https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ntnS0UrIe6w
My niece who went to Stanford and graduated at 4.0 is one of many thousands, if not to say hundreds of thousands, of individuals who are in their mid-20s who don’t want to have children, Jordan. Don’t want to have children because how could you imagine bringing children into a world when on January 1, 2050, the whole world’s going to blow up because of climate change? How could we be so thoughtless? And so to have a clear narrative, a much better narrative about how our future’s not disastrous, our future is up to us. We’re going to get the globe that we deserve, and quite candidly, with greater mindfulness, it’s going to be the greatest possible human achievement ever. And so that’s how I felt coming out of London and how I felt with the great program that you and your colleagues put together. Do you think, this takes us off our topic a bit, but I’m going to go there anyways, I mean, you stressed two things that struck you when you were at the Art Conference, and that was that you were surrounded by people of faith, and you could read that religiously to some degree, but you could also read it as being surrounded by people who are willing to have the courage to put forward a positive vision of the future, because that’s a form of faith too. And it’s very important for people who are watching and listening to understand that you can’t take a step into the future without faith, because you can’t predict with anything approximating certainty what’s going to happen as you move forward. And so you have to adopt an attitude a priori that sees you through regardless of what happens. And you can adopt an attitude of corrosive cynicism and bitterness and pessimism and defend yourself that way, and there are times when that’s appropriate, but as a general stance towards the world, it tends to be counterproductive. And it’s also the case that what a fragmented or misplaced faith, religious faith even, seems to have as a consequence the development of something like an anti-human stance as things that aren’t human, like nature itself, become worshiped instead of what’s properly put first and foremost. And there is a remarkable concordance, I would say, between the religious belief that each person is a divine locus of being, let’s say, and made in the image of God and a pro-human stance. And one of the things that’s really terrified me about the environmentalist movement, which purports to be about the sanctity and security of the planet, is easily transformed into something that is clearly and demonstrably anti-human. Like I’ve watched in absolute open-mouthed amazement over the last 10 years as the Greens and the radical leftists, when push comes to shove, immediately demonstrate their willingness to sacrifice the poor to their planetary salvation delusions. And it’s so interesting, because in principle, the left has been the party that puts forward the demand for compassion towards the marginalized and the oppressed economically and otherwise. But man, when you stack up the oppressed and marginalized against the hypothetical interests of the planet as such, the lefties will sacrifice the poor in a tenth of a second. And they do that, not least with their insistence that energy costs have to skyrocket and consumption come down, which to me is tantamount to saying, when consumption comes down, the poor starve. That’s a necessary consequence of decreased consumption. And anyone who thinks otherwise is either willfully blind or ignorant beyond any, what would you say, any morally acceptable degree. So, all right, so it was very- Let me take a moment to respond to that though, Jordan, because it’s absolutely clear that everyone implicitly or explicitly has a religious belief. For some people, their religious belief is that there is no religious belief, but that then becomes its own religion. That is to say, some form of massive moral relativism becomes what in fact is what they worshiped. I stood in awe of you speaking on the stage at a couple of times about Jacob’s Ladder and the Book of Job. And you know, Jordan, what’s fascinating about you, and I know this is your podcast, but priests, and I come from a Catholic background, I worked for Pope Francis, I co-chaired in the Vatican Financial Reform Commission, I have quite a Catholic background. But priests cannot put people in pews, and yet you can fill the O2 arena with tens of thousands of young men to talk about the Book of Job and talk about Jacob’s Ladder and talk about the uphill struggle as being the moral struggle of our times. I just congratulate you and your colleagues, and I know you give a lot of credit to those around you as well, for just being able, Jordan, to enunciate this message in a way where it resonates to those who are genuinely lost, to those who are genuinely looking for a roadmap of how to have a better and more productive life. And I want to establish early on this call, I’m not a climate denier, I do believe that there are human influences that are very much putting our land, our air and our water at risk. By the way, the planet has never had eight billion inhabitants before, we’re about to be ten billion inhabitants, we’re going to have to find ways to behave much more sustainably. But I was looking through my book of notes from the art conference and one of the things that I wrote down is it’s not the climate deniers, it’s the trade-off deniers. And even in La D’Auto Si, in the papal encyclical written by Pope Francis on the climate crisis, he is very clear, Jordan, very clear, that there are trade-offs, that we need to have more prosperity. There are too many people that are left behind. The vast majority of human beings still use less electricity than one refrigerator uses in a year in the West. We need to find ways to improve access, improve availability, improve abundance of… And we’ve just finished this COP28 conference this morning, as you know, and they’ve come off and finally been able to say, let’s phase out fossil fuels. But they’re very quick, right? They’re very quick to add that this must be done in a just way. Well, if it’s done in a just way, the only way we’re going to be able to get ourselves off of fossil fuels is by massively increasing nuclear, by massively increasing some other sources, and that is not plausible from now to 2050. We are simply going to be continuing to utilise this mix of fossil fuels that we’re dependent on for reasons of justice, for reasons of human need, for reasons of human necessity. And as you pointed out and others at the conference, if you look around the globe, the wealthiest countries are the ones that actually have the cleanest energy mix. So we must prioritise continued economic growth. This is the mantra that I come to in my book repeatedly. Yes, we need more economic growth, but it needs to be more inclusive and it does need to be more sustainable. And I am a member of the church that says, let’s optimise between these various trade-offs, growth and cleanliness and sustainability. There are trade-offs and we’re going to have to navigate them. It’s multivariable calculus. It’s not as easy as the only thing that matters is net zero by 2050. It’s not the only thing that matters. Many things matter. Well, that only thing that matters narrative, I’ve been thinking that through in some detail. And so part of what we’re facing on the pathological culture war front is oversimplification that occurs for two reasons. And the first reason is purely factual, is that there are human effects on the environment, some of which are deleterious. I was struck most particularly when investigating such effects on the effects of unrestricted coastal fishing on fish stocks because I think that’s something we’ve done particularly disastrously. There’s a variety of problems like that, but the important thing is there’s a variety and that the solutions to those problems are actually, while they’re multidimensional and complex. And you can collapse all that into a single theory, which is that there’s one fundamental environmental emergency that’s climate related and that can be attributed more or less solely to carbon dioxide. And so the temptation there is to take this overwhelming complexity on the factual side and reduce it to the kind of simple mantra that anyone can master really in about 15 minutes. And then you’re done with that whole problem. It’s like, well, no, the important thing is climate and the solution is carbon dioxide reduction. It’s like, now the benefit to you is that you don’t have to think anymore. But there’s an additional benefit to the oversimplification, which I think is even more nefarious. And it’s analogous to the oversimplification that’s part and parcel of the victim-victimizer narrative. You know, if you view the world through a lens of power and you assume that every human relationship can be understood in terms of victim and victimizer, then all you have to do as a moral agent is claim your allyship with the victim and you’ve solved your moral problem. And the same thing applies on the environmental front, is once you’ve established that carbon dioxide is the villain, then you can make yourself not only a moral agent, but something akin to the Redeemer himself by merely proclaiming your, what would you say, your moral commitment to the goal of carbon dioxide reduction. And so you eliminate having to think in the factual world and you eliminate actually having to do all the work that accompanies genuine moral effort by swallowing the environmentalist narrative. And then there’s even a darker part of it, as far as I’m concerned. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]