How to Make the World a Better Place ｜ Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer ｜ EP 285 (LfefNZDlq6o)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=LfefNZDlq6o

That’s what we’re going to see this winter when we run out of sufficient fossil fuels and some people are going to start freezing. We will be much, much more worried about cold waves than heat waves. But that’s not how the media presented. That’s why we’re in trouble. Is it really the focus on global warming as global warming, or is it also a little bit the focus on global warming as kind of this ideological struggle that fulfills almost an emotional need for many people, much more than an environmental need? Why is there no Manhattan-like project into nuclear fusion or into nuclear energy in general? There are many tools at our disposal that could really help with global warming. But sometimes, I’m exaggerating here slightly, but sometimes I almost feel like that some might don’t want to go global warming fully away because they kind of put all their heart and soul into it. But now, by the way, something I think we partially also see with COVID, it kind of bleeds over into a cultural, moral problem. And this strike is much more difficult to overcome. Hello, everyone. I’m extremely pleased today and privileged, I would say, to sit down with Björn Lomborg, who I regard as the world’s foremost commentator on environmental and sustainability matters in the best possible sense. And Ralf Schollhammer, a journalist who’s been working in Europe diligently covering such ill-covered topics as the Dutch farmers’ protest. And I recorded a video earlier this week with Michael Jahn, who is a war correspondent and a journalist who’s also been covering the farmers’ protests. And he made a variety of prognostications about the dismal prospects of the coming fall. And I thought I would talk to Björn and Ralf in some detail about global issues, particularly with Björn, because, as I said, he’s incredibly well-versed in such matters. And then with Ralf more particularly about the rising wave of protests around the world, Canada, the US, Europe, while in other countries as well, and see if we can bring some clarity to the issue. So I’ll start with a bio of Björn and Ralf so that people know who I’m talking to, and then we’ll jump right into the discussion. Ralf Schollhammer is an assistant professor in political science and economics at Webster University, Vienna. In addition to his teaching and research commitments, he is a regular contributor to the public discourse and has been published in Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, and The Wall Street Journal. He also hosts his own podcast called The 1020, in which he talks to guests about a wide range of issues from Roman history to contemporary culture in the Western world, as well as global geopolitics. Dr. Björn Lomborg, one of the world’s foremost political thinkers, researches, and this is the truth, the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education. And so if you’re genuinely concerned about doing your duty to your culture and the planet, Björn is a great person to know about, to read about, and to follow. I think that might be more true of him than of any thinker on the policy front that I’ve ever encountered. For his work, Lomborg was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He’s a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media, for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Fox, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents. He’s also a bestselling author whose books include False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. Björn has discussed that book at some length on my podcasts, among many other places. He’s also written The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75BilliontoMaketheWorldaBetterPlace,whichisafascinatingread,TheNobelLaureat{e}^{\prime }sGuidetotheSmartestTargetsfortheWorld,2016to2030,andPrioritizingDevelopment,aCost-BenefitAnalysisoftheU{N}^{\prime }sSustainableDevelopmentGoals.Sowelcometoyou,Bj\ddot{o}rnandRalf.I^{\prime }mverymuchlookingforwardtoourdiscussiontodayandhopethatitwillenlightenpeopleastothesorrystateofEuropeanpolitics,le{t}^{\prime }ssay,andthe,andbringsomeclaritytothediscussionoftheapocalypticnightmarethatseemstobeplaguingusaboveallelseatthemoment.Bj\ddot{o}rn,nodoubtyo{u}^{\prime }vebeenwatchingwha{t}^{\prime }shappeningontheEuropeanprotestfrontandwiththemanufacturedenergycrisisandnowwiththemanufacturedfoodandfertilizercrisis,andsowhatdoyouseehappeningnowandwhatdoyouseecoming?I{t}^{\prime }sveryhard.Yes,IhavebeenwatchingasIthinkRalphhas.Imean,webothlivehereinEurope,andIthinkthefundamentalpointisi{t}^{\prime }sreallyhardtoseewhatisgoingtohappen.I^{\prime }mgoingtogiveyoualittlebitofbackgroundbecauseIthinki{t}^{\prime }simportanttosortoflookatwhyisitw{e}^{\prime }resodependentonRussiangas,andthesimpleanswerisbecausewehavelotsofrenewables.Whatdoyougetwhenyouhavelotsofrenewables?Yougetlotsofpowerwhenthesunisshiningandthewindisblowing,butyouhavenonewhenthesunisnotshiningandthewindisnotblowing,andthenyouneedbackuppower.Inpasttimes,wewouldgetthisfromcoal.Now,coalemitsalotofCO2,soalotofthecontinenthassimplygoneridofcoal-firedpowerplants.Tha{t}^{\prime }soverallagoodthing,partlybecausetheypollutealot.Theyactuallykillpeoplethroughpollutants,butalsobecausetheyemitalotofCO2,whichobviouslyisalsobad.W{e}^{\prime }vegonetogas,butwehavenotdeliveredourowngas.Europehaslotsandlotsofshalegas,potentialshalegas,justliketheUS,butwehavenotusedit.Wehavetoalargeextentbeenincrediblyworriedaboutshalegas.Shalegasisprobablygoingtocreatealotofearthquakesori{t}^{\prime }sgoingtopollutethedrinkingwater,allthosekindsofstoriesthatyoualsoheardintheUS.Again,remember,i{t}^{\prime }snotthatitwasentirelyuntrue.TherearesomeproblemswithfrackingintheUS,butfundamentally,frackinghasmadetheUSbothmuchmoreenergyindependentandithasactuallyreduceddramaticallytheemissionsoftheUS.TheUShasreduceditsemissionsmorethananyothercountryintheworldoverthelast10years.EuropedidnotdothatbecausewehadcheapRussiangas,andnoww{e}^{\prime }reinthispickle.Sofundamentally,i{t}^{\prime }sbecausewedo{n}^{\prime }tlikecoal,weloverenewables,andthenweneedlotsofgas,andtherewearerightnow.Andofcourse,thatisgoingtomakeusvery,veryvulnerabletopressurefromPutin.Everybodyhasbeenpointingthatoutbefore.Well,le{t}^{\prime }sdigintothatabit.Firstofall,itwascompletelyobviousthatunidimensionaldependenceontheRussiansforvitalenergysourceswasabadstrategicidea.Andtha{t}^{\prime }seventhecase,Iwouldsay,insomesense,ifRussiawasaclearally,andwewere{n}^{\prime }tinawarwiththem,becauseyoudo{n}^{\prime }twantyourentireeconomysounresilientthatyo{u}^{\prime }redependentonasinglesourceforyourfundamentalresource.Andeveryonewhohadanysensewhatsoevercouldseethatjustasclearlyastheycouldseethedaylightsun.Andthenthesecondissuehere,andIdo{n}^{\prime }tthinkpeopledounderstandthis,isthateveryenergysourcehasrisks.Soforexample,ifyouputsolarpanelsonyourroof,youposearisktotheworkmenwhoinstallitbecausetheyfallofftheroof.Andyoumightthink,well,tha{t}^{\prime }strivialdanger,butwaymorepeoplearekilledinstallingsolarpanelseveryyearthanarekilledbynuclearpower,forexample.Andsoeveryenergysourcehasitsrisks.And,youknow,IgrewupinnorthernAlberta,andpeoplehadfrackedtherefordecades,noonewasconcernedaboutitintheleast.Andsothenwheneveryonestartedtoshortoutaboutthedangersoffracking,weallknew,peoplethatIknew,knewthatthatwasjustrubbish.Butevenmoreimportantly,ifyouareconcernedenvironmentally,andtherearesomereasonstobeconcernedenvironmentally,youwouldhavetopointtothefactthattheAmericansandtheirsuccesswithfrackingdrovetheircarbonemissionsdown15$1.4 trillion less rich every year because these kids are less well-educated. How is that not our biggest challenge? We’ll get back to more with our guests, Bjorn Lomborg and Ralph Schulhammer in just a moment. This show is sponsored by Helix Sleep. Getting a good night’s sleep is one of the most important things you can do for your health. Just like your diet and exercise routines are unique to your body’s needs, so are your sleeping habits. That’s why Helix Sleep provides tailored mattresses based on your unique sleep preferences. The Helix lineup includes 14 mattresses, each designed for specific sleep positions and preferences. Side sleeper models with memory foam layers offer optimal pressure relief. Stomach and back sleeper models feature a more responsive foam to cradle and support your body. Plus, Helix mattresses offer enhanced cooling features to keep you from overheating at night. Don’t compromise on comfort. Take the Helix Sleep quiz and find your perfect mattress in under two minutes. Helix mattress ships straight to your door free of charge. Try it for 100 nights risk-free. Go to helixsleep.com slash Jordan. Take the Helix Sleep quiz and get up to $200offyourmattressorder.Plus,twofreepillows.Tha{t}^{\prime }shelixsleep.comslashJordanfor$200 off all mattress orders and two free pillows. Well, let’s answer that. Why is that not our biggest challenge? And so we’ll go back to the religious issue. So if you configure the apocalypse and hell properly, then you take it upon yourself to carry a very heavy moral burden. And that burden is to put your life together. And that means to be productive and generous and honest and concerned with life more abundant for everyone. And you have to retool your whole psyche in some sense to aim towards that. And that takes that’s 100% dedication and lifetime of effort. But if you’re worshiping at the altar of a false God, let’s say, what you’re looking for is shortcuts to put yourself to put yourself in a position where you have the moral advantage and where you can claim reputation stakes because of that. And all of this false moral posturing that comes along with these shallow analysis is in my psychological estimation, nothing but a narcissistic trip to replace competence with the false competence of the Machiavellians and the psychopaths. And because I mean, your work struck me so hard, Bjorn, because I worked on the UN report on sustainable development for the secretary general. I worked on that for a couple of years. And one of the things that really came to the forefront for me, there were two things, three, one is we stupidly overfished and destroyed the oceans. That’s a really nasty thing. And we didn’t have to do that. The second was, oh, all the data shows that if you make poor people rich as fast as possible, they stop polluting and start caring about the environment. So isn’t that something we could make everyone rich and the planet would be better off? And then the next thing was, well, what’s the rank order of importance of our problems? And I went back to the UN central agencies, authorities a couple of times, the other people who were working on the report, and there were many of them and said, well, you guys have 200 goals here or whatever it is, 400 or 169. It’s like, that’s not any goals. Goals have to be prioritized, because you can’t do 200 things at the same time and all 200 things aren’t of equal importance. And they said, well, there’s a constituency for each of these goals. And if we prioritize them, we’ll annoy someone. It’s like, that’s not a good reason. And then next, we don’t have a methodology for prioritization. I thought, well, that’s a big problem. Does anyone? And the only one I came across, and maybe you could explain this a little bit. The only one I came across was you. And so you tackled this problem, which I thought was, I really thought that was a stroke of genius, Bjorn. And if the Nobel Prize committee had any sense, you would have been a recipient of the Peace Prize for this work, because it’s signally important. So you want to outline what you do and what you’ve concluded? So thank you very much. I mean, I should just say, what we’re doing is not rocket science. And as you point out, it’s kind of obvious, if you have 169 targets, which is what the UN has, you have no priorities. And so we simply try to work with some of the best economists across the world to look at where can you spend an extra dollar or an extra rupee or an extra shilling or whatever your currency is, and do the most good. This is an objective question. And of course, you can have a lot of conversations about how do you value different things, because remember, you need to include everything. So they’re both going to be economic costs. They’re also going to be social costs. For instance, if you vaccinate someone, not only has it a cost from the hospital part of the thing, but you also need to take people’s time to get vaccinated. Maybe they need to get off work. And there will also be environmental costs. For instance, if you put up a new power plant, not only does it have cost, but it will also add to more pollution and more CO2 emissions. You need to include all of that. And likewise, there are going to be lots of benefits, both economic, social and environmental benefits. Now, what we try to do is to include all of the costs and all of the benefits and account them in dollars. This is something economists have done for 30 years. And obviously, it feels a little sort of, really, can you do that? How many lives are you going to lose? But remember, we do that uncontroversially in many different contexts. One obvious place is when you put up roads, you decide what kind of security are you going to have on a road? Are we going to have a hard center line so people can’t run into each other? It’s more costly, but it also saves more lives. And governments around the world make those tradeoffs depending on how many lives you’re going to save and how costly is it going to be? That kind of consequence thinking we put into all of these issues. And then we basically came out with a list of saying, these are the very best things to do. These are the so good things to do, and these are actually the dumb things to do. And so we simply tried to say, do the smart stuff. And I appreciate you saying that this is something that the Nobel committee should be looking at, but I think in some sense, it’s so obvious it’s not rocket science, but we don’t do it exactly as you say, because nobody wants to offend anyone. So we just say everything is important. Well, we also end up worrying about the stuff that makes the headlines, which very often is global warming and other, you know, yes, problems, but perhaps not the most important ones. Well, we also do it because we’re lazy and ill informed and treacherous because we want to take the easy moral path instead of plowing through like, let’s say your work. And I’d like to point out, by the way, to those who are listening, you can argue about the accuracy of cost benefit analysis because it’s hard to price everything and to value everything. And you can debate about how you might do that. But Bjorn, who is doing something closer to rocket science in some sense, then he admits he got teams of economists together, multiple teams to independently produce lists of cost benefits by problem. And then he averaged across the ratings. And I know as a diagnostician and as a researcher, that’s how you come up with reliable calculations. And so those are calculations that could be replicated and valid calculations. And a valid calculation is one that actually bears some resemblance to the real world. And so what you did is in some sense, in retrospect, self-evident, but it’s also very, very sophisticated conceptually. And but what is also so remarkable is that it’s, it’s a singular attempt, despite the fact that we’re jumping up and down about the coming apocalypse, and everyone’s got their panties in the knot as a consequence of it. No one has sat down and done the hard edged economic analysis that you have done. And then you’ve taken a hell of a lot of flack for it too, because you end up prioritizing things like, well, stopping tuberculosis and feeding children instead of what shutting off Europe’s energy supply so that we can reduce carbon dioxide and and pat ourselves on the back for saving the planet. And you faced an awful lot of vitriol as a consequence of this too, which I also find unbelievably appalling because all of your work is devoted clearly towards specifying the most good that can be done in the most efficient possible manner. And why someone would be attacked for that is that’s really a great mystery. Well, you’re obviously undermining this, this very shallow religious commitment people have to their apocalyptic pretensions. And that’s the primary reason, but it’s, it’s also unbelievably appalling. Sorry, but I think it makes a lot of sense because you are heretic, right? I mean, in like, you know, previous times, it’s like, you know, imagine, you know, you are in like a fictional island culture, and what they do is every year, they throw a virgin into a volcano in order to get a good harvest. And then you come along and say, wait a moment, you actually could get a good harvest without throwing the virgin into the volcano. There will be many people who would say, but we are used to throwing that virgin into the volcano, right? I think, I think we, it’s a technical problem, but I think a lot of it, and this has been, I would argue, foster since the 1960s, but it’s a, it’s a cultural problem so much, right? This has been kind of instituted in education, or this idea, you know, in the seventies, it was the new ice age, it was all these kinds of things. I think this, the consciousness for the do, for environmental doom has kind of been, you know, inflicted upon the younger generations now for at least two generations. And then you, I think, again, I think technically everything you say is right, but maybe you could also speak a little bit to, I mean, William Nordhaus did get a Nobel Prize, right, kind of talking in a similar direction. And I wonder, why is he never in a talk show? I don’t know, maybe he’s a reclusive, I don’t know, but he’s never in a talk show, like he’s barely ever quoted. So I wonder, I wonder why it is. And I think because he is less outspoken than you are, but I think he would probably also be seen as a heretic. So that’s why you see more Thunbergs and less Lomborgs and less Nordhaus. Yeah, why we see Greta Thunberg instead of you on the international stage is just, that’s just, maybe she’s the virgin we’re sacrificing to the volcano, you know? So I think it’s, you know, you’re both right. And in very specific sense, I think what you just mentioned about the UN, that they didn’t want to offend anyone. Remember, we basically come out and say, as you said, you know, we should be focusing on free trade, contraception for women, vaccinations for a lot of rotoviruses, you know, a lot of these very, very simple things that you can do a lot about, tuberculosis, food for kids. It’s also a way to get better schooling, better schooling, all these kinds of very, very simple things. And the reason why they didn’t want to prioritize it was because they didn’t want to offend anyone. But as you point out, who gets offended? Well, when we put down some of the solutions that people argue for climate change, they’re not bad, they’re just not very effective. Some of them are actually bad. And, you know, the thing that we’ve just done in Europe, we’ll probably end up seeing in half a year was very bad. But fundamentally, that pisses off a much bigger segment than, you know, everybody who does tuberculosis think we’re, you know, we’re the, what’s the smartest thing since sliced bread. So it’s not that there’s not constituents out there that like what we do, all the ones that get up on top think it’s amazing, and not surprisingly, but there’s just so many more people who are advocating for the bottom things. And in that sense, I think it’s more a question of saying, well, this is almost a poll of saying, what is it that makes sense for people? What is the religion that we make makes us feel like we’re doing something for the world? And for most people, it feels much better to be saving the planet, which you’re unfortunately not actually doing. Instead of saving some kids lives, which just feels like, yeah, you know, our Prime Minister in Canada has just decided to do the same thing to Canadian farmers that the Netherlands has done to the Dutch farmers, he’s going to force them because he likes to use force because he’s saving the planet, even though he’s not, he’s going to force them to reduce their nitrous oxide output. And here, get this man, this is something he decided that he’s going to do that without calculating the ratio of pollution produced to food produced. And so the provinces and the farmers are pushing back and saying, well, how about you judge our polluting use on the basis of how much food we produce? Wouldn’t that be like vaguely reasonable? And the answer from the feds has been no, we want an absolute reduction. And that’s exactly an example of this low resolution, narcissistic moralism that is substituting both for genuine religious conviction and for genuine knowledge. And I would say our Prime Minister in Canada, he is he if if it isn’t Jacinda Ardern and Kamala Harris, it’s definitely Justin Trudeau, who are the poster people for this sort of thinking. So just on very briefly, it’s a great example of how economists would approach this conversation. It’s basically saying, look, there’s something nice about this idea of reducing nitrogen deposits. It actually, you know, especially bio, just but also other people like the fact that there are low of low fertilizer areas, you know, where where different kinds of sparse plantations live. And that can be a nice sort of ecosystem. But if you ask most people, how much are you willing to pay for that? So the other set is we can’t produce as much food, we can’t keep our culture. A lot of farmers are going to go bankrupt. And of course, also, that you’re just going to move this nitrogen deposit to, for instance, developing countries instead. Right. Exactly. You have to ask, so what’s the weighing of these two things? We do that all the time. And let me just give you this one obvious consequence called thinking. When you when you talk about the speed limit, most people, you know, if you if you don’t. So in the US, about what, 40,000 people die on the roads every year, mostly because people drive too fast. And the simple question is, well, shouldn’t you do something about it if you if you don’t reflect very much, people will just say, yeah, that number should be zero. Well, there’s a very obvious way to get it to zero is to put the speed limit at five kilometers or three miles an hour. Now, nobody would get killed, but nobody would get anywhere either. So that’s, of course, why we don’t actually do it every year. And every day, we decide all of us. Yes, I would like to go at a reasonable speed. And that will end up meaning some people will die. There’s a trade off here. Now we can have a sensible conversation. Do we want to have a you know, like, sorry, I’m a little unsure where I should use miles or a kilometer. I’m just going to go with miles, right? Okay, we use 55 kilometers. I didn’t do that. Did I 55 miles or 85 miles? And that’s a fine conversation. But nobody suggests it should be zero or three miles an hour. And that’s the conversation that we need to have in all these other things. So when we’re talking about nitrogen deposit, of course, we all want to have less rather than more. But we also have lots of other things we want to do. We need to recognize those like, yeah, so okay, so I want to return to something you said, and then I want to talk about economists versus biologists, let’s say. So when I had calculated, this is a rough calculation. And I knew it was wrong, I figured that we’d be facing a world in the fall and the winter where 150 million people would be starving. But Michael Yon mentioned that it was going to be 1.2 billion. That was his estimate. And I thought, oh my god, not only is that famine on a level that we haven’t seen probably since the early 60s. And then he talked about how famine multiplies aid, because once a famine hits that the governments tend to take centralized control over food production, and basically appropriate farmers crops and then the farmers quit growing crops, which is exactly what you’d expect. So not only do you have 1 billion, you have the stage set for expansion of famine. And then I thought, well, and Yon commented on this as well. Well, what happens when 1.2 billion people go hungry, and that’s going to be well in the poorest countries throughout the countries that are most likely as well to push desperate immigrants towards Europe’s borders and the same on the American front. And so not in the fall, you tell me again, if I’m wrong, if you are right, and Yon is right, not only are we going to see a seventh of the world go hungry in a serious way, like’s already happening in Sri Lanka, but we’re going to see immigration pressure, move human movement pressure on the flanks of Europe and the United States on a scale that maybe we’ve never seen. And how sure are you that that’s what we’re looking at in the fall and winter? So I think there’s a couple things. First of all, we’re starting out in a world where there’s already some 700 or 800 million people that are starving. And this has fairly little to do with the current energy crisis or fertilizer crisis, but it’s just the fact of people being poor. So again, that goes to your general point of saying, well, maybe we should get people out of poverty first. But the second part of this is it actually turns out that when people are really, really poor and really damaged in many ways, for instance, through starvation, they will not flee because they can’t. So I’m not sure that we’re going to see huge immigration streams. We might, and I think it’s useful to start thinking about, but I don’t have the data on whether so. So there’s a, you know, it’s actually, you see more refugee streams when people get richer, because then they can start to afford to get, you know, on trucks or buses or even flights and go to Europe and the U.S. But if you’re really poor, you’re just, you know, stuck. This is more of a moral problem than I think it’s going to be at first a political problem. But I think fundamentally, this is about our priorities. And it’s about saying, what kind of moral person do you want? Do you want to be the moral person that said, I want to save the world from climate change, so I’m going to make sure we don’t use gas to make fertilizer that could save millions of people? Or are you actually going to be a person who says, no, I actually think saving people’s lives is a little more important. But isn’t it even almost worse, right? Because I think in many instances, particularly in Africa, right? I mean, it was European policies, particularly, who hampered and in some cases really sabotaged their ability to feed themselves, right, by not allowing them access to energy. I mean, if you look at, for example, you know, global maps about electricity supplies, there is a huge gap in most of Africa, which also has the highest number of birth rates. So the population that’s growing fastest is the one with the most limited access to energy. And as you know, right, whether it’s high temperatures or low temperatures or whether food production energy is key. And I think in many ways, it was kind of deliberate policies, kind of the idea that you can all of a sudden run, I don’t know, you know, the Democratic Republic of Congo or these areas that you can run them on wind and solar. So it seems that it’s not just that we don’t help them to get rich. If somebody would be a cynic, but I think it’s true. In some cases, we kept them poor, particularly when it came to energy and food production. I think you’re absolutely right. First of all, remember, this is a European crisis. That’s why we’re talking about it. If it was a crisis in Africa, almost nobody would care. The second part of this is that the reason why Africa and many other places poor is not just because of this crisis that we’re seeing right now. It’s much, much broader. I made the comparison last year that all of the energy in Uganda, which is a bigger nation than California’s, they’re like 43 million versus 39 million. All of the electricity in Uganda is less than the electricity Californians use to heat their pools. I also read beyond that Uganda is fertile enough so that if it was properly harnessed, it could feed all of Africa and that they have a water supply that’s very close to the surface in most of the country. And that it would be a relatively simple matter to sink pumps all over the country to get enough water to produce the place fertile enough to feed the entire continent. That’s just Uganda. Yeah. And again, remember, it’s not just about getting food. It’s about becoming rich. Why is it we got rich? We got rich because a hundred years ago, so the average of industrial work in the US in the last part of the 1800s used most of, most industrial production was just his work force. It was typically a he. Today is what six or 7% of the energy that goes in is actually muscle power. The rest of it we get from fossil fuels, mostly from fossil fuels. That’s what’s made us rich because we can suddenly do 10 times as much. If you translate the energy that every person has into what would that be in equivalent human terms, each one of us in the rich world has the equivalent of slaves that are about a hundred slaves that help us on hand and foot 24 seven. These are the guys who drive us around the roads that deliver us food that gets it heat and cool in our houses and all the other things that we love. And somehow we’re telling the rest of the world, you guys can’t have it because of global warming. So that’s part of this. That’s part of this argument between economists and biologists, Malthusian biologists, and maybe Malthusian Marxist biologists as well that has been raging for well since Malthus. And that idea is that the only way forward to planetary salvation is to accept excessive restrictions on flourishing and growth is that there’s no way the planet can support us if we’re all rich, especially if we have first world living standards. And so the only thing we can do is cut back dramatically while in the first world. But the problem with that means that if you cut back the economy so that rich people get poorer, you doom poor people to starvation. That’s absolutely clear. And the economists say instead, well, no, look, we can get more bang for the buck continually. We can drive towards an efficiency that overcomes the Malthusian problem. And that would be the problem of overpopulation, let’s say. And we can, we can have more of what we need for less cost with less mess. And, and furthermore, that the best way out of environmental catastrophe and wood burning and indoor pollution and all of that early life cessation and high levels of child mortality, all that catastrophe is to make people rich, not poor. And that’s such a positive idea. It’s like, well, why wouldn’t you aim at that, man? We could make, especially think about, man, you’re on the left. Don’t you care about poor people? Well, we care about them as long as they’re suffering in a way that boosts our moral, our moral sense of ourselves. But once they start to get rich and have opinions, they’re nothing but annoying. I think it’s right on multiple levels. First of all, remember, you know, there are people, there’s a substantial sort of academic minority still arguing that we should have deep growth because of global warming. Yeah, so they’re basically telling us we should become less rich, especially in the rich world. First of all, I think, yes, it’s a bad idea. And we’ll get back to that in a second. But also it’s just never going to happen. How would you ever get people to vote for this? It’s just impossible to imagine. The second part of it, of course, is to say, do we really think it’s great to let most poor people stay about the same level as where they are? They talk about maybe they should be a slight bit better off. I think most of them, as you point out, want much better than this. The third point, of course, is, as you point out, most economists will tell you, we know that when people get richer, most environmental indicators get much better. People stop cutting down their forests when they become web designers instead. You know, they actually care about the environment and they pay some of their newfound richness to make sure that we pollute less and we have less air pollution. And as you point out, indoor air pollution, we stop burning coal or wood or dung inside our homes. Remember, this is not a trivial issue. About three billion people cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels, which means that these three billion- And 23 million, yeah, right, die a year because of that. Yes. And it’s equivalent, according to the World Health Organization, to each one of these people smoking two packs of cigarettes every day. We have no sense of this. You know, it’s clean inside our homes, but it’s not clean inside a very large minority of the world’s population because they’re poor and cook and keep warm with indoor air pollution. So we will fix many of these problems, but it is important to say, we are not likely to just fix climate change because we get richer. So far we’ve seen as you get richer, you emit more CO2, not less CO2. So we also need to fix this. But again, I think you’ve got to be honest and say you’re never going to fix climate change by just saying, let’s all be poor. That’s just never going to work. And also it’s destructive in all kinds of other ways. Well, yeah. I mean, well, it’s going to make it worse because if you exaggerate poverty at the low end of the distribution and tip people into desperation, they’re going to decimate their environment. I mean, as soon as people are starving in any given country, the first thing they do is while they cut down all the trees and they eat all the animals. Well, of course that’s what they’re going to do. And so that’s a complete cataclysmic catastrophe. And so even if getting wealthier does produce an increment in CO2 production, and we can talk about the consequences of that, making people poorer is going to produce a way bigger increment in CO2 production and produce all sorts of other cataclysmic consequences. So it’s not like there’s an easy, it’s not as if that, that if we made people poorer, that would in fact address the CO2 problem because it clearly wouldn’t. In fact, it’s more likely to make it worse. I think we need to keep those separate. It would make all other environmental indicators worse. Who would decimate the Amazon forest. They would decimate a lot of animal species and a lot of, and would dramatically drive up air pollution, but it might actually reduce CO2 emissions. So much of the CO2 that we’re worried about is the CO2 that will come from a rich India and a rich Africa because they would be emitting sort of 10 times as much as what they’re doing today. So there is some sense to this, but I think it’s important to say it’s incredibly morally irresponsible. It is impossible to imagine that people are going to say, yeah, you know what, you’ve just convinced me I want to stay poor. That’s just not going to happen. And it’s a bad way to fix the world, just sort of morally the right way to do this, of course. And that was what Ralph Wolf pointed out. This really is about making sure that we invest a lot more, for instance, in researching nuclear or a fusion, that we actually get these technologies that will save us. Now, it could also be wind or solar with lots and lots of batteries. That’s not competitive right now. Most of these things are not competitive right now, but we should invest in research and development to make sure at least one of these technologies become rich and cheap enough. And remember, that’s how we’ve saved all the other issues in the world. If we think back in the 1970s or 60s, when we worried about the world running out of food, we didn’t save the world by telling everyone, I’m sorry, could you eat a little less and then we’ll send it down to Africa and Southeast Asia? We did it through the Green Revolution, through science and technology that basically made every seed produce twice or three times as much food per hectare. That’s how you save the world through technology and innovation. Can I throw in something real quick there? Because I think you said so many important things, and particularly what you mentioned also before. I mean, one of the numbers I always find particularly fascinating is in the 1960s, up to the 1960s, Great Britain had as many inhabitants as Nigeria. Now Nigeria has three times as many as Great Britain. So these people need to be fed and what they need mostly for it, and you mentioned it, right? It’s going to be innovation. It’s going to be access to higher crop yields. And how do you get this? Well, this brings us a little bit back to the question of the Netherlands, right? In many ways, the Netherlands are the Silicon Valley of agriculture. But if you undermine their agricultural sector, knowledge is going to get lost. Let me give you two very quick examples, one from my home country of Austria. They are now trying to reopen coal power plants. They need to get people out of retirement because there is nobody around anymore who knows how to run them. Germany has similar problems in the nuclear sector. It is absolutely astounding. We had the first nuclear fission happened in 1938 and the first nuclear bomb in 1945. That was seven years. Nowadays, it takes more than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant because in many ways that knowledge has been neglected. Companies don’t invest in it. Students don’t study because there was no interest in it. And I think this is what we completely underestimate as a side effect of many of these environmental issues. If you tell people in the Netherlands that we’re going to crack down on agriculture, their agriculture and universities will have less students, will have less innovation. And then we have less ideas then to give to these countries, whether it’s Nigeria or others, in order for them to feed their populations. So this is also a war against the future, if you want. If you undermine the conditions for future innovation, you’re going to end up maybe in this Malthusian trap of your own making because you hampered the one thing that would have allowed you to get out of it. And that would be innovation and growth. Yeah. Well, on that on the Dutch farmer front, let’s say it seems to me that the people in the world that you should be most ashamed of persecuting might in fact be the Dutch farmers, because that little country, which is just a postage stamp, which has been scraped out of the ocean by unbelievable, diligent, conscientious effort, is the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products. And so to Ralph’s point, these farmers are stunningly efficient. And of course they do pollute because we don’t do anything perfectly. And if you demolish them, which seems to be the current Dutch government’s plan pressured in large part by judicial decision rather than legislative decision, which is also worth thinking about, then not only do you demoralize the very people that you should be celebrating, but you risk demolishing the food supply and the knowledge necessary to farm at that kind of level of efficiency. And so it’s at points where people like the Dutch farmers are being persecuted that makes me think that this is not just ignorance, that there is real malevolence here too, because at some point you’re so blind with regards to your moral pretensions and your insistence that you’re the one that’s saving the world with your foolishness, that you’ve crossed the line from someone who just doesn’t know what they’re talking about to someone who’s actively inflicting carnage and catastrophe on the world. And I would think that some of that is motivated by a kind of deep nihilism about human existence in general, the idea that we’re a cancer on the planet, the idea that there are in fact too many of us. And as the president of Greenpeace said in relation to the Dutch farmers, he said something like, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, which is really bloody convenient if you don’t happen to be one of the eggs that’s being broken. So you’ve had a lot of resistance to your work, Bjorn, and I know a lot of that’s rooted in people’s ignorance, but what other motivations do you think there might be for rejecting out of hand the kind of, well, you say it’s not rocket science, it’s not that hard to read your book, which is how to spend $75billiontomaketheworldabetterplace.I{t}^{\prime }sactuallyaprettystraightforwardreadandhey,i{t}^{\prime }spublishedandyoucanbuyit.Soi{t}^{\prime }salsonotthatdifficult.Andyoufacedallthisvitriol,whichis,andtha{t}^{\prime }sassomeonewh{o}^{\prime }sactuallyenvironmentallyoriented,right?BecauseyoubasicallyaccepttheIPC{C}^{\prime }sprognosticationswithregardstoclimatechange.Andsole{t}^{\prime }sfocusonthis.Youtalkaboutthefactthatw{e}^{\prime }llbelessrichinahundredyears,assumingourcurrentrateofeconomicgrowththanwewouldbeifwewere{n}^{\prime }tdumpingcarbonintotheatmosphere.Andsoyouareinfavorofcertainapproachesthatmightbeappropriatetoamelioration.Howbigaproblemdoyouthinkcarbondioxideaccumulationisandwhatshouldandwhatareweactuallydoingaboutitthatworks?W{e}^{\prime }llgetbacktomorewithourguests,BjornLomborgandRalphShulhammerinjustamoment.First,w{e}^{\prime }dliketotellyouaboutBirchGold.TheUnitedStatesmetthetechnicaldefinitionofarecessionlastmonth,twoconsecutivequartersofnegativegrowth.Americansareconcerned.WashingtonMutual,LehmanBrothers,Chrysler.Duringthe2007recession,thesebluechipstocksallwentdowntozeroovernight.Howconfidentareyouthatyoursavingsareprotected?I{t}^{\prime }snottoolateforyoutotakeactionnow.Throughouthistory,goldhasalwaysbeenthebesthedgeagainstinflationandBirchGoldGrouphelpsyouholdgoldandsilverinataxshelteredretirementaccount.Ifyouhavea401korIRAtha{t}^{\prime }sunderperforming,textJORDANto989898andlearnhowtoconvertthatintopreciousmetals.TextJORDANto989898andBirchGoldwillsendyouafreeinformationkitonhowtodiversifyintogoldtax-free.Protectyourhard-earnedmoney.Takethenecessarystepstohedgeagainstinflationtoday.TextJORDANto989898.Soletmejustbackupandthen{I}^{\prime }llansweryourquestion.Itendtobelievethatmostpeopleareactuallywell-intendedandsoItendtothinkthatwhenpeopleare,asyoupointedoutintheDutchcase,whenthe{y}^{\prime }repursuingacourtcasetoforcetheDutchgovernment,ifIcareaboutthisonething,tha{t}^{\prime }swhatIwantyoutodo.AndIdo{n}^{\prime }tthinkther{e}^{\prime }ssomethingwrongaboutaworldwhereyouhavedifferentNGOsanddifferentsortofground,yeah,NGOsandgreenorganizationsworkingfordifferentthings,butweneedtorecognizethatyouhavetoprioritizeallofthesethings.Andpoliticiansarenotnormallystupidenoughtosay,IpromisetogivejobstoeveryoneorIpromisenobodywilldieontheroadorIpromisethatallkidsaregoingtogettouniversityorsomethinglikethatbecausewerecognizethatwouldactuallyhaveahugecostimpactifIwasforcedbyacourttodoso.Butw{e}^{\prime }vesomehowallowedourselvestomakestupidproclamationsintheenvironmentspace.IpromisetobasicallygetEuropebacktopre-humannaturestatus.Tha{t}^{\prime }sjustimpossibletohave.Ipromisetogetustonetzeroby2050.Tha{t}^{\prime }sgoingtobedrasticallycostly.So,andthen{I}^{\prime }llansweryourquestion.Sother{e}^{\prime }sbeenalotofeconomistslookingatwhatwillbethecostandasRalphmentioned,perhapsthemostprominentpersonwasRichardNordhaus,no,DickNordhaus,WilliamNordhaus,sorry,whogottheNobelPrizein2018,theonlyclimateeconomisttogettheNobelPrizeexactlyforhisclimateeconomics.Heestimates,andthisisbroadlyvalidatedbymany,butthereareoutlierstudies,thatthecost,ifwedonothingaboutclimate,willmeanthatbytheendofthecentury,w{e}^{\prime }llbeabout4$12,000 per person per year. And people are just not going to accept that. Remember, if you ask people, most people are willing to spend something on climate change, typically sort of between $25and$200. But if you ask them, so would you be okay with spending $10,000? No, that’s not going to happen. And you’re going to have an uprising. That’s, I think, why we need to say, well, we should be smart about this, but we shouldn’t be spending all of our money on one thing. That’s both dumb, it’s also economically inefficient, but it also leaves all the other challenges unfixed. Right. Well, this is a good time, I think, maybe to let you go. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Bjorn, and a privilege to be able to bring your thoughts to as wide an audience as possible. Because, well, we would do a lot better off by following the guidelines that you and your teams have produced than by flailing about in this apocalyptic idiocy and trying to elevate our moral status with half measures and dim-wittedness and expensive. You know, all those trillions of dollars that you’re talking about, we got to understand people that when you pull a half a trillion dollars out of an economy, it’s the poor that you doom doing that. Because every economic cost is borne most heavily by the poorest people, always. It’s like a rule of, an iron rule of nature and civilization, is that everything that’s expensive hurts the poor most. And so, and I’m pretty tired of hearing the environmental activists sacrifice today’s real poor to the hypothetically thriving poor of their utopian future. It’s appalling morally. And I don’t, it’s not just ignorant, it’s darker than that. It’s darker than that, as far as I’m concerned. You know, we have no right whatsoever to be telling Africans and Indians and Chinese, for that matter, that, well, you know, we’re rich and I don’t think we’ll give it up, rub, rub. But you guys, you know, you should be looking forward to a lot less prosperous future than you might otherwise be. And there’s just absolutely no excuse for that whatsoever. Especially when we know, we know, we know that if we help the world’s poor, or at least got out of their way, while they’re trying to be rich, that the planet would actually be in much better shape. We could have our cake and eat it too. And your work is so signally important in that regard, you know, and well, hopefully people will wake up and, and, and, and pay more attention to the economists and less attention to the bloody Malthusian biologists. So really good talking to you again, Bjorn. Thanks a lot. Wonderful to talk to both of you. Take care, Ralph. Take care, Jordan. All right, Ralph, on to the European protest front. So do you want to tell people what you’ve been up to and why and what you’ve seen? Well, over the last couple of years, a couple of actually started a little bit earlier, but Ken, I was a little bit in touch with some of the farmers in the Netherlands and some of the people also involved in the protests over the last couple of weeks. And I think there’s a few points that are very important to make and that tend to get lost in the entire debate. I mean, these protests go back to 2019. So this is kind of, they were a little bit glossed over due to COVID, right? There were stronger restrictions on, on the rights to demonstrate. So kind of the farmers didn’t really have the opportunity to voice themselves. But there’s one thing that is really important for me to make absolutely clear when what I use kind of, when I describe them, kind of very often, use also the term working class. But I think I really want also to put it into people’s heads. Working class is not the same as poor, right? Many of those farmers in the Netherlands are economically very well off. But what I mean by working class is kind of literally the people who make something work. So those are like, so right, they are the backbone in many ways of the Dutch economy. So, you know, they are people that need affordable energy, that produce then food that is affordable, right? So this is kind of what I mean by, by the working class. And this is also why there is a lot of sympathy towards them in the public. I mean, there was one poll taken, I think it was now 10 days ago. So I don’t know the exact numbers. There hasn’t been a poll since. But currently the so-called Farmers Citizens Party, which is kind of the political representative of the farmers, has one seat in the Dutch Parliament. If elections would have taken place, I think it was July 11th, they would have risen up to 20 seats. And, you know, Mark Rutte’s party would have lost 14 out of 34 seats. So there is sympathy from the Dutch for the farmers. And it’s not just about the farming. It’s more a general sense of that this is an attack on kind of what makes us wealthy as a country, right? This is kind of, we are, and there’s a lot of pride for the Dutch that they feel in the agricultural sector. And they should be, right? You said it before, it’s a country the size of a post stamp, and they are an agricultural, animal, livestock farming superpower. It’s outstanding. If you look at the research they do, it’s kind of what they export in know-how to Kenya, to Indonesia, kind of what they do positive there. But this is all created domestically in this very strong agricultural sector. So just as a concluding remark on this to give you a good comparison, forcing 30% of Dutch livestock to be abandoned or to basically disappear is kind of similar to going to Silicon Valley and say, so tomorrow you have to close down 30% of all startups. Well, Silicon Valley would still be there, but it probably would be significantly less innovative. And I said this before, this is really my big point is if you start to handbind to sabotage an industry that is extremely innovative, at some point they’re going to stop innovating because they’re going to say, first of all, they try to kind of ingrain themselves as the political class to get exceptions so that they can continue farming. And they will tell, this is what some Dutch farmers told me, they tell their children not to take over, you know, farms. Well, this is the thing that we really should be aware of here in large part is that I’ve watched major companies, corporations and other enterprises collapse and they can collapse precipitously because what happens is that when you pressure an industry, all the people that have options leave and the people who have options are the most competent people. And so if you tell extremely competent and intelligent and sophisticated farmers, because high producing farmers are all of those things, practical people with a wide range of knowledge and technical ability and mechanical ability and street smarts, all of that, if you say, oh, we’re going to make your lifestyle both uncomfortable and then fundamentally unviable, they’re going to think, oh, well, guess what? I have better things to do with my time. See you later. And then you lose the best people right away. And as soon as you do that, because a small proportion of people are responsible for almost all the productive effort, as soon as you lose that, that uppermost echelon, you lose the whole thing. So if we force 30% of Silicon Valley startups to close or even 10%, all that would happen is all the entrepreneurs would leave Silicon Valley, like they’re leaving California now, for example, they’re moving out of California now to places like Tennessee and Texas and Florida. That happens extremely quickly. You cannot pressure competent people because they just tell you to screw off and go do something else. And it’s a catastrophe. Okay. So tell me too, what’s happening on the ground? Like how many, do you have any idea what the true numbers of people are who are involved in these protests and are they mounting? Are they staying the same? Are they shrinking? It’s, it’s still going on. I mean, I looked at kind of the most, let’s say pessimistic or let’s say anti-pharma news outlets, and even they admit that it has been 25 to 30,000 people, right? That the protesters themselves say it’s over 40,000. So I think the real number is going to be in between. But there is again, something I think that’s very important for the listeners and the viewers. We talking about the Netherlands, the Netherlands are usually not a country with mass protest, right? This is ingrained in their political culture. They are very consensus oriented political nation. This is why also they have many parties in parliament. There is always a need for consensus. So for them to go onto the streets and block streets or the fishermen have blocked harbors, that’s a huge thing for the Netherlands. So even if the numbers might don’t seem that impressive, the fact that it’s happening really makes a difference. So if you get the Dutch to rise, I think the last time it happened was in 1672, where by the way, then the protestors actually ate their then kind of prime minister. So I mean, I’m not promoting eating prime ministers, but this is how he can also end. Yeah, well, this is worth stressing. I mean, in some ways, there isn’t a more civilized country in the world than the Netherlands. And I’m saying that having spent quite a bit of time there and being a great admirer of the Netherlands. But we have to understand is that the Netherlands was taken back from the sea. And that took a lot of effort and a lot of technological innovation over centuries. And so the Netherlands is a very, very well organized society. It’s hyperproductive, it’s extremely peaceful, it’s consensual, and it’s also extraordinarily free. And that’s a tremendous number of paradoxical things to get right. And then farmers are not only practical people who don’t fly off the handle, but it’s also very expensive for them to take their equipment, their heavy equipment, and not utilize it productively and to put it on the streets. And so they’re there and they’re not the sort of people who like they’re not hippie protesters in Berkeley in 1968 who have nothing better to do when they’re not drinking and smoking pot. These are people with very difficult jobs, and it’s very expensive of them to take time off. And so for Dutch to be driven to the point of protest and then for Dutch farmers specifically to be protesting, if you don’t see this as a canary in a coal mine, then you’re an idiot. You’re willfully blind fundamentally. Yeah, and there’s more to it. I think this is so kind of the general conversation reporting talks a lot about the nitrogen issue, like kind of the environmental part of it. But I think this is something, and this is why you see more and more of this all over Europe. It’s a little bit of a conflagration that over at least the 90s and early 2000s, there was a growing discontent in the Dutch population, not just about environmental issues and environmental policies, but also about migration, kind of all these issues. And this comes now together because there is, I’m not to be very clear here, I’m not sure if that is true. I mean, definitely some of the farmers also believe it. So I cannot speak to the validity of it, but it’s something that also raises them emotionally, which is this idea, right, that a lot of the land is that the government kind of wants to force them off the land, take the land and then use the land to house migrants. So to what extent that is really true, the evidence is mixed. So there have been one or two cases where these plans are really, where these plans exist. But if it’s really the main motivation, I have my doubts about this. But the point is, and this goes back to what I said initially, there is a sense in the population that more and more the group of people that is the most important to keep the economy going, to keep the country going, that also preserves the culture and these kind of things, that they’re constantly under attack and undermined by the political and particularly also by the cultural elite. And I think this is part of the story of that anger that should not be underestimated. So this is not purely because many of my critics said, oh, Ralph, you know, this is just about nitrogen and that comes from the EU. Yes, that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. But there is more going on underneath. Well, what we could say in regard to that, and I would say this is a reasonable approach from a psychological perspective, is that when you start to use compulsion on people, so compulsion is the sign of bad policy. And so when you start to use compulsion, the judiciary compels the legislative branch and then the legislative branch compels the farmers, forces them. Well, as soon as you use force on people, you undermine trust by definition, right? Because you don’t need to use force on people where there’s mutual consensus and trust. So use force and then you elicit paranoid reactions. It’s like if you’re going to operate in relationship to me as a tyrant, then just what sort of tyrant are you? And just exactly what you’re up to, what are you up to? And so that promotes the spread of these more conspiratorial ideas that might have a toehold in the truth on some fronts, but it’s part of a sign of a broader breakdown of communication and trust in society. And that’s an absolute catastrophe because you got to understand this. People have to understand this. A guy named Landis wrote a great book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations about this very factor. He basically claimed, and I think with plenty justification, that the only real natural resource is trust and that it almost requires a metaphysical miracle to set up a country where the default response from one stranger to another is, well, of course I can shop in your store and you’re not going to rip me off. Of course I can buy something online and I’m going to get the product. Of course I can send my kids to schools that the government runs and that’ll be fine. It’s just a matter of course. That’s a miracle. And when you use compulsion in the service of an apocalyptic ideal and undermine that trust, then you generate all sorts of, well, an endless amount of conspiratorial thinking. And that’s a catastrophe. No, I think you touch on something that’s extremely important and that is because particularly in the trust issue, increasingly, and this I would argue by the way happens all over the West. That is not just the Dutch phenomenon, right? That the quote unquote working class, and if you want to call them the ruling class, we can quibble about this, but they increasingly inhabit completely different moral universes, right? They live in completely different worlds. Exactly what you said, right? The people, as I call them, the working people, they want affordable energy. They want good public schools. They want to maintain their cultural and political identity, all these things. And then you have the political class, the academia class, and they have different goals, right? For them, climate change is number one, right? For them, social justice is number one, but it’s simply not the same for these other people. And at some point, you cannot have both of these competing moral priorities in the same country. It will come to a head sooner or later, and I think this is what we see in Europe. And to be honest, I think this is just the beginning, because these groundswells have been there, but as long as the economy was more or less working okay, as long as people felt that by the end of the year, they were better off than the year before, they were tolerating the accentuaries of their elites, right? They said, well, those are those eggheads in the universities. And now we all know that our politicians lie, but as long as I have access to a better life- As long as things are working. Exactly. But once they stop working, and this is so important what you said, because the true test of trust is a crisis. So all these polls were in the past where they said, oh, these are such high trust societies. Well, they were high trust when things were going well. But now we’ll see how well developed the trust really is if in the fall, the worst of the crisis is really going to hit. And I’m not that optimistic. Yeah. And so what do you foresee in the fall? Or are you in a position to comment on that? Well, it depends, of course, a little bit on what we talked originally, like on the way that Russia is going to behave. But we already see things happening, right? We see, for example, the government in Italy imploded. Then we have like very small things now in Austria when the Austrian president, right, he’s not a famous figure or anything, but kind of when he goes to public appearances, right, that people are booing him. And these are things that didn’t happen in the past. It’s happening in Canada, too. Yeah. So this content is real. And what kind of worries me the most is that the politics doesn’t have an answer to it, right? They immediately revert. They do it in Italy now. They do it in Australia, do whatever. They do it also in the Dutch case. They immediately revert to their preconceived notions, right? Oh, those are all, you know, right wing COVID denying, misogynistic. Yeah, misogynist bigots. What Justin Trudeau said. I mean, I’m sure these people exist in that group as well. But the thing is, you just increase the anger if you don’t at some point approach them and say, OK, so what bothers you? What ails you? And just kind of to put something to this, I think a little bit this revolution started in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. And what I mean by this is they did a fantastic study at the Rand Institution where they said, what’s the best way to predict whether or not somebody was voting for Donald Trump? Is it race? Is it skin color? Is it, you know, income? It turned out the best way to predict is that those people who crossed on the questionnaire, I feel that I have no voice. I feel that I’m not seen. That was the best predictor for people to vote for Donald Trump. And that’s not going to stop. Yeah. Well, people believe that Trump addressed them if idiosyncratically and eccentrically and even narcissistically, at least directly, honestly and in an unscripted manner. And Trump was very good at, well, that’s the populist danger that the leftists point to is that Trump could and did to some degree appeal to resentment. And that’s very dangerous, especially for a conservative. I think he was also pushed into a corner on that on that front because he was pilloried so badly that it’s not surprising that he regarded himself as surrounded by enemies. Right. And you can create a monster by persecuting someone intently. And I’m saying that as someone who I think is cognizant and appreciative of whatever Donald Trump’s flaws might be. But it’s definitely the case that the working class felt that they had been shunted out of the conversation. And the reason they felt that way was because they had been shunted out of the conversation. And it’s certainly the case, if that wasn’t true, in some fundamental sense, hey, you wouldn’t have seen the trucker protests in Canada, the corresponding protests in the US, and now the spread of this into Europe. Right. You can’t just put that at Trump’s feet by any stretch of the imagination. And so what do the farmers want and what’s the probability that they’re going to get it? And what do you think’s going to happen next? Well, in fact, I would argue that their demands are very reasonable, right? Because if you look at the numbers, they have been very successful in reducing emissions over the last couple of years. So we mentioned this before, really, Dutch agriculture is astounding. I would argue it’s one of the innovative wonders of the world. And they mostly complain about the timeline. So again, it’s not that they say, oh, we want to continue to emit as much as possible. No, they just say that 2030, 2035, and 2050 is not feasible for us. We can’t do it in the timeline. And the argument that comes back is, well, but you know, these are EU regulations. Well, that is true. Yeah, whatever. Exactly. And it’s something that we want to say also before. Well, of course, they have more nitrogen emissions. They are the number one agricultural producing country in Europe. So I mean, it’s kind of natural that they have more emissions and they did have an exception for a long time. And they pretty much only want that exception to continue. Well, the other thing is that there isn’t anybody who cares more about long term sustainability than actual farmers, because a lot of those people, well, not only do they want to farm for decades, which is a much longer time span horizon than most politicians and most people, but a lot of them would like to be able to have their children do the same thing. And they don’t want to degrade the topsoil and they don’t want to pollute the water. And so, but they want to produce as much food as they possibly can. And you’re not going to do that without some waste. I mean, that’s the thing about these net zero policies. You know, as soon as someone talks about zero, anything that there’s a totalitarian bent to them, because the cost of getting to actual zero is absolutely disproportionate. Like you could think, well, how about an 80% reduction? It’s like, okay, we might be able to manage that. Well, how about 90? Well, you’re pushing it. Well, there’s an exponential increase in the cost of getting from 90 to 95. And then again, from 95 to zero. And so zero is nothing but moral posturing. And so, and so what’s happening outside of Holland, how outside of the Netherlands, how cognizant are you of the nature of the spread of these protests into Germany and to Italy and into and into Spain? You know, the Canadian government collapsed in some sense under the weight of the trucker convoy. It wasn’t the federal government, but the conservative party leader resigned and the conservatives imploded, which was unfortunate in the highest degree, although we might get a better leader out of the deal. And so these protests do have a tremendous amount of significance. So, okay, so what’s happening on this on the protest spread front? There’s a couple of things that have happened parallel. I mean, I sometimes like to compare it a little bit to the Arab Spring. And the reason I use this comparison is not because of the dimension of the protests at the moment. They’re not nowhere near. But what you also mentioned, it’s kind of how these things can become contagious, right? In the Arab Spring, it started in Tunisia with a vegetable vendor, you know, kind of put up basically burning himself alive and then kind of this spread throughout the entire Middle East. And what you see in Europe increasingly happening. So we have the Dutch case. We had some protests in Spain. Basically, Emmanuel Macron’s government in France is a lame duck now. They really can’t get anything done. They’re kind of the amount of trust that the people or the distrust that people express towards him in the last elections. I think it’s only a matter of time until you’re probably also going to see protests in France. You see it partially also in Eastern Europe, right? There are protests in Poland. There have been protests in Italy that did play a role in the downfall of the current government. It’s going on a little bit in Spain, which by the way has huge political repercussions, as you probably have heard, right? Talking about the gas crisis. So the European Commission says every European country needs to reduce their gas consumption by 15%. And the first countries who said we’re not going to do this were among others were Spain and Italy, because they know how fragile their systems are. They can’t. And this is the thing. We live in a situation where Western governments and all of them, but many, they no longer can really ask sacrifices of their people because the people say, you know what, first of all, they don’t lead by example. We don’t have austere, shoddy, gold-like politicians. And personality, I would argue, matters in this way. It really matters who asks you for a sacrifice. And they don’t even really ask for sacrifice. They kind of demand it, right? Because you have to reduce your energy use. And of course, people don’t. Or else. Or else we’ll punish you. Yeah. Or else. And this is, and the other important thing for them, Germany is the best example here, that people say, but wait a moment. You told us you got this under control. You told us we can close down over the last two years, you know, six nuclear power plants. So three have been closed down. Another three will be closed down in December. Not going to be a problem. Right? So insane. Yeah. So they were told, I’m always very careful to use the word lie, because I like to believe in the best of people. But they were definitely told things that turned out to be entirely untrue. Now, they’re not just untrue. You know, I’ve been thinking about the distinctions between different forms of untruth. And so if you’re a canny liar, and maybe even a moral liar, when you lie, your lie is an approximation to the truth. It’s just bent in a slight direction. But if you’re really hell bent on lying, you tell anti truths. And the idea that we could close down nuclear plants in Germany, and replace that with stable and reliable renewables, that that would benefit the planet. And that that wouldn’t come at a unsustainable economic and political risk, which has clearly been the case, that was an anti truth. It wasn’t just a lie. And I don’t think it’s mere ignorance. Because, like, I’m not a political expert, by profession, let’s say. And it was obvious to me 10 years ago, that producing hyper reliance on Russia was just not a good idea. It just exposed the West to too much risk. And I can’t see how you could be a political leader. Look, you’re going to be pessimistic about this one way or another. If you’re blind enough as a political leader, not to see that as a stark reality, you’re way too blind to be a political leader. And if you’re malevolent and malicious enough to manipulate that for your own personal and political gain, then you’re too nefarious to be a political leader. And if you’re both, well, then, well, then you have the kind of leaders that we do have, unfortunately, at the moment in many situations. And I would certainly rank our current Prime Minister as first and foremost among those, the poster boy of the WEF and the globalist utopians. He’s bent and demanded this poor country of mine in ways that Canadians are just barely beginning to wake up to. I mean, I think there is more to it. I mean, I think you in your writings and also your commentary, you touch on this again and again, which I think is so important. I mean, this is also a little bit an element of a civilization in a crisis, but also a crisis of confidence. I mean, take one example. I always find this so fascinating. The Hoover Dam, right, was built in five years during the Great Depression. The Golden Gate Bridge was built in four years during the Great Depression. Nowadays, if you want to build something in the United States, right, you have to wait up to five years to get the environmental impact study. I mean, why would anybody try to build anything like that? And I’m not sure at some point, could we still do it if we wanted to? No, we couldn’t. Well, look, you know, I just reached out to Buttigieg’s office a couple of weeks ago about the immense spending that’s occurring on the infrastructure front. And because some of the people that I’ve been involved in had a hand in that, assuming that the Democrats who are going to spend a lot of money might spend it on something useful, like fixing bridges, let’s say, because infrastructure spending has about a 13 to one return on investment. That seems to be the calculation. And then so we reached out to Buttigieg’s office and tried to get some figures. It’s like, okay, you guys have all this money. Do you have a website that you where you’ve listed the projects that the money is being spent on, and just are tracking whether or not anything’s actually happening? And the deputy secretary wrote back, he reached out to an infrastructure expert that I was in contact with and, and, and, and encouraging to ask this question. And he said, well, we’re not sure that on a project of this scale, that effectiveness genuinely in quotes, effectiveness is a realistic goal. And we don’t believe that something with this sort of widespread significance can be evaluated essentially at that level of granularity. And then he sent me a map that showed how much money had been given to each state, which is not the question I asked. It’s like, I don’t give a damn how much money you spent. That’s easy. My business partner always laughed with me said, it’s really easy to grow your business on the cost side. And the amount of money you spend is not an indicator of your moral advantage or your moral reliability. What you’ve produced as a consequence of the spending is, and as far as I can tell, on the Democrat side, there’s no care whatsoever given to actually seeing whether the infrastructure money can be spent. And now, when I talk this through with many of the moderate Democrats I’m in contact with, we became painfully aware that the infrastructure bill spending was going to be in trouble because there are so many regulations and so much red tape that it’s not even necessarily the case that much of this repair can in fact be done. And I’ve thought for a long time, if we invented automobiles today, no one would be allowed to drive one. Too dangerous, too polluting. You just wouldn’t have the freedom. There’s no way the Americans could build the interstate highway system now. And these big projects of the sort that you’re describing, I don’t think we have the will anymore or the ability to do them because we’ve tangled ourselves up in moral quagmires. I would go a step further. If coffee, alcohol, and tea would be discovered today, you would never find it in the shelves in a supermarket because it would seem to be way too dangerous. And that’s the thing. We are becoming increasingly good in regulating. If you take New York and the Mayor Bloomberg, we can regulate the salt and the sugar out of your Coke and your cheeseburger, but we can no longer build a new bridge. We can no longer actually build an efficient highway system as it was built in the 1960s. I really think we can no longer do this. If you forgive that expression, we can torment the average person with ever-growing regulations at the same time, however, create conditions that those on top escape those regulations. Why do you think that the average American bill, and it’s the same in Europe as well, has 500 pages? Because it’s basically a list of exceptions. So the only person that actually is going to suffer or be affected by that bill is going to be the small family company or the small… There was this great example a couple of years back about a hardware store in California. And what they did is, you mentioned before, so people that came early at eight o’clock, they handed out coffee and donuts. So they put up a box of donuts and a can of coffee. The state of California was harassing them without end because they need a permit. Do they have a kitchen? Are they up to the hygiene standards? Until the hardware owner said, you know what, I wanted to do something nice for my customers, I no longer do it. So in these areas, the state is extremely powerful. But when it comes to other issues, they’re extremely weak. And this is going to be a problem again. I think for all of Western, if you forgive that expression, for all of Western civilization, if we don’t get our stamina back, if we don’t return to the spirit and as well the capacity to get things done, we have a problem. And that I think is the thing also with the Dutch farmers. They say, wait a minute, we actually do something. We produce something. We are the best in potato, which is the case. We have the highest yield per acre worldwide in tomatoes. The highest… Yeah, they should be getting prizes for that. These people should be getting awards. You should find the person who has the highest potato yield per unit of fertilizer used and give him, I don’t know what the equivalent of the Order of Canada is in the Netherlands, but obviously that’s a person who’s a hero in every sense of the word. And what’s also so surprising to me, and that tends to tilt me towards a certain degree of perhaps unwarranted cynicism is that it’s the very people who trumpet their allegiance to the working class and the oppressed who are at the forefront of targeting these excellent avatars of the working class, defined the way you defined it, which is, well, those are the people who like work. And so why don’t you leave them alone or at least get the hell out of their way? No, I would even go a step further. We kind of live in a kind of reverse Marxism at the moment where the working class wants to defend industrialization and the ruling class, right? Those who have capital, the Jeff Bezos and others and nothing against them personally, but they promote the industrialization. So it’s really, it’s a complete reversal of what we would think, right? That the exploited working class will, they will storm the factories and the machines. It’s the other way around. They want to keep the machines. And just to give another example, Germany, like Wille-Röntbosch, right? They make tiles in Germany, like a traditional company. They have been producing in Germany since 1879. They closed down production and moved to Turkey. They said, we can no longer afford with labor costs, energy costs. It’s impossible for us to produce there. But a huge majority of those costs comes from regulation, right? There was this case, last example, but I think this was so telling. During the economic crisis of 2008, 2010, right? Where the workers in factories said, we know this is a hard time, so we are willing to put in the extra hour. We want to see our company remain to be sustained, to succeed. And what happened was that the federal union sued the workers who voluntarily wanted to continue to work. So this is kind of, these are all these cases where we continue to shoot ourselves in our own foot and that is no longer sustainable at some point. And I think this is what the people in Europe feel. Let me give you one last statistic. If you are a 15-year-old Italian now, the expected work life you’re going to have is 35 years. I mean, that’s very much on the lower end for the Denmark, it’s 42. For Austria, it’s 38. But the point is, if you imagine, so we get about, life expectancy is around 80. Out of those 80 years, we’re going to work for, let’s say, 35 years. This is not sustainable under current conditions. And what I believe is, and this is going to be the great unknown, which is why I cannot tell you exactly what’s going to happen. So far in Europe, we haven’t seen a politician capable of channeling that anger, right? Of giving voice to that anger. So whether it’s a Trumpesque figure or whatever you would call it. So we haven’t seen that, but I think the potential is there. So if you have a politician, I believe, that would stand up and say, listen, I cannot promise you to retire at 65 and go to university until 42. These are going to be hard times. But what I can guarantee you is that I will fight tooth and nail for affordable energy, for good public schools, for controlling immigration, right? And I can lead by example. I am convinced that such a politician would have tremendous potential. But we are in this situation where all the potential new politicians come out of the same bubble where the previous politicians were created. So I don’t think they see it yet, which is, again, going back to 2016, which is why for all these absurdities, and I think he grasped it more instinctively than strategically, Donald Trump was successful. I mean, he was absurd, but he was authentic. He spoke to something. He spoke to anger that people felt. And we have very good numbers. For example, the election in Virginia in the fall last year, he mobilizes people that have never gone to the voting booth in their entire life, right? And then this gold toilet possessing too long tie wearing guy comes along. And rural Virginia voters say, yeah, that’s the guy I’m going to give my vote for. And I think we know why that’s the case. Yeah, well, there’s a real opportunity on the both the classic liberal and the small c conservative front right now to make a compelling case for the genuine working class. And to say, you know, we admire your thrift and competence and diligence and conscientiousness. We admire your willingness to make sacrifices for your children. We want you to be richer. If you’re doing so by being productive and generous, we support all that full in a full fledged and whole hearted manner. We don’t want you to be guilty about that because you’re bringing wealth, the wealth to the world that stops people from dying from absolute privation and destroying the environment while doing so. And all of that’s just lying on the table for someone who isn’t a populist and just appealing to resentment to carry forward. And you know, maybe that could happen. We’re trying to hatch plans on that front in a variety of on a variety of in a variety of manners at the moment. And so but I am very, very nervous about the upcoming winter, especially because the Russians, not especially, but in part because the Russians have the control of the taps to Germany. And if I was Putin and pushed into a corner, I wouldn’t hesitate to use that for a second. That’s a much preferable alternative to nuclear weapons and also one that’s much more morally justifiable. Not that it’s morally justifiable, but it’s more morally justifiable. And it’s not like he doesn’t have devastating economic weapons at his disposal. No, I think I think you’re right. I mean, this is exactly the point that many people now talk in the in the pundit class about the decolonization at the breakup of the Russian Federation. And and what are we going to do once this with Russia once this war is over? I’m more concerned about the European Union. I’m not sure exactly what you describe. I’m not sure if the if the worst should happen, right? Can the worst case scenario will kind of complete gas stop, right? You know, breakdown of the industry, the things this the the European Union is not going to survive this. Yeah. So on the European Union front, you said that there’s lots of pundits who are prognosticating the breakup of the Russian Federation, say in the demise of the Putin administration. But there’s every bit of evidence to suggest that the first thing to crack and break might be the European Union. Italy and Greece and Spain can’t tolerate the economic pressure, especially if things start to go sideways. That one thing that you mentioned at the beginning, right, kind of was the worst case scenarios for the fall, particularly in relation to Russian gas. And I think this is what we see now unfolding is that the unity of Europe is not as much as we thought it was. They could kick down the can down the road with the economic crisis because the ECP could just print money. So you kind of could gloss over the potential problems and effects for a majority of the people. But if Russia is really, you know, reducing gas to zero, right, we talk about jobs lost in industry, people unable to heat their homes. We talk about, you know, repercussions that will have effects on every single person living within the European Union. And then countries will immediately to start to look for alternatives, which we already see. Spain has said we have, you know, LNG ports, we can import liquid, liquefied natural gas. We’re going to do this and we’re going to use it for the Spanish people. Another quick example, the foreign minister of Hungary, right, I think otherwise a very impressive man just two days ago traveled to to Moscow and met with the Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in order to ensure that Hungary will continue to get gas. Now, currently, he’s very much scolded, which I understand. But the thing is, what Hungary is doing, sooner or later, other countries will follow suit. And by the way, most European countries still export tons of fossil fuels from coal to oil to gas from Russia. So if they really cut it to zero, significantly restricted. I think that that is a lethal threat to the to the European Union and to the European project. And the fact that this is barely talked about, I find very disconcerting. Yeah, well, I it’s I think the reason it’s barely talked about is because it’s the logical, inevitable consequence of this idiot moral posturing that’s been going on for 15 years. And it is indicative of a degree of blindness that is almost miraculous in its totality. I mean, how in the world could you possibly think that making your energy grid non resilient and then relying on the Russians was a reasonable move forward? And this is independent in some sense of whether you have good relations with the Russians. And how could you possibly think that making energy more expensive was going to be good for the planet when it devastates poor people, especially when you’re also purporting to care above all for the poor and oppressed. Like this is so utterly preposterous and so backwards that it couldn’t in some ways it couldn’t be we couldn’t be do more damage to ourselves in some sense if we were trying. And, you know, Bjorn just sort of casually mentioned that this is no slur on Bjorn, that’s for sure. But it was an aside that, well, it’s probably a billion, 1.2 billion people that are going to be going hungry this fall. It’s like, what? What? In a world where there could be enough food to make everyone fat, as we’ve seen happening over the last two decades, we’re actually going to enter a period where mass starvation is a thing again. And so, and we’re doing that because we’re, we’re being moral and we’re trying to save the planet. That’s really, that’s really what you think. That’s really how you think the evidence is laying itself out. Well, obviously the Dutch farmers and these sensible working class types, they know that something’s up. They know that the jig is up, you know, and I don’t know if you know this, but these protests are receiving almost no coverage in places like Canada. Our national newscaster just won’t talk about it at all. And it’s because they know, I think in some real sense, that this is the death knoll for the utopian globalist agenda. And this is happening the same week that Trudeau has announced that he’s going to force the farmers because he likes force, because of course he’s saving the planet and force is justifiable. He’s going to force the Canadian farmers into exactly the same conundrum that he’s, that the Dutch government is forcing the Dutch farmers into. And, you know, I know farmers in Canada and they’re not the backwoods rubes that intellectual elites like to presume they are. These people use satellite technology. They know to the square foot where the fertilizer in their land is going. They’re really motivated to reduce fertilizer use because it’s expensive. And so they want to target it as carefully as possible, but instead of working with them and talking with them and meeting with them with a degree of respect that’s clearly earned and deserved, the government just says, well, you guys could be doing a better job. It’s like, well, we’re doing the best job of anybody in the world. That’s particularly true in Holland, but Canada would be a close, well, it’d be in the top 10. This is, I think, the point you made, I mean, there’s one thing we probably have to keep this for another day, but I think that’s something that also needs more to discuss. We have a problem here and I think this is from which this all flows in the educational system as well. It’s in academia, but also already in schools, right? We kind of start to marinate young people in a sense of, not just a rejection of modernity, but also in a sense of historical self-hate. And I think this is the problem. So there is, sometimes I feel, and we touched upon this a little bit with Björn as well, but I really feel sometimes there is this idea that’s particularly strong in Germany, the Germans always have a thing for ideology, but it’s a particularly strong sense. And guilt. And yes, right. And this is exactly the thing now. I think that they say, no, we’re going to atone for our past and we’re going to sacrifice the future for it, right? So at some sense that the pain is not a bug, but it’s a feature, right? Now that I’m exaggerating here for dramatic effect, but it is, you know, now we suffer, so now we can atone for our sins of the past. And you can do this, but as I said, it’s probably going to cost you at some point your future. Well, that’s self-flagellation instead of proper atonement. And proper atonement is, well, we’re going to take stock of the catastrophes of the past and our oppressive use of power, and we’re going to do better. And I mean, part of the thing that I’ve been trying to do while I’ve been touring around is asking people, individuals to try to do better, because that’s the best thing to do is to bear your responsibility and to bear your privilege too, you know, is that we are privileged here in the West. And the way we atone for that is by being people whose lives justify our provision of resources and our God-given talents. And that’s the only way forward. And these false sacrifices, they’re for show, they’re like praying in public, to use a gospel metaphor. It’s like, well, don’t pray in public, just get your life together and be productive and generous and kind and work towards life more abundant and stop elevating your moral status inappropriately with your blind ignorance and your moral pretensions, especially at the cost of the actual poor, which is what we’re doing now. No, and allow me to make one last point on this, because exactly what you said, this is maybe why we should, should I know that you’re also a huge fan of Russian literature, right? Why people should read particularly in this respect Tolstoy again. I think we need to allow people, and I think this is what the working class wants, but you can find satisfaction, you can find a fulfilling life in being a farmer, being a good husband, being a mother, all these kinds of things. It doesn’t always have to be saving the world. I mean, also psychologically, I mean, we take 18 year olds and that is how you save the world. Precisely, right? One community at a time. But now we take 18 year olds and we tell them, you know, the world is going to end. The only people who can change it is you. No wonder that we have, you know, such high degrees of attempted suicide and depression and these kind of things. I think what we’re doing to young people as well as a consequence of this. Well, and we’re telling them that not only can they change the world and save the world, but they should do it now that they’re wiser than their elders, which they definitely are not. And that the best way to change the world and to save it is by stopping the bad people from doing what they’re doing. And so it’s a pandering, it’s a pandering of the worst sort. And it’s certainly the case that the intellectual class bears first and foremost, the responsibility for that occurring. And it’s also sometimes it also has almost a ridiculous, I find, element. If you think about and again, I hold no grudge against Greta Thunberg. I think, you know, that she has achieved quite a lot. But if you saw these pictures at the UN and other meetings, right, where mostly men in their mid fifties were kind of fawning over her and they wanted pictures taken with her. I just think, you know, that for me is not serious. Right. I mean, again, as you said with Bjorn, right. I mean, talk to the scientists, talk to the people that actual solutions, but don’t look for it for, you know, a good photo op. Right. I mean, I like Greta Thunberg, I like Amr Schwarzenegger, I like all these people, but I’m not entirely sure to what extent I would take my moral cues from them. Well, certainly not at a practical level. You know, I mean, these problems are extremely difficult. You know, if you want to do something like build a more effective sewage plant and who wouldn’t want that, then you talk to the engineers who know how to build sewage plants. These things have to be brought down to the level of painstaking detail. And that requires a lot of time and effort, like the time and effort the Democrats would have had to put in, for example, to track their infrastructure spending. Right. And that’s something you do if you’re knowledgeable and you’ve done a bathroom renovation. You know how a construction project can get out of control instantly and doesn’t, if you’re not paying attention to every detail. And the working class people, they’re the ones who are paying attention to the details, right. They’re making sure that their laces are tied and that the rubber hits the road and that the vehicles are maintained and they have that pragmatic knowledge of how the world works, that the elite use when they fly off into their into their utopian towers of Babel. So, well, Ralph, we should probably call it a day, I guess. That was a good discussion and congratulations on the work you’ve been doing. It’s extremely important. Thank you so much. I hope that I hope that this helps you bring your coverage of the emerging European protests seen to a much broader audience and helps clue people into the fact that these are not simple misogynists and racists and bigots as they were described in Canada, but unbelievably sophisticated, hardworking and people who have excellent businesses in the highest sense, who have been driven to desperation by the idiot machinations of their utopian masters. So really good to meet you and I hope we get a chance to meet in person.