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Welcome to the Quillette podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia.

Quillette is where Freethought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for

heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this

week's episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles,

visit us at quillette.com and click the subscribe button.

I'm your host this week, Iona Italia, and my guest is Paul Brown.

Paul is an engineer who has worked in various different disciplines, mechanical, drilling, manufacturing,

and now building software systems for engineering businesses.

His main interest is an understanding how things work at a fundamental level,

maximizing efficiency and getting the most out of available resources.

In a recent article for Quillette, he argues that the current approach to energy and environmental

policy isn't just unsustainable, it has put us on a collision course with reality.

We discuss the hidden costs of renewables, net zero and the energy transition, and the skewed

political and economic incentives that are driving many countries towards unsustainable energy

policies. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Paul Brown.

I think I'll begin here, which is that we have, in most of the Western nations, and most extremely of all in Australia, perhaps, there is this perception that we can fairly easily and quickly shift our energy production

from fossil fuels to nuclear and renewables. I don't want to talk about nuclear too much

...