https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NSkxFxq0hiI
I worked for the UN for a while, like indirectly, and I wasn’t paid for it by the way, it was volunteer work. I worked on this document which was a report to the Secretary General on sustainable economic development. It’s quite funny because a lot of the right-wing conspiracy theorists are having a field day with that man, that I’m some sort of like closet globalist shill because I work momentarily for the UN. It’s like, well, what the hell are you supposed to do when you’re asked to do something like that? There was a document that was being prepared that was supposed to lay out some half-ways intelligent vision of what things might be like if the international community cooperated for the next 30 years. There weren’t brutal guidelines that were going to be enforced by jackbooted Nazis. It was just a proposal paper. So we had a chance to work on it. There was only one Canadian team and I got placed on that and that was kind of cool. So it gave me an opportunity to spend two years reading about economics and about ecology at the same time. What was so weird about that was the more I read, the more optimistic I got. I thought, well, that isn’t what I expected. I thought we were going to hell in a handbasket at quite the rapid rate. There’s no doubt that we’re doing some stupid things. I would say the stupidest thing we’re probably doing is overfishing the oceans because there’s just no use. There’s just no use in that. It’s completely destructive. It doesn’t do anybody any good and it could be stopped. But I know that your country, for example, is starting to put aside marine park reserves that are fishery-free essentially. You don’t need a lot of that before the ocean can regenerate itself because it’s actually pretty good at that. One of the things that’s kind of funny, you know, remember when there was that big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? You know there were more fish there two years later than there were before the spill? You know why? Because people stopped fishing. So it turned out that the pollution was really good for the fish. It’s like… Yeah, well, that’s why you have to do your research carefully because you never know, you know? You never know what’s true and what isn’t. So that was pretty interesting. The same thing happened in World War II, by the way, in the North Sea because the North Sea had been fished out pretty badly and then during World War II it wasn’t all that safe to go out and fish in the North Sea because, you know, you would get sunk by a submarine and that was not very bright. So people stopped fishing and the fish came back very rapidly. Fish do that because they breed quite quickly. And so if you just leave the damn things alone for a while, most of them come back. But, you know, apart from the fisheries, which is really quite an appalling and pessimistic story, although not hopeless, and people are waking up to it and building these marine reserve parks, for example, a lot of the ecological news was surprisingly good. Way better than I thought it would be, you know? So for example, there are more forests in the Northern Hemisphere than there were a hundred years ago. So who would have guessed that? I wouldn’t have guessed that. Partly it’s because marginal farmland has returned to forest, and because we’ve got more effective at agriculture by a huge margin. And there are more forests in China than there were 30 years ago. And so that’s something. And it turns out when people burn coal, which is, you know, kind of polluting, they don’t burn wood. So you know, they’re going to burn something because they don’t like eating raw, inedible things and freezing to death. So they’re going to burn something, and it turns out that coal is actually preferable to wood. And so, well, and so these things are complicated. And the ecological story looked better than I would have ever guessed. Even the overpopulation issue, you know, ever since the 1960s, with Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb, there was this terrible pessimism that we were going to breed, you know, like uncontrolled rats until every square inch of the world was like covered with some starving skeleton and that that was all going to happen by the year 2000 when there would be mass starvation and the price of commodities would have blown through the roof and we would run out of oil and all the commodities that we need to maintain a reasonably high standard of living. And, you know, that didn’t happen. And not only did it happen is that rates of poverty went down and rates of hunger went down even though the population went way up. And so there are more people who are hungry now than there were 50 years ago, but there are far fewer proportion of people who are hungry. And that’s really something. And so the overpopulation doom and gloomers were absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And we’re going to peak at 9 billion. That’s what it looks like. All the projections indicate something around 9 billion and that’s only 2 billion more than we have. Like it’s not nothing. It’s still 2 billion people. But at the rate at which we’re improving agricultural output and with regards to efficiency of agricultural output, there’s no evidence whatsoever that we’re going to run out of food. And, you know, a country like Uganda, this is quite interesting, if Uganda, which is a very big country by the way, if it was utilized properly, it has a water table underneath it and plenty of water. If Uganda was utilized properly, it could feed all of Africa. And so it’s not like we’re making full use even of the agricultural capacity that we have available to us. And so there’s no, we’re not going to overpopulate the world and leave everybody like starving in on like Easter Island with nothing but giant heads and no trees. That’s not going to happen. And in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that within a hundred years, one of the biggest problems that we’ll be facing is a declining population and that that’ll be worrisome. I mean, we won’t be concerned about that at the moment, but that whole doom and gloom scenario just seems to be wrong. And you know, there are fewer wars than there were by a large margin. The overall rates of homicidal behavior in the world have plummeted. The rates of death by terrorism over the last 50 years have plummeted. There’s a lot of good news. There’s way more good news than there is bad news. And that’s there’s no wars in the Western Hemisphere. There’s a piece of good news. You know, that’s a remarkable thing. So and you know, and it’s been it’s been 70 years since World War Two, and we’ve had thermonuclear weapons since then. And of course, everyone’s terrified of those bloody things. And no wonder. And maybe that’s for the best because we maybe we needed something to really terrify us, you know. And that’s certainly possible. But even though there’s always the possibility of a mistake and there’s still the possibility of a nuclear outbreak, we haven’t used them and we haven’t had a Third World War. And almost all of us here have lived in what you got to think, man, comparative peace and prosperity if you compare it to any other time and place anywhere else in the world at any point in history, which is not perfect because, you know, you’re still getting old and you’re still going to die. And we haven’t we haven’t what we haven’t defeated all the diseases that that beset us. But, God, it could be a lot worse. And we seem to be making it a lot better.