Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1777 - Andrew Dessler
Uploaded: 2022-02-16T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1777 - Andrew Dessler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-16. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1777 - Andrew Dessler' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-16. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1777 - Andrew Dessler

All right, we're up. Well, thank you very much for being here, Andrew.
Appreciate it.
Why don't you tell everybody, if you would, what you do and what your
credentials are?
So I'm a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. I'm the
director of the
Texas Center for Climate Studies. I've been studying climate and the atmosphere
for about 30 years.
Okay. And thank you for being here. And I brought you on here to counter this
book. Steve Koonin,
who was my last guest, and I'm trying to do this and balance things out. He has
a very different take
on what the science says about climate change than you do. So I guess we should
start. I know you've
read the book. What do you think about his book? Yeah, well, let me start with
a little context,
I think some historical context. So for decades, on a number of problems, there
have been scientists
who show up and say the consensus is all wrong. So it started in the 60s with
tobacco. So the evidence
was very clear that smoking is bad for you. And then the scientists started
showing up and saying,
no, you know, we don't really understand. There's all these problems with the
science. And what the
tobacco companies figured out very early is that having a scientist advance
that message was much
better than having a PR person. So they would go out and hire scientists to say,
hey, we need you to
push this message. And they went out. It was very effective. They delayed the
recognition that smoking
is bad for you for decades. Have you seen the documentary, Ministers of Doubt?
Merchants of Doubt. Yeah. In fact, I was going to say, you know, that's a
fantastic book by Naomi Oreskes
and Eric Conway that really goes over this all the way into climate change
about how science is used
to try to undermine policy action. And so then, you know, fast forward to the
80s and you have
fluorocarbons and ozone depletion. And in fact, the exact same thing happens.
The science was really
well established, but the scientists are showing up saying the scientists have
it all wrong. And in
fact, the arguments they're advancing are almost exactly the same as the
arguments that Dr. Kuhn is
advancing. If you take a Word document, you just do a global word replace ozone
depletion for climate
change, you have exactly the same argument. In fact, I have a slide with a
quote that I normally don't make
people read a paragraph. But I think this is actually really useful. If you go
to slide 52, this is from
1989. And I think is it going to show up there? Yes. It's worth, so this is a
quote from
something that was said about fluorocarbon. It says, the current situation can
be fairly summarized as
following. The CFC ozone theory is quite incomplete and cannot yet be relied on
to make predictions.
The natural sources of stratospheric ozone layer have not yet been delineated,
theoretically or
experimentally. The Antarctic ozone hole is ephemeral. It comes and goes. It
seems to be controlled by
climatic factors outside human control rather than CFC. So that's exactly the
same argument. You know,
we don't understand it. It's natural variability. It's identical argument. And
keeping it back up,
in the next paragraph, New York Times reports, talks about the disadvantages of
CFC substitutes. They may be toxic,
flammable, corrosive. They certainly won't work as well. They'll reduce the
energy efficiency of appliances.
They'll deteriorate. $135 billion of equipment used CFCs in the United States
alone. And much of this equipment
will have to be replaced or modified to work well. Eventually, that will
involve 100 million home refrigerators,
air conditioners in 90 million cars, central air conditioning plants in 100,000
large buildings.
Good luck. The total costs haven't even been added up yet. And again, you know,
windmills don't work.
You know, the costs are going to be extraordinary. And you were around the 90s.
Do you remember the
economic apocalypse that happened when we replaced CFCs? It didn't happen. The
economic apocalypse didn't
happen. We replaced them. And none of that happened. What did they replace them
with? With other CFCs.
There's so the original F-11, F-12 got replaced with these things we call HCFCs
that are less
damaging than those in a layer. And none of that happened. And that that those
people are the true
alarmists in the debate. The people that say we can't do it because we can do
it. And all the,
and they're just trying to scare people into not taking action. So you have a
question?
No, I was going to say, I think Kunin's take on replacing things is essentially
that there's
so many people in third world countries in impoverished areas that rely on
fossil fuels,
and that eliminating fossil fuels will be devastating to those environments
because these people are going
to lose out on massive amounts of income. And economically, it's going to
affect them in a
disastrous way. That's his take, right? I mean, I don't want to put words in
his mouth. Certainly,
he argues that it's difficult to transition. I think he said at one point
during his interview
with you that fossil fuels are the cheapest energy source, which is not true.
In fact, let me,
I have a slide on that. If we go to slide 33, this actually shows that now, so
your viewers may not
know this. And in fact, a few years ago, fossil fuels were the cheapest energy
source, but the prices
are plummeting. So this is a plot from Lazard, what they call the levelized
cost of energy. And you
can see on the left side, it's the price in 2009. And you can see the top dot
is solar. And it was
extremely expensive in 2009. And then as you go down, 2019, wind and solar are
now the cheapest
energy sources. Gas is close, but wind and solar, they are the cheap energy
sources.
Is it possible to replace all of the fossil fuel energy that we get with solar?
Oh, wow. That's a great question. And I guess we'll just sort of let the
conversation flow
as it wants. So yeah, let's, let's talk about what it takes to, what would,
what would a grid
that's carbon free look like? Okay. So everybody who's capable of tying their
shoelaces knows
that wind and solar are intermittent. So solar doesn't produce energy at night.
Wind doesn't produce
energy when the sun's not blowing. So everybody knows that. Okay.
When the wind's not blowing. When the wind's not blowing, yes. Everybody knows
that. So if you want
to create a, a reliable carbon free grid, you have a grid that's about on
average produces 75% of its
power from wind and solar. And then the other 25% is what we call dispatchable
firm power. So it could
be nuclear, could be geothermal, could be hydro. It's a power source you can
turn on and off to balance
the variability of wind and solar. So when, when the wind stops blowing, you
turn up your dispatchable.
And when the wind, when you're getting lots of wind and solar, you turn it off
and you let wind and
solar run. I was under the impression that wind was not very effective, that
these windmills don't
produce that much power. I mean, some days in Texas, it's half our power. Half
of our power comes from wind?
Yeah. If it's a windy day, we get an enormous amount of power. Yeah. Texas has
an enormous amount
of power that we get from wind on windy days. Some days you don't get a lot of
power, but you do.
That's incredible. I did not know. It's half of our power. Yeah. So conceivably
with solar and with wind,
we could power the entire state. And with, you need some dispatchable power.
Right.
You need, you need some nuclear, you need some geothermal, you need some high,
you need something
that you can balance the, the renewable energy with. But much less than we're
currently using.
That's right. And so, so you might say, you might ask reasonably, you know, why
use wind and solar at all?
Why don't you just build a hundred percent nuclear? And that would work. And I
would actually support
that, but that's much more expensive. The wind and solar are very cheap at this
point. And in fact,
the marginal cost of wind and solar energy is zero. They produce energy, an
extra joule of energy
at no cost because they don't have any fuel. Right. So if you want to pay the
least amount for energy,
what you want to do is you want to have a grid that's mainly wind and solar,
but then you have to have
this firm power that makes up for it when the power, when wind and solar don't
produce. Because there are
going to be times when they don't produce. We know, we know that's going to
happen.
So wind and solar also rely on, there's, there has to be some sort of battery
that collects the
energy, correctly? No, no. So that's a different- Solar does, right?
No, they really don't. So that, that's part of why you need to have dispatchable
energy. You don't
really need energy storage on a grid. Now, there are some benefits to energy
storage, especially
storage that lasts a few hours, because you can collect energy at noon when
solar is producing
lots and shift it into the evening. So you can shift the energy a few hours. So
you might want
to use batteries for that, but you don't really need long-term storage to run
the grid. You just need
some sort of dispatchable power to balance the renewable. So is, when you have
batteries that are
attached to solar systems, is that just for individual use, like for off-the-grid
homes and
things of that like? No, no. It'd be industrial-scale batteries. And again, the
idea would be to shift
power from when you're getting the most solar, which is noon, to when the
demand is the highest,
which is a few hours later. Right. But what I'm saying is, for individual homes,
most of them have battery backup systems. They have systems that store the
solar, correct? Like,
I used to have a system like that. Yeah. You know, I don't, I actually don't
know the statistics. I think
most people have solar panels in their house that don't have batteries. I think
some people do,
but most don't have solar. So they connect to the grid as well.
Yeah. So they're using- But if the grid goes down,
that means their solar power is down as well, right? That's right. So for most
people who have
solar panels in their house, they actually have an interlock system that when
the grid goes down,
their solar panels shut off. And the reason to do that is for safety of the
power line workers.
They don't want, if the power line workers think there's no power on the grid,
they don't want
these solar panels feeding power in. They walk in and they get shocked. So that,
so that solar panels
actually are designed to shut off when the power goes out. Now you can, you can
put a battery on
your house. You can have it disconnect from the grid and you can basically make
your house a little
island. But most people don't do that. If they do do that, is, is it really
possible to power your
entire home through solar that way? You know, you can, it's, that's a question
of how much you want to
invest. If you, you certainly could do that. I think if you have big enough
batteries, you could,
you could do that. But the grid is a good, reliable backup most of the time.
And so I think
that's what most people rely on. They just hook up to the grid. And you know,
when they're not,
when they're not generating enough power, there's pulling energy off the grid.
And when they're
generating excess power, they're pushing it onto the grid. Right. But I think
one of the things that
people like about the idea of solar power is that you're off the grid, is that
you don't have to rely on
anything. Like if the big freeze happens again and everything shuts off, you'll
have a refrigerator,
you'll have heat. Right, right. Oh yeah. No, I think that's, that's right. And
I would love to
have a house like that. But most people don't have houses that can disconnect
from the grid.
So most of the people that do have solar power, they have solar power and they're
attached to the
grid. So solar is just a way of saving money and saving energy costs and saving
your energy consumption.
Yeah, that's right. So i