https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=umDOu1FxnLw
One of the things I’ve seen, you tell me what you think about this, something that I’ve seen that actually shocks me, that I was interested in watching over the last five or six years, I wondered what would happen when the left, the progressives, ran into a conundrum. And the conundrum is quite straightforward. If you pursue carbon pricing and you make energy more expensive, then you hurt the poor. And I don’t think you just hurt them. In fact, I know you don’t, you just don’t hurt them. I heard a man two days ago who’s fed 350 million people in the course of his life, heading the UN’s largest relief agency, make the claim quite straightforwardly that misappropriation on the part of interventionist governments increased the rate of absolute And that has happened not least because of carbon pricing, not just carbon pricing, but the insistence that carbon per se is an externality that we should control. Now, Germany’s paid a radical price for that, for example, so their power is now about five times as expensive as it could be. And they pollute more per unit of power than they did 10 years ago before they introduced these policies that were hypothetically there to account for externality. And the externality was carbon dioxide. I don’t think that’s a computable externality. And I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that it’s actually an externality that we should be warping the economic system to ameliorate if the cost of that, and it will be, will be an increase in absolute privation among the world’s poor. So and here’s an additional argument on that front with regards to externalities. You get that wrong. And here’s something you could get right instead. If you ameliorate absolute poverty among the world’s one billion billion poorest, they take a longer view of the future. And that means they become environmentally aware. And so the fastest route to a sustainable planet could well be the remediation of absolute poverty. And the best route to that is cheap energy. And we’re interfering with the development of cheap energy by meddling with the hypothetically detrimental externality of carbon dioxide. And so I think this is a complete bloody travesty, by the way. We are putting the lives of hundreds of millions of people directly at risk right now to hypothetically save people in the future, depending on the accuracy of our projections. A hundred years out, these interventionists, these people who are remediating externalities, they actually believe that they can calculate an economic projection one century out. That’s utterly delusional. So, okay, so just as a to be clear, the first thing I was just giving an example of how you can use like a government intervention to make a free market track something, which is what cap and trade or like carbon taxes would do. I wasn’t necessarily speaking to the strength of that individual thing, but yeah, but that’s a good thing to focus on. Yeah, we can focus on that as well though. We can focus on that as well. So the first thing, this is going to sound mean, but I’m, you know, I’m very realistic. There needs to be a better argument than just it disproportionately impacts the poor. That’s classic leftist argument. It might be about that. But it’s the same argument you made to justify your swing to the left at the beginning of our discussion. You said that you were looking at economic inequalities that disproportionately affected the poor. So I can’t see why and I’m not trying to be mean about this either. I can’t see why you could base your argument that it was moral. It was morally appropriate for you to swing to the left from your previous position because you saw disproportionate effects on the poor. And I can’t use that argument in the situation that I’m presenting it right now. Well, because it depends on if we think it’s a condition that ought to be remedied or not. For instance, if I walk around and I see homeless people and I’m like, man, this is really sad. We ought to spend more money on homeless people because it seems like they’re disproportionately affected by their living conditions. And then somebody says, oh, well, do you think we should still lock up, you know, rapists and murderers? Aren’t they disproportionately poor? I’d probably say, well, yeah, we probably should. And I go, well, isn’t that hypocritical? Well, no, I think that rapists and murderers should probably be in jail, but we can also help the homeless at the same time. I think that just helping the poor isn’t an argument like a blank check to do every possible thing to satisfy poor people. Right. I agree. Yeah, that’s fine. Because the poor, everyone who’s poor is not a victim. Some people who are poor are psychopathic perpetrators. And it’s very useful to distinguish them. But I was making a much more specific argument. My argument was that the fastest way out of absolute privation for the world’s bottom billion people is through cheap energy. Yeah, I understand what you’re saying. I just work my way towards that. Yeah, I just want to say that just because something targets the poor is not necessarily an argument against it. It depends on how hard it targets them. And it depends on whether mass starvation is the outcome. The outcome is important. That I agree with. So for instance, like a syntax. The outcome will be mass starvation. Yeah, I’m getting to it. Syntaxes on like cigarettes and alcohol are always going to disproportionately impact the poor or even sugar, we might say, right? But just because that disproportionately impacts the poor, is that a good thing or a bad thing? These are probably the people that suffer the most from those particular afflictions. Right. Right. And that is an immediate versus delayed issue too, right? Because the reason… I mean, obesity isn’t immediate. I mean, the reason for the tax is to stop people from pursuing a certain form of short-term gratification at the cost of their longer term. Well-being. Correct. And that exact same idea, if you believe climate models or if you believe that we’re heading in a certain direction in terms of climate, the overall warming of the planet, would be the same argument you would make for climate change. Only if you believe that you could model economic development a hundred years into the future. Well, we’re not trying to model… We’re more concerned with modeling climate development, economic development. No, no, no. We are equally… No, well, okay. Tell me how I’m wrong. I don’t believe that because what I see happening is two things. We have climate models that… Financial experts thought we were in the clear. While these experts anticipated rate cuts, inflation in the United States is still a significant economic concern. Think about it. 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We have climate models that purport to explain what’s going to happen over a century on the climate side, but we have economic models layered right on top of those that claim that there’s going to be various forms of disaster for human beings economically as a consequence of that climate change. And so that’s like two towers of babel stacked on top of one another. And so because if people were just saying, oh, the climate’s going to change, there’d be no moral impetus in that. It’s the climate’s going to change and that’s going to be disastrous for the biosphere and for humanity. But that’s an economic argument as well as a climate based argument. It’s both, but the worst projections of what would happen if the climate took a disastrous turn are worse than the worst projections of what is our planet going to look like economically if we hardcore police. Why would you? Okay, but I don’t understand the distinction between the models. Well, the argument would be that whatever pain and suffering poor people might endure right now because of a move towards green energy, that pain and suffering is going to be short term and far less than the long term pain and suffering. But that’s dependent on the integrity of the economic models and the climate models as well, right? Exactly. But in exactly the stacked manner that I described it. Like there’s nobody in 1890 who could have predicted what was going to happen in 1990 economically. Not a bit. And if we think we can predict like 50 years out now with the current rate of technology and calculate the potential impact of climate change on economic flourishing for human beings, we’re diluted. No one can do that. And then, and so, and it’s worse. So imagine that as you do that and you project outward, your margin of error increases. That’s absolutely definitely the case. And at some point, you’re certainly on the climate side, the margin of error gets rapidly to the point where it subsumes any estimate of the degree to which the climate is going to transform. And that happens even more rapidly on the economic side. Potentially. Right now, I think right now this is a disagreement on the fact of the matter, though, not the philosophy of what we’re talking about, just controlling externalities. If we think, so I’m curious, let’s say that we think we can accurately predict the climate and the economic impact. And we think that the climate impact would be far worse if we don’t account for that, both in terms of human conditions and any of those presumptions. I sure. But then, but then if you don’t. But I mean, like, obviously, if I agreed with that factual analysis, I would probably agree with you on the prescription here, too. Right. And I don’t like none of the climate models were accurate or could accurately predict. They’re not sufficiently. Well, they’re not sufficiently accurate. That’s the first thing. And second, because they have a margin of error and it’s a large margin of error. They don’t even model cloud coverage well. That’s a big problem. They don’t have the resolution. They don’t have nearly the resolution to produce the accuracy that’s claimed by the climate apocalypse mongers. People keep saying that, but we just got another one of the hottest years on record. How many times are we going to have another hottest year on record? How many times are we going to have an increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere before we’re finally like, OK, I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because it depends. The scientific answer to that question depends precisely on the time frame over which you evaluate. Climate fluctuation and that’s actually an intractable scientific problem. So you might say, well, if you take the last hundred years, this variation looks pretty visible. And I’d say, well, what if you took the last hundred and fifty thousand years or the last ten million? You can’t specify the time frame of analysis. The time frame is incredibly important. That would be like saying, look at, you know, let’s say somebody developed cancer and they didn’t realize it and the person has lost, you know, 40 or 50 pounds in the past six months. And I’m just like, you you look very sickly. You know, like, OK, well, look at my weight fluctuation over the past 10 years. You say, well, that doesn’t really matter. What matters is the fact that the time frame isn’t important. But I’m saying that it is important. Yeah, but I’m saying I don’t know how to specify it. Well, you would probably specify it with the beginning of the industrial age, right? Why? Because that’s when carbon dioxide, which is a gas that’s in this trapping more heat on the planet. Why is that relevant to the time over which you compute the variability? Because it seems like as carbon dioxide is increased in the atmosphere, the surface temperatures have risen at a rate that is a departure from what we’d expect over 150,000 year cycles of temperature variations. No, not with that time frame. That’s just not the case. Absolutely the case. No. What do you mean? You just flipped to 150,000 year time span. What I’m saying is that if we expect to see a temperature do this in 150,000 year time span and 100 years time span, seeing it do this, that’s very worrying. You mean like Michael Mann’s hockey stick, the one that’s under attack right now in court by a major statistician who claimed that he falsified his data. I mean, that spike? I’m talking about the record temperatures that have been declared for like the past five years that have also increased with the concentration of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I mean, I’m not going to tell you that every model is perfect. They’re not perfect. Sure. But right now we’re like standing in traffic with our eyes closed saying the car hasn’t hit me yet. So I don’t think there’s any coming. I think it’s pretty undeniable at this point that there is an impact on climate across the planet. I think that’s highly deniable. We have no idea what the impact is from. We don’t know where the carbon dioxide is from. We can’t measure the warming of the oceans. We have terrible temperature records going back 100 years. Almost all the terrestrial temperature detection sites were first put outside urban areas. And then you have to correct for the movement of the urban areas. And then you introduce an error parameter that’s larger than the purported increase in temperature that you’re planning to measure. This isn’t data. This is guess. And there’s something weird underneath it. There’s something weird that isn’t oriented well towards human beings underneath it. It has this guise of compassion. Oh, we’re going to save the poor in the future. It’s like that’s what the bloody communists said. And they killed a lot of people doing it. And we’re walking down that same road now with this insistence that, you know, we’re so compassion that we care about the poor 100 years from now. And if we have to wipe out several hundred million of them now, well, that’s a small price to pay for the future utopia. And we’ve heard that sort of thing before. And the alternative to that is to stop having global level elites plot out a utopian future or even an anti-dystopian future. And that’s exactly what’s happening now with organizations like the WEF. And if this wasn’t immediately impacting the poor in a devastating manner, I wouldn’t care about it that much. But it is. You know, I watched over the course of the last five years the estimates of the number of people who were in serious danger of food deprivation rise from about 100 million to about 350 million. That’s a major price to pay for a little bit of what what would you say for for progress on the climate front that’s so narrow it can’t even be measured. I don’t think the increase in hungry people on the planet is because of climate policies. Why not?