EPISODE 212: “The Truth about Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change” with Dr Jerome Corsi, PhD

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to The Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists and thinkers. Fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics, and human flourishing. Interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:00:23):

Bill Walton Show. I’m Bill Walton. Claims about manmade threats to the Earth from climate change must rank among the biggest hoaxes ever perpetrated by anyone, anywhere. Even worse are the so-called solutions being opposed to achieve, “Net zero carbon emissions,” like eliminating hydrocarbons and mandating wind and solar power, which essentially shut down a modern economy that has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

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What’s happening now is not about the climate, it’s not about energy. It’s not about the environment. Instead, an unscientific and purposeful climate scare is being perpetrated by a new class of power leads to impose their will and right to rule over the rest of us.

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Well, I know these are strong statements, but the more you dig into the faux science and the unstated agenda of the climate change regime, the more they ring true. If we care about freedom and human flourishing, we need to speak out with the truth about climate. One great place to start is by absorbing the facts in the recently published book by my guest on this episode, Dr. Jerome Corsi, titled The Truth About Energy, Global Warming and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation. It’s a tour de force that establishes the case with carefully reasoned, well-researched and fact-based arguments.

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Dr. Jerome Corsi received a PhD from Harvard University and has published over 25 books in economics, history and politics, including six New York Times bestsellers, two at number one, Unfit for Command and The Obama Nation. So, Jerry, welcome.

Jerome Corsi (00:02:27):

Bill, great to be with you. Thank you very much.

Bill Walton (00:02:29):

Yeah, great to see you. Well, let’s start with this. I want to get at the heart of the matter. You write the whole climate hysteria seems to focus on a molecule, carbon dioxide, CO2, which we humans exhale, and which we release into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. So, Jerry, what’s the truth about CO2?

Jerome Corsi (00:02:53):

Well, I think first of all, CO2 is not a noxious chemical. I mean, obviously we exhale it. It doesn’t kill us, it’s part of a natural carbon cycle. What the argument is with burning hydrocarbon fuels since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve caused the planet to dramatically heat up in a way that historically has not been the case. That’s the argument.

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Now, there’s several fallacies in this argument. First of all, there was much more carbon dioxide in earlier Earth periods. We take the Earth being about 4.6 billion years old. And I know that’s not the biblical view, but it’s certainly the scientific view. You’ve got a very, very hot Earth in the beginning of time, that had a lot of sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was basically a non-inhabitable planet. For 80% of the time Earth has been in existence, up until the Precambrian period, there was no life on the surface of the planet, and so it was not an inhabitable planet.

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In fact, the changes in Earth have been dramatic, so that maybe a hundred million years ago, we had much more carbon dioxide than we do today. We’ve had ice ages with more carbon dioxide. Today, carbon dioxide is a trace molecule. It’s only 0.0004%. That’s four one thousandths of 1% in the atmosphere. That’s all the carbon dioxide there is. Its impact as a greenhouse gas is not measurable. It’s so small.

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The argument is that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, as we’re admitting it, that holds the heat in Earth and it warms up the planet. But as I said, first of all, these greenhouse gases are essential for life on the planet. Otherwise, at night, all the irradiance from the sun would escape back into the atmosphere, and it’d probably too cold to inhabit. And secondly, water vapor is 70% of all greenhouse gases, much more important than carbon dioxide, [inaudible 00:05:10] demonizes water vapor or demonizes high carbon dioxide because that’s what we use in industrial activity, burning hydrocarbon fuels. So, that’s why it’s picked as the villain.

Bill Walton (00:05:23):

Well, you point out in the book, and it’s so true, there’s so many distorted statistics and numbers that are thrown out to scare people. I think one of the things you mentioned is that the scary reports are we’re now putting 80 billion cubic whatevers of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Well, you need a little context for that. Evidently, the atmosphere is how many trillions of cubic yards large. So, it turns out to be, as you point out, 0.001%. So, that 80 billion is not even a drop in the bucket. It’s not even a drop in the ocean.

Jerome Corsi (00:06:03):

But it sounds like a big number. So, it scares people. And again, a lot of the science is… The intergovernmental, the IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the UN organization responsible for a lot of this climate hysteria, has perpetrated a very distorted view with the science, which I think legitimate climate scientists reject. The idea that we have, for instance, as I said, today we are in an interglacial warming period. And carbon dioxide is actually very positive because it’s what plants absorb.

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More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are warmer, makes a greener planet. It actually allows life to thrive. The reason we have now six or more billion people on the Earth is because the Earth is not only warmer, but it has more plant life. And with burning hydrocarbon fuels, which are cheap energy compared to other alternatives, we have the ability to produce enough food and have enough of an industrial society to support this level of population. It has never been possible in the history of the world until now. We should be very pleased about this.

Bill Walton (00:07:21):

Well, how did carbon dioxide get singled out as the terrible thing it’s supposed to be? And when did the IPCC gets stood up? You say it’s part of the United Nations. When did this all arrive at our doorstep?

Jerome Corsi (00:07:36):

The IPCC goes back about maybe 20, 30 years. I mean, it’s been a recent phenomenon. The first three chapters of the book, I outlined how this hysteria developed. After World War II, several writers, including Harrison Brown, let’s start with him, who was a nuclear scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, started writing books about, “There’s too many people, we’re going to use up the natural resources of Earth and people are going to starve and die. So, we have to have fewer people and we have to use fewer natural resources.”

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Well, that was a Malthusian idea. Malthus is famous for the mathematics that population is going to exceed food and people are eventually going to starve, and you can’t produce enough food to keep the populations going. That idea was advanced by people like… The Population Bomb. We had the-

Bill Walton (00:08:40):

Was hat Paul Ehrlich or was that-

Jerome Corsi (00:08:42):

Paul Ehrlich and his wife.

Bill Walton (00:08:43):

Yeah.

Jerome Corsi (00:08:44):

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb in 1968 was a very, very big book and bestseller. And it again, advanced this too many people idea, we got to kill people. I mean, Harrison Brown actually wanted there to be government control. He wanted there to be worldwide control of population, only allowed to have certain number of children. He wanted to eliminate the mentally deficient. And Paul Ehrlich advanced that argument and made it popular in the ’60s. And then he got joined by John Holdren.

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John Holdren was ultimately the science czar for Obama. And he had a background in science, but they too met at the university out in California where Ehrlich was teaching. Ehrlich’s specialty was butterflies. He had studied butterflies. That’s how he got his PhD. He had nothing to do with the climate or population. Also, Ehrlich never said there were too many butterflies. I’ve never read [inaudible 00:09:39].

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But at any rate, Ehrlich, when he joined with Holdren, Holdren said, “Well, look, if there’s too many people, we got to find a reason why people will have an existential fear.” And he said, “In terms of the climate, because hydrocarbon fuels exude carbon dioxide, it is going to cause an imbalance in the Earth’s temperature.” At first, they thought it was going to cause an ice age. That was the initial fear in the ’70s that we were going to have a new ice age and kill everyone.

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The planet actually started warming up, and another little brief period, it was only cold and then it was warming. These changes occur all the time in time series analysis. At any rate, so they switched it to being global warming, and Holdren started advancing this argument. So, the environmental movement in coming out of World War II, which is basically that, “Let’s be good stewards of the planet,” which is a responsible idea, once it got it hijacked by the depopulationists, the Malthusians, and then it got further hijacked by the radical environmentalists who want there to be less industrial activity on the Earth. And finally it got co-opted by the Marxists. So, by the time you get to AOC, Alexandria Cortez, I mean Ocasio-Cortez, and Congress and others, they now advance that in fact, it is capitalism and the burning of hydrocarbon fuels that releases this carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And they believe the carbon dioxide is fossil fuel, so we’re releasing carbon that was trapped in this dead organisms into the atmosphere. And it compounds because it’s building every year, releasing more. And so it’s additive. And if we raise the temperature of the Earth a few degrees, we’re going to actually have global warming catastrophes. [inaudible 00:11:48].

Bill Walton (00:11:49):

This has all gotten very mystical and very otherworldly because aren’t they also saying things like we’re not only disrespecting the Earth and species now, but we’re disrespecting all those poor dinosaurs that died and were compounded into whatever they were. And that’s what they call fossil fuels. And you point out in the book that we’re not talking about vasts fossil fuels, we’re talking about hydrocarbon, which is… We can talk about the chemistry of that, and I hope you will.

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But just one other point. It seems like all these things you’re talking about: Ehrlich, the Malthusian, the people, the Club of Rome, the limits to growth, the whole group of people are totalitarian, top down, they’re anti-human, they’re anti-flourishing. And most importantly, they’re anti-innovation and they don’t believe that that humans have been creating much that’s worthwhile for the time we’ve been on the Earth. And particularly, they don’t buy into the fact that the Industrial Revolution, which was powered… they call it capitalism, that was Marx’s term. It was really free market economics, voluntary exchange, people innovating and building a better world. They don’t believe in that. And so all these groups have coalesced into a coalition that… I guess I’m doubling my terms here. And it is not just about climate, it’s now about transgender.

Jerome Corsi (00:13:16):

Well, that’s correct. That’s what it’s called.

Bill Walton (00:13:19):

It’s all one- [inaudible 00:13:21].

Jerome Corsi (00:13:22):

It’s ideologically driven. It’s ideologically driven.

Bill Walton (00:13:23):

Not science driven.

Jerome Corsi (00:13:24):

Not science driven.

Bill Walton (00:13:26):

Can I circle back here though? How did that lonely little molecule, the CO2 molecule, get singled out as the demon? Because if you pointed out, it’s a trace element, I think you say in the book, you go up three or four or five times and it still wouldn’t show up in the measurements.

Jerome Corsi (00:13:43):

And we’ve had ice ages when there’s been a hundred or a thousand times more carbon dioxide, it’s concentration in the atmosphere. So, it is not a driver of Earth’s temperature. It is not a major factor in Earth’s temperature. Water vapor plays a much more significant role. But the point is the… especially with Ehrlich and Holdren, they had to find something that created an existential threat. In other words, “We’re all going to die unless we do what I say, okay? What I’m saying, what the argument is, we got to stop using industrial activity. We can’t burn hydrocarbon fuels because they emit carbon dioxide.”

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Now, I mean, carbon dioxide, as I said, is plant food. It’s one of the key molecules that permits life on Earth. We exhale it. Given that this was a Malthusian movement, it’s almost suicidal. We’re the cause of our own extinction. We’re the cause of what they’re saying is going to be a sixth extinction. Human beings are the problem. We’re the malice. We’re the nemesis on Earth. We destroy ourselves. And of course, we have take cows with us and anything else that emits methane. They want basically a reduction back to a much smaller population without industrial activity. And they want to be in control. And so this is the whole movement for renewable energy, et cetera, comes out of this motive to be in control.

Bill Walton (00:15:19):

I don’t think this is commonly understood at all. I think there’s a… Even Republicans that should know better, of course, I have to revise that after the 1. 7 trillion omnibus bill they just voted for. We should know better. I mean, this has never been about climate. Yeah, everybody wants to feel good. They want to be nice to the climate. They like animals, they like plants. And so being green has been put into this virtuous category when in fact the agenda is quite Draconian, quite ominous.

Jerome Corsi (00:15:58):

Well, there’s nothing green about… What’s green about wind energy? What’s green about solar energy? As far as I can see, the sun is yellow. I mean, there’s nothing green here.

Bill Walton (00:16:08):

Well, but even further, it’s not really renewable and it’s not really sustainable. I mean, the amount of mining that needs to go in to make the equipment or the materials that make a battery or a wind farm or a solar field is astronomical. It’s much more energy intense than hydrocarbons.

Jerome Corsi (00:16:29):

As I point out, also, I wrote a chapter on Solyndra, which was the boondoggle in the Obama administration.

Bill Walton (00:16:35):

Great chapter. I had some friends that worked in that administration on Solyndra.

Jerome Corsi (00:16:39):

So I’m sure you did.

Bill Walton (00:16:40):

It was a tough career move for them.

Jerome Corsi (00:16:42):

They all decided that they were going to put the money under Obama. They put billions dollars into wind and solar. And of course, Peter Schweitzer, who I greatly admire with his government accountability institute there in Washington, demonstrated that about three quarters of the money that went under the Obama, various stimuluses to green energy, went to people who were on his finance committee in 2008. Now, the projects all failed. The wind farms and solar panels out there in the desert that nobody’s using at all, they’re junk. And no one was put to jail. And the money was gone, billions spent. And much of that equipment is obsolete today and useless because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t sufficiently power what we need with enough energy to propel a major city or a major population area.

Bill Walton (00:17:38):

Well, I like what you wrote about when you’re praising Mark Moreno, who should be praised, has been a pioneer in this field for decades. But I guess one of the things you say, you’re right, is that, “When the government mandates and subsidies run out, the fields of rotting wind turbines and rusting solar panels would be a monument to the follow of decarbonization.”

Jerome Corsi (00:18:01):

Yeah, I mean, it’s exactly-

Bill Walton (00:18:02):

Well said. Well said.

Jerome Corsi (00:18:04):

I mean, look, if we had a solar battery the size of a flashlight battery that would power a city, you wouldn’t need subsidies. That would be produced by private industry immediately and everybody would switch to it. The fact is that hydrocarbon fuels are combustible. And so they’re energy coefficient, if you look at the physics, hydrocarbon fuels, it’s very high energy coefficient. Whereas wind and solar have to be stored. They’re generating electricity, and they’re not used as they come offline, they have to be stored. And the sun doesn’t shine all the time. The wind doesn’t blow all the time. So, you have to have backup hydrocarbon systems.

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And the problem is that the storage also loses energy, it’s extremely costly, and also uses a lot of rare materials like lithium and these electric vehicles. So, it’s a very inefficient energy technology. You’d have to have huge areas of the Earth devoted to wind and solar. And even then, the logistics of transmitting that energy over long distances and storing, it is not easy. It’s very expensive.

Bill Walton (00:19:18):

Well, yeah, my friend, I think him as well, Mark Mills at Manhattan Institute, has written extensively on this. And he points out that to replace hydrocarbons in the United States, with wind and solar, you’d need wind and solar fields that would cover half the surface area of the continent. It’s stunningly terrible use of the environment, if you will, not to think of all the birds that the windmills are going to kill.

Jerome Corsi (00:19:52):

They do constantly. And look, the core of my book really, after the first few chapters where I explained this politic, is ideological. We’re dealing with an ideological agenda.

Bill Walton (00:20:02):

But let’s give a quick plug for the book. This is The Bill Walton Show. I’m here with the great Dr. Jerome Corsi, who’s written a book, and if you’ll hold it up so we can make sure we get it on tv, The Truth About Energy, Global Warming and Climate Change. And it’s a fabulous-

Jerome Corsi (00:20:21):

Exposing Climate lies in the Age of Disinformation.

Bill Walton (00:20:25):

And it does, and it does. And I’d highly recommend it. You need to have a cup of coffee for some of the chapters before you start in reading because it gets into the actual science and the real truth behind what’s going on with the climate. And if you want to win arguments with your friends at the club or wherever you’re into it, this is the place to start because it’s got all the real science that you’ll need. Jerry, continue.

Jerome Corsi (00:20:54):

Well, I mean, there’s so many. This movement exists because they’re… First of all, people are not well educated in science any longer. People are not versed in math. They don’t have backgrounds in chemistry or physics. And a lot of lies have been told, the disinformation about energy over the years is enormous.

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I start out with one of the key ideas of saying that oil, coal, and natural gas are not fossil fuels. They’re hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are chemicals. And even this distinction goes back into a fundamental, I think, misunderstanding that traces back centuries in chemistry to where there’s organic and inorganic chemistry, and carbon related issues going to organic chemistry. A lot of our bodies are carbon. Hydrocarbons are assumed to come from organic material. Those were supposed to be the living chemicals. Well, there is no such thing as living and dead chemicals. There’s just chemicals. Chemicals that-

Bill Walton (00:22:02):

So, the distinction between organic and inorganic is a false one.

Jerome Corsi (00:22:05):

False one, because basically chemistry is about atomic structures and how atomic structures, either as elements form or when the elements combine, elements come together to form molecules, what that process is like to form molecular structures. So, carbon dioxide is carbon atoms and oxygen atoms, which are combined to do a carbon dioxide as a molecule, and that has a unique structure.

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Now, the question that was raised in chemistry and had been raised very brilliantly by a group of German chemists between World War I and World War II, was how is oil synthesized? In other words, it was a chemical structure. There has to be a way that it’s put together. And the idea that it was decomposing organic material, to anyone who’s really versed in science in terms of the second law of thermal dynamics… And this is why, Bill, it takes a little bit of study to be able to understand this.

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But if you don’t get these concepts, you’re going to be easily fooled by the rhetoric of the left because you can’t argue with it. You can’t see through it. But the point is that carbon dioxide as a chemical structure can, the Weimar Republic chemist said, “We’re going to figure out how to synthesize it how Earth makes this stuff.” And what they decided was Germany had a lot of coal. They did not have much oil.

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Now, if they were going to fight World War II, the Weimar Republic chemists were charged and assigned to figure out how to produce synthetic oil, diesel fuel, aviation fuel to run the Wehrmacht, the army that was going to fight World War II for the Germans. So, they came up with these equations. They actually synthesized hydrocarbons, and they realized that if you take something that’s got carbon in it and something that’s got hydrogen in it, and you’ve got intense pressure and heat with the presence of a catalyst, which is often what’s needed to make these atomic joinings into molecules, they don’t just join together. I mean, hydrogen and carbon want to get together, but to get together, they’re going to need a catalyst that gets… they need a matchmaker and they need the right temperature. They need the right heat in order to bind.

Bill Walton (00:24:33):

I knew this show was going to be sexy.

Jerome Corsi (00:24:36):

Well, that’s good. It’s all about the prairie process of all these chemicals. [inaudible 00:24:40].

Bill Walton (00:24:40):

But I wanted to interject here. The Germans tried to create something that would make gasoline, ultimately, from the hydrocarbons, but turned out to be very expensive. And if you look at what happened to Germany, and most people don’t know this, they fought the war with totally insufficient hydrocarbon gasoline resources. Look at all the photos, and there are lots of horse and carriages still in the German army in World War II.

Jerome Corsi (00:25:07):

Well, in fact, Germany created Fischer-Tropsch plants all around Germany.

Bill Walton (00:25:13):

That’s what the-

Jerome Corsi (00:25:13):

They did.

Bill Walton (00:25:14):

… process is to break… Fischer-Tropsch.

Jerome Corsi (00:25:16):

These were two chemists. Yeah, F-I-S-C-H-E-R and T-R-O-P-S-C-H. These two chemists created a process, the Fischer-Tropsch process, where they basically were able to gasify coal. They were able to produce it into a vaporized form. Pressure and heat, they could take carbon and hydrogen and form hydrocarbon chains. Now, that’s a little technical, but I mean, I do describe it in the book because the Germans realized they could produce everything, from methane to propane to fuels that were needed to produce aviation fuel, diesel fuel and gasoline.

Bill Walton (00:25:57):

Now, would that technology be commercially viable today or was that-

Jerome Corsi (00:26:02):

Actually, at the end of World War II, army intelligence went to Germany and got the Fischer-Tropsch equations. And I’ve found them on the microfilm in the National Archives out in Silver Spring. It took me quite a while to find them, but I have now filed all the Fischer-Tropsch materials and understand the chemistry. They work. And after World War II, we did build at least one Fischer-Tropsch plant in the United States.

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China, by the way, is still operating Fischer-Tropsch. China doesn’t care how expensive they are. We operated if one or two, and we decided they were too expensive, given how relatively cheap oil and natural gas were. Now of course, our petrol chemists said we’re going to run out of gasoline because it’s only so many dinosaurs. There’s only so much fossil fuel. But we never have run out of it. That’s another point I want to get to, and I do elaborate on that in the book.

Bill Walton (00:26:57):

Well, let me get to the point that I want to understand, which is burning hydrocarbons, gasoline, coal, natural gas, whatever, emits something into the atmosphere, I guess, CO2.

Jerome Corsi (00:27:12):

Yes, among other things, but CO2 is the one they care about.

Bill Walton (00:27:15):

But there’s no link, as you’ve pointed out in the book, between the CO2 levels and the Earth’s temperature.

Jerome Corsi (00:27:25):

The link is so minimal. I mean, carbon monoxide-

Bill Walton (00:27:28):

Define minimal. Is it 1%, 10%…. What do we know? Because we’re reorganizing an entire western civilization based on this belief. And it’s a belief if it’s this wrong, we need to get it out there and correct the record because we’re making lousy decisions right now based on this fallacy.

Jerome Corsi (00:27:49):

The water vapor is 70% of all the greenhouse gas effect on Earth. Water vapor. Now, that’s not necessarily clouds. Clouds also play a role. Clouds are condensation of water. Vapor is just simply-

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Jerome Corsi (00:28:03):

Condensation of water. Water Vapor is just simply like free H2O in the atmosphere of which there’s a lot. Okay. It’s also in the oceans. So it’s the evaporation of water out of the oceans. Our atmosphere has a lot of water in it. Water vapor, is an important greenhouse gas effect. Carbon dioxide is 1/1000th of 1% of the atmosphere. And its effect as a greenhouse gas is almost unmeasurable. It’s so small. We’ve had ice ages with-

Bill Walton (00:28:40):

But if you had to pretend there was a basketball court and that was the atmosphere, the CO2 would occupy one square inch of that basketball court?

Jerome Corsi (00:28:51):

It’d be like a grain of sand.

Bill Walton (00:28:52):

Okay. I would just want to get that into some visual thing.

Jerome Corsi (00:28:56):

A grain of sand. [inaudible 00:28:56] Grain of sand, [inaudible 00:28:58] tiny. And [inaudible 00:28:59] well, yeah, it has an effect. But 70% of the picture we’re drawing is water vapor. Now, why are we going to concentrate on those little grain of sand and forget about the 70%? Well, because hydrocarbon fuels don’t emit water vapor. So we can’t demonize it.

Bill Walton (00:29:17):

My God.

Jerome Corsi (00:29:19):

Okay. And what the Germans found out was that the earth internally has the right elements. It has enough hydrogen, it’s got enough carbon. It’s got iron and iron oxide is a good catalyst. It’s got the temperature. It’s got the heat. So the mantle of the earth is where hydrocarbons are formed. Now, this was, again, a very radical idea. Again, our petro-geologists don’t believe it even today. But the point is, they still think it’s formed in sedimentary rock. Now, I mentioned the second law of thermodynamics, which is basically entropy, which means when you die, our bodies decompose. They go back to the constituent chemicals. The Bible says, “From dust into dust.” Say from dust into oil. When you know bury somebody, you don’t put a rubber lining in the casket because that Matilda’s going to turn into oil.

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It doesn’t happen. Okay? And Matilda’s going to become dust. If she’s lucky, you’re going to have a little bit of skeleton left. Even over time, that’ll go. Fossils are not the animal. They’re usually silica [inaudible 00:30:38] is the animal structure. And so therefore, the idea that the abundance of oil we have is from dying organic material, especially given the evidence we have… Thomas Gold, who was a very famous scientist at Cornell, wrote a book called The Deep Hot Biosphere. What he realized was in the bottoms of the oceans, which are so dense, there’s no light down there. There are these hydrocarbon chimneys. There’s big chimneys coming out of the bottom of the oceans. And they exude hydrocarbons, methane. A whole bunch of hydrocarbons are coming out of these.

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And the plants and animals down at that level live on the hydrocarbon. They don’t live in photosynthesis. Now, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which is very reputable, went down to these Woods Hole. They went down to these hydro therms and they sampled the hydrocarbons. They wrote an article in science and said, “These hydrocarbons are produced by the Fischer Tropsh process.” So we do have scientific evidence. The Fischer Tropsh chemistry is active in the mantle of the earth producing hydrocarbons today. And no one knows this because it’s the type of science that they don’t want to teach in the schools.

Bill Walton (00:31:54):

What do you mean? Who’s they that don’t want to teach? You’re going up against a whole establishment [inaudible 00:32:01]-

Jerome Corsi (00:32:02):

Petro-geologists, I write about them. I actually [inaudible 00:32:05] a whole shelf full of hydrocarbon chemistry books. And they all start out by saying that oil and natural gas and coal are fossil fuel because they are made from organic material. So organic material that died in the swamp or died in the right conditions-

Bill Walton (00:32:24):

Which was a theory that somebody put forward in the 19th century.

Jerome Corsi (00:32:28):

It actually goes back to about some 1800 [inaudible 00:32:32].

Bill Walton (00:32:32):

Some guy, some British, some English guy in a laboratory [inaudible 00:32:36] came up with this idea. Okay.

Jerome Corsi (00:32:37):

Russian [inaudible 00:32:38] Russian guy.

Bill Walton (00:32:39):

Russian. Okay.

Jerome Corsi (00:32:40):

By the time of Humboldt… If you know about Humboldt, Humboldt was one of these natural history guys. And they were speculating about how oil was formed. They said it came from dying organic material. Now, the lab who did the atomic chart was also… The atomic chart we used today in chemistry was from Mendeleev. Now he was in the 1850s. He said that oil, natural gas, coal were hydrocarbons. And they did not come from dying material. He actually worked in the energy industry in the 1850s. Now, this is the guy who developed the atomic chart. I suspect he knew something about chemistry and atomic structures. And he understood as I do, that you don’t need a living thing to produce living molecules that then produce oil.

Bill Walton (00:33:38):

But why are the petrol oil… You know the book… By the way, this is the Bill Walton show, and I’m here with Dr. Jerome Corsi. And he’s written a wonderful book. [inaudible 00:33:50] It’s a complex book, but it’s totally worth it. The Truth About Energy, Global Warming and Climate Change, Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation. Stay with us on the show and listen to this and go to his book. Because if you want to know the truth, this is the place to start.

(00:34:09):

Now, Jerry, Thomas Kuhn wrote this book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I’m sure you know. [inaudible 00:34:17] And he talked about the new big ideas that came along. And I don’t remember the whole detail of it, but the gist was this, the scientific establishment holds a conventional point of view. And then there’s another idea that comes up. And that new idea comes up with some young guy, let’s call him Einstein. Let’s call him Jerry Corsi. But anyway, they come up with this idea and the establishment just absolutely rejects it. And the only way that new idea gets accepted is the old scientists die. So you got a generational change before… You can’t change minds. You just have to have new minds that are receptive.

Jerome Corsi (00:35:01):

Thomas Kuhn said basically is that what happens is you come up with a scientific theory like that the sun revolves around the earth, rather the earth revolving around the sun. And then you start making observations. And your data doesn’t fit the old theory. So the old theory is leaky. Somebody comes up with a new theory that fits the data better. Now I’m just telling you, you’ve got scientific confirmation that the mantle of the earth is producing hydrocarbon fuels through these Fischer Tropsch equations the Germans came up with. Now that’s new data that says the fossil fuel theory is obsolete because fossil fuel theory can’t explain how dead organic material got into the mantle of the earth. And if they tried to, they’re not going to be able to have enough dinosaurs down there to make oil.

Bill Walton (00:35:59):

So we’re not burning those poor little dinosaurs from [inaudible 00:36:03]

Jerome Corsi (00:36:03):

No. Oh God.

Bill Walton (00:36:05):

Tell AOC that.

Jerome Corsi (00:36:06):

Well, when I grew up as a kid in the ’50s, they had Dino, the dinosaur who was [inaudible 00:36:15] oil.

Bill Walton (00:36:14):

Sure. Yeah. I was there. I was there.

Jerome Corsi (00:36:18):

All the kids had Dino, the dinosaur little toys. Well, even as a kid, I thought that was nonsense. How many dinosaurs did it take to make a barrel of oil? Ridiculous idea. You can’t boil a dinosaur down to oil. Now the problem is that that idea is stuck. And then it again is part of the idea that, because these creatures died, the carbon dioxide died with them. And now we’re releasing dead carbon dioxide, which is also nonsense because there’s carbon dioxide is not one of the main constituents of decomposed material. Decomposed material goes back into the original chemicals. The Bible does not say dust into oil, dust into coal, or dust into natural gas.

Bill Walton (00:37:14):

So we’re going to come back. We got to dig into this some more. And I promised you I’d read a couple of your tougher chapters and I didn’t get to them. I’m going to get to them. We’re going to go dive into those. In the 10, 15 minutes we’ve got left, how do we turn this into an elevator pitch to change minds? Because if we don’t change minds, we’re running like lemmings off a cliff.

Jerome Corsi (00:37:41):

Well, we are. In fact, we are. The main concept in the book… There’s two main concepts in the book. Number one is that the Earth’s climate and weather patterns are extremely complex. They’re impacted by the intensity of the sun, which varies. Sometimes the sun burns hot, sometimes it’s in a minimum. That affects earth’s temperature. Earth’s temperature is affected by the amount of cosmic rays that hit us from interstellar material because cosmic rays produce clouds. They have the right physics to interact and produce clouds.

(00:38:23):

Well, the clouds are a negative feedback. Clouds block the sun and make the earth cooler. So cosmic rays enter in. Then the other factors that are extremely important, so I said water vapor in the atmosphere, but the ocean currents. The ocean currents have a major effect on climatic conditions. So right now, for instance, and this is December of 2022, and again the arctic vortex, which is a wind pattern because of the ocean currents, this complex interaction has dipped down into North America and into Europe. So for a while, late December, early January can be reasonably predicted that we’re going to have in the middle of the United States extending up into New England, because it’ll sweep that way, we’ll have blizzards and very, very cold weather. And it will also be hitting in Europe. Now that’s a complex pattern. So number one concept is no single variable like carbon dioxide has the ability to drive Earth’s weather or temperature. It doesn’t.

(00:39:39):

And these cataclysmic, we have tornadoes, we have hurricanes. They’re a natural function of the Earth’s weather. Weather is, it’s raining today. It’s snowing today. Climate is patterns of weather. So patterns of weather can be an ice age. Ice ages are not caused by a little bit more or a little bit less carbon dioxide. They’re caused by earth’s pattern around the sun. If it gets more elliptical, we have an ice age, more distant from the sun. And there’s mathematics that demonstrate that. So number one is your weather and climate are extremely complex and no one variable like carbon dioxide determines what’s going to happen. Number two, the earth distributes heat. So we get a lot of heat on the equator. The earth wants to move that heat to the poles and to the upper atmosphere. This is the natural process. Not because we’re humans here. The earth is not adjusting for us. There have been five extinctions before humans got here. And we’re just the latest creatures walking around the surface of the earth as far as the earth is concerned. There have been others here before.

(00:40:56):

So that’s number one point, how complex this is. Number two, the mathematics. Now I just got some fairly deep mathematics in the book. I try to make it simple. That’ll make this very easy, I think, I hope. The earth’s climate is non-linear. Now, linear equation means if you put the variables in, you put two and two, these variables of four will come out. And you put four and four, and eight will come out. Put eight and eight, 16 will come out. A non-linear equation, you can put a two and two, and you might get seven because there’s other factors internal in the equation which manipulate the variables. So it doesn’t always produce the same result. In fact, it’s chaotic. The earth, it’s chaos. So no mathematical model can ever capture the complexity of how the earth operates. Now these concepts lose people pretty quickly and you have to think about them. But imagine it this way. The IPCC wants to tell you that if we burn hydrocarbon fuels and this is a greenhouse gas, it’s going to heat up the earth, burn twice as much. It’ll heat up the earth twice as much. Okay. Fundamental logical fallacy, which is post hoc propter hoc. In other words, just because something happened afterwards, doesn’t mean it’s because of.

(00:42:29):

And I illustrate that by saying, my mother says to me, “You failed your test today and it was because you didn’t eat your breakfast.” No, I failed my test today ’cause I didn’t study. I didn’t go to the class. I didn’t know what this course was about. They gave me the test. I didn’t know what they’re talking about. That’s why I failed, mother. It didn’t have anything to do… Now I didn’t eat breakfast. But if I ate breakfast, I’d still fail the class. So if we produce more carbon dioxide because of burning hydrocarbon fuels, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to heat up the atmosphere that much more. Because it’s a non-linear equation and it’s very complex and it may not behave in a linear fashion, may not produce the results you think it’s going to produce.

Bill Walton (00:43:11):

Well I keep coming back to that grain of sand in the corner of my gym floor. How it even [inaudible 00:43:17] quadrupling its size have anything to do with the global [inaudible 00:43:20]-

Jerome Corsi (00:43:19):

That grain of sand in your corner of your living room is going to determine how your marriage is going today. I don’t think so. It may have to do with how you treat your wife. That might have something to do with it. But that grain of sand probably doesn’t have anything to do with how your wife is feeling [inaudible 00:43:35].

Bill Walton (00:43:36):

I’ve got so many questions for you. But how do high IQ people in business and government and throughout the West seem to have agreed that CO2 is the villain and CO2 is produced by hydrocarbons and burning those and therefore we need to shut down the western economy with [inaudible 00:44:06].

Jerome Corsi (00:44:05):

We kill ourselves in order to save the planet.

Bill Walton (00:44:07):

Yeah, so we can make a whole argument about the global elites. And the global elites don’t think it’ll affect them because they’ll have plenty left for them and the rest of us [inaudible 00:44:20] will suffer. But without getting into the global elite question, how do you average smart people think this blindingly wrong thing is true?

Jerome Corsi (00:44:29):

Well, there’s a couple of answers to that. Number one, the only thing green in the climate debate is money.

Bill Walton (00:44:36):

Yeah, that’s true.

Jerome Corsi (00:44:38):

And there’s a lot of money to be made doing conversion to hydrocarbon, away from hydrocarbon is to do wind and solar. And Obama’s spent billions. Biden’s spending billions again. And if it doesn’t work, they’ll spend billion more because the fact that it doesn’t work doesn’t prove to them it won’t work.

Bill Walton (00:44:56):

It’s like communism.

Jerome Corsi (00:44:57):

It just proves [inaudible 00:44:58]. You got to do more of it. We’ll get it right. We just didn’t do it right. We’ll do it right this time. Well, no matter how many times they do it, they’re just going to spend, but those billions are gone and nobody went to jail. So it’s a great way to get billions of dollars. Number two, understanding climate requires… And I’ve tried in my book to make it easy. Now that doesn’t mean you’re not going to have to think and read it. In fact, I met with my publisher yesterday and we decided to break this book into about three and let you have people read bites of it because there’s so much in here. But the point is-

Bill Walton (00:45:35):

Well, as an earnest reader myself, I agree with that. I would [inaudible 00:45:40] break into smaller chunks.

Jerome Corsi (00:45:41):

[inaudible 00:45:41] probably right. Good idea.

Bill Walton (00:45:41):

You can sell more books. It’s good. So make it a serial.

Jerome Corsi (00:45:46):

[inaudible 00:45:45] If my publisher, if that’s what he wants, I’m going to do it. He’s a very smart guy. But the point is, look, it’s easy to fall into a mistaken idea. And the Malthusians telling us we’re all going to die. Chicken little, the sky is falling. It’s easy to believe a scare. I started out the book with Charles McKay who wrote this book, The Madness of Crowds [inaudible 00:46:17]-

Bill Walton (00:46:17):

Extraordinary popular delusions in the madness of crowds. It’s a classic. Everybody should own that.

Jerome Corsi (00:46:24):

And he demonstrated, for instance, going back to the 16 hundreds or whatever in Holland. They thought Tulip bulbs, which produced these different various colors of tulips were… So everybody invested in the tulip bulbs. When the craze died, about all they could do is eat the tulip bulbs because they were worthless. People lost fortunes. Let’s everybody leave their families. We’ll march off to the Crusades. We’ll get indulgences from the Catholic church and we’ll kill the Muslims and we’ll take over the holy land. Okay. So everybody walks out of Europe. Let’s kill the witches because they’re now possessed by the demons and so therefore we got to burn them at the stake. So we burn a lot of women at the stake. So at some point, other people say, “Hey, this isn’t working. It’s a bad idea. They were never possessed.”

(00:47:18):

What are we going to do with the holy land once we possess it? ‘Cause the other people living there. They’re living there for a long time. What do you do with them? It was not a very well thought out idea. But not thought out ideas that scare people or motivate them are very appealing to the human psychology. And you can put it in very simple terms, like Himmler saying, “Tell a big lie and tell it often.” Eugenics, “You got to kill the Jews.” Well that’s a very bad idea. First of all, it’s inherently wrong to have a Jewicide. I mean it’s horrible. It’s horrific.

Bill Walton (00:47:59):

But I want to dig into something that you just… Okay, you tell the big lie. Himmler was an agent of that. He didn’t believe it, but he knew it was a big lie.

Jerome Corsi (00:48:09):

Yeah. Propagandist.

Bill Walton (00:48:11):

My question is, Larry Fink. Larry Fink runs Black Rock. Larry Fink is a big brain. He’s a good bond trader.

Jerome Corsi (00:48:21):

Money. How much is he going to make?

Bill Walton (00:48:23):

Well then you’re saying this is self-interested. He doesn’t really believe this non sense about climate change. You’re saying it’s a self-interested move, not based on any science. But what will give him more money and power?

Jerome Corsi (00:48:37):

Most of the people I know working in the oil industry couldn’t care less about dinosaurs. They’re finding oil deep in the ocean. They’re finding oil at great depths because we got the technology go down there. They know how to take shale and make it into oil. It’s another hydrocarbon. They know how to convert it. You talk to them about… They don’t care about dinosaurs. They care about producing oil. And they’re going to go get it where they can get it, where the technology takes it to them. And the resource economist, Julian Simon, who I wrote about in the book, was not… He was malthusian. So that the only ultimate resource is human intelligence and human ingenuity. And that we need to preserve the gene pools that we have. Genius is rare. We have more people will have more geniuses. Julian Simon is saying the Holocaust, how many Mozarts did we kill? How many Beethovens did we kill? How many Einsteins did we kill?

(00:49:40):

And that those genetic pools are gone. That’s another tragedy of these genocides. Not just the human insanity of killing millions of people, which is a madness. But the idea also that you are… It’s self-defeating. It’s suicidal. You’re destroying some of the gene pools you want to be preserving. And yet, Eugenics, and whether there’s bad genes, we got to get rid of these people. They’re evil. And you demonized Jews. A very popular idea. The German people were highly, highly educated and they became Nazis. They went for this, the racial ideology. The Catholic church in the middle ages, not the most beautiful institution in the face of the earth, had gone through a reformation, ran inquisition. And ran the crusades. So again, a bad idea that scares people with a simplistic concept is very powerful in the human psychology because to refute it requires the knowledge of understanding the phenomenon you’re talking about.

(00:50:59):

So we want to talk about witches. Maybe we have to understand abnormal psychology. Which even today is yet being understood, in a very complex area of science. And to understand this book got praised by some of the top scientists. You can see the blurbs at the beginning of the book. And the top scientists basically acknowledge that the public is totally unaware of the physics or the chemistry of how climate works. We can’t predict weather reliably over six months. How can we say that we’re going to produce this much hydrocarbon and we’re going to destroy the earth? Again, it’s a complete folly. It stands out with a blaring red light to say this is a hoax. It’s a folly. It’s madness.

Bill Walton (00:51:58):

My assumption here is that this didn’t get reviewed by the New York Times or the Washington Post [inaudible 00:52:06] or any of the mainstream-

Jerome Corsi (00:52:10):

They ignore it. They wanted their basic [inaudible 00:52:13]-

Bill Walton (00:52:13):

Well this is once again, the ideas like this, they’re being tucked into a corner and not reported or covered.

Jerome Corsi (00:52:21):

But yet the book is there. See, I think the book will be read more after I’m dead. These are the kinds of books… By the way, I’m running a trilogy. The second books on the Neo-Marxism. I wrote this book knowing if I could get the visibility to make it a number one book. But knowing [inaudible 00:52:39]-

Bill Walton (00:52:39):

I’m going to help you do that. We may-

Jerome Corsi (00:52:41):

I’m greatly appreciative, Bill.

Bill Walton (00:52:42):

We may have to come back and talk a lot more because we’re covering the whole. And I guess we’ve got to wrap this up. I hate it. I could sit here and do this all day long. I got to talk to Joe Rogan and see if he’s got a franchise on three hour shows. [inaudible 00:52:58]-

Jerome Corsi (00:52:57):

Well, I’ll be happy to talk with [inaudible 00:53:01].

Bill Walton (00:53:01):

Okay, we’ll come back and get at this some more.

Jerome Corsi (00:53:04):

But anyway, [inaudible 00:53:05] for talking with you and thank you for the show.

Bill Walton (00:53:08):

Well for those of you that are listening and instead of watching and there are a lot of you, the book is the Truth About Energy, Global Warming and Climate Change, Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation. It’s on Amazon. It’s in Kindle. It’s in paperback. Highly recommended. I’m surprised Jeff Bezos lets it stay up there. But while it is there, go buy it.

Jerome Corsi (00:53:33):

If this book is going to sell for a long time, it’ll be selling for… It’ll catch on. But it’s going to take time for people to penetrate these ideas. The hoax and as the hoax collapses, and as you see what happens to Europe in trying to not exist when Russian gas, you’re going to realize that people are going to be searching for the truth and they’ll find it. [inaudible 00:54:00]-

Bill Walton (00:53:59):

It’s going to be a cold, dark winter in Europe.

Jerome Corsi (00:54:03):

Yeah. It is. People are going to die.

Bill Walton (00:54:05):

Perhaps part of the United States. So anyway, thanks to you all for joining and again, this has been the Bill Walton show. And you can find us on Substack and YouTube and Rumble and all the major podcast platforms. And please subscribe on your favorite platform. And also to join on our website, we’d appreciate your comments, which you can give us in all the platforms as well. We take them at heart and think about future conversations based on what you tell us you’d like to hear. So anyway, thanks for joining and we’ll be back quite soon.

Speaker 2 (00:54:42):

I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Want more? Click the subscribe button or head over to the billwaltonshow.com to choose from over a hundred episodes. You can also learn more about our guest on our interesting people page. And send us your comments. We read every one, and your thoughts help us guide the show. If it’s easier for you to listen, check out our podcast page and subscribe there. In return, we’ll keep you informed about what’s true, what’s right, and what’s next. Thanks for joining.