ttle bit better. Here it goes. The simultaneous sip.

Mmm. Yeah. Yep. I can feel everything improving now.

Now I have a special guest, which I'm going to wait for a moment until he gets on here. If the technology doesn't work today, we'll figure something out. So let me just check here. I'm trying to talk to Michael Shellenberger when he is available, which will be any moment now, about his incredible new book that I read. And you should be proud of me. It's kind of a big book and I actually read it. Wow, can you believe it? Yes, I did. All right, Michael, if you're having trouble getting on, I will be looking for a message from you just so as I know.

All right, Michael says he's there. But Michael, you say you're there, but when I look at my guest list you do not appear. So there's an icon at the bottom of your screen. Click the happy faces icon at bottom, and once Michael clicks that I will see him and then I will add him on, which I think might be happening right now. Yes, it is. So let's see if our technology works. Michael, can you hear me? Hey, it worked.

So let me tell the audience what we've got going here. So this is Michael Shellenberger, whose amazing new book, "Apocalypse Never," which you can see right here, which is just now, I just saw it's number seven on Amazon's most read books of the week. I don't know if all of you know this, but Amazon puts out a lot of books. If you could be number seven on their most read list, holy cow. It's number one in a bunch of categories that apply to it.

And Michael, would you describe yourself as an environmentalist activist still, or is that where you started and you've evolved? How would you describe yourself for the audience?

"I still consider myself an environmentalist and environmental activist. I spend a lot of my time making the case for nuclear power, which I think is one of the most important technologies in the world, certainly one of the most important environmental technologies. So yeah, I guess you can now say I'm a best-selling author too, which is pretty cool."

You know, the thing that I loved about your book, and by the way I don't usually like books, I have to admit, even when I read them I think, well, you know, maybe I shouldn't have. But I actually loved every part of your book because your writing is excellent. It keeps me engaged the whole time because your personal story was woven in with it all.

What would you say that if you and Greta Thunberg were ever in the same room that the matter and the antimatter would make you both explode and disappear?

"Yeah, that'd be a very interesting experiment, wouldn't it? I would want a lot of other people to be present, that's for sure. It would be quite a show."

All right. So your book is sort of a tour through the environmental not only the history and the psychology of it, which I found actually the most interesting part was the psychology of how we got to where we are in various ways. But when you looked into everything from ozone to whaling to the Amazon rainforest and all this, and you've done deep dives in all of these, where were you most surprised? And what would be the most surprising to the audience in terms of things that people generally believed to be true that just aren't true?

"Oh man, there's so many of them. I mean, I think one of the two most fun chapters in a way were the chapters on plastic waste and on meat, because these are two topics that I had certainly read about but I had never really properly researched, much less considered myself an expert on. So one of the most surprising things was I opened this chapter on plastic by describing this very famous viral YouTube video where a marine biologist pulls a plastic straw out of the nose of a sea turtle. And I learned more about the history of these sea turtles, and one of the things I learned is that they were being overharvested. They were being killed for their shells to make tortoiseshell glasses. The tortoiseshell was missing, and it was sea turtle because sea turtle shells were the original plastic, the original bioplastic. So it turns out that the plastics that we use today made from petroleum products actually helped to save sea turtles. They also helped to save elephants because they were substitutes for the ivory in elephant tusks. So stories like that where you discover these things that you're told are super terrible often had a really important role in protecting the environment."

And the surprising part about that is that the sea turtle that had the straw up his nose, I didn't even know sea turtles did cocaine. So that was surprising to me.

"No, turtles don't do cocaine. I just made that up."

All right. So one of the things I found most powerful about your book is the people who want to save the world seem to be destroying it, and they don't know why, but they don't know it. Okay, can you walk us through what a developing nation needs to do to become a good nation? And can they get there with solar power?

"I mean, this is, I joke that because I wrote this book, I dedicate this book to my children who are ages 14 and 21. So I wanted people to be able to read it who were just 14 years old. So I told a lot of stories. I tried to make it as simple as possible with a lot of stories. And I talked about how really the process of economic development, unless you're Saudi Arabia, is basically the same everywhere you go, from having a country where almost everybody is a small farmer to getting factories, people working in cities. And that the only way to do that is by moving away from renewables, away from wood and dung and waterwheels, towards fossil fuels and to some extent hydroelectric dams are very important. Hydroelectric dams I consider the highest form of renewables because they provide so much reliable power. But really it's a story of rising energy consumption. Increased energy consumption is actually good for the environment because energy is a substitute for matter, which is what we call the natural environment. So yeah, the reason this trend I criticize here, which is this idea that we should stop funding hydroelectric dams, roads, electrical grids, modern agriculture, and instead the World Bank is giving small farmers a solar panel and a battery and saying good luck with that, it's simply not going to work."

So would it be fair to say that environmentalists, if they got their way, would lock all of the poor people into poverty basically forever? Because nobody's figured out how to get out of poverty without doing it the way you just mentioned. So would, yeah, I mean Greta would be destroying the lives of poor people forever?

"Yeah, I mean what they would say is, well we should help them with some charity. But for sure the idea, and in fact they've succeeded. They basically persuaded the World Bank, the European Development Bank, all the big international development banks whose purpose after World War II was to lift everybody out of poverty. They have diverted basically all of that money from energy that can lift people out of poverty, whether it's a hydroelectric dam, a coal plant or a nuclear plant, to these little charitable experiments, the solar panel on a hut. They've actually also denied countries the money they need for irrigation, fertilizer or tractors, which is the basis for, because when you have factories and cities you have fewer farmers and they have to grow more food. It's just really simple. So yeah, I mean it's an agenda that basically, at the end of the book I have three chapters about why is everybody so crazy on this environmental issue. And I look at money, power and religion. And the power, definitely there's an effort by rich people in the rich countries, Greta Thunberg herself, Bill McKibben, the other characters in the book, are actively trying to keep poor nations in poverty. And I think it's unconscionable."

So that's the most amazing part about this. And I've always tried to figure out why people have different opinions on things where science should be the only opinion. And the environmental one is the most amazing one. And I don't know anybody who's looked into it as much as you have, who has your, I'll say, talent stack, the ability to analyze things and communicate them. I don't know anybody who comes down on a different side when they dig into it as much as you have. And it feels like the environmentalists are in some cases just in it for money or whatever. But in many cases I think they just don't have as deep a talent stack. In other words, they're just not capable of looking at the field in its entirety. They're just seeing part of the field. Does it feel like that to you?

"I mean I would say yes in some ways. What's striking to me, Scott, is that environmentalists, the people who want to control the energy and food production all around the world through the United Nations, this is not some conspiracy theory, I document all this in the book. These are people that have never spent any time in poor countries. These are people who have really never spent any time in the productive sectors of their own country's energy and food economies. I always joke that nobody's more alienated from nature than environmentalists. Environmentalists are people that live in a city. They want to put huge industrial wind turbines in the airshed of birds, bats and insects in places where they don't live. But if you ever get a wind turbine proposed for the coast of California or for the coast of Cape Cod, those of us in the rich cities and the rich coasts shut that down immediately. So there's a lot of hypocrisy at work. There's a lot of ignorance. It's hard to pull them apart exactly."

Now for the benefit of the audience, give us your view of climate change. Is it man-made? Is it alarming? Give us your overview on where you think climate change is heading.

"My view is that climate change is real but it's not the end of the world. It's not even our most important environmental problem. I think it's taken up way more of our attention and money and time than it should. It's led us to not only neglect what I see as more serious environmental problems, which would be things like the loss of habitat and rainforests and the fragmentation of forests for endangered species, poverty, the overconsumption of wild animals including fish. We've basically forgotten about all those problems. They don't even really get into the newspaper as much anymore. And then it's led people to do things that are clearly harmful. The first one, and part of my motivation for writing the book, is that they've contributed to rising anxiety and depression among adolescents. I'm not saying they're the sole cause but they're certainly part of it."

You know, when I grew up we were taught that there was going to be a nuclear war in our lifetime and we'd probably all be dead. And it definitely had an effect on my whole mental makeup, probably permanently. And I can't imagine that that's not messing up kids.

You talk about, there's a fascinating part towards the end of the book where you're talking about maybe the psychological underpinnings of the death cults. Could you say something about that?

"Well yeah, the last chapter in the book, and I think you know I ended up, I'm actually hiring somebody from Extinction Rebellion, which is crazy. But basically the last part of the book I'm in London. I'm actually advocating for nuclear. I went to 10 Downing Street, went to Parliament, met with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and I was making a case for nuclear. But I'm trying to get through Trafalgar Square and it's just this crazy Extinction Rebellion protest. Thousands of people are arrested and it's very disturbing. They have up signs that say things like 'climate change kills children,' which is just ridiculous. It's pseudoscience. And I spent some time trying to figure out what's going on here. What is this? Well obviously, or maybe not obviously, but I think it's very clear when I review the research and I certainly think about my own history, that this is a religious movement. You could say it's a religious cult. I quote somebody, one of the best British columnists on this, called it the upper-middle-class death cult, which is not inaccurate. And so what's going on? And I sort of point out that really these apocalyptic environmentalists tend to be people who don't believe in traditional religion but they still have the need to believe in something. They still have the need for personal transcendence, for some sense of immortality."

Now is that, do you think, that a sense of immortality is that they're saving the world so that's their legacy? What, how does the need for immortality or our basic need to feel like we have some lasting impact, is that where it is? And saving the world?

"Yeah it's really exaggerated, right? I mean it's like a Marvel superhero story of yourself. I contrast it like if you think about if I look at my parents when my kids and my brothers and sisters' kids, when we're all home for Christmas, my parents are the happiest I ever see them because they see their grandkids. They are immortal, right? They see that they are living on through their grandkids. That's a healthy, normal fantasy or a story of immortality that they have. I think for this idea that I as a person am going to save the planet from climate change, I mean it's identical in structure to a Marvel superhero story. It's so over the top. It's so ridiculous. And what we find is that basically a lot of what these apocalyptic environmentalists, the story they're telling is a Judeo-Christian story of saving the whole planet from Armageddon. But they don't even know that. They think they're just talking science. They think that they're actually describing the world as it is. They don't know that they're in the grip of a religion."

Yeah, one of the hardest things for anybody is to know what you don't know. And one of the things that I've noticed is that the environmental movement skews young. Wouldn't you say that it's a young person's movement? Is that a fair statement?

"Yeah, I mean I think there's, I see a lot of the leaders and the activists in the apocalyptic climate change movement being adolescents and middle-aged people, which are a kind of two existential moments in your life where you're kind of like, who am I? What am I doing here? What is my purpose? You have it as an adolescent and you often have a midlife crisis. So I think it reflects some insecurities, some personal insecurities that people have around their own lives. And then they become part of a movement. It gives our lives meaning. But ultimately if I could sort of break it down like this, the difference between an environmentalist activist and what you are is that you know more than they do. I mean it kind of comes down to that, isn't it? You've just looked into it in more detail and so you can see the whole field and you can see that for example the solar isn't going to solve all our problems. But the person who hasn't done the work is going to say, well you know Elon Musk says solar, it's going to work, without realizing that Elon Musk is a competitor to other forms of energy, which is one of the things you talk about."

Can you say something about that? About what is it that's caused people to think that solar could solve their problems when it's so obvious that it can't?

"Well that's right. When you see people, this incredible love for renewables and the anger that people have at you when you point out all of the obvious problems with it, you know like the wind turbines are spinning blades that kill a lot of endangered species or that the solar panels require covering four hundred times more land than a natural gas or a nuclear plant require. When you just point out those problems, advocates of renewables, apocalyptic environmentalists, they get really angry in the same way that a true believer gets mad when you suggest that their God isn't real. So you know I think it's clear, you see it in all of the literature, you see it in the advertising. Renewables have always been viewed as a way to harmonize human society with nature. So nature ends up playing the role of God. And where we used to try to get right by God and by God's laws, there's now by supposedly secular people an effort to get right by nature. And science becomes kind of a new religion."

You know, I've always noticed people always have this need to be part of something that's bigger than themselves and maybe get approval from something bigger than themselves. So as you're talking about, it's like you try to get God's approval if you're a believer. But if you're not a believer, maybe you need nature's approval. Maybe we're just wired so we need that approval from the bigger power.

So I gotta ask you about nuclear. Is our country going in the right direction finally? I know the president doesn't say much about nuclear but the Department of Energy does seem to be doing some things. Is it moving in the right direction in your opinion?

"Not really, unfortunately. I'm afraid the nuclear industry itself is committed to managed decline. They announce a lot of R&D projects but honestly there's no effort to maintain our existing nuclear plants or build new ones. So what we've got is a lot of demonstration projects that are attempted to kind of make us feel better about a basically bad situation."

Now is that not at least in part because there's some desire to get to so-called generation 4 that we don't know how to do yet?

"Exactly. So there's some iteration and testing in government that they build some kind of a test facility to do that, didn't they? Or they're building it?"

"Yeah that's the idea. The problem is I've just done so much, I just know so much about the history of this that we see this repeatedly where there's all these demonstration efforts. There's been so many prototypes and demonstration reactors made and they don't ever go anywhere. What really gets nuclear plants built is when utilities decide to build plants and they usually end up building the same kind of plant or a very similar kind of plant to one that's been operating. So my concern is not that I have no problem with the demonstration efforts. My problem is that we're not doing the things that the Russians and the Chinese and the French and the people that are serious about having a nuclear expansion are doing, which is to build full-sized light water reactors. That's why I'm so obsessed with Britain right now. Britain's considering building six full-size light water reactors. It's got the construction. That's what it looks like when countries are going seriously on nuclear. And unfortunately we're not doing that."

And for our audience that's not up to date, the types of nuclear that other countries are looking at building would all be types, would you call it third generation, which has never had a meltdown that killed anybody yet. Is that true?

"Oh yeah, of course. Even Fukushima's radiation didn't kill anybody and that was Gen 2. So yeah, it's Gen 3. These are in some ways honestly they're just over-engineered. In the book I talk about the fear of nuclear and the irrational and ideological nature of the fears. But my view has always been on nuclear that we too often make the perfect enemy of the good. And really what works is to just build good plants, have the same guys building the same reactors over time. That's how costs come down."

So if you were to say you were the President of the United States instantly and you're going to say all right and fix nuclear energy in this country, would you look at forced standardization? Would you just get out of the way and remove regulations if some of them are unnecessary? I don't even know if they are. Where's the lever? What would you focus on to change first to fix it?

"The most important thing is to have a national consensus on a long-term plan for taking nuclear from 20% to 50% of our electricity by 2050. And that's a pretty reasonable goal. You would then work with the utilities and the states because we do have a fragmented utility system. Most countries it's a single utility or a couple of them. We have so many utilities because we're such a big country. The most important thing is to have a goal and work towards it. And yeah, I think standardization would be the obvious way. But I thought the real problem is that the economics don't work because it just takes so long to get it approved. If you don't fix that it doesn't matter how much leadership you have, does it?"

"If you're doing unapproved designs, sure. But we have a perfectly great, I mean it's really great, advanced pressurized water cooled reactor called the AP1000. They're building two of them in Georgia. Those workers are literally a national asset. I mean those construction workers, because they know how to pour cement and make rebar and weld at nuclear-grade standards. After they're done they should move up the road to South Carolina and build two more nuclear reactors there. If I had a national building program it would just spread because the key is that the workers themselves, there's so much specialized skill involved, speaking of skill stacking, that they are. These workers, it's tragic if we don't build more nuclear plants after those two AP1000s. We're going to lose so much valuable asset in those workers. It's scary."

Is this the same kind of skill, I know pouring concrete is not the same skill you'd need to make a nuclear engine for a submarine or for later for a Space Force, but we have the same problem, right? Because space will be nuclear-powered. That's a guarantee, isn't it?

"Oh yeah. If you're serious. So if we don't have a big nuclear energy capability, a robust nuclear industry in the United States, we're not going to own space. And whoever owns space owns the Earth. That's pretty much a guarantee, wouldn't you say?"

"Absolutely. I haven't done enough on this question. I'm very interested in space. I'm very interested in national security implications of space. And you're right, nuclear, the innovation on nuclear has really come from the military. That's how we got our existing light water designs. And the left, the pro-nuclear left has often condemned our existing light water technology by saying it came from the military. But that's the strength of it. That's where our microchips came from. That's where personal computers came from. That's where the internet came from."

Yeah, right. Why are we embarrassed about the military roots of these technologies? That's why they're so great, right?

"Yeah, that's such a weird thing to be angry at."

So Michael, is there anything you want to leave us with? I'm going to go on to some other topics here. Is there anything that we need to know that I didn't ask?

"I just wanted to say that first of all thank you Scott for plugging the book. People get it. You should know that I've been now censored twice. I was censored by Forbes who took down my original column announcing the book and then I was censored by Facebook after an absolutely outrageous unscientific attack on my book by a sort of star chamber of climate apocalyptic jerks who basically got my articles censored on Facebook. So please sign up at Environmental Progress to get updates directly from me. Please buy the book. I would love to hear from readers. It's really exciting to have the conversation."

All right. It's "Apocalypse Never," Michael Shellenberger. It's a bestseller written all over it and it's already a bestseller. And congratulations on the book. It's really, this is a really good book. I mean it really is. You did a great job on this. So thank you, Michael.

"Thanks Scott."

All right, take care.

All right, that was very interesting. Let's talk about some other things. For example, Trump's taxes. So let me summarize the entire situation about Trump's taxes. Blah blah blah, some legal stuff, blah blah blah, lawyers disagree, blah blah blah, court, blah blah blah, will be appealed, blah blah blah, will take a long time, blah blah blah, may not make any difference for the election because it may be delayed until after that, blah blah blah, precedent. There you go. That's everything you need to know about Trump's taxes.

I am loving the story about Mayor de Blasio and the protesters painting this giant Black Lives Matter, I don't know why you'd call it a sign or a message, on the road directly in front of Trump Tower. And here's what I love about it. I always put myself in the story and say, well what if I were Trump? If I were Trump and I knew that the city was mocking me by putting Black Lives Matter right in front of my high-end building, what would I think about that? And I had the following feeling. When I first saw the workers doing their thing, you know they're painting, you can't see what they're doing yet, you just see that people are doing something. My first thought was it's going to be an eyesore and I wish we wouldn't waste our time on such things. And then you see the aerial view of it and I'm thinking to myself they're actually pretty good at making stuff. Whoever mapped out the letters in Black Lives Matter and picked the color and the font did a really good job. So I'm looking at this thing and I'm thinking I kind of like it, you know, just artistically. Because let me give some context. I also like tattoos and scars because they tell you a story about a moment in time. And the Black Lives Matter thing not only looks good in the same sense that Mount Rushmore just looks good. You know if Mount Rushmore were done poorly would you go to see it just because there's big important presidents' heads on it? If they didn't quite look like the presidents would you bother going to see it? No, it matters it's done well. That's what makes Mount Rushmore so impressive. It's done well plus it's big. So this Black Lives Matter thing, I'm looking at it and thinking I kind of like it. If I were the president I'd say thank you. I would just say I didn't love the idea but when I saw you did a good job on it I think I liked it. Imagine if the president said you know it kind of looks good there. Let's keep it maintained. Let's make sure that nobody ruins it. What would that do to people's heads? Would they explode?

Now of course I don't think the president can do that because Black Lives Matter refers to not only the idea but also the organization. And he's not so pro the organization. But of course he like everybody in the world would agree with the concept. So if I were him I'd just say, I would call it a concept not an organization. I would say it's kind of cool. Let's leave it there. That's how I treat it because I actually do like it.

This was interesting. So yesterday I got a direct message from a small, I guess you'd call them a startup, they're kind of new, called Ground News. Ground like the ground you stand on, news. And what they do is they take all the news stories on a topic and they see if the left-leaning news sites or the middle or the right-leaning news sites are focusing on it more. And then you can see how it's covered differently by the left and the right. So it's a really good idea to give you more of a landscape of the bias in the news industry. But they sent me one that they thought I might be interested in yesterday which was the story about Trump signed executive order expanding educational and economic opportunities to Hispanics. And it's funny because you look at the Ground News chart and it shows that the people on the left, the media on the left, just ignored the story like it didn't exist. But the outlets on the right and the middle, like well it's a story, the president's doing it, it's a national story, of course we're going to write about it. But the left, crickets.

Now think about that. Think how important the Hispanic American vote will be. And here's Trump signing, I don't know what the details are, but he's expanding educational and economic opportunity for Hispanics. And you would th