By now most people will have heard about the podcast of Joe Rogan. His concept is simple: invite an interesting guest, don’t prepare the interview too much and talk for a couple of hours. Rogan was accused of spreading ‘misinformation’ about Covid during interviews with Robert Malone and Peter McCullough. Rogan has become very popular, apparently because he is giving a platform to views that are otherwise mostly ignored by the mainstream media. His podcast now attracts millions of listeners and he has a contract with Spotify, who stream his podcasts. Artists like Neil Young pressured Spotify to end their cooperation with Rogan, which they refused.
So Joe Rogan is looking for all kinds of controversial guests. It was waiting for a ‘controversial’ climate guest to be invited. The most logical candidate at this moment in the US is Steven Koonin who wrote the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. He has had a long career, in academia and he worked for BP for five years. He was also former Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy under the Obama administration. And so it happened that Koonin went off to Austin to tall to Rogan. The episode is here.
It was the first Joe Rogan podcast that I listened to from start to end and it was not disappointing. The amount of ready knowledge that Koonin displayed was quite impressive. They talk about the science of climate change, the tribal behaviour in the field (the attacks on Koonin), the important role of fossil fuels for the developing world, the economy and politics and even geoengineering. The whole episode (2 hours) is well worth your time. If you then want to see more of Koonin, he was invited last year by Clintel and the Irish Climate Science Forum to give an online talk. That talk is available here. At clintel.org you can also find several reviews of his book.