I'm thrilled to have with you now a man who writes a substack called Irrational Fear at substack dot com. He covers all kinds of stuff, from climate.
Issues to.
DEI issues, to all of these kind of cultural hot topics, and he does so in such a way that is extremely informative and often infuriating. We'll get to that in a moment. Now it's called irrational fear, Doctor Matthew Wylicky joins me.
Now, Doctor Wylicky.
For years, and I mean over a decade, I've told people that my number one irrational fear is running out of toilet paper. And guess what happened during COVID. Guess what I was proven right? So I asked this because irrational fears? You know, why did you choose that title? First of all for your substack?
Thanks Mandi, thanks for having me so.
I mean, I really think that the mentality that we see, or the fear that is breeding, especially in young people, is not based on science tific fact. It's not based on observable data. It's it's what I would call irrational. It's not really based in the science. It's based on feeling. It's based on vibe, and it's based on a lot of manipulated, kind of hyped up data that you see coming out in the mainstream media, and unfortunately it's just
not you know, how we should base our fear. You know, fear is a really important instinct, and it should be based on facts, on understanding your environment. And if people are manipulating that fear and causing you to have an irrational fear, I really worry about that. And so I thought it was kind of fitting when I saw the especially the kind of the mental anguish young people were going through when they were thinking about climate. Everything they told me seemed irrational.
Well, and we're going to talk about climate here in just a second, but I want to dip back into COVID for just one second, because if you still had any faith in the government and you went through COVID as irrational thinking adult, I feel like it is incredibly hard now to maintain faith in some of the institutions that lied to us over and over again during COVID
when we look at climate. In my mind, this is something I've been talking about since I got my own show in two thousand and five, and I've had the opportunity to have scientists on the show who either had an alternative theory. You've got a post up here I see about the sun, and they can't get funding for any alternative theory research. That's the part that I think is really dangerous. And so when you talk about this stuff,
do you go after it? And we're going to talk about climate law fair here in a moment, do you go after it because you believe that this is politically manipulated or that people are being manipulated. What makes you dig into these issues specifically, or is it just frustration that they're just bastardizing science.
It's probably all of the above.
I think COVID was the climate playbook in hyper speed. Climate's just taking a little longer, But it's a it's a weapon for government to get involved in everybody's life, in every aspect of your life, and it's a real easy way to kind of manipulate data to push policy. In science is about trying to figure out the truth,
regardless of where it takes you. And so when I see people starting to what I call bastardize the science, that's really frustrating as a scientist because that's what makes the public lose trust in people like me, And unfortunately that sucks because I think that scientists are very important. I think science has been very vital to giving us the society that we have today. And when it starts to get politicized and people lose trust in it, we're going to suffer.
We're all going to suffer.
Are you familiar with Dreight the Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex speech? This is one of my favorite things to bring up. This is one of my things. He also talked about the scientific industrial complex and warned against it. And I feel like the scientific industrial complex is at the root of this issue. There's too much money coming from the government to get a pre prescribed outcome, right, I mean, they have an agenda, they're giving out the grants.
How do we stop that?
So one way to stop that, I think, is that you have to the funding institutions cannot be ideologically captured. Right now, the funding institutions when it comes to things like climate or for example, when it came to COVID, the NIH the NSF, these institutions would make these ideological statements. So me, as a young scientist pushing back against this, thinking like, Okay, I need to get a grant.
I need to get tenure, I need to publish.
How am I going to ever get money from these people if they've already told me that the thing I'm going to kind of push back against they've already accepted as the truth. And so you've got this capture in the funding institutions. And also a lot of the most prestigious journals will never push back against the narrative.
They want to toe the line. The editors want to toe the line.
And so once we can get the way we disseminate the science and the way we fund the science to lose this ideological capture, that will free up a lot of young scientists to be able to push back against the narrative and not think that it's going to be you know, career suicide.
Doctor Matthew Whylicky as my guest, he has a great substack called irrational fear. Let's jump into the climate law Fair column that almost made my head explode the other day because you've got two lengthy entries about this, when the first one was called follow the money, how climate
bureaucrats are robbing taxpayers blind. So let's start a little bit with that, because we've talked a little bit about some of that egregious sort of patting the coffers of Democrat run environmental org and I'm gonna put air quotes around environmental organizations. Tell my listeners some of the stuff that you uncovered in the amount of money that is being shoveled out the door based on politics and not science.
It is absolutely staggering.
So just within the last few days of the Biden administration, they shelled out close to twenty billion dollars to these NGOs, one of them called the Climate United Fund. They got seven billion dollars. This is a fun that's existed for less than a year, has no financial records, no environmental track record of doing anything, and they were scheduled to receive seven billion dollars. I know that we throw these numbers around and it's hard to put that into perspective.
Seven billion dollars is about seventy percent of the National Science Foundation yearly budget. That's every academic like me that was a geologist or environmental scientist or earth scientist that was doing work out in the environment, testing waters and figuring out air pollution and soil and degradation and things like that. That is seventy percent to an NGO with a few people that's existed for less than a year.
I mean, the Free Press reported on it as well, and they said it was like throwing gold bars off the Titanic, and it really is. I mean, this is just an outright theft of the of the taxpayer's dollars.
And it's not a small amounts.
I mean, seventy percent of the entire year of the National Science Foundation went to this one little ngo.
Who runs that ngo.
There's a few connected folks, you know. Stacy Abrams was part of this. Who's a politician from a Democrat politician from Georgia.
And one of the initiatives she had was that they were.
Going to replace appliances in low income families with more efficient appliances. And if you talk to any sustainability expert I used to teach a course at University Alabama called sustainability, there is no possible way that we can take a working appliance and throw it in a landfill and replace it with a new appliance and make that environmental. That is the ultimate virtue signaling. That is a grift. That
is just taking your money. And I'm sure they're going to charge three times for the new appliance, and they'll pocket part of it.
So you brought the word grift into the conversation, and I think it's highly appropriate. So let me ask you about this.
And I've long thought this.
I mean the fact that al Gore has become a multi millionaire many, many, many times over by shoving the climate grift down everyone's throat. Is this just about, at this point, lining the pockets of people who have figured out how to tap into the grift.
Yeah, it took me a long time to get here, and every day I'm more and more convinced that it's really set up as just a siphon of taxpayer dollars into green technologies and into these people who already invested in this because they knew how this was going to work. And none of this has anything to do with helping the environment, helping local impacts. You know, there's so many things we could do, There's so many things we could do to make our environment better for local people, make
working environments better. But we have this obsession of CO two and honestly, it does nothing for the local environment except lining the pockets of these politicians and these and these global elites. And the more and more I get into it, it was I was very hesitant to get to this point because I was part of this science.
I'm I'm an EU scientist.
I was one of these people, and I really rejected this idea for a long time.
But I don't know how else to see it.
The hypocrisy is just so blatant, and the amount of money that is being siphoned off with no results at all, Right, it's just there's no other way to call it, an other word to call it than a grift or just straight up fraud.
Well especially, I mean, I guess it was more challenging for you as a scientist than it is for me for as a casual observer right when I'm not in the fight. But you've sort of run out of rational explanations for why people do things other than it's a grift. To your point that we just talked about giving an organization that's barely been in existence for five minutes, run by Democrats with no track record in environmental science at all, how can you presume that that's anything.
But let me get to the.
Law fair stuff before we run out of time here, because I really want to dip into this We've been talking insensibly about federal judges issuing these national injunctions, which I do believe is going to be found to be not doable. But you specifically talk about the US District Judge Tanya Chuckkin and her in her ruling on behalf of the Environmental Protection Agency that has been trying to claw back these crazy grants, and she came out and said, no,
you can't do that. I mean, at what point does the government agency that's given out these grants have I mean, do they just get hamstrung by these judges And what does the judge have to gain here?
This is a really important issue, and so a lot of times when we think about lawfare, I think we think about it as like going after your political opponent and trying to get them out of a race or something. And obviously that's terrible and I don't like that. I think the lawfare that I talk about, so I define it a little different. I define it as the strategic use of the legal system to achieve political goals that cannot succeed through transparent democratic processes. And so this has
societal impact. This will be how our laws are made. And so now we're seeing that judges can essentially ignore all of the facts that these these NGOs did and exists. They have no environmental track record, they haven't really done anything in the environment, and they're willing to still give them seventy percent of the NSF budget because obviously they're all tied in with each other, they're all kind of
behind the same party. They all scratch each other's back, and the will of the people is clearly being ignored because I think if the people knew that NGO that hasn't existed for more than a year is getting seventy percent of the NSF budget, which out of that seven billion dollars, something like over six billion is just for them to divvy out how they see fit. And the new NSF, Yeah, they have no obligation to be transparent.
I want to talk a little bit about the EPA's two thousand and nine endangerment finding because that is the crux of the issue when it comes to being able
to push back on climate change initiatives. And we're here in Colorado where our governor is committed to getting us to this impossible net zero standard by twenty whatever, and we have had our energy costs or to skyrocket where they're now saying even our energy companies, who make a lot of money building this new infrastructure, they've even said this is an unattainable goal. So what is that two thousand and nine endangerment finding and how is it the underpinning of all this other stuff.
I think Governor Polson definitely knows that it's not achievable. I think he's virtuo virtue signaling like everyone else. He's running for the thousand. He's running for president.
He is, he's been running for president for the past two years, so he's going to run for president.
Yeah, go ahead.
So the two thousand and nine endangerment finding was a finding by the EPA where they used the Chevron doctrine, which was a doctrine past decades ago that allowed three letter agencies to kind of reinterpret nuanced laws. If the Congress said we want to Clean Air Act, the EPA could say, okay, well, what's clean air mean? Well, clean air means this amount of CO two. So that's essentially
what they said. They said that clean air is defined by a number of parts per million of CO two and we're above that now, and that allows them to regulate CO two in the time that I said that, I was exhaling forty thousand ppm of CO two. That's one hundred times the level that's in the atmosphere right now. So we're going to interpret clean air as a level of CO two below what the atmosphere has today, then we are polluters as well. And so this is where
you get Now. The Chevron doctrine was struck down recently, so these agencies no longer have this right to do this, but the two thousand and nine engagement finding still stands. This is what has given the EPA the right to regulate energy miles per gallon diesel in shipping trains. All
of this has been regulated by this endangerment finding. And I think if you take this back to Congress now, it's going to be really hard to have politicians stand in front of the lectern and speak while exhaling forty thousand ppm of CO two and then claim that CO two is a pollutant. I'm excited to see it. I hope it happens. But I think the holy grail for all of this is the two thousand and nine Dagerment Finding. I think lee Zelden has his bulls. I write on it.
It's going to take a little time and Congress is going to have to step up, and it's going to be really interesting to see people exhaling forty thousand ppm of CO two while they claim that four hundred ppm is pollution.
Well, we've always thought politicians for the problem. Okay, we've always thought that here on the Manny Connell Show. I do want to know, though, what sort of documentation, what kind of backup, what kind of science did the EPA consult put forward or any or did they have to in two thousand and nine or did they just slap this endangerment here finding and then they were like, you have to believe us because we're the EPA.
Their primary source is the IPCC. Right.
The IPCC is not scientists, it's the inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change. Right, It's a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians. Now they employ scientists by all means. I know a lot of people that have worked for the IPCC. But if you look at the IPCC reports and you look at what the scientists say, and then you look at see what the policy maker summary is, they're very different.
The policy maker summary is clearly written to elicit what I call this irrational fear, and they just omit all of natural variability, They omit past warming and cooling cycles. They kind of ignore everything that happened in the past so that they could focus on what's changing now and then point the finger at CO two.
That was their primary basis.
But the more and more we look at the IPCC findings, the more we see holes in it.
They ignore all of.
The inconvenient science. They highlight all of the science that inflates the problem. And it's just not a true scientific institution. It's a governmental panel that is meant to push policy, and they are using the language of the executive summaries and things like that to elicit this kind of emotional response. That's what they went on in two thousand and nine, and it's clear that if you take that in front of the American people, they'll that down in a second tything.
Well, I think it's interesting. On the twenty eighth of this month, you have a column and I was mentioning earlier about the scientists that I have interviewed over the years about climate and things of that issue. One of them that I interviewed, I think maybe in two thousand
and eight or two thousand and nine. I was still in Florida when I interviewed him, and he had put forth a theory about the Sun and how the Sun's raised and all of these different things, and about where we are in relation to the Sun and how all this stuff comes together. Made perfect sense to me. But he couldn't get any money to continue the research on it because they didn't want to consider that it might
be the Sun which they cannot tax or control. So very quickly, because we're almost out of time, give me a brief of this column of what happened here about the IPCC ignoring the Sun.
Yeah, so this is just this is the standard practice. So part of what they use is they use there's two competing models. One model shows that the solar intensity hasn't changed much. One shows that it's kind of increased a little bit. Well, if it's increase a little bit, maybe that's partly to blame for some of the warming.
That we see. But clearly, like you said, it's hard to tax the sun.
So let's use the model that shows that the Sun isn't increasing, so we can blame all of the warming on CO Two, we could tax.
The energy companies.
It's this kind of lying biomission and it's it's just and the fact that other scientists don't speak up makes me kind of It's a little bit cringey, but that's kind of how it works with everything they do.
Don't you think that it's becoming slightly more okay to push back against the dogmen now because I'm seeing more and more people and nobody's coming out kind of slamming the door open and saying this is all wrong, like you are. But people are being a little more vocal about, hey, you know, maybe we should consider this. I think that maybe the tide is shifting slightly.
But what do you think? I think so too.
It's going to be a long stretch and an uphill battle because this is a this is a behemoth.
I call it the climate industrial complex.
I mean we're talking trillions of dollars have now been invested in keeping this kind of narrative going, and so pushing back against it is becoming more open, you know, on X and things like that, You're seeing more people get traction like me. But ultimately, the universities, the funding institutions, the prestigious journals where this data is going to get published the IPCC.
We still have a long way to go.
Doctor Matthew Wylicky is my guest. I highly recommend his substack. You can find it at substack dot com just search Irrational Fear, and I also put a link to.
It on the blog. Doctor Wilicky.
I got to have you on on a more regular basis because this is super interesting and I think people may understand that perhaps they're not being told the whole story, but they are not seeing the bigger picture, which is we have to bring it back to science instead of grift, and that is going to require a much more longer concerted effort by everyone.
That's my whole goal. Thanks Mandy, thanks for having me on.
All right, that's doctor Matthew Wilicky.