https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0SxMcU6dxak
human beings have been affecting the structure of the biosphere ever since we’ve been around, and that’s for a very long period of time. And the idea that there was somehow some pristine state of nature before we emerged on the landscape and that there’s some moral imperative to return to that, it strikes me it’s so incoherent that it’s barely comprehensible. And there is something like a hatred for humanity, as far as I can tell, that’s lurking underneath this. Hatred for humanity, certainly a hatred for industrialization. And those actually turn out to be the same thing. I mean, one of the things that’s really struck me as incomprehensible over the last few years is that, especially on the left, is that you have these joint claims being put forward simultaneously on the left, and one is that we’re radically pro-environmental and we’re also the philosophical doctrine that is standing up for the poor and oppressed. And I think, okay, well, what happens when those two things are pitted against each other? And when are they pitted? Well, they’re pitted when it comes to discussions about cheap energy, because it’s clearly the case, and you outline this in your book quite nicely, that the most effective way of remediating absolute poverty, so lifting people out of the privation that’s associated at least with lack of education, but also with starvation itself, is to provide them with cheap energy, because as you pointed out, there’s no difference between energy and work, and there’s no difference between work and productivity. There’s no difference between productivity and the eradication of poverty. And so we are pursuing these expensive energy policies, and hypothetically, we’re supposed to benefit the planet, although we’re not, but we are definitely dooming people who are already poor to a much more truncated horizon of opportunity, and to absolute privation and starvation in many cases. 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So this tension between the alleged concern for poverty and then the quote concern for the environment. And then this question of how this bizarre view evolved, you know, because this was not the view of our environment and our impact a hundred years ago. And interestingly, it’s not the view of our environment that anyone who lives near nature has. People who live in nature don’t worship nature as the superior God that can’t be impacted. And I think it’s my own understanding of the history. And I really enjoy, there’s a book by Ayn Rand called The New Left, the Anti-Industrial Revolution. And it was written at the time that this was happening. And one of the analyses is basically there’s a transition between the old left and the new left, where the old left claimed to be for industry, for productivity, for prosperity. And what happened is that was clearly not achieved by their policies. Communism led to the devastation of industry, the malfunction of industry, widespread poverty. And Rand said, well, you know, the left basically had a choice. Are you going to stay with your anti-capitalism or are you going to embrace capitalism because you really care about industry and productivity? Right, right. And actually what they did was they kept their anti-capitalism and they looked for new reasons to support anti-capitalism. And in the 60s, they decided on this issue of environment. And it was a convenient issue in a number of ways. One is the pro-capitalism side didn’t do a very good job with it, particularly rhetorically. They didn’t make the point that, well, good environments are made possible by prosperity. So the idea of a good environment in a humanistic way was co-opted by the anti-capitalists who had no right to it whatsoever. I mean, look at the Soviet Union and an environment. But they owned that value issue, but then they packaged it with this hostility toward human impact as such. And what they really did brilliantly was they took over the schools. So they put in the schools this idea that human impact is bad and especially the idea that it’s inevitably self-destructive because the planet is this delicate nurturer that our impact ruins. And that has permeated the whole educational system where people think that we inherently are destroyers of the planet and it has permeated the scientific community. What I call this delicate nurturer dogma is unfortunately pervasive in Earth sciences today. It’s a very primitive and bizarre view. It has nothing to do with reality that our impact is inevitably self-destructive. Actually, our impact has made the Earth much better overall, including safer from climate. But nevertheless, I think it’s really, there was initially a real political motivation to spread this, but now we have this irrationalist philosophy that has a mind of its own. Yeah, well, that’s okay. So let’s delve into that a little bit because the other thing that I’ve come to understand more clearly in the last 15 years, let’s say, as the data has also become more clear, is that… So we lifted more people out of poverty in absolute terms and also in relative terms between 2000 and 2015 than we had lifted people out of poverty in the sum total of human endeavor before that. And it’s quite clear that the reason for that was that fewer countries pursued absolutely counterproductive economic policies of the type that were put forward, let’s say, by the communists when the Cold War was raging. And so you saw all over the world, including in places like Communist China, that there was a radical move towards something approximating free market and free trade between individuals. And in some countries that was implemented more effectively than others. But wherever it was implemented, at least quasi-effectively, people immediately stopped starving. And so, and I’m trying to make a case in relationship to the anti-capitalism. So let’s say that you are a genuine classic leftist and you are actually concerned with the poor, especially remediation of absolute poverty. And you’re looking at the data and you see that after the Soviet Union collapsed and there were fewer countries turning to communist dogma to formulate their economic policies and more countries started to develop, started to participate in the broad free market, that we drove poverty down to its lowest level in absolute numbers or in relative numbers certainly than we’d ever seen before in history. And so then again, we’re back to the same issue. If the spread of free market policies remediates absolute poverty, which it clearly does, and in a staggeringly rapid manner, then what in the world is driving the anti-capitalist ethos? You know, you said that there’s this underlying metaphor of nature as something like fragile virgin, right? Continually rendered susceptible to our raping and pillaging. So there’s a weird metaphor lurking at the bottom of all that. But given the overwhelming data that something approximating free market frees people from absolute poverty and then conjoining that with the observation that richer people actually care more about the environment, you’re left again with this question of what in the world is motivating this. There’s some deep hatred. It’s like a deep hatred for humanity itself, but even at the expense of the planet. And so I still struggle with trying to comprehend that. There’s a kind of existential guilt there for the crime of existence itself. It’s something like that. I mean, I think there’s one really powerful fact about the increase in prosperity that I draw attention to a lot in Fossil Future because I think it’s very notable. So I point out, I was born in 1980. Since 1980, we’ve gone from more than 4 in 10 people living on less than $2 a day, and this is adjusted for inflation, to 1 in 10. So as you said, this is the greatest alleviation of poverty in human history. Now what’s really interesting is if you survey, and this was done in the UK, you might have seen this before, but there’s a survey of college-educated adults in the UK about what has happened to extreme poverty over the past 30 or 40 years. And this is just an objective documented thing. There’s no question. And so what happened is only 12% of people thought it got better. Right. 55% of people thought it got worse, and the rest thought it stayed the same. And it just shows you the level of miseducation about this issue. And I do think a lot of it is the modern anti-human environmental movement because what they’ve done is they’ve taught us that our impact ruins the planet. And so we just assume that because the world used a lot more fossil fuels, particularly China and India did, which drove much of the increase in prosperity, they just assume that the world is worse. And what I call, I don’t use this term in moral case, but I use it in fossil future, our knowledge system, so the institutions we rely on for expert knowledge and guidance, they’ve done a, they’ve totally failed at educating us about how much the world has improved from a human perspective. And this goes back to my argument that the anti-human environmental movement, they’re trying to pretend to be pro-human. So they don’t want us to know that the earth is a much better place than ever to live. They don’t want us to know that climate disaster deaths are way down. They don’t want us to know about the decline in extreme poverty because it totally challenges their narrative that impact in general and fossil fuels in particular are bad. And if we recognized how vital fossil fuels are, then we would be really afraid of these proposals to get rid of fossil fuels in the next 27 years in a world that needs far more energy. And unfortunately, we’re starting to realize this involuntarily because these policies just implemented 1%, these anti-fossil fuel policies just implemented to 1% success rate in the anti-fossil fuel movement’s view, have already led to a global energy crisis.