Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive May 24, 2026
Scott Adams Philosophy Archive
Search ideas
Episodes Episode #254 Segments
MainContent Climate & Environment

Back to episode — Episode 254 Scott Adams - Nuclear Power, Kanye, Cultural Gravity

Context —

Well, it's a weird day in news. It feels like the news went from being all Trump-centric to being nothing about Trump suddenly. Did you notice that? I'm looking at CNN's homepage and I'm like, where's all the Trump stuff? It's like I guess we don't do Trump stories when everything's working out well. So the news is so good for Trump that he's been erased from CNN. They're not even going to talk ab…

← Previous segment →

Let's talk about my pinned tweet. So the tweet I pinned is my Periscope I did yesterday afternoon, if you haven't seen it, with a persuasion lesson wrapped around explaining my app, the interface app in which you can immediately talk to an expert. And I had said, wouldn't it be great if every time there's something in the news and the headlines, somebody who's an expert in that topic could just log on to the app in case the media wants to find an expert?

So lately we've been talking about nuclear power. There's an article in The Wall Street Journal I want to talk about in a minute. There have been at least two breakthroughs reported. One breakthrough, some bacteria that eats, might eat nuclear waste. They've actually had the bacteria that might neutralize nuclear waste, which would be amazing. There's also a breakthrough at MIT in reducing the heat that comes out of the reactors, which has all kinds of cost and efficiency benefits apparently.

But wouldn't you like to talk to an expert? It'd be great if somebody who is an expert on building nuclear power plants just logged on the app. It's a free app. And then anybody in the media who was looking for an expert could just search for nuclear.

Now, the thing that I keep saying about climate change is that the climate change experts tend to look at the costs of it but not the opportunity costs. You know, what happens to all the things you couldn't do because you spent all your money on this? They also tend to leave out nuclear as an option. And if it's true that climate change is going to just be the worst thing ever for the world, no matter how much you hate nuclear power plants, the worst case scenario is one of them melts down. Yeah, maybe a couple of them melt down over time. But isn't that way less bad, depending on where you place these sites, assuming you place them so that when they melt down, if they melt down, if we're using technology that even does melt down, that it wouldn't be the biggest deal in the world?

It seems to me that's not even close to how big a problem that would be, a nuclear meltdown of a power plant, especially a new one, right? If you built a new plant, the odds of it melting down I think would be much lower because of what we've learned. But it feels like the risk of that would be so much less.

So somebody is saying Japan, and I think that's the perfect example of what not to do. Japan put their nuclear power plant in a place that was at risk for a tsunami. They knew that that risk was there. Why don't we not do that?

Somebody says thorium is a game-changer. Somebody, other people say fission is not that far away. Maybe that's true.

So I'm reading this article in The Wall Street Journal. I tweeted it. You can see it in my Twitter feed if you want to read up on it. Where a Nobel laureate, a Nobel prize-winning laureate, says the same thing I said, which is you're not really considering the opportunity costs. And if you haven't included them, you have not analyzed it. And if you do, you come to the opposite conclusion. The opposite conclusion. That's a pretty bad mistake there. You come to an opposite conclusion.

So my take on climate change is that whether or not the problem is exactly what the climate scientists say, I'm not really the one who can analyze that. But what I can say is that the way we debate it is fraudulent. Because if we're ever talking about climate change and we're not talking about its only practical solution, which is to go nuts on nuclear and do it fast, get the government involved, reducing some regulations so we can build plants faster, that sort of thing, if we're not doing that, we're not really taking climate change seriously.

So the weird thing about the climate change folks is that their dream of a green world with green technologies, you know, like solar and wind, by pushing climate change as the fear factor that gets you that green technology, they've done exactly the opposite of what I think they want. What I think they want is a world with no nuclear power but is also green. But instead they're going to cause the opposite. Because if they alarm the world enough on climate science, and I think they have, so if the climate change fear gets high enough, it kind of guarantees nuclear power because it's literally the only solution anybody has that would get you a reasonably fast solution.

Context —

Let's talk about Kanye. So I'm seeing a lot of people forwarding around on the Don Lemon show on CNN, and Bakari Sellers was an African-American pundit. He was on there a lot. And Bakari said some mean things about Kanye. But one of the things he said was that his problem with Kanye is that, this is Bakari Sellers saying this about Kanye, you're saying that his problem is that anti-intellectualism…

Next segment → →