https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eqeuB084ySQ
There’s plenty of other things you could stand up to and that was what we were talking to. Instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society, why aren’t you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis or the one that stand up against maternal death or the one that stands up for free trade or the ones that stand up for all these other things where we know for very little money we can make a tremendous benefit. So again, I get why it’s not a… That’s a really hard question, man. I mean, I think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment. You know, if you’re resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state, you can easily identify an enemy. But if you stand up against tuberculosis, like obviously tuberculosis is bad. It doesn’t make you look good by comparison. All right, so you mentioned you do promote CO2 emission amelioration strategies in false alarm. And you did just point out that although we should be striving to make the poor around the world as much less poor as we possibly can, as quickly as we can, so everyone wins, including us. Just like Henry Ford won when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars, the cars they made, they are going to increase their rate of carbon dioxide emission. And for some people, that would be enough reason to scrap the whole enrichment process. But you have some strategies that you think are wise to ameliorate the problems that would be associated with that. Yes, so I talk about five different solutions in the book. So the first one is the carbon tax. Any economist would say, you know, look, you have a problem, you emit CO2, but you don’t actually take it into consideration because it’s free to emit. So that’s how we think about the polluted pays, you put a price on carbon. In principle, you should do this across the world, you should do it so that it slowly rises with time, it’s the most efficient way to deal with it. There’s two things we need to recognize with it. One is, it turns out to be very, very hard. One is, it turns out to be very, very hard, because it makes it very explicit to people that tackling global warming is actually costly. Secondly, we know that politicians are just really, really bad at doing something for a long time, very consistently across all areas. What politicians typically end up doing is they’ll put it on something. So, you know, in many places in Europe, for instance, you have enormously high taxes on cars. And you have enormously low taxes on people who are good at lobbying their governments for their particular interests. So, you know, greenhouse gardeners, greenhouse growers don’t have to pay the carbon tax, because that would make it really hard for them to grow their tomatoes or whatever. And you can see how this happens across a wide range of areas. So that’s one part of the problem. The other part is that even if you do this really, really well, it’ll only solve a smaller part of the problem. So, you should do this. We should focus on a carbon tax. But we should also be realistic. This is not what’s going to fix climate change. This will fix a smaller part of climate change. So, it’s part of the solution, but it’s not the most important part. The second part, and that’s where I think we actually have the biggest opportunity, is innovation. So, if you talk to Matt Ridley, this is certainly also his ballpark. But it’s basically recognizing that most things that we’ve solved in this world are about innovation. So, you rarely get people to solve a problem by saying, I’m sorry, could you please not do all that cool stuff that you like? Could you please stop feeling good about all of that? That rarely works out as a political strategy. Unfortunately, that’s typically what we say, could you please not fly, not eat meat, not do all these things? Could you please have it a little hotter in the summer and a little cooler in the winter? That’s really, really hard to sell to most people. What you need is innovation. And let me just give you an example. Back in the 1950s, Los Angeles was one of the most polluted places on the planet, because there are lots and lots of cars. And they have the special sort of geographical notion that just leaves all of the pollution inside this little basin of Los Angeles. It was terrible to live there in many ways. And obviously, the simple answer is to tell people, most of this came from cars. So, the simple answer would be to say, stop driving your car. Of course, if you’ve ever met someone from Los Angeles, you know that that’s not a solution that’s actually viable to them. Well, there aren’t even any sidewalks. No, it’s not really viable for anyone in any city. What did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter. This little thing that costs money, you put on the exhaust pipe, and then basically you have much, much cleaner cars. That made it possible for people to keep their cars, drive a lot, and have much, much cleaner air in Los Angeles. Now, I’m not saying everything is perfect in Los Angeles and there’s still air pollution problems, but it made it a lot better for very little money. That’s the way that we need to solve global warming. If we could innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, and this green energy could be nuclear, it could be fusion energy, it could be solar or wind with batteries, it could be lots of other possible solutions. If we could innovate one or a few of these solutions down below fossil fuels, everyone would switch. You wouldn’t need sort of a Paris Accord where you have to twist everybody’s arm. Let me ask you about that for a minute. So, it’s not a straightforward matter to set up governmental policy to support innovation. I mean, innovation is a very abstract idea, and I’ve seen much evidence of failure at the governmental level here in Canada. When governments have set out to foster entrepreneurship and to seed the development of high-tech industry, for example, generally it’s a cataclysmic failure. I mean, obviously, it’s self-evident in some sense that a good idea is good because it solves a complicated problem, and the more good ideas we have, the better. But do you think that it’s, like it seems on the face of it, unless you dig down into the details, it seems like hand-waving. Obviously, we should have better ideas to solve our problems. But what do you think constitute concrete, realistic, evidence-based solutions to the problem of fostering innovation? Do you think it’s actually possible to set up policy that does that? Yes. So, the short answer is yes. And the reason is that what’s lacking is mostly long-term investment. So, investment that will only generate the solutions in 20, 30, 40 years. Remember, this is why we invest a lot of money in health care of basic research that then eventually becomes research that, for instance, pharmaceuticals can make into products that they can make money off of. There’s always too little investment societally in things that you can’t monetize right away. So, if I make this great- It’s very hard to invest in things that you can’t monetize right away. Yes. If I make an innovation that then in 20 years, say, will help us generate this enormously beneficial breakthrough, unfortunately, I won’t get any money because my patent has run out. That’s why most companies will not be investing in these long-term development. What happens is that you then have a dearth of investment into these sorts of long-term innovations, unless you have the public invest in them. And I’ll get back to how we do that smartly. Okay. But we do that in medical research. For many reasons, people recognize this is part of the place where we need to produce lots of professors, lots of medical Nobel laureates, and then eventually the pharmaceuticals will take over and actually make products out of this. That’s a great setup. We don’t do this in energy. For a variety of reasons, it is one of the places where we spend very, very little money, partly because it doesn’t feel like you’re solving global warming, because you’re not solving it right now. You’re only solving it in 20 or 40 years. That feels like you didn’t really care. But the reality is this is the only way that we’re going to get these sorts of long-term breakthroughs. Now, one reason why politicians often screw this up is because they are not willing to invest in these long-term investments. They’ll say, we want a Silicon Valley in Canada in three years. That makes sense if you need to get re-elected in four, but you can’t do that. And so you shouldn’t be trying to do this in a very short-term way. Another way is that you end up giving this away to companies. And companies, of course, are just going to spend it on the profit that they were going to do next year anyway. But hey, thanks for the money. So the point here is you need to do this carefully in a way that will generate long-term innovation. This is not easy. You are going to waste a lot of money. But we know that governments around the world have done this in a variety of different ways. We know, for instance, the internet, the transistor, the fracking in the US. There’s a number of places where you have been successful. And all we have to do is to spend lots of money. And I’d love to talk more about specifically how we should set this up, how we should evaluate it, and we should be careful about it. But fundamentally, we should do this in a way that we say we want to generate a lot of knowledge that we believe in the long run can deliver benefits that will actually help companies produce energy that will be viable. But we are not going to try and do this for the next three or five years. So we’ve got to stop that panic mode and start this long-term thinking. We do have realistic knowledge about both that we’re investing very little compared to typically almost all other areas and that more investment here would make it more plausible that we would faster get cheaper green energy.