https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z_dw_2TERTc
Energy is not only way more expensive and way more unreliable in Germany, to the point where, for example, manufacturers of car batteries for electric cars can no longer do it profitably in Germany because electricity costs are too high, but that while they’ve demolished the energy provision system and rendered themselves hyper-reliant on the Russians, they’ve also made their energy per kilowatt much dirtier, because you need backup for these hypothetically green renewables, which aren’t green at all, by the way. You need backup, and that backup has to be fossil fuel, and they’ve shut off their nuclear plants, and so now they’re turning to coal, or many of the Europeans are now turning to wood burning to prepare for the winter, and they’re deforesting, in many places, they’re deforesting the country. And so one of the things we’ve got to get real straight here is that even if your goal, and even if you have the goal of a more sustainable environment, and you have your metrics in place to produce that, and even if you accept the apocalyptic version of carbon dioxide overproduction, which I don’t at all, by the way, but even if you do, there’s no evidence whatsoever that these counterproductive policies that are punitive in relationship to the poor have had any impact on the environment at all that hasn’t been entirely negative. And so I don’t see at all how anybody on the radical left, on the globalist utopian environmental front, can put forward an argument saying that there’s anything about that that’s moral, because we have way more people who are poor than we needed to have, we’re impoverishing people in the West and the developing world, and while we’re doing that, we’re actually making the environment worse by the standards that the people who put in the policies regard as the appropriate standards. So how is that helpful? And then on the colonial front, one of the things we hear all the time is how awful the European world really has been in terms of its imposition of the colonial empire on the rest of the world. And there’s no doubt that all of us walk on blood-soaked ground, and that’s part of the catastrophe of being human, I suppose. But I can’t see anything more colonial that we’ve ever done than to insist that we enjoyed a pretty damn good standard of living, and that was driven almost entirely by fossil fuel reliance. But it’s pretty much enough of that for everyone else, and we cannot expect to have a world where those in the developing world could aspire to or hope to have anything like the prosperity that we’ve enjoyed, and we’re going to be the good examples in our own country and teach those, let’s say, backward savages exactly how they should treat the planet. I don’t see, I can’t see anything more colonial than that attitude. Like I see in Canada, for example, I think I read recently that if Canada hits all of its climate goals for the next 25 years, we will reduce our carbon output less than China will increase its carbon output next year. So it’s completely bloody pointless from any practical perspective. And the argument might be, well, we should lead by example. It’s like, now should we? We think those developing people in the developing countries who are trying to move towards some reasonable standard are too damn dumb to figure this out all by themselves, say, and we’re going to charge in there like the saviours. And while we’re doing that, we’re going to impoverish them, and we’re going to make our own countries worse off. And there’s nothing colonial about that. It’s like, I don’t think so. I think there’s something plenty colonial about that. We should say, it’s no wonder that you’d like to have enough food to eat and not have to burn dung and wood in your huts. And it’s no wonder that you’d like to have some educational opportunities to your children. And obviously, the way forward to that is going to involve fossil fuel utilization, clearly, because there’s no alternative. And we’ll just get the hell out of the way while you pursue, quite successfully, by the way, what we’ve been pursuing for 200 years. I don’t see a moral leg to stand on in that debate. It’s appalling. And it’s murderous. It’s worse than appalling. It’s murderous. Well, to pick up some of those themes, I mean, as you know, involved in agriculture, and I’m passionate about feeding people. And you made the comment about driving people in the developing world into poverty. I put a slightly different twist on it. You’d reverse decades of the most astounding progress in lifting people out of poverty. Australia is one of the seven big hitters in international agricultural research. There’s six countries and the Gates Foundation that put money into it. And we’ve just done some research, which is really interesting. It shows that participants benefit their own agricultural sectors enormously because while we participate and help the third world, developing world, with their feeding issues and so forth, we learn things that we’re able to bring back here. It’s a real win-win. And the progress has been amazing. An extra five billion people fed properly. Right, right. It’s stunning. Over the last 50 years. That’s something to celebrate. That’s for sure. This is good news. And that’s a huge part of that as a consequence if they’re turning to something like free market solutions. Western know-how under a Western rules-based system led by the dreadful Americans. I mean, pity help us if the Americans are not oversighting. You worry about climate change and environmentalism. The two greatest threats are to return big slabs of the world’s population to grinding poverty so that they’re not able to afford the luxury of wondering about how the environment might be fairing because they can’t feed their kids. And the other will be the breaking of the rules-based system that the allies basically put in place in 1945. And people will laugh at me for saying that, but it’s true. And every Western country is worried about supply chain security after COVID. Well, that was globalization. And it was the Americans making certain that the trade routes were kept open. All right, we’ve got to retreat a little bit. But the answer is not to go back to some system where we break that rules-based system. And the reason is very simple. The autocrats of this world don’t give a damn about environmentalism. It rates a very distant priority behind their own power. We know that. You can see that in Beijing today. What matters to them is power. So if you’re worried about environmentalism, don’t starve people and don’t break the Western liberal rules-based system that we’ve imposed and policed. And we beat the Soviets and all of those sorts of things. And now we’re putting it at risk. The limits to growth model too has a certain type of deep pathology associated with it that needs to be brought to the surface too. Because one hypothesis is the planet has a limited carrying capacity and it’s a zero-sum game. And we’re Malthusian rats and overpopulating the place. And that what we need to do in consequence is limit growth and perhaps move towards a much less populated planet. That last one is a very frightening proposition because, as you said, life-bad ethics. Well, who gets to go? That’s the real question. And exactly how. And who are the monsters who make the decisions? Well, exactly, exactly that. But I also think that that model, it’s certainly not the only model that you can derive from the data, let’s say. Because one of the things I learned when I was deeply investigating the relationship between economic growth and long-term environmental viability, let’s say sustainability, something like that, was that strangely enough, and perhaps not so, if you can lift people out of absolute poverty and get them up to something approximating $5,000 a year in terms of average, say, contribution to GDP, then they stop adopting a short-term view and they start to adopt a long-term view because they have the luxury of being able to think beyond the moment. And I suppose partly why we want security, which is what wealth can offer, at least to some degree, is so that we’re not bound by the absolute emergencies of the moment.