what I
call the postation or the bastardization of science right once,
(07:03):
and climate science is the poster child of it all.
I mean, we see that the healthcare industry and COVID
opened our eyes up pretty clearly to the healthcare industry
and pharma and things like that. But climate science has
been on this train for a long time.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
And we talk about.
Speaker 4 (07:17):
Subsidies and money going into things like fossil fuels, it's
ten times more that goes into the green energy sector.
So this has been a huge amount of government funding.
And once that money gets involved, then there's no longer
data driven science. It's now become narrative driven science. They
will manipulate or cherry pick or suppress any data that
(07:40):
doesn't fit the narrative, and they will amplify the data
that pushes the narrative, and so they falsely make it
seem as though the science is settled and there is
no opposing views. And if there's people that are trying
to publish, they get in with the editors and they say, look,
if you're going to publish these opposing papers, we're not
going to put publish in your journal anymore. And so
(08:02):
there's back channeling things, and there's all this suppression of information.
It's it's completely gotten out of hand. And a climate
science is the perfect poster child of all of this, because,
like you said, it's perfect for government.
Speaker 3 (08:15):
It's it's involved in everything.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
It's what you eat, it's where you travel, it's what
you drive, it's where you work, it's what you consume.
It's a perfect tool that gets involved in every aspect
of the economy, in every aspect of our daily lives.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
And it's just been completely bastardized.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
So uh yeah, there's there's there's so much.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
There's so much there.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
Let me ask you one more on this, and then
I want to move more specifically to climate science and
some of the stuff that you and that you wrote recently. So, uh,
as I'm thinking about politics infecting climate science, I recognize
we have a new administration coming in and these people
(09:01):
are going to have a very different view of so
called climate change. And you know, I'll tell you my view,
by the way, not that it matters. My view is
the climate always changes, Humans can have an impact, the
impact is not an existential threat, and most proposed solutions
(09:23):
are much much more expensive and harmful than any even
modestly likely outcome from climate. So that's just so you know,
that's where I am. But do you think that with
a federal government coming in that probably has a view
more like mine than like al gorese? Do you think
(09:44):
some scientists in air quotes are going to start looking
to write papers saying we're not all gonna die and
it's not true that hurricanes are getting worse and all
this stuff, because maybe there will be fun for what
coincidentally is honest science.
Speaker 4 (10:05):
Yeah, I mean, that's that's that's the hope, right, And
and you know, I don't fault a lot of these
young academics. I you know, you go to graduate school,
you go postdoc, you're making no money, you finally get
a tenure track position.
Speaker 3 (10:17):
You're going to kind of keep your head down. You
don't want to rock the boat.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
You know, there's a big self preservation instinct to just
kind of go along and get along. I've got a
big mouth, so I couldn't shut up enough. But that's
obviously why I didn't stay and get tenure. So I,
you know, I have a lot of respect for those folks.
I realize that the system is really kind of messed
up at the moment. But I'm hoping as if the
new administration goes to the funding agencies, to the NIH,
(10:43):
to the NSF and says, you have to get rid
of all of this garbage, ideology, verbage in here. Get
rid of it all so that when a young academic says, hey,
I've got some evidence that pushes back against some of
the things you published, They're not going to go try
to find some little tiny journal somewhere else to publish
it because they know that you're not going to publish.
And so if the new administration can really kind of
(11:04):
get all this ideology out of the funding agencies. I
think the journals will follow pretty quickly. The academic the
institutions are already going along. So my former institution, the
University of Alabama, got rid of all of its DII offices.
The entire state got rid of all of it in
a year after I had left and kind of spoke
up about things like that. And so if the dominoes
(11:28):
start to fall, they're going to fall quickly, right. But
I think it's going to really start with the funding agencies,
because the funding agencies are really the dominators. They control
where the money goes, what the research is, and they've
really taken these ideological stances and until we get that
out of there, but I think.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
The new administration will have a lot of control on that.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
This is government money, it's taxpayer money, and you know
it shouldn't have an ideology, should be data driven.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
We're talking with doctor Matthew Wilicki and his website is
called Irrational Fear. His substack is called Irrational Fear. So
if you just type in Irrational Fear substack, you'll find
it and you should become a paid subscriber.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Like I am, my.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Money's where my mouth is, so you should definitely do that.
So let's talk a little bit about a couple of
your articles, and we got.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
About five minutes left. But I actually think some of that.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Macro science stuff is every bit is important. The status
of the science industry is every bit as important as
this other stuff. And I'm trying to decide which one
of yours I want to focus on right now. I
think I want to go to one as maybe you're
next to last.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
The hidden cost of saving the planet, and it ties.
Speaker 1 (12:35):
In just you know, something I mentioned in passing before
that I think most so called solutions proposed by people
who think we have a big problem are far more
expensive than the problem is ever likely to be, and
they never look at their the costs of what they propose.
So why don't you talk about what you're teaching us here?
Speaker 4 (12:53):
Yeah, so this was really based on this kind of
mantra that we hear constantly pounded into us that renewables
are cheap, renew switching to renewables makes everything cheaper, and
electricity price is cheaper. Well, it's a real simple metric
that you can look. We could just look at the
percentage of total output from things like solar and wind
and compare it to the price per kilowatt hour. We'll
have to do some currency changes, so I just put
(13:16):
it all into US dollars. And if you see that
nations that have adopted more renewables actually have higher per
capita costs for electricity, and that goes across the commercial
industry and residential sectors. And if one thing that we
complain in the US all the time is that we've
lost our manufacturing sector, we need to bring back manufacturing jobs. Well, manufacturing,
(13:37):
by the essence of itself, it's energy intensive. You're taking
and building and making something that requires an intense amount
of energy. Throwing some subsidies to these companies to come
back here but then charging them something like five times
the energy cost per kilowatt hour that China or.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
India does doesn't make sense.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
They're not going to come back here and then go
bankrupt in a few years because of our enner costs.
If we talk about the new administration doing something to
bring back manufacturing jobs, the number one thing is to
make electricity prices and energy prices cheap for industry and
for manufacturing. That is a guarantee to bring back the jobs.
(14:15):
You don't need the subsidies. You don't need to throw
all the tax breaks. At that point. They will come
back because they will be profitable. That's why they have left.
And so, you know, all of this really ties back
to energy and climate policies. The fact that we're losing jobs,
the fact that we're losing huge sectors in our economy.
It all goes back to these policies that are pretending
(14:37):
to save the planet and all in the name of
it's going to be cheaper. And so, you know, I
just want to convince people that, look, I know that
the mainstream media keeps telling you this, but it's a
real simple plot to make. To just look at countries
and the amount of renewables they have and the price
they pay for electricity.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
And if you do that, there's an upward slope.
Speaker 4 (14:55):
The more renewables you have, the higher the electricity, the
higher the electricity costs, the lower the manufacturing and industry sectors.
It all ties together, and it starts with our policies
in terms of climate and energy.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
All right, we have two minutes left, so one comment
and then a follow up question. So the comment is
that Germany is the poster child for doing this wrong.
They've they've phased out their nuclear plants. They've been doing
more and more and more green for years and years
and years. And now Volkswagen just announced their firing ten
thousand people. And they're big chemical companies because chemical, chemical
(15:32):
engineering and that sort of thing very very very energy intensive. Right,
So Germany has always been thought of this kind of
industrial powerhouse.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
And they're crashing. Germany's in recession.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
It's because their energy prices are too high, because they
did exactly what the liberals want to do in the
United States. So I literally have about ninety seconds. What
I would like you to just explain, as you know,
as simply as you can. I think it would not
be obvious to the casual listener to these subjects. Why
(16:03):
renewables should be more expensive? Why energy produced from renewables
should be more expensive. After all, you put up the
solar power and the wind does the rest, and you
don't have to keep putting oil into it, So why
is it more expensive?
Speaker 4 (16:15):
So renewables, by their nature are both energy and material intensive,
So they it takes a lot of energy and materials
to make a silicon wafer and make the solar panels
and all of the metals and concrete that go into
the wind turbines. The second part is that it's not constant,
it's not on off, it's unreliable, so it requires all
of these backup systems in the grid where you're gonna
(16:36):
need all these fossil fuel what we call peaker plants,
because if you have a nice warm day but it's
cloudy and people are turning on their acs and there's
no wind blowing. The Germans came up with a word
for this. They have a whole term where the wind
and the sun doesn't shine, then you're going to have
to fire up all these plants, and so you need
all this redundancy in the system, which makes the system
(16:58):
so much more expensive. Are u that the best system
would be a nuclear based load and then some fossil
fuels and renewables here and there to help with peakers,
But there's no way you're going to produce baseload with
renewables and do it at any sort of affordable price.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
And I think this is a key thing that listeners
need to understand. Wind and sun don't always produce energy.
The sun isn't always up, the wind isn't always blowing.
In fact, most places in the world are not very
well suited to either one. Right, most places, you know,
you get to the northern hemisphere where a lot of
people live. I mean, people who are putting up solar
(17:34):
in Minnesota and northern Germany are morons. They're just sacrificing
to their own religion. And you know, same with wind
all right. You know, West Texas is pretty windy and
a lot of open land, but not most places. And
but the key point that Matt just made is it
doesn't run all the time, and so you got to
(17:56):
have other sources of power. And that's part of the
reason renewable is so expensive. And by the way, if
your backup is a natural gas plant, you cannot shut
them down and then start them up again just in time.
You have to run them all the time by the
nature of the way these plants work. And so renewables
are not replacing and let's say natural gas, they're just
(18:17):
adding a very expensive layer on top of it. I'll
give you the last twenty nine seconds because I like
prime numbers.
Speaker 3 (18:23):
Yeah, I agree with you one hundred percent.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
I think there's for small applications they could have a
little bit of a purpose.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
But it's absurd to.
Speaker 4 (18:30):
Think that we're going to be powering society and things
like AI technology with renewables awesome.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Matt Wylicky's substack is called Irrational Fear Right Irrational Fear
dot substack dot com, or just go to my blog
at roscommensk dot com and you'll find all of this,
including the articles we were just talking about. Got links
to all of Matt's stuff. I'm really glad you're out
there doing what you're doing, you know. And it's also
I got to say, brave of you to take that
(18:57):
entrepreneurial leap away from the guaranteed page and go be
able to you know, be an entrepreneur without the safety.
Now that's pretty cool. Brave or crazy, we're going to
find out. Yeah, there's a fine line between the two.
It's good to meet you. I know you're local, so
hopefully we can get together in person some point.
Speaker 3 (19:15):
Great talking to Russ, all right,
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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