This pre recorded show furnished by Matthew Matern.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and our guest today, Michael Shellenberger Michaels and author and has done a lot in the environmental field and really excited to have you as a guest, Michael, and to share a lot of the work that you’ve been doing in the environmental movement for quite some time. And thank you, and welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Well, Michael, tell us a little bit about how you got in the environmental movement to start with and what were the things that motivated you to work in this field?

Sure. So I’ve been a environmental and progressive activist for really my entire adult life ever since I was a teenager. I’ve been involved in various causes saving the red saving the redwoods saving the rainforests, trying to improve factory conditions among Nike, workers in Indonesia. I was a big advocate for renewables in the early 2000s, I came to see some of the limitations of renewables. I had some friends say you should take a second look at nuclear power I did.

I overcame a bunch of my fears about nuclear energy, and I’ve become a big supporter of nuclear for the last decade. I’ve founded several organizations including environmental progress, which is the organization that I run currently, we incubate leaders ideas and movements, and are working on three different grassroots movements, one on nuclear energy, one on conservation and another. On dealing with the drug death crisis that is the subject of my new book, San Francisco.

I had a book that came out last year called Apocalypse never why environmental alarmism hurts us all. In both books, I think are warnings about some of the threats to civilization I see in terms of undermining the institutions and bases of our civilization. Neither book are easy to categorize as liberal or conservative. I’ve been a progressive all my life. But recently, I’ve decided I no longer identify as progressive because of the problems that progressives have created in California.

So I’m more of an independent thinker. Sometimes I’m called a moderate or heterodox sycl. But I remain an activist in addition to being an author. I’m writing books and write articles, not not for my own self aggrandizement.

But really, because I want to make the world a better place. And my views have evolved, but my values have been pretty much the same in the sense of really wanting to see all humans lifted out of poverty, wanting to see cities be safe and flourishing places, for entrepreneurs and for citizens and families, and also wanting to protect the natural environment. So it’s a little hopefully, that’s a thumbnail sketch for you.

But that’s a lot. And I guess one of the things that caught my eye when, you know, learning a bit more about what you’ve done, the why the environmental alarmism is hurting us all. And if you could kind of address that, because I think that’s something that caught my eye. And I’d like to hear more from you about that. Sure.

So my views are that climate change is real. It’s created mostly by humans. It’s something that we should worry about something that we should do something about, but the reaction to it, particularly in recent years has become so over the top and exaggerated that it’s actually created harm. We have actually been doing a pretty good job of dealing with climate change. You wouldn’t know it from listening to a lot of rather hysterical climate activists.

But the fact of the matter is the United States has reduced its carbon emissions 22% below 2005 levels, mostly thanks to fracking for natural gas, which has replaced coal. We would reduce carbon emissions a lot more if we use nuclear energy, but the people that are the most alarmist about climate change are also the people that are most adamantly opposed to the two technologies that have done the most to reduce air pollution and carbon emissions, which are natural gas and nuclear. I’m really concerned as the father of an adolescent about the impact that the alarmism has on kids.

There’s a lot of teenagers that think they’re not going to live long enough to have kids. That’s ridiculous. There’s every reason to think that the future is going to be brighter than the past. People are going to live longer. We suffer with too much food. We produce more and more food every year. That’s not a problem. The problem is managing how much food we eat. We’re actually turning more of the Earth’s land surface over to nature grasslands and forests. forests, which has habitat for endangered species, there’s every reason to think we should have an increase in biodiversity over the next 50 to 100 years. So most environmental trends are going in the right direction.

But you wouldn’t know it from reading the news or listening to climate activists, the the most important issues are all manageable through continued technological change. So my concern is that I think climate change has become such a totalizing, even totalitarian discourse, that it’s actually starting to infringe on prosperity and undermine environmental goals, particularly with the war on nuclear power, but also the war on natural gas.

And I’m particularly concerned by the impact on poor countries, since so much of what environmental activists are trying to do is to prevent poor countries from getting access to cheap and reliable energy. So I read Apocalypse number for a number of different reasons, but certainly defending the right of poor countries to develop and pushing back against what is clearly hysterical exaggeration. Were two of the big reasons.

Well, one of the things that we hear a lot about is that if we don’t resolve this situation by 2030, and reduce our emissions dramatically by that point in time that it’s it’s going to be kind of too late. So what’s your response to that line of thinking?

Well, you know, I was first told that we had to act within 10 years, or it’d be too late in 1987. When I was a sophomore in high school, the Associated Press ran an article based on United Nations report saying that we had just 10 years to act before the world would end. So this is just a public relations tactic is grossly misleading. We are reducing carbon emissions right now, by moving from coal to natural gas, we’re probably gonna see emissions go up at the end of this year because of a bump from COVID.

But there’s every reason to think that carbon emissions have peaked and are declining and rich countries. We know they are they peaked and declined started climbing in Europe in the 1970s. Poor Countries are still developing, so their emissions are going to go up, continue to go up a bit more. But really, we shouldn’t see global emissions peak within the next 10 years.

Buried in the recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was some good news, which is that we do not see coal coming back. Coal is twice as dirty from a climate perspective as natural gas. The most extreme climate scenarios are based on a six toppling of, of coal use over the next half century, that’s simply not going to happen because we’re in a transition towards gas.

So again, the main obstacle is the people that claim to be the most worried about climate change. They’re the ones that are trying to shut down nuclear plants and replace them with fossil fuels and renewables. If you really care about climate change, you should be advocating for nuclear energy.

What about this argument that because of us, because we’re reaching a certain percentage of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the in the air, that in the atmosphere that we’re kind of going to reach a tipping point, is that an accurate statement? Or is that not accurate?

It’s not accurate in the sense that the best way to think of climate change is as a gradual, incremental problem. All else being equal, we wouldn’t want to change the temperature of the planet at all, because we’ve created a civilization farm cities natural protected areas around a particular temperatures. But if we had to see a temperature change, you’d rather see it become warmer than cooler since more people die from cold than heat every year.

And we can protect against heat deaths from with air conditioning, and which requires cheap energy. But the tipping points is not scientific. It’s does not the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not include tipping points in its scenarios. And the reason is, is because it’s based on a set of basically speculative connections, I interviewed one of the lead scientists that did a big tipping points paper, again, not included in the peer reviewed scientific literature, but a kind of speculative opinion piece.

The problem is, is that we don’t understand a lot of these connections. The other issue is that if there are tipping points in the global system, they may not have anything to do with our own contribution to climate change. I first became alarmed about climate change around the fears that the Gulf Stream was going to shut down. best available science shows that it may very well be slowing down the Gulf Stream which brings warmer water and temperatures from the southern hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere. but it may not have anything to do with climate change, and it’s occurring over hundreds of years.

So when you really look at these tipping point, these apocalyptic scenarios, you’ll discover things like melting ice sheets, or things that you worry about over a 700 year to 1200 year period. It’s very hard to really manage risks that are 50 years away, much less 500 years away. So the bottom line on all of the risks of catastrophe, and there’s much better mechanisms for thinking about catastrophe from like an asteroid or a volcano is just that we should be prepared for the worst.

And that means having a strong national security strong infrastructure that can be prepared for various disasters, whether it’s an influenza virus or a Coronavirus, as we’ve seen, or an asteroid or a supervolcano or some sort of unforeseeable event, we should be prepared. But then that means actually being prepared for a wide variety of potential disasters, not just climate change.

Well, you’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC. My guest, Michael Shellenberger will be back in just one minute. Michael’s talking with us about environmental issues and his views about why environmental alarmism as for all of us, we’ll be back in just one minute.

This is KABC 790, with your host, Matt Matern. This is Unite and Heal America and KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host and I’ve got Michael Shellenberger. Michael is an author and lead some environmental organizations and Michael again, something you talked about before the break was natural gas. And and there’s certainly some arguments back and forth as to whether that’s a good power source going forward in the future.

And and you talked about fracking. And I know there’s a concern regarding methane being released during the process of, of getting natural gas. So what’s, what’s your thinking on that? And methane is even more potent greenhouse gas than than even CO2? And what can we do to minimize that or reduce it? Or should we try to get away from using natural gas so that we don’t have methane escaping into the atmosphere?

Yeah, I mean, so my basic view is that there’s a hierarchy of energy, and that what we’re trying to do for both people and the environment is moved from more energy diluted fuels to more energy dense fuels. So there’s a basic progression, you can move from wood to coal, you get twice as much energy out of the same volume of material from wood, when you go to coal.

When you go from coal to petroleum and natural gas, you reduce the carbon emissions by half, you increase the energy intensity significantly, and then eventually move from natural gas to nuclear, you eliminate all air and water pollution, because nuclear power plants don’t produce pollution. So generally, that’s the direction you want to go. So the move from coal to natural gas has been responsible for the reduction of carbon emissions in the United States by 22%. Over the last 15 years, it’s mostly beneficial process.

Some methane gas does leak from when you expand new natural gas production. There’s been some debates around this in scientific literature. But basically, the amount of gas that leaks does not outweigh the benefits of reducing the carbon when you replace coal with natural gas. And the way to think of it is that yeah, methane is definitely a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon emissions. But it’s also more short lived. It only breaks down after a few decades, whereas carbon emissions are in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

And so we’re really concerned about high levels of warming in the future from the accumulation of carbon dioxide. Some so most reputable analysts when they look at this, they support transitioning from coal to natural gas, even people that I disagree with on a number of issues, we tend to all agree on the on the benefits of moving from coal to natural gas.

That being said, I don’t I don’t support moving from nuclear natural gas, because I think nuclear is the cleanest way that we have of making electricity. And so I it may seem paradoxical, but I but it’s actually quite consistent. I advocate for moving from coal to natural gas, but I oppose moving from nuclear to natural gas. Again, these fuels have relative benefits, and they have to be understood in the context of what the alternatives are.

Well, I guess that’s something that is, is hotly debated whether Nuclear is one of the ways to get to a net zero emission world. And, and I know Bill Gates is strongly behind nuclear as being part of the mix. And I guess one of the things that we have to would have to deal with is the political part of the equation.

And, and that we haven’t built. Very many, I think I’ve read one nuclear plants since 1996. In the United States. So we’re not kind of in the process of rolling out nuclear facilities. Where, where do you think we’re headed? And where’s the Biden administration coming down on on this issue?

Yeah, I mean, it’s, as with nuclear, all things are two steps forward one step back, you know, we have almost 100 nuclear reactors, about 60 nuclear power plant sites, that’s a sufficient number of nuclear plant sites to really add you could add reactors to them and power the whole country. reactors, the great thing about nuclear as you can just add more reactors to an existing power plant site, you can have a nuclear reactors of existing power plant site, today, we have one or two at an existing site.

So it’s all sited and ready to go, there’s been a lot of enthusiasm for pretty radical technological change. I tend to be skeptical of radical technological change, particularly on capital intensive and slow to turnover machinery, like nuclear plants. I think of it this way, you know, one day, we’re gonna have hydrogen powered jet planes that can fly us from Los Angeles to Australia in an hour.

They’ll basically be supersonic spacecraft almost, that day will come I don’t really doubt it. But we’re nowhere near that day. Now. That’s 100 or 200 years away. That’s my view of the the futuristic reactors that people want to build, including the very small ones. We have very good technology. Now, just like we have very good jet plane technology, we should continue to build it and expand it. The Biden the Biden administration, like all Democrats are divided between some Democrats that want to do 100% renewables, which most experts think is grossly unrealistic and a bad idea.

You know, you can’t rely on weather dependent energy because the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow and batteries are really expensive. And, and, and, and material intensive, and not very good for the environment wildly. So nuclear is a big part of this. And the Biden administration has been pretty weak in general, they’ve been a little bit better, perhaps, than past Democratic administrations, but not much.

So nuclear is, you know, the Cinderella of energy technologies. It’s the most beautiful of the mall, when you look at it, when you really look at it. But it’s, it’s been so demonized, because of the past associations with nuclear weapons. And because of really a kind of negative, anti humanistic, anti energy view among environmentalists who just really have always thought that more energy meant more people and more development, and they’re against that and nuclear had just sort of negative associations that are quickly disappearing for younger people.

I mean, you talk to people in their 20s, or 30s, they really don’t get what the hang up is among baby boomers ran nuclear power. So some of that’s fading, but not as quickly as we would have liked. So. But I will say, you know, Americans are mostly shielded from it, but the energy prices are going up very significantly, and the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, and Asia.

And so I just did a column today about how France, Britain, Japan and other major countries are actually turning back towards nuclear power, because natural gas has become so expensive, particularly as we’ve dealt with supply chain bottlenecks relating to the the economic return after COVID.

But I guess, a couple of things that come up in that in response to that. One is, are there many or any of these 60 nuclear sites in the US that are currently looking to expand to get up to eight reactors at any site? Or are we still kind of stuck in neutral or going in reverse by decommissioning the sites and reactors?

Mostly, we’re in neutral or reverse. We did have some good news, Illinois legislature just voted to protect two nuclear plants for reactors that were at risk of closure. They did keep them operating. But yeah, I mean, the you know, we’re blessed and cursed in the United States, we have abundant natural gas thanks to fracking, which again, I’m in favor of when it’s replacing coal, and opposed to replacing nuclear, but that’s men very cheap. electricity from, from natural gas, which is not burdened with the over regulation that nuclear plants are burdened with.

So at this point, we don’t have the big renaissance of nuclear that we want. However, we are creating a grassroots movement in support of nuclear. And it’s been making a lot of headway. I mean, just the conversation that is occurring on nuclear power today versus 10 years ago, when I changed my mind about the technology. It’s like night and day. I mean, now it’s hard to find people on social media like Twitter, who will say that they care about climate change, and also say that they oppose nuclear power.

It’s become sort of politically unviable for people to be anti nuclear. But it’s it takes a while. And so, you know, nuclear is a long game. It’s a slow moving technology. I think we’ll get there. But it’s definitely not happening right now.

Well, I could say just personally, I could say, you know, as a child of the 70s, and Three Mile Island, and now more recently, what happened in Fukushima, there is the sense that, hey, human error occurs and humans being who they are, there is a concern that we will screw things up and with nuclear mistakes, they’re they’re very long lasting hundreds of 1000s of years.

So one can understand why there’s some reticence in employing nuclear power. I would, I would say, though, the the inverse of that equation is that if you’re serious about the environmental disaster that may be coming, we don’t have time to kind of quibble something pretty radical is required and nuclear does fit the bill as far as having zero emissions. So it is, it is something that probably shouldn’t be in the mix. Even though it isn’t a perfect technology.

It’s certainly far from far better than most every other option that we have available to us and, and we’re gonna go into a break, but I’d like you to discuss with the listeners after we get back some of the downsides of some of the renewables visa vie, nuclear and why you’re, you’re in favor of nuclear, as compared to wind and solar.

So, you’ve been listening to KABC 790. This is Unite and Heal America with Matt Matern. My guest Michael Shellenberger will be back in just one minute.

As you may know, your host Matt Matern of United heal America is also the founder of Matern Law Group, their team of experienced employment consumer and environmental attorneys are dedicated to leveling the playing field by giving everyone access to the highest quality legal representation contact 844 MLG for you, that’s 844 MLG for you, or 84465449688446544968.

This is united heal America. On KABC 790 This is Matt Matern. Guest today, Michael Shellenberger. Michael was named heroes of the environment by Time Magazine. 2008 also got the Green Book Award. So certainly has bonafides in the environmental field yet, Michael, your pronuclear. Tell us why you think nuclear power is in any way better than renewables such as wind and solar?

Well, sure, I mean, like a lot of Americans, I was anti nuclear I was raised in the 80s. We, as a 12 year old I watched a really terrifying made for TV movie about nuclear war, which was a big subject in the early 80s. Chernobyl happened when I was 15. So I was definitely anti nuclear, I was very pro renewables as an alternative to nuclear. And I only changed my mind on the technology because I was working on advocating for renewables.

And there was a lot of grassroots opposition to renewable energy projects, not just in California, but also around the United States. You know, people don’t realize but it takes three and four times more land to generate the same amount of electricity from a solar farm as a wind farm. And so there’s huge land use impacts including on endangered species. So what’s great about nuclear is that the amount of uranium fuel the size of a coke can produces enough energy to power your entire life, including all your jet travel, all of the really high energy activities that you engage in and buy in.

When it comes out as waste. It’s the same, you know, metal fuel rods that same amount. So you have a tiny amount of waste, there is no pollution, pollution is waste discharged into the natural environment. There isn’t a pollution from nuclear power plants. People worry about the accidents. The accidents are remarkably benign in terms of their impact.

They’re very scary because people think as I did that, nuclear plants or something like nuclear weapons that if there’s a meltdown, it’s like a bomb going off. It’s not you have to worry about the radiate radiate radiant material that escapes the plants. But nobody died from from Three Mile Island. Nobody died from Fukushima, Chernobyl was the worst accident. About 50 people died after putting out the fire either immediately after a few months after.

And the best available science just that a total of 200 people will eventually die from that accident over like an 80 year period. Well, you put that into comparison to other energy technologies, and there really isn’t one. Ordinary power plants which reduce fossil fuel power plants produce air pollution that kills 6 million people a year. burning wood and dung in poor countries kills or shortens the lives I should say, of one to 2 million people a year.

The land use impacts are just gigantic and big solar and wind farms. We’ve seen the desert tortoise, the near desert tortoise really be negatively impacted. There’s species of bats, there’s golden eagles, bald eagles, whooping cranes, many bird species are threatened by wind turbines, which are spinning blades in the air shed of insects and animals. So when you look at what’s a scalable technology to deal with things like climate change, or just to reduce air pollution, there’s only nuclear, hydroelectric dams do a pretty good job in the countries that have them.

But a lot of countries have already dammed up all their rivers, mostly in the developed world. So when you look at what’s scalable, what can actually replace baseload fossil fuels, it’s only nuclear. And so nuclear, I think, has a really special role to play. You know, I think even if you don’t like it, you can think of it as cursed a blessing or a blessing curse in the sense that once the scientists figured out how to split the atom, there was no going back.

In other words, once you know how to split the atom, then the knowledge of how to create nuclear weapons, but also nuclear energy, you can’t get rid of it, even if you could try to kill all the nuclear physicists in the world.

But we knew what political scientists have been pointed out since World War Two, that even if two countries got rid of nuclear weapons, and then they went to war with each other, the first thing they would do is try to reconstruct their weapons. And so we can’t get rid of the technology as much as some people might want to.

And so I think it’s incumbent upon us to, to do to make the best of it. It’s an incredibly powerful technology, I do think it’s the most dangerous technology, because it’s the only way you can make weapons so powerful that you could truly wipe out civilization.

But I do think that humans are up for it, we manage a lot of dangerous things in the world, including viruses. We sometimes things go wrong, but I do think we’re capable of managing this technology. You know, people imagine, sometimes nuclear acting like a virus or something as though you know, if it were misused, then it would, it would blow up the world instantly, or something. But that’s not really accurate, either. Mostly nuclear weapons have created peace everywhere, they’ve gone in the form of deterrence.

And it makes some people uncomfortable, but that’s the truth of the matter is that, you know, nuclear weapons or create peace wherever they go. So it’s really just not the technology is just not what people thought it was. There was a lot of efforts by the radical left in particular in the 1950s and 60s, to sort of paint nuclear as a threat to civilization.

But that those those kinds of claims were had other motivations behind them. They were made by people that really were out to change Western civilization more broadly. So I think nuclear is one of the things where even if you’re uncomfortable with it, it is something that we need to deal with. And we should really make the best of it.

I guess the question is, you know, in terms of the lead time that it takes to build a nuclear power plant and get one online, which my understanding in the US is anywhere from 10 to 20 years, that there’s a that the advantage of wind and solar is those those technologies can be rolled out a lot more quickly than than nuclear. So what’s, what’s your proposal there? Should we sit on wind and solar and wait for nuclear or keep doing wind and solar.

Yeah, it’s it’s actually the case that nuclear is the fastest. So yes, it takes longer to build a nuclear power plant than it does to put solar panels on your roof. But if you put solar panels on your roof, you don’t even have enough electricity for your household, you build a nuclear plant, and that’s enough power for three to 6 million households.

We’ve seen look at France and Germany, you know, France generates a generates electricity that produces 1/10 of the carbon emissions as German electricity at almost half the price, the French scaled up nuclear, and they get over 85% of their electricity from zero emission sources. Germany gets less than half of that amount from zero emission sources.

And the difference is that Germany has been trying to do with renewables and phasing out nuclear while while France is mostly nuclear. So nuclear is kind of what you intuitively think it is. It’s it’s really powerful. It produces a lot of energy. We can build nuclear power plants as fast as we’re comfortable doing.

You know, it’s the oil cycle. But realistically, how fast given our political processes, can we can we build a nuclear power plant with the current existing regulations, you know, not in a airy fairy world of, you know, wiping out all regulations, that that’s not the world we live in, live in? Let’s live in the world we live in and say, how fast can we do it?

Yeah, I mean, so what we know. So I mean, if I had to spit ball, it just give you a rant, it just kind of give you a broad answer, I’d say 10 years to build a nuclear plant. The time goes down when you build more reactors. So we know this everywhere in the world, this the workers who make the first reactor, and turbine and steam generator, they can build the second one much faster, 10 to 20 30%, faster, and then it just keeps getting faster from there. In South Korea, they actually were building nuclear plants faster than coal plants.

So it’s not that there’s something’s so special about the technology that you can’t build it quickly. It’s just a matter of practice. So it does matter though, how much regulation you have. So give you an example. They were we were in the midst of planning to build these two reactors in Georgia. And then after 911 happened, somebody said, a bunch of people said, Well, we really need to make it so that it’s that you if you fly a plane into it, then nothing will happen to the reactor. Well, is that really necessary?

I don’t think so. Because we know that news, we know that jet planes, when they crash into cement, cement containment buildings, the jet planes fall apart. It’s not like flying into a glass building like the Twin Towers. So I can give you a general answer. But the issue of how much regulatory burden there is directly affects how long it takes to build a plant.

Well, yeah, of course, that is part of the equation. And we certainly want to keep keep ourselves safe by building safe nuclear power plants. That’s certainly one of those technologies that we need as many controls on as possible to make sure that they, these plants are as safe as possible. So you don’t want to cut too many corners. And from what I understand it’s 10 years to build a plant in Europe.

So it’s it’s not as if the world standard is substantially less than 10 years. To my knowledge. I mean, maybe South Korea was churning them out faster than than that, but so that that does lead us to the conclusion that I always made that we have to probably continue to do solar and wind here in the states simultaneously with building more nuclear. Are you against building out solar and wind at this point in time?

I am. Probably keep the answer on this one a little short, and then we’ll come back to it after the break. But maybe give us your short answer. And then we’ll we’ll return to this question.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, I’m, I have solar panels in our backyard, so that’s fine. I’m opposed to big industrial, solar and wind projects because they’re having negative impacts on wildlife. You know, they’re pulling baby desert tortoises out of their burrows in California right now. Putting them on the back of pickup trucks, putting them in pens where most of them die.

This is a critically threatened species. You know, we have bald eagles threatened whooping cranes threatened by industrial wind projects, the North Atlantic right whales threatened by North Atlantic by Atlantic wind enter energy industry. So these are not minor impacts that we’re encountering. And these are all often in places where like in California, we have so much solar now that we have to pay neighboring states to take the excess solar from us. So it’s not a trivial matter of just, the more renewables better the more renewables you add, the more expensive your electricity is, and the bigger the environmental impacts.

So you’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This Matt Matern, our guest, Michael Shellenberger will be back in just one minute.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790 This is Matt Matern, your host and our guest again, Michael Shellenberger. Michael, I wanted to kind of switch gears and talk about the technology of electric cars and hydrogen cars, and the hydrogen economy versus kind of the battery powered economy that is used for electric cars and the like.

Where do you come down on on this? As far as? What do you think we should be investing more into the hydrogen powered economy or a battery powered economy?

Yeah, I mean, I’m pretty skeptical of that, we’re going to move all of our petroleum powered transportation sector to lithium batteries, for a variety of reasons. The first is just that it actually increases the weight to power ratio. Generally, what we’ve seen is rising energy intensity of vehicles, meaning greater power to weight over time, not more heavy vehicles.

And so and that’s a general trend across various products in the economy is that we see declining material intensity or, or what more technically you might call D materialization. The most famous example of this, of course, is the cell phone, or the iPhone, which basically replaces all sorts of other products.

But we see it with everything. In our society where things become lighter and less material intensive, we use more energy, but we use less natural resource and material throughput just for straight economic reasons. But that has strong environmental benefits. So the alternative path to a transportation sector that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, would be a hydrogen gas powered vehicles that’s been talked about for a long time we have those vehicles, they’re more expensive than today’s vehicles.

But the advantage is that they can go much farther, they are much lighter. And therefore you continue that trend towards less materials, you’re not moving heavy amounts of lithium from South America, or Central Asia to different parts of the world, all of which seems like the wrong direction in terms of from an environmental but also an economic point of view. And then the other advantage of hydrogen gas is that over time, you can transition more easily from natural gas to hydrogen gas for not just transportation, but heating and cooking.

So the original vision in the 50s and 60s for Ecological Society was one that was powered by nuclear plants, the nuclear plants would make hydrogen from water, obviously, you can hydrogen gas h2 from h2o, you can also make it from natural gas or methane, which is CH four is split, take the carbon out atom off and split the two, the four hydrogen atoms into H2.

So I tend to be a supporter of that hydrogen, that hydrogen future, but it’s it’s complex and I it’s not something that I feel particularly strongly about and actually lifted out of my book Apocalypse never because I felt like those things would get shaken out. I don’t I’m not a big supporter of just heavy subsidies for electric cars, because they tend to be pretty regressive paying my affluent neighbors here in the Berkeley hills to own Tesla’s is I don’t think a great strategy.

Well, I as a former Tesla owner, I then switch to hydrogen cars last two cars, I had hydrogen cars so I’m kind of a hydrogen proponent. I will put that out there for truth and advertising. But I recognize there there are benefits for each technology and some downsides but what I like about hydrogen is that it is it is both kind of clean fuel. And as you said, you don’t have to have the mining that goes on for lithium batteries which is pretty substantial.

And if we think about it, if we went to a complete a electric powered fleets across the world, that would be maybe a billion cars with lithium powered batteries Where where are we going to dispose of A billion back is and then mine up the material for another billion plus batteries. There’s some serious problems and going in that direction.

So I agree. I wanted to I wanted to switch gears yet again to something you had brought up earlier, which, you know, I just can’t help but talk about which is your your analysis regarding the drug deaths in San Francisco and what’s happening there and, and what what you think the failure in policy is and how it could be changed?

Sure. So you know, a lot of people know we’re in the midst of two terrible drug epidemics are actually the worst in world history. Nothing compares to it. We have a methamphetamine epidemic we never dealt with. We have an opioid crisis that started with the over prescription of of opioid pharmaceuticals. Many people then switch to heroin and now people are dying from fentanyl.

17,000 people died from drug overdoses in poisonings in the year 2000 93,000 people died last year, almost three times more people die from car accidents about five times more people than died from homicides during a normal year.

This should be the number one issue in America in my view. It’s not just homeless people destroying a lot of homeless people are dying. But you know, kids that are you know, suffering from anxiety and depression quite understandably. were experimenting with pills. Some of them ended up taking pills that were contaminated with fentanyl and they died. Their parents found them in their bedrooms. This is ongoing.

Other times we see actors like Michael Williams, but we also saw Prince and Tom Petty die from fentanyl. People just dying absolutely unnecessarily. I think we need a whole of society effort to deal with this problem. We need universal psychiatric care, we need to take stronger action to shut down the open air drug dealing which plagues many major cities in America.

Generally, I just think progressives went too far with compassion. You know, the Beatles were wrong. Love is not all you need. You also need discipline and strictness. There may be consequences for behavior. So I wrote my new book, San Francisco, why progressives ruin cities because I want to draw attention to this problem and point out that there’s a lot of liberal cities in the world, including the Amsterdam where marijuana is decriminalized.

Prostitution is decriminalized, that don’t have open air drug scenes, or what we call homeless encampments, much less 10s of 1000s of people dying from drugs every year. So there is a way to there’s a third way between mass incarceration and mass homelessness. It’s much more similar to what they do in Amsterdam and other European cities than what we do in California.

Well, how is it that much different? I know they had a heroin problem in Portugal, and I believe they, in some way legalized it. And they found that that seemed to help because people they dealt with it as a public health problem, as opposed to a criminal problem.

Yeah, that’s to hear or is that that’s not really the you know, there’s a lot of misinformation about Portugal, in particular, but basically Portugal, Netherlands, and your Germany, France, they all do the same thing. They do not allow people to use drugs publicly. If you use drugs publicly, you’re arrested.

Yes, you may, you know, you’re decriminalized in the sense that if you are arrested for using drugs publicly, and you have below the amount that would trigger basically felony prosecution. But you’re not let off the hook. You’re brought in front of something called a commission for the dissuasion of addiction, which includes law enforcement, psychology, psychologists or psychiatrists and your family members. So they stage an intervention, the government stages an intervention to deal with your drug problem in Portugal.

So nobody does what we do here, which is allowing people to camp and public use drugs in public suffer their addiction in public. It’s just completely bizarre and, and uncivilized. So every civilized country offers addiction care and psychiatric care. And they use some amount of coercion for people that are breaking the law in other ways publicly for reasons related to their addictions.

Well, what about our our just our housing problem here? My understanding is that we’re we just have a housing shortage in part of approximately 3 million units in California alone, because of probably building restrictions and in large measure is that the way to resolve our homelessness problem is just allow more building to be done in multifamily housing, which would then hopefully reduce the cost of housing for people who are in the lower economic spectrum.

We need more housing, but it’s not the reason that people are on It’s another reason that addicts are on the street. I mean, the basic picture for the people on the street is that they became addicted to hard drugs. Couch, they quit their jobs to dedicate their full time to their addictions. That couch surfed they often stole money or borrowed money from friends and family until they were cut off from friends and family.

And then they maintain their addiction by living on the street. I found zero people living on the street who were not suffering from mental illness or addiction. If you are priced out of your rent, you do not go and pitch a tent in the dirtiest and most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. You move out of state like hundreds of 1000s of other Californians have. So we need more homeless shelters, the people that have opposed building sufficient homeless shelters are the homeless advocates themselves.

But we also need drug treatment, we need it to be mandatory for people that break the law. We need proper psychiatric care. These are problems that simply we should have been dealing with in the 60s and 70s that we never dealt with. And then when these two big drawback drug epidemics hit, that’s what led the homeless problem to explode in California.

But I probably have to disagree with you a bit and that I’ve worked with the homeless community here in LA and I certainly know of homeless people that were not necessarily series drug problems or mental illness problems who did become homeless. But I do recognize that those are two major problems that do plague the homeless community.

So unfortunately, we’ve kind of run out of time, but I really appreciate you being on the show, Michael, and it’s been a very lively discussion and certainly let the listeners know where they can find you and find some of the books that you’ve written.

Thanks so much. Matthew is wonderful talking.

What is what’s your website, Michael?

Oh, environmentalprogress.org. And both books are available at Amazon.com San Francisco and Apocalypse snapper.

Okay, well, Michael, have a great afternoon and thanks for being on the show. This is Matt Matern Unite and Heal America, KABC 790 and we’ll be back next week.