The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
551. An Honest Take on the Looming Energy Crisis | Scott Tinker
Thu, 29 May 2025
Is our planet doomed? Probably not, it turns out. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson joins geologist Scott Tinker to dismantle the myth of energy scarcity, exposing the flawed narratives that demonize coal, oil, and natural gas. Together, they reject the false binary of renewables versus fossil fuels, arguing instead for an abundant future powered by both. This conversation confronts the culture of fear that paralyzes progress and issues a stark warning: if the West continues to undermine its own energy and technological ambitions in service of an ideological green agenda, it risks ceding global leadership to authoritarian regimes like China. Innovation, prosperity, and freedom depend on confronting reality—not retreating from it. Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy This episode was filmed on May 23rd, 2025. | Links | For Scott Tinker: Watch Scott’s speech at the 2025 ARC Conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7EjhVyCHgA Switch On (Film) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk75bD-C3H4 Switch Energy Alliance https://switchon.org/about/leadership/ Watch Energy Switch (Show) https://www.pbs.org/show/energy-switch/
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
If you're concerned about people who are struggling, as far as I can tell, there's nothing more important than energy.
There's a great experiment going on right now as we've put more intermittent energy, led by solar and wind, onto grids. How much can you push that? When that sun or wind go away, something has to be there immediately to back that up. to make it continue to work. And it's brutal managing a grid that has things coming and going.
The most appropriate way to serve the poor is to make energy radically available reliably, period.
If you want to clean up the atmosphere emissions, as well as the land, the air and the water, you have to accelerate economic development.
If this is all true, then why the hell aren't we doing it?
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Chapter 2: How important is energy for alleviating poverty?
We're not out of energy options, we're out of ideas.
Thank you.
So I had the opportunity today to speak with Scott Tinker, and I've spoken to Scott before and on a podcast, and he was a contributing speaker at ARC and delivered one of the most popular public speeches that we've ever put on the ARC platform on energy and the environment. Why should you listen to this podcast? Well, there's a bunch of reasons.
The most practical is that Scott will walk you through what you need to know to basically have a schematic understanding of the structures upon which your abundant world depends, the energy infrastructure. And he'll tell you a story that you won't hear from other sources, and it's accurate.
And you need to know these things because knowing them helps you understand what opportunities the future holds. And so much of what we're told about the future is transmitted to us by people who... ratchet their way to power by terrifying and compelling the population. And that's the sign of a kind of tyranny.
Scott offers something much more like an invitational vision, which is that we could have an abundant world for everyone if we set our mind on that. There's no fundamental scarcity of natural resource. There's no looming apocalypse that we can address by making the world a worse place.
that the pathway forward to abundance and plenitude and opportunity is through ample energy provision of all sources and the elevation of the poor in the world to the status of... Well, roughly of the developed West. Can we do that? Yes. There's no shortage of resources. That entire conceptual structure is faulty. There's shortage of will and resolve. And you need to know this.
You need to know this if you're young, because... A world that's rife with apocalyptic fear-mongering is one that will demoralize you. You need to know this if you're going to have children because you have to understand what kind of world they could inhabit and what kind of world the doomsayers will doom them to if the narrative is wrong.
And I don't know anyone who knows more about this and who's a more thoughtful and informed speaker about such issues than Scott. And so do yourself a favor and pay attention to this podcast. So Scott, I thought I'd start this with a bit of a story from Spain. I received this today, found this today from the Telegraph, which I sometimes rate for.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do renewable energy sources face?
As you know, most people watching perhaps know, or at least some do, the whole country faced a blackout and more than the country, right? Into Portugal and France as well. Just a few weeks ago, I think it was the biggest, well, it's described in the Telegraph as the worst electricity failure in any developed country in modern times. So another number one for Spain.
The stench of a cover-up hangs over Spain's giant blackout. Faith in the current investigation has reached rock bottom. The socialist government of Pedro Sanchez is trying to buy time with explanations that either make no technical sense or veer into absurdity. Red Electrica. there's a name for you, which runs the grid is accused of stonewalling everybody.
Sources in Brussels have told the Telegraph that the authorities were conducting an experiment before the system crashed, probing how far they could push reliance on renewables in preparation for Spain's rushed, phase out of nuclear reactors from 2027.
The government seems to have pushed the pace recklessly before making the necessary investments in a sophisticated 21st century smart grid capable of handling it. Okay, so what's the background to that story? They also put a woman in charge of the entire electrical grid who had absolutely no experience in the area and she's been an unmitigated disaster.
And so, well, that sort of sets the stage for our conversation. I mean, we've talked a number of times for everybody watching and listening. Scott's participated in the ARC Endeavor Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London.
We're trying to build a visionary alternative on the international side for a future of abundance and distributed responsibility instead of top-down apocalyptic nightmare control. And so that seems like a good alternative. And Scott's been extremely helpful on the energy side because he shares the ARC vision of...
low-cost, reliable energy distributed worldwide as the foundation for peace and abundance and direct aid to the poor in the most possibly effective way. And so we're going to run over that territory today. And Scott is very well connected among people who understand how the energy system works.
And he's going to, well, share his expertise with us so that we can sort out just what the hell's going on. So let's start with that. So comments about the Spanish situation and its implications for Europe more broadly and Australia for that matter, because they're experimenting with the same thing.
Right. Well, it's good to be here with you. And that's a tough situation and tragic. It's dangerous for human lives when you have major blackouts like that. So I always go back to some of the underlying principles of all these things, Jordan. And I am not against any form of energy. In fact, I've put solar in an indigenous village in Colombia, our Waco people. Oh, that's all they had.
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Chapter 4: How does energy density affect our choices?
Yeah, you're building two systems. And they're redundant, which makes them expensive. Right, right. I mean, you think poor air traffic controllers, I flew today, have a... you know, pull out your hair job, stressful, try managing a grid. Because I've been inside them. ERCOT is the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas. Texas has its own grid. It's Texas. We can secede someday from the nations.
We have our own electric grid. I've been inside ERCOT and there are a wall of panels and grid operators and all the different lines and you see arrows flowing different directions and they are literally calling on people, start up that gas plant. Shut it down. It's orchestrating it. It's incredible. Make sure the baseload nuclear is always running. You don't turn nukes on and off. They just run.
We have four nuclear reactors in Texas, two at Comanche Peak, two at South Texas Project. They always run. Coal, it likes to always be on. Yeah. Think of cooking indoors in your kitchen. Would you bring charcoal in and light it up? That takes a while to get started. And once it's going, it takes a long time.
How many industrial processes rely even for their physical integrity on continuous power supplies? I know there are industrial processes where if they lose power long enough, steel smelters and so forth, it devastates the plant. Refrigeration, freezing, medicines, hospitals.
No, you... Everybody likes it always on. Some are not fully reliable, reliant on it. But so, you know, coal isn't great for that. Nuclear and coal, they're called baseload. They satisfy the minimum demand on that grid. So that's what you want in place. You need that in place, some baseload. That's the foundation. Foundation. Yeah. And natural gas... It's like cooking.
I can turn on my gas stove, boom, it's hot.
Right, right. Cook, cook, cook, turn it off, boom, it's gone. Right. Natural gas is extremely clean, too, all things considered.
No sulfur, no SOX, no nitrogen in NOx, no mercury, no particulates. Right, right. It has CO2 when you burn it.
Hey, the plants love that, Scott.
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Chapter 5: What role does nuclear energy play in the future?
So we've gotta go, we've gotta get our heads around this idea that to literally lift the world out of poverty and all the good things that come from that, we gotta go dense, dense, dense. You're not going to be doing it with low-density forms of energy. There'll be good pieces of that portfolio, the optionality and energy. I don't mind solar and wind where it's sunny and windy.
You got a lot of sun here. Use it, you know, in places that make sense. It's a really, a very efficient use of the sun when you've got great sun. You know, you're in lower latitudes. You don't have many clouds. Winter doesn't happen much. Da-da-da-da. That's a pretty good... Use of sun and that use is called capacity factor.
So if I've got 100 units of sun and I can make it generate 30 units throughout the year, that's a 30% capacity factor. And that's pretty good for solar. Nuclear, 90% or more capacity factor. Nuclear is always on.
Okay, so let's talk about nuclear and scarcity as well. I mean, okay, so- What are the objections to walking, running down this road, let's say? Well, it's pretty obvious that energy is harnessed to serve the poor. I think that's incontrovertible. The mere fact that there was 1 billion people and now there's 8 billion shows how useful energy is.
And the immensely high standard of living, there are no energy poor rich countries. That's right. Okay, so now the next issue is going to be- There's some energy poor people in rich countries. Right.
But there are no energy poor countries.
Right, right. Okay, so now we face the issue of, well, we can't go to 1800. Because there aren't enough sources of energy. It's a finite resource. But you deal with that with... Okay, so layout why no is the answer. So we'll talk about... Okay. And what the intelligent mix is. My suspicions are that...
The more we rely on nuclear, the more we can shepherd our use of fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are useful for fertilizer and for plastics, and nuclear isn't, and for transportation, let's say.
And a lot of other things, petrochemicals and all sorts of things that we use. fossil fuels for that most people don't know.
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Chapter 6: How do we address energy scarcity globally?
These are big shale gas basins in the country. And you mean big. Big. They're huge. They're big. Right. And oil followed, more technology. Natural gas is a little molecule. I think you'll be interested in this. Why do you have to frack? Why do you have to crack rock? Okay, and here's why.
And when you're cracking rock, what you're doing is putting water, which is not very compressible, under a lot of pressure, and then putting it into the ground under pressure and releasing that pressure. And that pressure release cracks rock down there a couple, five, six, 10,000 feet. Cracks the rock, makes these little teeny cracks. Why?
Well, because the holes where the natural gas is, are, the molecules are, are about, they're so small, they're in the nanometer scale. I could fit about a hundred of those little holes across the width of one human hair.
So that's the natural gas pools that far underground. They're not pools at all. They're micro reservoirs.
Yeah, there are a hundred of those little teeny pools across one human hair. And so the molecules, it's not easy to get them out of there. Now, so you gotta crack that rock. You're creating, you got little teeny rooms and you're creating little pathways, doorways and hallways for them to flow toward a lower pressure area.
And that wellbore, when it comes down and goes down and cracks rock, and then you open it up, you've created a low pressure pipe and everything wants to go towards low pressure, like humans. Hey, less pressure, give me less pressure, I'm good. I don't like the high pressure. In they go, and they start to flow up. So that's why fracking, hydraulic fracturing, came about.
It had been happening again for five decades.
Yeah, well, I grew up in Northern Alberta. Cracking vertical.
Cracking vertical. And then the horizontal wells, they came together. So that changed things here. Our natural gas production in 2007-8 from shale, that's the name of these rocks, was about 4% of our natural gas came from shale in 08. Today, 70%. Wow.
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Chapter 7: What is the relationship between energy and economic development?
Yeah, surprise, surprise. Sheiks for shale.
I wrote a piece about that. I mean, like, oh, no, the U.S. is coming back. All of a sudden, OPEC doesn't control. It was a wild time.
That's when fracking becomes dangerous. It's going to cause earthquakes.
Yeah, and it lights on fire and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Documentary films.
Nonsense.
Yes. So, well, and you've got to do fracking, right? Let me defend that. You know, you can't go out there like the wild west. Fracking is a major industrial operation. It is. You're lining up big trucks around a hole, putting a bunch of water under pressure. You're producing oil and gas. You've got to do it right.
Well, then you hope that the developed world would do it right because that's where you'd expect it to be done right. This is where you want it to be done right. Absolutely.
And it's regulated. Occasionally there's a bad actor. So what I'm saying here, remember we have 95% still left in the US, very hard to get a lot of it out technologically, but we'll get more. Middle East and Russia haven't even started to release that because the oil they sell to the world's markets today is cheaper. So the arbitrage is better.
They're just getting more. The Saudi fields are like $5 a barrel to produce something like that.
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Chapter 8: How can we transition to cleaner energy sources?
This is why the economists are always at war with the biologists. Correct. Because the biologists have fallen into this foolish Malthusian thinking. And the economists say, no. No. We're innovative enough so that we switch directions. Correct.
And that is... You see, the biologists should understand this because the fundamental distinction between human beings and all other animals is that our environment is not fixed.
Yeah.
Right? It's unbelievably malleable, which is why we can live everywhere.
Right.
And so, as you're... There's a biological reality underneath the economic reality. It's like... Well, we're going to run out of natural resources. No, we're going to run out of the game we play with that commodity now and then. We'll just switch to a different game with a different commodity. And in a complex industrial... There's many games like that that we can switch to going on all the time.
Incredibly complicated. And you see the technological uses of these things with energy always changing. I was riding over here today and there's this autonomous car just driving along with us, you know, and so... you don't run out of oil, it becomes too expensive. And back to what we talked about earlier, we start using it for those things that only it can uniquely do. Yeah, right.
Instead of transportation and burning it, Well, maybe we use hybrids or maybe we use fuel cells, hydrogen. There's a lot of hydrogen in the world. You gotta make it, you gotta split the water.
But we can make it with nuclear.
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