The Bill Walton Show | CO2 The Miracle Molecules with Dr Will Happer and Greg Wrightstone

CO2 Coalition Chairman Dr. William Happer and Executive Director Gregory Wrightstone were featured guests on The Bill Walton Show.

From TheBillWaltonShow.com: “The Bill Walton Show is a forum for in-depth and thought-provoking conversations with leaders, thinkers, artists, entrepreneurs and activists. Smart, original and interesting people…lovers of freedom and the American idea.”

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Bill Walton: 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: Climate alarmists and the green industrial complex have been warning incessantly that increasing levels of greenhouse gases are purportedly driving atmospheric warming to dangerous and previously unknown levels. They say that higher temperatures are leading to ever-increasing natural disasters, severe weather events, and human health concerns. Is this true? What if just the opposite is true? What if the slight warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases is overwhelmed by natural climate drivers that have been active for hundreds of millions of years? What if, based on thousands of years of historical records documenting temperature and human experience, the possibility of additional warming will be overwhelmingly beneficial to humanity?

Bill Walton: Carbon dioxide, or CO2, is portrayed as the worst villain in the climate alarm pantheon of satanic gases. Is this true? What if CO2 is a miracle molecule, dramatically improving the Earth’s ecosystems and creating the conditions for human flourishing? Well, I’m back with Dr. William Happer, co-founder and chair of the CO2 Coalition, and Gregory Wrightstone, its executive director, and they’re going to explain why they believe this to be true.

Dr. William Happer: Well, Bill, thanks for that introduction. Of course, they have got the sign wrong on CO2. Carbon dioxide is very beneficial to life on Earth; it’s at historically low levels. Very seldom in geological history has it been this low, and you can already see that plants are growing much better. Crop yields are going up because of the increase in CO2. So, nothing about CO2 is bad. It’s unbelievable that they’ve managed to turn this beneficial molecule, which you and I breathe out with every breath, into something evil.

Bill Walton: But what they say, what that great scientist from Harvard, Al Gore, reliably tells us is that CO2 is driving temperatures through the roof, and the oceans will begin foaming… I can’t remember his speech at the time, but it was going to be terrible. CO2 is supposedly driving temperatures up, leading to droughts and famine. You’re saying it’s just the opposite?

Dr. William Happer: It’s nonsense. We’re in a warming period now that began around 1800, maybe a little earlier, as we came out of the Little Ice Age, which was a very cold period in the 1500s and 1600s. Most of the warming we’ve seen over the last 100 years or so is almost all due to natural causes. There’s probably been a little contribution from CO2, but it’s not very much because CO2 is not a very potent greenhouse gas; it’s a puny greenhouse gas. It’s heavily saturated and can’t do much more than it’s already done.

Bill Walton: Greg, you’ve written an amazing book called A Very Convenient Warming, and it’s just coming out. It’s also on Kindle. The charts in this book illustrate all the points that Greg and Will are going to make during our show. You have an interesting chart in here where you show that this has not been a straight line of warming; the Earth has been warming and cooling, warming and cooling, for millions of years. In fact, it’s been warming and cooling, with glaciers receding and coming back, over the last 10,000 years. A lot of the health of humans and human civilizations is tied to those climate cycles.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, it is. If we look at the last 10,000 years, that dates back to the end of the last glacial advance. We’re in what’s called an interglacial warming period. These are on 100,000-year cycles over the last million years or so, and we should be thankful we’re in a warming period. But it’s important to note that during that 10,000-year period, we’ve had, as Will said, warming trends. We should welcome that, but the warming trend we’re in now looks eerily similar to nine other warming trends over the last 10,000 years on a cyclical basis.

Gregory Wrightstone: What’s really fascinating, or really, over the last 5,000 years, is if we go back to the first great civilizations that rose up, the empires that rose up, each one of those warm periods was correlated closely with the rise of empires, the rise of civilization. Food was bountiful, and we know these periods were warmer just from historical records—where they were growing olives or where they could grow citrus. We don’t need carbon isotope data to get the science; we can go by people writing about it, talking about it. You could grow grapes in the UK, citrus in the north of England near Hadrian’s Wall—the Romans were growing it there; you can’t do that now.

Bill Walton: There was a period before the… well, you’ve named the eras that have been named. The Greeks, when it was getting colder, what was that called?

Gregory Wrightstone: The Greek Dark Ages.

Bill Walton: The Greek Dark Ages, yes. There’s a word I use often in the book, and that’s “horrific.” The horrific consequences to humanity and the human condition were during the cold periods. It’s completely opposite of what we’re being told. We’re being told that CO2 is driving warming, which will lead to horrible consequences. That’s not what history tells us. History tells us we should welcome the warmth and fear the cold.

Bill Walton: Well, you make the point in this book—and I want to reemphasize this several times as we talk—that Dr. Happer says, and it’s documented in here, that temperatures drive CO2; it’s not the opposite. So this notion of “we’re going to eliminate CO2 and change temperatures” doesn’t work that way.

Bill Walton: I want to stick with this historical discussion because there’s also this period that coincides exactly with the Roman Empire, which was when the Earth warmed.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, that was the Roman Warm Period. Again, food was bountiful, and of course, the Romans conquered much of the world. The Roman army marched on its stomach, and the Roman Empire was fueled and fed by food supplies coming from North Africa. A lot of it came from Egypt and Tunisia, which were the breadbaskets of the Roman Empire at that time. We hardly think of Egypt being a breadbasket of the world today, but life was good for them. There are a lot of reasons why the Roman Empire collapsed; it wasn’t all due to climate. The previous warming trend, the Minoan Warm Period in the Bronze Age, clearly led to what’s called the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Maybe in 50 or 100 years, all these great empires—the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, the Harappan Empire, and the Indus River Valley—all of those great civilizations collapsed within 50 or 100 years when it started getting cold.

Gregory Wrightstone: It’s the strong relationship between the rise and fall of temperature and the rise and fall of human civilization.

Bill Walton: I like the way you summarize the Romans. There’s a reason they got to wear togas.

Gregory Wrightstone: Exactly, it was warm.

Bill Walton: But when it got cold, that was around 400 AD, 400 to 500, that’s when we went into the so-called Dark Ages, and that’s when it got horrifically cold.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, and we know from the COVID era—we’ve all learned a little bit—we’ve learned that cold weather in the winter leads to an increase in flu and diseases, and it was exacerbated during the Dark Ages. Think about it, they were huddled together in their wooden homes, maybe with animals in there, so because of the cold temperatures, it was easy to spread diseases—fleas, rats, and the like. We’ve seen that cold temperatures are conducive to viruses; they thrive better in cold than they do in heat.

Gregory Wrightstone: A lot of the consequences and deaths during the Dark Ages were due to the associated illnesses and diseases that came along.

Bill Walton: Didn’t the High Renaissance come about because it started warming up again? I’m a history buff, but I never really knew that climate was that determinate.

Dr. William Happer: Actually, the High Renaissance was pretty near the middle of the Little Ice Age, but it didn’t occur in northern Europe; it occurred in Italy, where the Little Ice Age didn’t matter much.

Bill Walton: Yes, the Mediterranean climate.

Dr. William Happer: Yes, yes.

Bill Walton: But you’re thinking, I think, of what they call the High Middle Ages.

Dr. William Happer: Yes, the High Middle Ages—that was definitely a warming period, absolutely. That’s when the Norse, for example, farmed Greenland, which you can’t do today, but there’s wonderful evidence that they flourished. That’s also when all the Gothic cathedrals were built, with a lot of glass, which you couldn’t have if it was colder. One of the things that makes it easy to understand is that olive groves were much farther north during that period than even what they are today.

Bill Walton: So we can compare historical records of that time to what’s actually going on now. Where can you grow citrus, where can you grow…

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, exactly.

Bill Walton: So, what caused the climate to change in roughly 400 to 500-year cycles, where we had hot and then cold periods? What causes the glaciers to come in and go out?

Dr. William Happer: I think the honest answer is that nobody knows. Getting the answer has probably been set back by at least 50 years by this crazed fixation on carbon dioxide as the control knob of climate. It’s clearly not the control knob of climate. There are probably a number of control knobs, but we’ve neglected to try and investigate them because of this obsession with CO2. We’ve caused a lot of damage to real climate science by this obsession.

Bill Walton: Well, clearly, the CO2 emitted from the chariots was a big factor in the…

Dr. William Happer: Yes, exactly.

Bill Walton: But civilization flourished, waned, flourished, waned, and then we got to around 1850. I think it’s helpful to bring it up to where we are sort of post-Industrial Revolution. I always thought the Industrial Revolution was mainly driven by ideas, freedom, democracy, and that sort of thing, and that the middle class, the bourgeois, flourished. But you also attribute it to the weather getting better.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, well, let’s step back for a moment. The coldest period of the last 10,000 years was the Little Ice Age, horrifically cold. We know that just south of where we are today, George Washington at Mount Vernon—Martha loved ice in her summer drinks, so he would have his slaves and servants go down to the Potomac River and cut the thick ice that accumulated every year and put it into his ice house. Well, the Potomac hasn’t frozen like that in many decades; it rarely freezes over. So we know, just using historical records like that, that it was really cold at that time. We’ve been warming since the late 17th century—more than 300 years. The first 200-plus years of that had to be entirely naturally driven. But others will tell you, “Oh, but that’s all changed in the middle of the 20th century; now it’s all being driven by carbon dioxide and our excesses and our sins—what I’ll call the sins of emission.” But that’s just not the case; those same natural forces that were driving temperatures upwards since the time of George Washington are in action today—they didn’t go away.

Bill Walton: Let’s get to what I think is a central point here. As I said in the introduction, and you two have written persuasively about this—others have too—you’ve got a growing coalition of scientists that are… I won’t call it a consensus because I don’t like that word much anymore, but a lot of people agree on the science that CO2 is not the poison; CO2 is part of the solution. One of the reasons that man-made CO2 emissions—and let’s say there isn’t a lot of man-made CO2 emissions—have been beneficial is because you’ve got some very interesting charts here about the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It has been dropping for tens of millions of years and was dropping precipitously until around 1800 to 1850, and then we started using fossil fuels. We started emitting CO2 from our activities, and that’s actually raised the CO2 levels, which has been beneficial to agriculture and human flourishing.

Dr. William Happer: Yes, you can see that directly from the yields of crops like wheat, soybeans, and corn. There’s been a recent study—a very good one, I think—that argues that about 40% of the increased yield has been from more CO2. There are other factors too—nitrogen fertilizer, which Greg mentioned, has been very important, as well as better cropping, better varieties of crops. They’ve all contributed, but CO2 has been a major factor, and we should be grateful for that. Who wants to give up 40% of the yield of agriculture? You couldn’t feed the world if we did that.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, and we see too, as you mentioned in the book, that global food production and crop production is greatly outpacing population growth. We often hear, “Well, the population’s too large.” Well, no, it’s not. We’re outpacing population growth with crop productivity. In the book, I capture the top eight crops in terms of tons of production, and all eight of those are breaking growth records year after year after year. As Will said, it’s attributable for the most part to CO2 fertilization effects, but also the warming we’re seeing is hugely beneficial to agriculture. We know that the growing season in the continental United States has increased by more than two weeks since 1900. The warming is great; it means killing frosts arrive earlier in the spring and later in the fall.

Bill Walton: Also, 20 times more people die due to cold than to warmth. Why do we take vacations in Wales? You don’t hear people saying, “Let’s go to Siberia for a really cold, desolate vacation.”

Bill Walton: This is Bill Walton with the Bill Walton Show. I’m with Greg Wrightstone and Dr. William Happer, leaders of the CO2 Coalition. We’re talking generally about the beneficial nature of CO2, but specifically, I think everybody listening to this needs to get a copy of A Very Convenient Warming. The subtitle is How Modest Warming and More CO2 are Benefiting Humanity. This is a really essential point for us to understand because people say, “Well, carbon may be bad, but it’s uneconomic to get rid of it, and we need to deal with it even though it’s evil.” Well, it’s not evil.

Gregory Wrightstone: Oh, you just threw me a softball, so I’m going to hit it out of the park.

Bill Walton: That’s what I was trying to do! But then there’s also a difference between carbon and CO2. We’ll get into that later on.

Dr. William Happer: Yes, Dr. Happer has been a huge proponent here of the benefits of carbon dioxide. If you had talked to me maybe two years ago, we’d talk a lot about how there is no climate crisis, and it’s true—there isn’t, and we can document that with science, facts, and data. But we’ve moved beyond that, and Dr. Happer predated me in this revelation. What we see today, by almost every metric, is that Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering, and humanity is benefiting from modest warming and more CO2. It’s what I call, Bill, the greatest untold story of the 21st century—this thriving Earth and the increasing benefits to the human condition. These are things that should be celebrated. Instead, they’re being demonized using false data, misinformation, and disinformation. The disinformation isn’t coming from those of us who are skeptics—it’s coming from those promoting a climate crisis.

Dr. William Happer: Let me just add a few words to that, Bill. If CO2 really were dangerous, if it really were a pollutant, then I would be on the side of Al Gore and Greta Thunberg. I would be out there pushing back against it, but I’m a scientist. I know more about radiation transfer than most people, and I know that CO2 really can’t do the things they’re claiming. There’s no evidence for that. I also know as a scientist that CO2 is tremendously beneficial to life. Greenhouse operators, for years, have doubled or tripled the amount of CO2 inside greenhouses, and you have to pay for it—it’s not cheap. But it’s worth buying the CO2 because the fruits, vegetables, and flowers are of much higher quality as a result of the higher levels of CO2, and it more than pays for the cost of the CO2. This is not driven by ideology; it’s driven by the pure profit motive, which is one of the purest motives that drive humans.

Bill Walton: As a recovering private equity guy, I’m all in favor of the profit motive.

Bill Walton: Why has the CO2 level in the atmosphere been declining for as long as it has—I mean, millions of years? You mentioned some geologic reasons, and you’re a trained geologist.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, the biggest reason here is carbon sequestration—natural removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s through things like carbonate limestone, which is calcium carbonate, so it’s removing carbon dioxide. It’s also from coal formation. During the Carboniferous period, huge amounts of carbon dioxide were removed from the atmosphere and incorporated into the coal that we’re now liberating. That carbon dioxide was also captured in oil and gas source rocks—a lot of these were algal blooms that needed carbon dioxide and sunlight for photosynthesis, which accumulated on the seafloor and are now turned into fossil fuels.

Bill Walton: But none of those sound like man-made causes. This is kind of what we need to get away from—this conceit. You had a quote in your book from John Kerry about how they were so fortunate to be gathered at Davos, with the special nature of… continue.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, well, in my book too, I looked at it a little differently. With fossil fuels, I call them Nature’s solar-powered batteries. Coal, of course, comes from mainly vegetation—trees, swamps that lived, died, accumulated, and then were buried and turned into coal. They lived because of photosynthesis. What do we need for photosynthesis? Water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide—and the more carbon dioxide, the better. Oil and gas source rocks were also formed from photosynthesis of plankton and algal blooms, so they used sunlight. The sunlight powered the fossil fuels and created the fossil fuels we’re using, and now we’re liberating all that energy that was trapped in these fossil fuels. So, we can actually view coal, oil, and gas as Nature’s solar-powered battery that we’re now liberating and using for our betterment.

Bill Walton: I think we’ve got our tagline for our movement here. I mean, that’s… you know, you want solar? We’ve already got it. We’ve been using it for 150 years.

Dr. William Happer: Yes, exactly.

Bill Walton: So, why has CO2 been going down?

Dr. William Happer: Over the last 90 million years, CO2 has gradually been going down, and I think the honest answer is that nobody’s quite sure why. Greg mentioned a number of things that clearly contributed. Another thing I would add is that this has also been a period of mountain building. The Himalayas started rising up some 60 million years ago, and the Andes too, so we’ve had much faster erosion than over many geological periods, which brings calcium ions and magnesium ions, which are necessary to form the carbonates that Greg mentioned, and the enormous beds of limestone—the chalk cliffs that we see in England. That’s probably at least partially associated with the mountain building that we’re experiencing today.

Bill Walton: There’s an illusion too that CO2 is some massive part of our atmosphere. Ask the man on the street, “What percentage of the air you breathe is carbon dioxide?” and they’ll say 20%, or half—they don’t know. I mean, this whole debate is going on, and we’re supposed to radically transform all of civilization because of something that almost nobody understands. You’ve got some pie charts in your book that show there’s this big chart. What is the number one thing—water vapor in the atmosphere—and then number two is…

Gregory Wrightstone: For greenhouse gases, yes.

Bill Walton: But then you get down to something called trace elements, and then you have to break out a separate pie chart to show those trace elements, and somewhere in there is carbon dioxide. What is it—0.04% of the total?

Gregory Wrightstone: 0.04%—it’s minuscule, but it’s very valuable and necessary. Although it’s only 0.04% of the atmosphere, it’s just as important to life on Earth as oxygen, so the more of it, the better. We can see that because we’re actually living in an era that’s CO2 impoverished.

Bill Walton: You talked about CO2 as a high-powered… what was your analogy?

Dr. William Happer: Although it’s a very tiny fraction of the atmosphere—0.04%—it is a very potent greenhouse gas in small amounts. If you look at the greenhouse effect today, probably about two-thirds is due to water vapor, and the other third is CO2. But the greenhouse effect doesn’t increase very much if you double CO2. It only changes the greenhouse…

Bill Walton: That’s the point we need to make. I needed more coffee to really understand the chapter in your book on this, but evidently, once CO2 is out there and influencing whatever it influences, adding more doesn’t really change much because it’s already done its work.

Dr. William Happer: That’s right, Bill. I often try to explain it to my wife by saying it’s like painting a barn red. If you have an old barn and you want it to look nice, you put a coat of red paint. If you think that’s not red enough, and it’ll get redder by putting on a second coat of red paint, you’re wasting your money—it won’t make the slightest difference. The amount of CO2 in our atmosphere today is a little bit like red paint—it acts much like paint, but it’s the maximum amount you can put in, and it won’t get any redder if you double it. It’s like putting another coat of red paint on a barn—it won’t get any redder. The technical term for that is saturation. This is something that’s been well understood for 100 years or more; it happens in stars, and so there’s nothing mysterious about it.

Bill Walton: I was referring to John Kerry and Al Gore. These men have massive egos, and they go to Davos and think they’re among gods who understand the problems and are going to solve them for all of us little people, while they fly into Davos on their Gulfstream 5—or maybe a Boeing by now, I don’t know. But we are not gods, and the Earth and climate have been what they’ve been for hundreds of millions of years. Now all of a sudden, we show up, and we’ve got to reorder our whole economic and social system based on the ideas of these people. Your book is notoriously short on villains. Who is behind what I now think of as the lie that CO2 is so bad for us and that we need to reorganize things?

Dr. William Happer: Well, I think part of it is just groupthink. It’s something that’s been indoctrinated for many decades now. Young people have never heard anything different when they grew up, so you have to feel sorry for someone like Greta Thunberg, who’s never heard the truth. Once you get a bad idea going, it’s hard to get rid of it, so that’s part of it. But I think there are some intentional efforts to keep this myth going. It started with organizations like the Club of Rome, who were looking for some sort of threat that people could unite against. So, we would fight climate change instead of fighting each other. That’s the basic idea—it hasn’t worked that way, and I’m not sure even the idea is correct, but there has been a deliberate promotion of the threat from CO2 when it’s not a threat at all.

Bill Walton: We just finished reading State of Fear by Michael Crichton. He had a very interesting idea that as soon as the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the ruling class needed a new demon, a new enemy to label, to keep all of us in a state of fear. So, they created the climate thing to keep us worried about something so they could solve the problem that didn’t exist and stay in power.

Gregory Wrightstone: I think Crichton was right, and I’m very sorry he’s not with us today. He was a wonderful voice for reality. I capture some quotes from Michael Crichton at the back of the book, in the “Notable Quotables” on consensus. Probably the quote from him that most people use is, “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus.”

Bill Walton: That’s right.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, period. In fact, a little historical note—Greg wasn’t there, but when we formed the CO2 Coalition, we talked about calling it the Crichton Coalition.

Bill Walton: I was unaware of that.

Gregory Wrightstone: The only reason we didn’t was that we were unable to negotiate with the Crichton family for the use of his name.

Bill Walton: He was famously a good businessman, so I guess his estate ended up with that attribute.

Bill Walton: The problem we have now is that the demon has been baked into our economic policy. We just passed an Inflation Reduction Act that is anything but—it’s really the Green New Deal. We’ve given John Podesta, one of Clinton’s top advisers, a $400 billion slush fund to throw at wind, solar, and batteries. They’re building constituencies for this bad science all over America, all over the world. Local communities are investing in it, and now they feel like they’re all in. How do we turn that around?

Gregory Wrightstone: We’re doing our part by providing the science, the facts, and the data that dispute the need for carbon capture and sequestration. We’re disputing the notion that we need renewables like solar and wind that are actually economically and ecologically destructive. People need this information—the information we provide at our website, CO2Coalition.org, and in our books. Our members are highly published and are huge writers.

Bill Walton: We, and I mean that collectively, because now that I’ve gotten involved, I’m going to help us all succeed in getting the word out. You have a section in your book you call “We Must Destroy the Environment to Save It.” Could you elaborate on that?

Gregory Wrightstone: A great example of this is the notion of extinctions. The UN claims that they’re exploding; we’re in the sixth great extinction—species extinction. But we document in the book that actually, we’re in a significant decline in extinctions. The UN report clearly states that the greatest threat to endangered species is habitat loss. What’s their solution for curing a non-existent climate crisis? Destroy the habitat, pave over thousands of square miles with solar panels. Don’t call them farms—they’re not farms; they’re industrial complexes. Cut down thousands of acres of mature forests, either to convert to wood pellets to be shipped to the United Kingdom and called “green,” or to cut down huge swaths of our mountains to put these jarring wind turbines on the top.

Dr. William Happer: Somebody calculated that to replace fossil fuels with wind and solar, you would need to cover about half of North America.

Gregory Wrightstone: Yes, well, a great example, Bill, is that if we look just north of us here in Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Game Commission controls 1.8 million acres in Pennsylvania. The 18-member committee voted unanimously to permanently ban any wind turbine projects on their properties, on the mountain ridges, because they said it was counter to their task, which is to preserve and protect the animals, mountains, and forests in Pennsylvania for sportsmen.

Bill Walton: The manufacture of batteries, wind, and solar equipment is massively destructive. The mining for one battery—I understand it’s a 2,000-pound battery—requires 500,000 pounds of materials to be unearthed. We’ve got to create new mines and put those all over, and of course, we’re not going to put them in Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. They wouldn’t want them there. We’re going to put them in Africa, probably, or maybe Asia, but more likely Africa.

Gregory Wrightstone: The other thing about this green agenda is that we’ve got two billion people in the world who are suffering extreme poverty—they live on $2 a day or something. Without fossil fuels, without cheap, abundant energy, which it provides, they’re never going to get out of poverty. Those people are cooking—bear in mind, they don’t have access to electricity. According to the UN, 800,000 people die every year from indoor smoke pollution from cooking on dried dung and wood in their homes. What we’re doing, following this Green New Deal and Net Zero, is condemning these people to continued generational poverty.

Bill Walton: Could you explain Net Zero to me? I find it very hard to understand.

Dr. William Happer: I’ll let Will take a stab—we need a big brain scientist.

Dr. William Happer: How do we get to Net Zero? We don’t. It’s a suicide pact. If we all die, there will be zero emissions. If you really look at what’s being proposed, it’s pretty close to that. It’s like the People’s Temple in Guyana. I think most people are not going to drink the Kool-Aid, so sooner or later, this will collapse. I hope it’s sooner rather than later because a lot of damage can be done, but it will eventually collapse because people don’t want to commit suicide. In Guyana, most of them didn’t want to drink the Kool-Aid—they were forced to drink it. So, we should keep an eye on who controls power.

Bill Walton: I want to stick with the science, but the philosophy of the green movement, particularly the Club of Rome, seems to be profoundly anti-human. They think fewer people on Earth is better than more. You just described human flourishing, massive growth, and doubling lifespans because of the prosperity brought about in part by global warming and in part by the fossil fuels revolution. They want to bring that to a stop.

Gregory Wrightstone: Dr. Happer last year wrote an important paper with Richard Lindzen. In it, they concluded that attempts for Net Zero would lead to millions of deaths. They’re trying to ban nitrogen fertilizer and decrease carbon dioxide.

Dr. William Happer: What’s so ironic is that if they are worried about the growth of the world population, the demonstrated way to stabilize the population is to make people prosperous. Every prosperous country, whether it’s the US, Europe, Japan, or now even China, has a birth rate that isn’t enough to sustain the population. Wouldn’t you want to make India prosperous or Africa prosperous so that people can have a decent life? They can have the luxuries that everyone else in the world has, and they don’t have to continue cooking with animal dung. It’s just crazy. I don’t know why they’re doing this.

Bill Walton: Speaking of crazy, methane is even less of a trace gas than CO2. What does methane do?

Dr. William Happer: Methane is a greenhouse gas—it’s third after water vapor and CO2, then comes methane. But methane’s contribution to warming is only about one-tenth that of CO2. CO2 itself isn’t doing any harm, so why would we go after methane? The victims are farmers, for example—all over the world, farmers are being attacked because their cattle are belching methane. If you’re a cow, you have to belch methane—that’s how you digest the fodder. I’m hoping that maybe the farmers will finally lead the world and push back against this craziness.

Bill Walton: It’s happening in Germany.

Dr. William Happer: Yes, and it happened once in this country—the embattled farmer stood and fired the shot heard ’round the world, and maybe they’ll do it again. All of it is nuts—it’s all made-up threats that empower a very small minority and cause enormous harm to everybody else in the world.

Bill Walton: It seems like an elitist agenda to really stamp down on people’s happiness and flourishing. The methane scheme also aims at less meat, which people, you know… Cows—I just learned—why do we raise so much cattle? Well, the cattle can use land that’s otherwise not usable.

Dr. William Happer: Cattle are amazing—they can actually get food value from cellulose, which we can’t. They have this rumen, this special stomach, that’s full of microorganisms that are able to break down cellulose and convert it into fatty acids and proteins. The cow then converts that into beef, milk, and things that are good for the world. But in the process, you release a lot of methane. You can’t metabolize cellulose without producing methane. Cows, termites—anything that does that—has to produce methane. It’s completely harmless—it’s been doing that for hundreds of millions of years and has caused no harm to the world. The attack on methane is an attack on farmers, an attack on cows, an attack on an abundant source of protein that would benefit everybody. It’s part of their secular religion, essentially—it’s not science, it’s dogma.

Bill Walton: It’s not altruism—it’s dogma. We have to stop them as soon as possible. Greg, how are we going to do that? Let’s talk about the coalition. We’re about to wrap up here. Tell us what we can do to get involved in what you’re doing.

Gregory Wrightstone: The CO2 Coalition—we’re very proud to be the leaders of it, Dr. Happer and I. We’re 150 of the top scientists in the world who are climate skeptics, pushing back. We just brought on Dr. John Clauser, who was the 2022 Nobel laureate in physics—hard to call him a science denier. We have Dr. Patrick Moore, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace until they lost their way. They all believe, as we do, that there is no climate crisis and that CO2 has a huge beneficial effect on the Earth. We need more of it, not less. We’re trying to get our message out, but the mainstream media won’t have this conversation, won’t promote the science, the facts, and the data. They continue to promote this disinformation of a false climate crisis.

Bill Walton: Assuming YouTube doesn’t pull this show, they’ll probably do what they did last time—give a context warning that this does not comport with the United Nations IPCC. I’ve been permanently banned on LinkedIn—that was a year and a half ago. My very last post—this is actually pretty funny—my very last post was, “I believe I’m about to be banned and de-platformed by LinkedIn.” They removed it, called it false and misleading, and then banned and de-platformed me. Now, that’s funny—it’s true, but still, you’ve got to laugh.

Dr. William Happer: Education is important. I mentioned the brainwashing that our poor children have gone through for several generations now. One of the things Greg is leading is an educational initiative. We have a learning center at the CO2 Coalition—you can click on the net and find material there. We’re working hard on that, trying to make it better.

Bill Walton: Where do we find the website?

Gregory Wrightstone: CO2Coalition.org, yes, that’s correct. Our companion is CO2LearningCenter.com, the educational initiative. We’ve had a wildly successful direct mail campaign because people—it seems like once you get exposed to the truth about what’s happening, it’s very intuitive, and people say, “Oh yeah, that makes sense.” We’re seeing unprecedented responses from people around the country—we’re told that it’s unprecedented. People are responding because we’re actually doing something to fight back against the nonsense. We’re doing something to fight back against our children and grandchildren being indoctrinated into this climate cult. We’re promoting critical thinking skills and the scientific method—they’re promoting groupthink and indoctrination. This has to stop, and so we’re actually doing something at the CO2 Coalition about that.

Bill Walton: Dr. William Happer, Gregory Wrightstone, CO2 Coalition. Thrilled—we’ll be back. We’ve got a lot more to do here. We covered about 2% of the interesting material in your book, A Very Convenient Warming. We’ll cover more in future shows.

Bill Walton: This has been the Bill Walton Show with Bill Walton. You can find our show almost always on YouTube—unless we go against the science consensus. Rumble, Substack—our shows are posted there—and all the major audio podcast platforms. If you’re not already a subscriber, please subscribe and ask your friends to subscribe. I think we go deep into some interesting topics that other people aren’t covering, with experts you normally don’t get an opportunity to hear. So, this is the place. Thanks for joining, and I hope you found this interesting. We’ll talk with you next time.