Heartland Daily Podcast

This is the Heartland Daily Podcast.

Hello. Welcome to the Hartman Institute Daily Podcast. I'm Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and Managing Editor of Environment Climate News. I'm doing something a little bit different today. Instead of talking to a policy wonk about the latest study or a politician about pending bills or votes, I'm interviewing a writer of a work of fiction.

The book is called Missy's Twitch, and the author is John Pepper. I was offered a review copy of the book about a month and about a month after I got it, I found the time to read it and knocked it out in 3 days. Though a work of fiction, it could have been ripped from the headlines and private diaries of people intimately involved in climate in the climate hype and politics today. I cannot recommend the book highly enough, and I'm pleased to have its author with us today to discuss it. John, thanks for joining

us. Oh, thanks so much, Sterling. Pleasure to be with

you. John, before we jump into the details of Missy's Twitch, for our listeners who may not be familiar with you, Please give us a little bit of your background and previous work, and what prompted you to write not 1, not 2 as it turns out, but 4 works of fiction about characters and issues surrounding fossil fuels and climate change.

Okay. Glad to, Sterling. First of all, for those who don't know me, I am the author of 4 novels, and, they're all tied together. It's called this the series is called Fossil Fuze, and there's plenty of fighting over fossil fuels in these books. In addition to being an author, I'm an agency president.

I have a small communications firm based in New York City with an office in Washington DC. It's called Indelible, and we deal largely in crisis communications. I was also a journalist for a number of years in Detroit. I was national reporter for 4 years for the Detroit News, then a columnist for 10 years, where I focused largely on business and politics. And often, they came together as we'll probably discuss, I think, through the course of this of this podcast.

In addition to all that, I've been an executive in corporate America. I worked 13 years as an executive in fortune 100 companies in the energy business and also in the automotive space. Obviously, energy and climate were a big part of my life there and, what I had to focus on a fair amount because they were constantly issues that were coming up especially from the media. So you ask about what inspired me to write books and I would say a few things. One is that I thought I had some entertaining stories to tell based on some of the experiences that I've had, some of the insights I had, observations of people, and what's going on in the world.

I also wanted to use fiction as a vehicle

for social commentary, which you alluded to in your in

your opening remarks there, Sterling. And Sterling. And I thought the territory was wide open because so much of literature and popular entertainment comes from one side of the of the spectrum, and there's very little that critiques some of the, absurdities and the excesses from the other side. So I thought this would be a good way to expose some of that and bring it to life, get it off, you know, I I draw a lot of my knowledge from knowledgeable scientists and and authors who write, nonfiction books, but I wanted to take a different, step toward showing people what it's really like by bringing some of these characters to life. And when you talk about corporate life, there's very little in the way of satire other than shows like Succession, movies like Office Space, which is one of my favorites.

Very few satires about business generally that I thought have been successful and there have been even fewer books about climate change and climate alarmism that come from, the point of view that I would have. And, most of the books, as you know, Sterling, and climate change, and there are a lot of them out there tend to be dystopian tales from the other side. Oh my gosh. The world is ending. The climate change climate has been destroyed by these greedy, fossil fuel companies and so forth.

We have to head for the hills because the water is gonna rise or or, you know, vegetation is gonna disappear. On and on. You know all the stories. They're told constantly, and it's a concerted effort by a lot of folks to make sure that we are constantly made aware of what's going what they think is going on with the climate.

Right.

So, after my 3rd book, which is called Green Goddess, I was really inspired by a project in my neighborhood. That's where the government was pushing hard to sign up a bunch of contractors to rip up our shorefront and protect us from supposedly high waters that were coming because of climate change. They're spending upwards of a $1,000,000,000 maybe 2,000,000,000, the end is not in sight and I just I would go to community meetings and ask questions like why are we doing this? What are your assumptions? How high is the water supposed to rise exactly?

And I got a lot of mumbled answers, and sometimes I was actually sent to one community meeting, I was sent to the back of the room. They said, look. These these are inappropriate questions to ask because everyone

stand in the quest go stand in the corner, put on your dunce cap.

Exactly. If they'd had a dunce cap, they would have made me wear it. That's for sure. And, so what I I went back, and I kept pressing this engineer who was the head of this project and said, what are you basing this on? How high do you think the water is supposed to rise in New York Harbor?

Now New York Harbor, as you can envision, is around the Statue of Liberty. It's right out off, you know, Manhattan here, leads out to the ocean, and they said, well, 3 feet by 2050. And I would, this caused me to dig into the science and to look up the the, the IPCC reports and the the contrarian reports and filings by lots of other people. I thought, we're not even close to that. That's not even not possible it's gonna happen.

Not in the not in the realm of possibility. You know, if they really believe something like that, I've I've I've not been to New York in a while Mhmm. But I haven't heard about the great project moving the Statue of Liberty from, the island to a mountain top somewhere.

Exactly. Well, I think with with the you know how our arm is up out stretched. I think that's how high they think the water is gonna rise.

Well, there were images of that. I think, I forget. There were images of that. Maybe an Al Gore's film, you know, that was, like, advertising poster or something. But Yeah.

You talk about preview you know, has has anyone from our side taken this on before? And, of course, the late Michael Crichton. Doctor, Michael Crichton, who was also a really good writer.

Oh, yeah.

Did State of Fear, and that's just about the only one I can think of, and it was more of a, I guess, an an adventure story, an action story than Missy's Twist is. But they both dealt with, 8, they dealt with hard climate science, looking at it, taking data to be the most important thing, as opposed to climate models. And they both showed sort of the inner workings of real politics going on. So that, you know, to the extent there's something in common besides just both being skeptical fiction works on climate change, I think those they have those things in common.

Yeah. Yeah. Michael Crichton's book was was groundbreaking in that sense. And unfortunately, as you say, it was the last of the last of its breed, and I think it was 2004 when it came out. So we're talking 20 years, 2,004, 2005.

And it was it was a it was a terrific book, a thriller, had a really interesting point of view on it. I didn't actually read it until after I'd read I'd written Missy's Twitch, and a number of people said, hey. Wait a second. You gotta you gotta you know, read this book. It was it was odd.

And so I I I went back and read and thought, you know, well, good. I'm I I'd read other Michael Crichton stuff in the past, but for some reason, I hadn't I hadn't seen it. Years. Yeah. Yeah.

By the way, if if you if anyone buys Michael Creighton's, book on State of Fear, it's still out there. And the electronic version that I bought had 3 of his speeches at the front, and they were fantastic. They were they were terrific. Yeah.

Crichton was really bright. And and not just bright, but he had an inquisitive mind. Mhmm. You know, he he was always searching for answers, not not believing he had answers, and and I think that's a credit to him.

Well, yeah. And it's interesting you say that, Sterling, because I I find that, some of the people around this climate industry who are espousing the most certain views about science and how settled it is Yeah. Are the most suspect, because as you know, there's so much that is uncertain, so much we don't understand that we still need to understand and research. But you watch some of these characters out there and say, you know, pay no attention to that science behind the curtain. Yeah.

Exactly. You know, just just listen to us.

Yeah. Look, I know a famous climate researcher. I have published in the same Cambridge publication as him and book. Mhmm. We went to the same we were at the Cambridge.

I finally asked him. I said, what would it take I said, I know what it would take to convince me that humans are causing catastrophic climate change. Not that climate change is happening, mind you, I don't doubt that, and not that humans may be playing a role, but that it's catastrophic, that it's that it's that's that it's something we have to respond to now. And I asked him, what would take convince you that you're wrong about that?

Right.

Because that's what he said.

Mhmm.

And he said all of physics would have to be overturned. I said, really? The law of conservation of energy, entropy, all of that has to go for you to be wrong about climate change? He said, yes. Everything I ever learned about physics.

Wow. You know, it was an answer. It was extreme hubris on his part, I think. But, in any case so, John, before we get into the details of Missy's Twitch, you've written, as we've already discussed, a book series called Fossil Feuds. Mhmm.

Now please describe you've already you've already told us a little bit what what prompted you to write the series. I'm not sure what prompted you. It's like I'm not sure what the precipitating event is that I've gotta write this first book. Mhmm. But describe the different books in this series.

And if you wanna get into what it was that just like, today, that's it. I've gotta write this book.

Yeah. So they all, first of all, I was inspired, as I mentioned. I had seen and heard and, so many things that have gone on in business and politics over the years and I thought at this point in my career, it'd be a shame to just kinda kinda you know, go away with these stories still

in my

head and I think by fictionalizing them, I could mix and match different events that I've seen different personalities. I've seen behaviors and so forth so they're all entirely fictional characters, but you know some people you know like some of them, especially the political figures may resemble folks that people know in the news, But I just thought there's a lot of interesting, material out there to play with that I just never see. And it was for me writing these books was like watching, a bingeable TV series or something like that. That is you get so immersed in it, you you can't wait to get back to writing it because you wanna find out what happens next. And that's that's really the way it goes because II started each of these books not knowing what the end would be.

The one I'm working on right now, I know more of the ending. But the first ones I thought, just tell the story, tell some stories about characters and then see where it goes. So all these books center around a fictional company, the Power Company, has operations around the world. It's an energy firm, and the the ruling, power behind the company, it's more than a 100 years old, is the Crow family. They're all descended from a company founder by the name of Homer Crow, who I envision as a a contemporary of John d Rockefeller and other industrial pioneers from the early 20th century and late, late 1800.

And so what it covers is is their battles. The reason it's fossil feuds is they have a lot of fights going on with politicians, activists, and each other. So the stories focus on the behaviors and attitudes of the the corporate chieftains the politicians a lot of time on the activists. There's a continuing there's one group in particular that is in all the books called the Planetistas. I'm introducing an I'm introducing another, another activist group in my next book called the Climate Rangers, and they, they go around beat up people with hockey sticks.

There you go. But, but all the stories are meant to be entertaining and educational too as you mentioned. And, so that requires a great deal of research, but the first book was called A Turn in Fortune. It was about competition inside the c suite. It pits, Robbie Crowe, who's a scion and heir to the energy fortune, who acts as chairman, and he's got a highly successful CEO by the name of Walker Hope who does so well that the chairman's very threatened by that.

The CEO's getting way too much publicity, way too much credit for the company's success, so this leads to a showdown. One of them has gotta go. So that's a lot about the dynamics inside a a company. The second one is called airs on fire. It's about turbulence within the ruling family, and, it's about the chairman's desire to make friends with Enviro's, and that leads him to overspend on a grab bag of green technologies that causes a stock to plummet.

He takes it out on a shareholder who critiques him in social media, and this is another showdown. This time within the family over whether Robbie should still run the show given his misplaced focus. And, then there was green goddess, a company under fire from activists and politicians demanding that it transitioned to new forms of energy. And, of course, that's the big question. Right?

What are these magical forms? Wind and wind and solar, we know about the issues there with intermittency, unreliability, problems with the grid, with load, etcetera. So, but they do have at Crow Power, they have a a division and subsidiary that's focused on research and diffusion energy. So they grab onto that and use that to make a splashy demonstration at the Statue of Liberty, as a matter of fact, and to show that to try to prove some sort of green bona fides, and it works for a short period of time. Anyway, it was, it was, I think, it showed kind of the struggle that companies face.

Those are in the traditional energy space to try to find new ways of operating because there isn't a better option out there right now that's staring them in the face. So almost all of them have some sort of research going on to find something that has fewer carbon emissions or methane emissions or less pollution, whatever. But, so far, they have not found something to displace what accounts for 85% of the energy in the world, and, of course, that's fossil fossil fuels. So that brings me up to Missy's Twitch and that's, that's I guess what we can talk about next. That's about alarmism run amok.

Before we get to the

rest of this podcast, I wanted to let you know about 2 fantastic live podcasts Heartland produces every week. We'd love for you to join us every Thursday at 1 PM EST, noon CST live for our flagship in the tank podcast. You can watch on the stopping socialism TV channel on YouTube, where you can participate in the show in the chat with other fans and also ask questions that we'll address on the air and put up on the screen. And every Friday, also at 1 PM EST and noon CST, you can go to Heartland's main YouTube channel. Just search for the Heartland Institute on YouTube for the new Climate Realism Show.

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We're also on Rumble. See you there.

I'm gonna do something I hadn't planned on doing, but, you know, you mentioned that some of the, some of the figures in the book in Missy's Twitch, and I'm sure this is probably true of your previous novels. I haven't read them yet. Mhmm. That people may recognize them, at least the this particular caricature of

them. Mhmm.

I'm gonna read this. This this comes at the end of a meeting between the White House's staff while the president sleeps by the fire. Mhmm. Basically, all underlings are making decisions. Mhmm.

And they've got the vice president in the room who is sitting there wide eyed and silent, and they decide since she's actually the most powerful elected representative in the room, Maybe they should get her, her take on this. And so I'm gonna read this a little bit because it's it's hilarious. So she turned to the famously vacuous vice president, Sherika Fugazi, who had come to the meeting late and sat at the other end of the room in wide eyed silent throughout the conversation petrified that someone might ask her a question. Yet, Jessica felt she couldn't ignore the most senior official in the room who was awake. Madam vice president, is there anything you'd like to add before we close?

Shirkah blinked several times, nodded, her lips dry, her mouth agape. Why, yes. I'd like to make this point because I think it's very important. She cleared her throat, and that point is that the root cause of climatosis, that's a disease that is labeled in this book, the root cause of climatosis is climate change, And climate change, as we know all too well, is about climate, she said gravely. And then she leaned forward, raised her index finger to draw attention to her point, but, and a lot of people don't get this it's also about change.

You hear what I'm saying? And when you put those things those two concepts together climate and change, what do you get? Climate change. So you start by zeroing in on the problem and that leads you to the solution whatever that is. Tada!

Yes. Well, I'm sure nobody could figure out who that might be modeled after. Yeah. Yeah.

I gotta tell you there were, you know, like, that was one spot, but there were whole there were whole, you know, the guy you you call Spanky McFarlane, the science the science director for the president, that's the physicist, by the way, in real life I was referring to.

Mhmm. Oh, really? Yes. Okay. Okay.

Yeah.

I know

what you're talking about.

Yeah. So it, there were times that that, you know, I read this book, and it was just laugh out loud funny. There were other times that I was sitting there going, you know, this is just so sad, because this is really the way it is. Mhmm. And so, anyway, focusing specifically on Missy's Twitch, please outline the story for our listeners, and what are the motivations driving the different main characters?

Okay. Yes. So the story is about, as I mentioned, climate alarmism and how it's used by politicians and businesses to buy into their solutions. Fork over your money or your vote or both, and I try to use humor, drama, and, some exaggerations to make my points and to make that make it entertaining. So you start with the title cat character, the one who's got the twitch, and that's Missy Maborn Crowe.

She's assigned to the Crow family. She's about 6th generation. Her mother runs the company, which causes instant tension right there. She's fresh out of Yale, gender studies, really majored in woke. She became a camp campus activist, marching across campus, demonstrating against fossil fuels.

Now supposedly, she's starting work at the Crow Power Company, and, she's working only in the fusion area because that's the only thing that would be suitable for her. She's so opposed to fossil fuels. Well, she's got an $8,000,000 pad in Tribeca, a very tony neighborhood in New York. And, she's decorated it with a bunch of Georgia O'Keefe paintings, in keeping with her, her focus on gender issues, but she has a problem. And that is that she can't go to work, because she's developed this twitch, and it's involuntary.

It moves her arm and makes her do things she doesn't wanna do. And her friends are getting it too. After she gets it, then suddenly all her very impressionable friends also rush fresh out of college get it too. They've all been been bombarded with propaganda about climate change since they were in diapers. You know, and so here they are again, suffering from this stuff.

So this becomes, an issue. She goes to a therapist who labels her anxiety over climate change as climatosis. And she sees an opportunity, this therapist does, to help make this thing go viral and get more patients. So she helps put her on TV. Missy and her friends put a video on TikTok.

Suddenly, this is a worldwide phenomenon. And all these kids were suffering from climate anxiety based on all the propaganda they've been hearing all their lives are suddenly manifesting their fears with, with these twitches. Spasms. Yeah. Yeah.

These spasms are to be psychologists would call it a conversion disorder. And,

so that psychologist. The psychologist in your in your book, doctor is. Mhmm. No illusions there. I'm certain.

Mhmm. But, he she comes up with a novel name, climatosis. Mhmm. And so climatosis becomes the cause celeb. The, we've got to battle climatosis.

It's

Yeah. Yeah. Poster child for this. Imagine you know, here's somebody from a family that's that's their name is associated with fossil fuels, and she's coming out. She's damaged by this, and it can happen to anyone.

So the Dewey Fenwick administration in Washington, which, which is pushing all kinds of green solutions on things. They wanna use her as a way to show, how damaging climate change can be and how the world needs to adopt, some of their many solutions. And, of course, we've seen a lot of this as you pointed out in recent years with massive spending bills that they can't tell you what the bills are actually gonna do or what impact it will have. They can't quantify in any way, what difference it would make for climate because they don't know, But but we're still gonna spend. So anyway, I I digress, but Missy Missy becomes the cap on this.

That's not that's not that's not that much of a digression. Look, when they pass these bills, when they say we have to vote on the bill before we can know what's in it

Right.

Or when they're questioned directly, when when administrative heads are questioned directly and they say, okay. How much is this going to change the temperature? And they say, well, that's not how we measure success. Right. Well, okay.

How do you measure success? Well, it's getting people to go along and and believing. It's not hold it. We're spending billions of people to get people to go along for something that may not even have that's as you say, we can't quantify the impact on climate change, which is the whole point of it.

Right.

Madness. And and and and in a novel, funny. In real life, which is what we've lived in in the real world, it's not funny at all.

No. No. It's not. I I don't I don't spend a lot of laughing, when I'm reading the news about this stuff. I just smack my head and go, how can they get away with this?

Well, I tell you how they get away. I mean, I I I'll get back to Missy in a second, but, I mean, this has been a massive across the board effort by a lot of entities to push this on us and say, look at this crisis. I in the book, I I tie it to anyone who's seen the music man, remembers professor Harold Hill coming into town and creating a a crisis. There's a the presence of a pool table in your community. And look what it's doing to our youth.

Well, they he knew as the folks who are behind the climate crisis supposedly know, and that is that you create a crisis and then you bring the solution with you. And that's what this is all about. It's a it's a it's a bifurcated effort. On one hand, push the crisis. On the other hand, push the solution.

It's about the it's a you you you describe different politicians and chronic capitalists in the book. They don't, you know, in my opinion, they don't come off well, though they come off, I think, pretty accurately. Mhmm. But it's for those guys, what it's about is power. It's about control and money.

For the for the for the crony capitalists, it's about resources, it's about it's about, padding their bottom line even more at the expense of of other people. Mhmm. But it's also about power. It's about controlling other people's lives.

Right. Absolutely. I absolutely agree. And, yes. It's crony capitalism, which you've seen in in many other industries over a long period of time.

I mean, let's face it. Eisenhower warned about it back in the fifties. Right?

Yep. Yep.

The the military industrial complex. Well, it's a climate industrial complex now and and Kony capitalism is at the center of it. So you've got you've got this breathtaking effort to convince us the science is settled when they not when when people I respect, the scientists that I respect on this and I've read, would tell you it's in anything but settled. There are too many variables we don't quite fully understand, are hard to measure, can't compute, on and on. So we know that, but, nevertheless, we're told every day in every way, look at what science what climate change is doing to us today.

Here's another disaster. It's tied to climate change. So, anyway, they don't they don't bother with the science anymore. It's just simply move along buy the solutions, and we'll be fine. So you've got you've got all these folks pushing this line of thinking, and I'm sure there'll be I'm sure there are disclaimers on anything you're doing like there are on some of the things I've done appear on a on a podcast and suddenly you have this UN, United Nations disclaimer on it saying, hey.

Here here's the I mean, how does that happen? Well, we know how it happens. UN went to work and talked to Google and said, you guys need to get the straight scoop from us, and we have the official truth. So you've got foundations, the UN, activists, universities, media, search engines, reference materials, politicians, entertainment industry. It's it's everywhere all at once.

And it it's really it's hard to penetrate for the ordinary folks out there who aren't obsessing over this issue like maybe I am and maybe you are. They're they just you just have to kind of assume that these people know what they're talking about. And the more you dig into it and pierce the veil, you realize they don't. And, I I tend to I have a lot more respect for the people who say, let's learn more about this. Yeah.

Than the folks who are saying, it's all over, folks. Show's over. Just here, buy these solutions. Because, I mean, look at I don't wanna digress again, but look at the look at the solution they pushed with EVs. Here it is, another top down solution that was not ready for primetime, a nice niche product that some people really liked and thought was pretty cool, and it is.

But, you know, there are other consequences of these EVs in the mass market that they imagined is not ready for it. They don't embrace it. Extension cords aren't 500 miles long, so that's a problem.

You know, we already have we already have, 20,000 more chargers than we have gas stations in the country, and we still can't get them keep them charged. We have we have, they they say we need 1,200,000 of them. We have a 150,000 gas station, but we need 1,200,000 chargers to keep these things on the road. Wow. The, and you may not know this.

I've known it for some time. I've I've written about it. It'll come out in Climate Change Weekly tomorrow. Do you know when the first electric vehicle was created?

Well, I think that it was goes back to the early, 1900 as I recall. Maybe the 18 maybe the late 1800 with Daimler. I don't know.

Well, even earlier, the first electric locomotive, because that was the first vehicle that used electric

Okay.

Was in the 18 thirties. Wow. The first rechargeable battery was 18 59. The first electric cars preceded the first internal combustion engine vehicles. They were tried each of these technologies were tried and tested in the market.

Mhmm. You know, the first one, almost 200 years ago now, 180 years, and they failed every time without government support, without government help, They were competing on their own, and the problem that they had then, nearly 200 years ago, is the same problem that they have today, high cost, limited range. Yeah. That hasn't changed in 200 years.

It's no. It it it hasn't, and they've been chasing this forever. I mean, kinda like they're chasing fusion now as well. I I remember, in my column writing days back in the 19 19, nineties going to see the former head of General Motors, guy named Bob Stempel. And he started a company, based on trying to find a battery solution.

Now this guy had all kinds of resources, all kinds of engineering and automotive knowledge, and he was gonna work on some new form of battery that could actually have the proper storage so that these vehicles could be successful. Well, he died, some years ago, not achieving his dream as many others have died on this on this beach. And it just it isn't there. And to base this notion that we're all gonna drive electric vehicles, the idea that somehow there will be a solution to this before we we take all these fossil these gasoline and diesel vehicles off the road It's not just wishful thinking. It's disastrous and dangerous and stupid.

It's bad it's bad for our health. It's bad for the environment. It's positive hazard, and it doesn't they just don't fit our lifestyle in the sense of, an electric vehicle I first off, I wouldn't want one charging my garage overnight, but they may fit they may fit if all you're doing is commuting around town for a few miles a day. But even a modest trip I've written about this. I've I looked at the electric vehicles on the road.

Less than 5% of electric vehicles on the road can make it from here to to Houston without a charge in traffic during the middle of summer in Texas Right. From from Dallas to Houston. So what would be a 4 hour trip for me in my vehicle becomes an overnight trip to get here, and then a second overnight trip back if I wanted to do it, you know, one day down, one day back, which is easily done. I can do it in a day down and back, and I've done it. I've gone to Austin and testified.

That's that's what 3 hours, 3 and a half hours from where I live. I can go down to Austin in the morning, testify, in the afternoon, and come back that evening. I can't do that in electric vehicle.

No. No. You can't. And just imagine. I mean, this is all dreamed up, of course, by folks who live in in small cities in the Accella corridor and the West Coast miles across or however long it is.

And, and, miles across or however long it is, and, and through the Midwest and other places where it's just simply impractical. Now, if I wanna drive down to Florida, how am I gonna do that from New York? I've gotta figure out where am I gonna stop for charging? How long is it gonna take? How much more time do I have to put into this?

And by the way, if I put any suitcases in the back, that's gonna that's gonna lower my range. And god forbid it's hot, and I put on the air conditioning because that's also gonna drain the battery. So you've gotta have a lot of contingency plans if you're gonna take a road trip. The great American road trip would be a a history if they went through with this. But you can see that consumers are rebelling just as they did before, and they're not gonna accept this.

The companies are reducing and laying off people at the battery plants. They're reducing the production schedules of the auto companies. And this was the the sad thing about this too, though, Sterling, I mean, this is all derisked for the manufacturers by taxpayers. Yeah. We gave the money to the companies to say, look, you're doing God's work here, so we're gonna pay you for it.

And then it turned out to be crap. I mean, it just it didn't work. It's people didn't want it, and here we are. We're stuck with the tab. To be fair,

if it was coming from the government, you should have known right then it wasn't God's work.

Well, there's that. But but they regard it as as God's work. That's for sure. The people foisting the sides.

Well, with some some some deities work, I'm not sure they ever really thought it was God's work, honestly. In any case, so let's wrap up a little bit about Missy Twitch. Mhmm. I don't want you to give away the ending. Okay.

But, you know, talk just a little bit more about, her journey.

Okay. So so Missy is, as part of being a trophy for the Dewey Fenwick administration, she's appointed to this National Climatosis Commission, and, she's asked to give a speech at Central Park where she's basically gonna give her kind of a live hostage video on behalf of climate change to all these folks suffering from climatosis. And so she in the course of doing this speech, she's given lines from the politicians that criticize the company, and now it's starting to hit a little close to home. It's getting personal about her family, her family's history, and so forth, and this causes her to maybe do a little searching. Maybe she needs to know a little bit more about this before she before she makes this big public, broadside.

So she starts doing a little bit of research with the help of of an adviser to her mother and also with the help of a professor who has been, denied tenure at his at his college because he had the temerity to write something about climate change that was not in keeping with the gospel of the of the college that was depending on lots of funding for its research and so forth. So she is

professor who's now serving who is now a barista serving coffee in a Che Guevara inspired coffee shop where they they don't have any problem with capitalism.

Exactly. Although they do make pretense. One of the one of the little jokes in there, or observations about this professor was that, yes, he's wiping down latte latte machines at Cafe Che, otherwise known as Commie Coffee in lower Manhattan. And, he's named employee of the month, which is a $50 gift certificate, but he doesn't get to keep it all because in keeping with equity ideas, it's divided equally between everyone, even those who don't show up for work.

Yeah. So may

as well get used to communism right away. And, but yes. So she's she's looking at we hearing more about the research, questioning some of the assumptions she's made, and it's dawning on her, maybe I don't have this thing nailed exactly. Maybe a lot of my assumptions are wrong. And, so this causes I I'll I'll take it about that far.

She still has to give this piece

The scale the scale's falling from her eyes, not just about climate change, but also about how she is being used and her generation is being used.

Exactly. Exactly. So, so she's gotta she's gotta figure this out, and how what's she gonna do? How's she gonna put it? What's she gonna say?

And that that leads to sort of the, the climax of the book when she gets on

stage.

And after she finishes throwing up in the bushes before she goes on, what's she gonna say? So that's that's where we are. Yeah.

So this is a work of fiction. Mhmm. Very highly readable, funny. I'm not gonna say nail biting. It's not it's not a, you know, it's not an adventure story.

Right.

It's not a thriller. Mhmm. But it, it's informed by facts, much like Michael Crichton's book we talked about earlier was. Mhmm. You you you looked into the science.

Mhmm. You looked into not just about climate change, but about energy and energy needs, because this is some place something you came from

Right.

As you pointed out. So what is your nonfictional assessment of the threat climate change poses to civilization and the virtues or lack thereof of fossil fuels?

Climate change threat, I would say it's not much. It's a it's an issue that we watch, but as far as, anthropogenic climate change, we don't know what how much of that is of our climate change is caused by human activities. We suspect there's some, but there's a lot that's due to natural variability as we know. And, again, we don't know exactly how much. Nevertheless, I think all the scenarios we've heard about catastrophe don't amount to much at all.

The models have been proven wrong repeatedly. They never they never stops them. They simply move the goalposts out a little further and say, well, you know, it's just it's another 5 years, and we're gonna hit hit the tipping point or that slippery slope, and we're gonna slip into the abyss, and it's gonna be horrible. So I don't think that it is something that requires us to reorder the economy far from it. It seems like more of an excuse to do it than to actually do it, to prevent anything that's going to really hurt us.

So in my view, it's unproven, it's unquantifiable, and they have an unsatisfactory explanation for why we need to reorder the society that we live in. As for fossil fuels, they're still indispensable. They're central to our way of life and at the moment as far as energy goes, they're irreplaceable. They're cheap, abundant, portable, dependable. You don't have to plan your trip across the country, by staying in motels for, you know, inordinate amounts of time.

They're not perfect, and, there are trade offs as there are to everything else. Sure. There's pollution associated with, extraction, also with some of the burning, you know, with coal and so forth. There's, you know, if you look at if you look at the fields of North Dakota from from space when they're doing fracking, you see a lot of gas that's burned out into the atmosphere for, you know, this goes to waste. So there there's a fair amount of waste, and they're they're finite resources.

But here's the thing, it's like it's like capitalism. It's the worst possible system except compared to everything else. Well fossil fuels are kind of the same boat. It's the worst possible energy source except compared to everything else.

Except for every all the others. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's a better way of putting it. So but, you know, if you look at the history and many many people have pointed this out, fossil fuels are a bit essential and coincident with human flourishing over the past, you know, century and a half, and so why do we wanna stop this?

And we don't really wanna stop it. If we if the people pushing this this story truly believed in this, they'd be pressing China not to, keep building coal plants. Right? But they just want us to stop, and they want us they want us to feel better about this somehow, that we're not doing it. Well, come on.

That's a that's a that's an illusion. Or as as Richard Lindson says, I love this quote. He said something to the fact of, you know, historians are eventually gonna look at this as one of the greatest delusions in human history, that we had to we had to do all this to fix climate change that we don't know we don't know what the problem is, much less the solution. So

do you think the people I see what people say every day. Mhmm. You know, because I follow this really, really closely. Mhmm. And sometimes I think they're stupid.

Mhmm. Sometimes I think they're evil. Mhmm. A combination of both, perhaps. Mhmm.

Rarely do I think they're completely unaware, but then I saw something yesterday. Let me see. I'm I'm trying to find it. Okay. I don't know if you saw what John Kerry said yesterday.

I've I've seen a lot of what John Kerry says, but I I haven't didn't see that. I see I see his daughters out there now.

Well, he said something to the effect that people would be, less upset about the Russian and Ukraine war if Russia was just doing more about climate change. It's okay to bomb civilians so long as you do so with bombs that don't actually burn carbon when they explode. You see something like that, and you think, is he just unaware? Is he really that stupid? Does he not care about humans?

Yeah. Here here's what he said. He said, I can I can play the video, but I can't read it?

Okay. Oh,

yeah. There it is. It says, there. John Kerry says people would, quote, feel better about the war in Ukraine if Russia would, quote, make a greater effort to reduce emissions?

That's just that's just it it is as laughable. I mean, like a lot of things that John Kerry says or Al Gore says, it's just ridiculous that that they truly believe that this is the overriding principle by which we all, judge our lives and and behaviors and so forth is preposterous, but it just shows you how deep inside the bubble he is of Martha's Vineyard and and, inside the Beltway and so forth in this private jet. He doesn't know what's going. He's totally out of touch with the ordinary concerns of ordinary people and says stupid stuff like that that that's Yeah.

I mean, back when the

worst the worst on its face.

You know, back when Russia invaded Ukraine originally, he said he said, you know, let's hope that the invasion doesn't take Russia's off the ball on climate change.

Right. I do remember that. Yeah. That's that's the word. Forget the nuclear war possibility.

Yeah. Let's let's worry about are they are they emitting too much. You you may recall, Sterling, there's a there's a portion in the book where the president Fenwick is going around the room, and they're talking about all some of the climate things solutions they have. And, so the the sec one of the people from the defense department, this Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

This woke generals talking about, well, we're just making sure that we're not gonna approve any weapons that have a carbon footprint. And the president

Even the president yeah. Even the president was sort of taken aback by that one.

Yeah. He says, well, what if they're using bombs? Well, she hadn't thought of that. Another another idiotic idea they had was to was to snuff out the eternal flame over JFK's grave

Yeah.

And install instead of flickering, candle, powered by solar power. So, you know, but they they're always looking for these, kind of symbolic gestures that are meaningless ultimately, but but that that play to their to their backers and play to the people who are who are either true believers, complete cynics, profiteers. I don't think it's all one mentality. I think it's a lot of different mentalities that kinda joined together in this

Yeah.

In this cause. And, unfortunately, we're we're stuck with kind of trying to deal with their solutions, which are are not just annoying and expensive, but potentially very dangerous. And I'll I'll get into that more in my next book because, there's something that's kinda staring us in the face that I think is is concerning and that's motivating me to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and write.

Well, if you think about it, I'm gonna I'm gonna put a pitch in for myself here. You might send me some copies of, of the next book, and maybe I'll have you on again, and and maybe some of the previous books because I'd like to catch up on those.

Yeah. Great. I would love that.

In any case, we we've run a little long. And so in closing, please tell our listeners how they can get Missy's Twitch and the other books in the series.

Missy's Twitch is available at, all the usual places, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, etcetera. It's also available in a lot of independent bookstores, so I'd urge you to go through them. It's available in about 40 countries around the world in English. I hope to get it translated at some point. And, Green Goddess is available in a lot of the same outlets.

The other books, the earlier books are all available on Amazon. So, just put in my name, John Pepper, j o n, no h, and, Pepper in Amazon, and you'll find Missy's Twitch, Green Goddess, airs on fire, and a turn in fortune. And then later this year, another one.

John, it's really been good to speak with you today. I hope to get your other books and to have you back on again, and I wanna wish you, to well, and thank you for myself and our listeners.

Well, thank you, Sterling. It's been a great conversation. Really appreciate, your comments and your interest and, and your observations on the book. Sometimes it's interesting to hear what other people have to say, things about the book that you didn't see yourself. So

Yep. I'm gonna try I'm gonna try and go on Amazon and leave a review even though I didn't get it through Amazon, so I won't be a verified purchaser. But there you go.

Well, please do. Yeah.

So, losers, thanks for checking in us today. Please check Heartland's website as we continue to follow the, and track the progress of energy environmental laws and regulations that affect you. And if you're not already receiving these podcasts other than your favorite device, go to iTunes and subscribe. And when you have the time, please rate our podcast on iTunes so you can help us expand the reach of free market ideas. You might also check out our weekly climate livestream, now rebranded the Climate Realism Show, every Friday on your favorite social media streaming service, where Anthony Watts, Lanae Lukin, and myself, and almost weekly guests discuss the climate topic of the week, complete with taking questions from viewers.

Thanks. Take care. Bye.