https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=WNgZWSSsBE4
I tend to believe that most people are actually well-intended. I tend to think that when people are, as you pointed out in the Dutch case, when they’re pursuing a court case to force the Dutch government, if I care about this one thing, that’s what I want you to do. I don’t think there’s something wrong about a world where you have different NGOs and green organizations working for different things. But we need to recognize that you have to prioritize all of these things. And politicians are not normally stupid enough to say, I promise to give jobs to everyone, or I promise nobody will die on the road, or I promise that all kids are going to get to university or something like that. Because we recognize that would actually have a huge cost impact if I was forced by a court to do so. But we’ve somehow allowed ourselves to make stupid proclamations in the environment space. I promise to basically get Europe back to pre-human nature status. That’s just impossible to have. I promise to get us to net zero by 2050. That’s going to be drastically costly. So then I’ll answer your question. So there’s been a lot of economists looking at what will be the cost. As Ralph mentioned, perhaps the most prominent person was Richard Nordhaus. No, Dick Nordhaus, William Nordhaus, who got the Nobel Prize in 2018. The only climate economists get the Nobel Prize exactly for his climate economics. He estimates, and this is broadly validated by many, but there are outlier studies, that the If we do nothing about climate, it will mean that by the end of the century, we’ll be about 4% less rich than we otherwise would be. As you point out, we’re likely to be much, much richer for a variety of reasons. And hopefully because we’re also smart and don’t actually stop our innovation, all that stuff. The UN estimate that on the sort of middle of the road path, which is sort of a bumbling through as we normally do in the world, each person on the planet will be 450% as rich as he or she is today. That’s an astounding opportunity that, of course, will have lifted out most people out of poverty, will no longer have starvation. It will be a wonderful planet in so many ways. Remember, most people actually don’t believe this, but this is likely where we’re headed. With global warming, and if we do nothing about it, I’m not suggesting we should, it will instead of being this 450%, it will only be 434%. I’m sorry, I can’t show the difference. It’s very, very tiny, right? It’s important to get a sense of proportion. Yes, climate change is a problem. Yes, it would be better if we were at 450 rather than 434%, but this is not the end of the world. It’s important to say both things. 434%, 434% better is, that’s quite a bit better. We can be quite happy about that. It’s important to say it’s a percent of what we are today. So it’s 334% better. Yes. Postmodernism is tearing our world apart. The one thing that may be able to unite us is a mass return to our Judeo-Christian roots. At the individual level, that means developing our prayer life. There’s a ton of literature out there on the benefits of secular New Age mindfulness meditation, but what isn’t talked about nearly enough is the power of a consistent prayer life. That’s where Hallow comes into play. Hallow is the number one Christian prayer app in the US and the number one Catholic app in the world. Hallow features over 5,000 prayers and meditations, including daily prayers to help you build a habit of prayer and gratitude, Bible reflections with Jeff Cavins and Father Mike Schmitz to help you grow in knowledge and understanding, meditations to help you prepare for sleep and rest each day, reflections with Bishop Barron, and much more. Use Hallow as a foundational tool to grow in gratitude and character each and every day. Try it free for three months by going to Hallow.com slash Jordan. That’s Hallow.com slash Jordan. Ground yourself in fundamental truths with Hallow today. Right, right. Fair, fair enough. Well, I’m willing to settle for that. Yeah. And so, you know, you said that you think that people are mostly motivated by positive inclinations and I’m inclined to agree with that. But I do think, and I think we really have to come to terms with this, is that we are being enticed into taking the easy moral route forward. So there isn’t anything more important to someone economically, practically, socially, biologically than their reputation, because their reputation is a marker of their deserved standing in the social community and their viability as a trading and playing partner. And the way that you accrue reputation points is through diligent effort and generosity, fundamentally. But you can game that and you game that by taking shortcuts to ethical prowess when you’re offered them in a tempting manner. It’s like, well, instead of getting up and I’ll give you an example, Bjorn. This is a good example. You know how I stopped being faced by protests at universities when I went to talk there? I have my, I hold my talks at eight o’clock in the morning. Yeah. And you know why that’s funny? Because none of the bloody protesters will haul themselves out of bed to come and, you know, agitate about that magical super Nazi because it’s eight in the morning. Yeah, it is funny, but it’s also exactly right. It’s like, well, yeah, you’re once you shake off your hangover days, you can haul yourself out of bed by six in the afternoon to go and protest and wave a sign about all the evil people who are destroying the world. But if your commitment requires getting up in the morning once, well, that’s a bit too much for you. And so this, this enticement of laziness and it’s, it’s this weird nexus between narcissism and willful blindness and ignorance because they, they, they foment and, and reinforce each other. And as I said, it’s, it’s just not that hard to read your book, especially if you’re, you’ve devoted your life to saving the environment. And I’ve done what I could to bring hammer and tongs to your theories because your books are pretty damn optimistic. And I think, well, could that possibly be real? And I haven’t been able to break. Well, what I haven’t been able to do about your approach is to think of a better one. Thank you. As error prone as it might be, because who can do cost benefit analysis? Of course, it’s not going to be perfect. But right. Right. And again, the, the, the amazing things, you know, the, the, the best things we can do in the world are not just, you know, twice as good. They’re more like a hundred times or a thousand times better than the really dumb things that we very often do. And that’s, of course, why we feel much more comfortable about it. But if it was just a factor of two, sure, you know, that could be all kinds of calculations and stuff. But when you’re a thousand times off, maybe we should start paying attention on where we could do good. And it gets back to your point of what happened, for instance, in Holland, which was driven by a court case. So if you take politicians on their words and they’ll, they’ll make a lot of different promises. Imagine if people took them to court for all of those promises. Imagine what would happen when courts say, well, you’ve said this, so we, you have to spend that much money. If you actually did that for all the different things politicians have said, I think it’s plausible that you would actually have a total account that would be higher than the entire national budget, quite possibly by a large amount. Imagine if we allow the courts to say, oh, in this case, you promised this, so you got to do that. Oh, in this case, you promised this, so you got to do that. Imagine if the courts did all of that and then basically said, I’m sorry, you’ve got to spend all of your GDP. So everybody has to pay close to 100 percent in taxes and we’re going to pay all of these things that politicians have promised. That’s ridiculous. And it’s, of course, terrible. This is exactly why we have politics, because politics is that very hard decision between a lot of different nice competing things that we would like. We both like to have less nitrogen deposits. We’d like to have better agriculture. We’d also like to have safer roads and we’d like to have better schools and all these other things. We can’t spend all of the money 10 times over. So that’s why we have politicians making these hard and complicated and not satisfying decisions. But we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be run into courts deciding, no, you have to do this because you promised it. Because if they did it across the whole area, we’d probably be both bankrupt, but also we would not have that crucial conversation about where do you want to spend the next dollar? Well, we would also cede all the legislative power that should be instantiated in the sovereign voice of the people to judicial overlords, which we seem to be doing at a very rapid rate. That’s happening in Canada, partly because the legislatures are cowardly and they devolve decisions to the judiciary when they shouldn’t, but also because the judiciary has become increasingly activist and is perfectly willing to put their apocalyptic nightmare what vision at the pinnacle of the judicial process hierarchy and to start ruling in accordance with that instead of relying on precedent rule of law. I mean, in Canada now, you know, you cannot be appointed a judge unless you swear fealty essentially to the D.I.E. mantra. They’ve put they’ve laid out what the personal requirements are that are necessary to be a judge. And one of them is sensitivity to all the racial, et cetera, issues that the D.I.E. activists hypothetically believe are a necessary priority. And the second one is what would you say openness to the importance of social justice issues that they’ve actually documented this now in the steps necessary to become a judge in Canada? Yeah, it’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. And these activists judges do believe that, well, they’re way more efficient than that noisy parliamentary process. And that should scare us. That is part of the reason why a lot of people are protesting simply because you can’t have a judiciary or anything that ends up making promises that will cost you at least a large part of your fortune. Just perhaps before I get going, if you look at net zero, because I think in some way, the Dutch thing that we’ve seen that we’ve seen and even the European conversation, remember, I believe it was I forget, it was Citigroup that estimated the total cost for Europe because of the increasing energy prices is going to be about half a trillion dollars higher than it normally is over the last 10 years, which is a huge cost. But let’s just remember, if Europe was actually serious about their net zero goals, which, of course, is going to be incredibly hard, which basically means we’ll have to give up most of what we think of as wonderful in the world. According to McKinsey’s study, that would cost more than a trillion dollars, so twice as much. But every year for the next 30 years. So if we had courts going in and saying, no, you’ve got to cut down your nitrogen deposit costs, that will be terribly disruptive. But it’s much, much less than what you could actually imagine is going to happen if people actually take our net zero promises seriously. And this is not just for Europe and the US. It’s likely that the cost of net zero by the by mid-century would be in the order of 200. But if you ask them, so would you be OK with spending $10,000? No, that’s not going to happen. And you’re going to have an uprising. That’s, I think, why we need to say, well, we should be smart about this, but we shouldn’t be spending all of our money on one thing. That’s both dumb. It’s also economically inefficient, but it also leaves all the other challenges unfixed.