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Oct. 17, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
45:43
Delingpod 41: Mike Shellenberger
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Welcome to the Dellingpod and the Dellingvid, indeed, with me, James Dellingpod.
And I know I always say this, but I can't tell you how excited I am about this week's guest.
I've been dying for ages to have him on the show because he is, like me, a genuine environmentalist.
His name is Mike Schellenberger.
Welcome to the show, Mike.
Thanks for having me.
It really is interesting, actually, your career trajectory.
Because you started out as, I imagine, the kind of ardent greenie who would really have hated my guts.
I don't know whether you're even aware of me, but as a young man, you were an absolute mad keen environmental activist, weren't you?
I still am an environmental activist.
And, you know, I think the one difference that I'll say that I was never a Malthusian, meaning I never thought that there were too many people in the world.
And that was in part because I was a socialist.
I was a, you know, a young radical.
I went to work with the Sandinistas when I was in high school.
Did you?
Alright.
Yeah, so your book is obviously spot on.
I think there's some interesting...
But you mean watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside.
I mean, in some ways, I was a watermelon.
I think there's parts of me that probably still are.
But I never thought that there was too many people.
I never had that Malthusian view because I think I had...
You remember Marx and Engels hated Malthus.
So I think one of the most interesting things about...
What we call environmentalism, mainstream environmentalism, is the marriage of what used to be called socialism and what used to be called Malthusianism.
That's a very nice point you make there, and it's one that Brendan O'Neill, who considers himself a bit of a Marx fan, points out that Marx actually would not have liked the modern environmental movement because it is essentially a kind of conspiracy against the workers.
What happened with me a little bit, because you want to know how my views changed, is I was attracted to the romance of small farmer collectives.
That starts in Nicaragua, and then I go to the semi-Amazon.
I was doing my PhD in the Amazon.
live in the farm anymore.
They wanted to go to the city, get an education, get a job.
And so in terms of my red pill moment, it was like, oh, actually people want to live like moderns.
They want to have bourgeois lifestyle.
You know, and Marx said, he said, the great thing about capitalism is that it rescues people from the idiocy of country life.
He wasn't...
My mom's side of the family is always from the farm.
I mean, there's parts of farm life that I absolutely love.
You grew up on the farm?
No, I didn't.
But my mom's family was...
My mom's from the farm, and so we would go back and visit.
But it's the stuff that we all love about the farm, is the peacefulness, the quiet, the great food, the fresh food.
But yeah, it doesn't offer the excitement of modernity.
And so I think it was finally going, okay, modernity's not so bad, you know?
And people are voting with their feet.
More people live in cities than live in the country now in the world.
So that's sort of how I started to change.
I think what you're talking about there is very interesting because I think that the modern environmental movement, the kind of people who are protesting today with Extinction Rebellion, for example, think they have a monopoly on the love of nature.
And the world divides into nature lovers and people who understand the beauty and tranquility and honesty of the country life and farms and so on.
And then there are hateful capitalists who want to destroy nature, who don't understand the environment.
And it's so not like that.
I'm like you.
I... Absolutely love the rural idyll.
I live in the country now.
I've always been a nature boy.
I love wild swimming.
I love identifying tree species, animals.
I used to golf with my father as a child, collecting reptiles and amphibians around the world.
So when I find that these...
These greenies caricature me as some kind of cigar-chomping capitalist purveyor of evil in the pay of big oil.
I think you really don't know.
And it's so good meeting you and realising that here is somebody who was unequivocally part of the green movement, who has now changed.
So it was that PhD, was it, that you were doing, that changed you when you met real people who wanted to get out of the...
I mean, it took a bunch, right?
It wasn't just that.
It was that, and then I decided to leave my PhD program because I knew that writing a dissertation wasn't going to help anybody.
And I wanted to do political work, so I went back to the Bay Area, mid-'90s, got involved in a campaign against Nike for their factory conditions abroad, juvenile justice stuff, drug decriminalization.
I helped save the last ancient redwoods of California.
It was really around when we came to climate change that when we started looking at the climate issue, which I was concerned about, it was clear that everything that people were proposing to deal with it wouldn't work, just at a technological level, and that every time I would read about it, I would get depressed.
And so you kind of go, well, wait a second.
And meanwhile, we were looking at a bunch of social science research showing that it really alienated a bunch of people.
So it's kind of like, well, so what's going on here if the politics of climate are so alienating to most people, or let's say at least half, And if you need to get some kind of majority to succeed with any legislation, why are environmentalists continuing to pursue this?
And that was when we wrote this essay in 2004 called The Death of Environmentalism, which said it has to do with thinking that some things are part of the environment, but other things not.
And the way that we environmentalists were classifying things Excluding workers, for example, from their category of the environment actually was the reason why environmentalism was so unsuccessful on its own goals.
Isn't the real problem, if there is one single problem with the environmental movement, that It's quintessentially misanthropic.
They think the planet is this wonderful thing, if only the...
Well, the Earth has a cancer, the cancer is man, as one of their formative documents said.
Yeah.
Yeah, and of course, but even there it's complicated, right?
Because, you know, it's misanthropic usually against particular groups of people, not against all people.
And so you see...
Traditionally, in the 60s, the Malthusian misanthropy was aimed more at poor Africans, poor Asians.
They were worried about the population explosion in poor countries, even though they consumed far less resources.
Harrison Brown.
I mean, it's extraordinary reading that book.
It was written in the 1950s, I think.
Yes.
And he talks about the planet kind of crawling with this...
He clearly sees people in the third world as vermin.
Right.
So it's a dehumanizing rhetoric.
Yeah.
That's the first thing.
And by the way, you see it earlier in Vogt and Osborne both had books in 1946.
So you see really coming...
It really starts after World War II, where I think...
I think there's a bunch of stuff behind it.
Certainly one of the things behind it, I think, is rich people in rich countries who are misanthropic being afraid of the rise of the rest, of the development aspirations of poor countries.
And there were environmental consequences, obviously, but also there's something, I think, more sinister there, which is, I think, a desire to keep people down.
And that's the part I think that you and I both see as so troubling in so much of the climate.
Apocalyptic discourses that's being used as a way to, what I point out in my recent article, it's a way to deprive Africans of cheap electricity.
By the way, including from hydro and nuclear, which are zero emissions, but also natural gas.
So we see like Norway is participating in an EU effort to prevent African countries from getting development aid for natural gas-powered plants, even though these are all countries that have made their wealth off of oil and gas.
Yeah, you wrote this very good piece, didn't you, in Quiet, which you're referring to.
And you mentioned the World Bank, which...
It's the organisation which is supposed to fund infrastructure projects in the developing world, and it will not fund, will not finance any project which involves conventional energy.
It might build a few wind turbines in the Congo, but that's not what Yes.
These people need.
Well, this is exactly right.
And in fact, I've been writing about the Congo.
I went to the Congo in 2014.
And there's all this uproar that there might be oil drilling in a park in the Congo.
Oh, in the Virunga.
In the Virunga.
Yeah.
But when you look at the history of what's actually gone down there, the killing of, I think it was a group of gorillas.
We saw one of the orphaned gorillas.
But this killing of these gorillas was done by people involved in the charcoal trade.
So the threat to the gorillas...
And it was a revenge killing that had to do with a dispute over corruption.
They'd been paying the park director to let them make charcoal in the park, and then he reneged on it under pressure from the Europeans.
Long story short, the real threat to wildlife in Africa and around the world is wood fuel.
So the alternative to wood fuel is LPG in almost every part of the world.
We know from India that when you subsidize LPG for poor people in the Himalayas, the forests grow back because they don't have to use them for fuel.
So from my view, I am, I think, probably a little more concerned about climate change than you are.
In my view, the biggest environmental threat in the world is the continued use of wood fuel.
I've had that view for almost a decade now.
I've been focused on nuclear, but if you push me on it, I go, I would like to do more on that issue.
There's some challenge.
Have you been to Udaipur in India?
I haven't.
Udaipur is this...
Must have been an incredible place.
It's the place with the lake hotel in the middle of the lake, featured on James Bond movies.
You go there now, there is no vegetation surrounded it.
Not so long ago, maybe 20 years ago, you used to have big cats coming out of the undergrowth into the town.
It used to be on the edge of the jungle.
It's now been completely deforested.
I'm sure it's had...
I'm glad you mentioned that, because that was the subject of a WWF campaign.
And I'm sure that even now, if you Googled it, the only information you would get in the search would be, oil companies are responsible for the deaths of the guerrillas.
The Green Movement does not care about facts, it cares about the narrative.
Yeah, I mean, yes.
And doesn't that depress you?
I mean, given that there are so many...
This is what boils my piss, frankly.
There are so many really, really important environmental problems that matter in the world, that need addressing, ranging from the plight of the chalk streams in the UK, which are being destroyed by water companies just going down into the water table, to gorillas being killed not by big oil, but by charcoal burners, to overfishing.
Yep.
All these things, and we're focusing on what?
Yeah, absolutely.
And we were just in New Zealand, had an extraordinary wildlife experience seeing the penguins.
The yellow-eyed penguins are really in danger.
There's only a few hundred of them left.
What are the big factors?
Lack of habitat from the expansion of pasture land, which people fly over and they see as natural, and the overfishing.
And then, of course, they kind of go, well, it might be some climate change effects, too, with warmer waters.
I'm like, well, but how does that even measure compared to the fact there's not enough habitat for them and there's not enough food?
So I totally agree.
Climate has just—that's why I think it's not about the— What we're really dealing with here is a kind of political reaction.
I think people see Brexit and Trump as apocalyptic, and so it displaces itself psychologically onto climate change, which had already been framed as apocalyptic.
But anyway, your point is well taken.
It's basically like an argument with your wife.
It's never about what it's supposed to be about, because...
We displace it.
We displace it.
We scapegoat.
That's right.
Yeah.
Do you find yourself, as a kind of the Benedict Arnold of the Green Movement, do you find yourself being despised even more than you would have done if you're like me, whereas you've always been a hate figure?
You know, it's hard to know.
I mean, I've been so up and down in the environmental movement over the last, because I've been, you know, certainly kind of a public figure for 15 years.
You know, we've changed a lot of minds on nuclear.
I mean, that's part of it.
I mean, we've organized climate scientists.
Climate scientists are more active on defending nuclear plants than they are on any other issue right now.
Conservation scientists are amazingly pro-nuclear because they understand that it has the smallest land footprint.
They hate wind turbines because of the devastation they're wrecking on wildlife, in particular birds and bats.
Can we talk about that while we remember it?
Because there's so much stuff I want to talk to you about.
We could sit here for five hours.
I mean, you are like my dream date, actually, Mike.
Seriously.
I don't want Douglas to get jealous.
I know that he might fix me with his fierce blue eyes, but You're pretty good.
I got really upset reading your article about why renewables are bad for the environment.
And you were talking about the desert tortoises being ripped out of their burrows and transported on trucks to be put in pens where they die.
And you kind of think, this is being done in the name of the environment.
The desert...
Parts of the desert in the US have been ruined, haven't they, by wind turbines or solar...
It's certainly under threat.
I mean, that article you referred to, I talk about how I was raised truly as an environmentalist, and when you're raised as an environmentalist or a conservationist, your parents teach you to see nature where other people don't see it.
And the classic place is the desert.
You go to the desert and you go, there's nothing here.
It's alive with wildlife.
And particularly in California, we have the California desert tortoise, which is this ancient reptile that can live to be very old.
They're these incredible animals.
And in order to build that solar farm that you're referring to, yeah, they literally had to pull them out of their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, and take them to be penned up.
But that's the least of it.
I mean, we're going to have a report coming out in a couple of months that...
Because I had a bunch of people that were like, come on, Michael, you're exaggerating.
You just like nuclear.
You don't like renewables.
What kind of a threat is it, really?
So we said, well, let's go take a look at the science.
Coming out with a report that identifies several important species, including the whooping crane, the hoary bat.
You know, the red kite in Germany is a rapture species, seriously threatened by wind turbines.
Actually, we've got loads over here.
I'm not worried about the red kite.
I am worried about the hoary bat.
I am worried about, I think, a species of eagle, is it?
I think in Tasmania has come close to being wiped out by wind turbines.
Now, this...
Why aren't the greenies more angry about this stuff?
Well, I mean, nobody's more alienated from nature than environmentalists in many ways, right?
I mean, so you have people that are basically people in cities, they're not country people...
Yeah.
You know, they might go for vacation somewhere, but they're really out of touch.
And so I'll explain to people, I kind of go, look, you know, wind turbines are literally in the air shed.
We have insect declines in Germany.
A big report came out in Germany suggesting that insect declines are due to wind turbines.
Yeah.
And that seems far-fetched to people that love renewables.
It only seems far-fetched to you because you have no clue as to how it works.
Insects travel in wind spaces.
The birds and the bats chase them.
Birds and bats use wind energy flows as their habitat and as ways to move around.
So the idea that you could put these large spinning blenders in the sky at that same level that they fly and not have significant impacts is ridiculous.
So, yeah, I mean, I think it's that.
And then also, remember, you know, I've documented, I've written about it, you wrote about it, which is that the love of renewables was the goal.
It wasn't a means to an end.
It was the goal was to harmonize human civilization with natural energy flows.
Yeah, the wind is free.
Nature's bounty.
Let's harnest.
And it was also, remember, it was a way to restrict, then, human civilization and human growth aspiration.
So I refer to Heidegger, Heidegger's this famous German philosopher, maybe the most influential German philosopher of the 20th century.
He writes in 1953 in his famous essay, Question of Technology, that we should rely on unreliable renewables.
He criticizes hydroelectric dams because it allows reliability.
That's your question.
Oh, right.
He said we want to rely on unreliable energy flows so that civilization is basically harmonized into the natural environment.
So I wrote this essay that was called The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization is because they were never meant to.
They were meant to take us back to a pre-modern civilization, and that's the problem, is that people don't want to go back.
Yes.
Whenever I write one of my screeds on just how evil and environmentally damaging renewables are, The Greenies have these series of pat answers, one of which is that they genuinely seem to be so deluded they imagine that birds can somehow evolve Or develop a new kind of way of thinking to avoid these blades and that somehow soon,
just around the corner, is this new technology which enables wind turbine blades not to kill birds.
Right.
But the other one they come up with is about cats.
And they point out that, yeah, cats kill billions, allegedly.
I mean, I don't know how they do the research on this.
But cats kill lots of birds, therefore it doesn't matter that wind turbines kill birds.
Well, and the birds they're talking about are non-endangered small birds, sparrows, robins, starlings, which are not endangered.
In fact, often those are the birds that threaten the endangered species.
Starlings are terrible.
So the wind turbines are killing large, endangered, high conservation value birds, hawks, eagles, raptors, whooping cranes is one of the species we're looking at in Nebraska.
Yeah.
I mean, I think what's interesting too is how flexible dark green ideology is to justifying itself in different circumstances.
So I wrote a piece about how everyone was up in arms about the Amazon.
Amazon's on fire.
It's terrible, all of this clearing of the Amazon for cattle pastures.
And I wrote about how Giselle Bündchen, who's this world-famous supermodel, flies over the Amazon, which has been converted into cattle pastures with the head of Greenpeace, and she starts to cry at the destruction of the forest.
Well, if you look down, and they show it looking down, It looks like Provence, France.
It looks like Napa, California.
So I asked, does she cry when she flies over Napa, which used to be forested, and Provence or Germany?
Well, no.
You vacation there.
It's called agriturismo.
That's where environmentalists go to have their conferences to worry about the Amazon or on former forested lands that are now turned into pasture.
But when it's in the Amazon, it's somehow this desecration of Eden.
And of course, it's just a fact that they have no sense of history.
But it shows that, like, on the one hand, they decry the pastoralization of rainforests.
On the other hand, they actually romanticize the French countryside, the California countryside, as natural.
When, of course, it's anything other than that.
Yeah, so how are we going to win this battle when we have the other side which is so...
Intransigent and worse, immune to facts.
I mean, look, I'd be perfectly okay with these people if I could just go up to them and say, look, here's the evidence that you are killing birds and bats.
Here's the evidence that this is what human beings do and we're not going to go away any time soon.
How do we counter this kind of enemy which doesn't care about these things?
For me, that's part of the reason I like to focus on some specific things in particular.
So if you really care about climate change, you should be in favor of nuclear.
And if you're anti-nuclear, then you've just revealed that you've got a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with climate change.
Or that you don't know the facts about nuclear?
You don't know the facts, but most people at this point, I mean, I think there's some people that think it produces emissions, but most people now know.
Certainly in Britain and the United States, they know.
And then you kind of go, what about the Amazon?
Well, in the Amazon, we've pursued this strategy which has encouraged fragmentation and extensification, meaning that Greenpeace demanded that landowners set aside 80% of their land and only farm on 20%.
Well, the consequence is that you end up with this patchwork quilt of farms, which you need for big cats.
Like you mentioned, big wildlife species.
You need contiguous habitat.
So if you care about habitat, you should concentrate agricultural production and intensify it.
More food on less land.
And anything you're doing...
That doesn't result in more food on less land is not serious about conservation.
And then the third one that I always point to is just wood fuel.
If you care at all about humans and the environment, then we should just make it as a goal for our species to liberate the rest of us, the billion or two billion people that still rely on wood or charcoal for their main source of energy, They should have LPG. Don't give them just a solar panel, because a solar panel doesn't work at night when people cook.
It's not good for cooking, by the way, either.
And don't just give them a cook stove.
We need to liberate people from wood.
Wood is an oppressive fuel.
Oh, but you know what they'll say?
They'll say, yeah, but battery storage is just around the corner.
Yeah, this is the ways in which I think that the dark green ideology is so flexible.
There's always coming up with a response, a justification for why people should stay poor.
Yeah.
And I think pointing to that is, right, you know, I think it is important for you to explain to people that you love nature and that you care about the natural environment.
I think people do need to hear that.
We need to ground, I think, what we're doing in some common values and some common goals.
Yeah.
I think some of this is also just, you know, you've been working on this a long time and working on a long time, you know, 20, 25 years for me, and you see these waves, you know, where there's moments of just pure hysteria.
Look where we are now, with Greta.
Let's talk about Greta.
Well, I mean, the first thing that you have to think about, for me with Greta, the first thing you go is, we just did this exact same thing with Al Gore.
You remember, like, literally, like, identical, like, she's going to win the Nobel Prize, right?
I'm sure you agree.
Right?
She's a lock-in to win the Nobel Prize.
They gave the Nobel Prize to Al Gore.
Did anything change from that?
Yeah, he got a lot richer.
Yeah.
Yeah, he sold his television show to an Arab oil empire.
Television shows, television channel.
Yeah, and so I think it's interesting if you read it symbolically, you kind of go, well, I think these are two people that in some ways are seeking revenge.
Al Gore was seeking revenge for his defeat to George W. Bush.
Greta is, I think, seeking revenge on the society for, I think, having felt depressed, mistreated.
She says she was depressed.
So you kind of go...
I think what's interesting is not...
I mean, people want to get into Greta's head.
Which is interesting.
But I think more interesting is, what is it that she is speaking to in the European public in particular?
I mean, she's big in California, too.
But she's clearly appealing to some deep need that people have.
What is that?
Some of it's this apocalyptic desire.
But I think clearly there's something that people...
They want a child.
They want a young person to follow.
And I think there's a lot of symbolism in that.
I haven't completely figured it out, but...
Okay, yeah.
Maybe she's like the judge child in Judge Dredd.
You wouldn't have read Judge Dredd, but there is this evil, this child that becomes like, well, he's evil.
Isn't she Joan of Arc for you guys?
She is like Joan of Arc.
She's very much like Joan of Arc.
So Joan of Arc led an army, right?
I saw Zizek, the Marxist philosopher, I saw him do a little thing about Greta.
Yeah, the unintelligible Marxist.
But he loves Greta, of course.
But what he loves about her is the aggression.
In other words, isn't it the particular mix of, here's an innocent young girl, but she's so aggressive.
I mean, if you watched her speech, her recent speech in New York at the UN, what struck me was just how intense it was.
I mean, I was like, whoa!
Wow!
So much anger!
You're one of the wealthiest people in the world.
One of the things on Twitter I thought was interesting was somebody puts together photos of 20 kids from around the world and all 19 of the kids, there's Greta at the bottom, but all 19 of the kids are working.
They're in the factory or they're in the farm or they're doing some work.
The tweet was something like, which of these kids is attacking adults for robbing their future?
Here's the wealthiest child, one of the most privileged existents.
They're the angry ones?
What about the kids on the farm in India that don't get to go to school because they have to make dung patties or get the harvest out?
Why is Europe elevating Greta as this hero rather than some kid trying to add child labour.
You're right.
She's got very wealthy parents.
She lacks for nothing.
Now she's got a career made, all those kind of virtue signalling billionaires who want to sponsor her.
Actually, just a sidetrack.
I want to come back to Greta, but...
If you're a billionaire and you've made it and you want to kind of show that you're not a bad person, really, despite having benefited from the exploitative capitalist system, what do you do?
Probably the first thing you do is you join the Nature Conservancy, which people don't know about over here, but it's huge, isn't it, in the US? Oh, yeah.
Or you join the Sierra Club.
All these environmental organisations have bought wholesale into the green narrative, whereas I think they should be supporting people like you.
Do you...
Do you have any ability to penetrate the kind of the liberal left billionaire sector?
The short answer is no.
I mean, we're very small.
I mean, so I think one thing about us is that, you know, so we don't take any corporate money, any industry money, you know, including nothing from the nuclear industry, a very small number of high-tech funders, which we love because it keeps us independent, allows us to come to our own conclusions.
I mean, honestly, I'm not even sure what we would...
I mean, like, you know, what would you do with all that additional money?
I mean, for us, it's been a search for the truth about why are people so afraid of nuclear?
Why do people want to keep people poor and stuck in poverty?
And we don't need huge sums of money to answer those questions.
You know, I mean, I think there's...
I mean, what I worry about with the Greta phenomenon in particular...
Well brought back, by the way, nicely.
You know, because I think my kids, my friends, they kind of go, what do you think is so wrong about that?
You know, she's raising concern about an issue that even you think is important...
And there's sort of, I think on the one hand we go, well, she's anti-nuclear, by the way, so obviously she's not actually pursuing solutions.
But the sort of the anger, the kind of sense of resentment, and the lack of gratitude and awareness of her wealth and privilege and some appreciation of that.
And I was telling my colleagues, I was like, I would love to take Greta to the Congo with me.
And meet people in the Congo and kind of say, you know, look, this is the future that you say you fear.
But these people need cheap, abundant energy in order to survive the climate change that you fear.
They need cheap, abundant energy to survive the weather now.
I mean, it floods...
The place we went to, it floods every year and people's homes are flooded and there's water everywhere.
The IPCC says there'll be three and a half inches more potential flooding.
That's the difference between one and a half and two degrees.
Well, we're talking about several feet of flooding every year.
What are we going to do for these people right now?
Why is the concern?
And is the concern for yourself in the future?
Because I think Sweden and Netherlands and these rich countries are going to be fine.
You say you're concerned about these poor African countries, but you never go there.
I mean, you were here.
There was a big movement for African development aid in the, what was it, the 90s, the early 2000s with Bono?
Yes.
So that was a big fad.
Oxfam was a big deal.
There was Bob Geldof, of course.
That was before that.
That was in the 80s, right?
Yeah, that was in the 80s.
But that's all gone now, right?
But the people that are out here protesting for Extinction Rebellion would have been in the streets in the early 2000s for African development aid.
It's almost like they kind of figured out that was a really difficult problem to solve, and so then they moved on to an even more difficult problem to solve.
Yeah.
As you say, it completely goes in waves.
It's what's fashionable.
What's interesting is that the African development movement was not apocalyptic.
In other words, it did not say, if we don't increase development aid for Africa, the end of the world is coming.
What you can hear is this apocalyptic view that the world is going to come to an end.
In 12 years or 10 years, it's always very precise.
But I think it has to do with the sense that Brexit and Trump are the end of the world, and so then it displaces itself.
Well, that's right.
You were saying, very interestingly, that for the Democrats, climate change is now the number one issue for Democratic primary voters.
Which is extraordinary.
Extraordinary.
Whereas I imagine for Republican voters, it's like barely on the map.
Oh yeah, no.
And there used not to be this division between Democrats and Republicans.
It grew way wider, yeah.
I'm sure in the 80s, it was fairly similar.
They were both concerned but not obsessed.
Yeah.
I mean, and even here, it was George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher.
They said climate change is this 100-year problem, not a 10-year problem, and we're going to solve it with nuclear power plants.
Right.
We're going to solve it by phasing out coal with gas, and then we're going to have nuclear power plants.
And then the left said, no, no, it's going to be by becoming poorer and using unreliable renewables.
And at that point, I think the conservative movement was like, no, we didn't sign up for poverty, right?
I mean, I think that was, I think, part of it.
And then the left goes, why are you denying climate change?
It's kind of like, well, because you were saying that we were going to have to live in poverty and rely on bird blenders as our main source of energy, right?
I'll come back to the politics point, but there was one thing I thought of, which is that one of the most common mantras of the Green Movement is the notion of future generations.
But what's very clear from what you've been saying and what I've been reading on...
It's that the future generations they care about are white, Western future generations, because if they gave a damn about brown-skinned generations and yellow-skinned future generations in the developing world, they would be doing the opposite of what they're doing.
Well, and this is where it gets slippery again, right?
Because if you press somebody out, they'll say, oh, no, no, no, of course I'm most worried about people in developing countries.
And it's like, well, but then why wouldn't you support the cheapest form of energy for them?
And then they slip that right back and they go, well, because that would be the end of the world for them to use fossil fuels.
And you go, what about hydro?
Which, of course, the World Bank is not funding.
The Western countries are not funding hydro.
In fact, they stopped funding hydro and nuclear a long time ago.
So clearly you had a much more overt racist Malthusian agenda in the 60s.
Yeah.
That now then becomes something that's dressed up as benevolent.
It kind of wears the clothing of development and progress, but actually ends up denying, you know, seeking to deny those countries the basic civilizational necessity of cheap energy.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think the fact that climate change Whatever that means, because, I mean, obviously the climate changes, but they don't mean it like that.
They mean man-made climate change and all the baggage that goes with it.
The fact that it has suddenly become such a major issue for Democrat voters and also such a major issue in Brexit Britain suggests to me that this is not about the environment, it's about politics.
I think I would probably agree with that.
Yeah, absolutely.
I predict that in five years, probably not ten, but probably five, maybe even sooner, it will become a less important issue.
If a Democrat becomes elected in 2020, I don't think it's going to be as big of an issue as it is now.
Pray God that doesn't happen.
We shall see.
But either way, I just think it's...
So we're dealing with it some momentarily, but also, I think, historically.
I mean, I do think this has become a more important issue for the left.
Like you said, it's really displaced all of the other big environmental issues that people used to care about.
And that's troubling for me.
By the way, I can't get a handle on your politics.
I know that you started off as a kind of lefty.
Lifelong Democrat, yeah.
Are you still a Democrat?
I am still a Democrat.
It's difficult when my party is taking wrong positions on a number of issues that I care about.
Like everything?
Yeah.
Not everything, but yeah, I mean, but you know, look, we've made some progress with Democrats too.
We've had probably half our Democratic presidential candidates are now pro-nuclear.
But it's hard when our front-running presidential candidate now appears to be Elizabeth Warren and she says she wants to shut down our nuclear plants.
And so, yeah, it makes it hard to be a Democrat.
So, hang on a second.
So, do you share extinction rebellions, for example, war on capitalism?
Do you think capitalism is a problem?
Well, I think that raises the question of what is capitalism, doesn't it?
Well, okay.
But if you say modernity, I'm pro-modernity.
Right.
I'm pro-progress.
That's what it used to mean to be a pro-progressive.
Are you pro-free markets?
Well, that's a very interesting question.
Are there real free markets?
You know, I mean, in what?
For example, you don't have a free market in healthcare.
You have a single-payer system in Britain.
Oh, totally.
Which I bet you're in favor of, right?
If you want to get me on to the NHS, I'd say it's a completely failed socialistic model.
Whereas we have a bunch of our people that are not covered by health care, and it's a huge problem.
And that would bother me as well.
I mean, you know, so people go, you know, what is socialism?
Well, France and Sweden, which are the two countries of the cleanest electricity supply, French electricity is ten times bigger than Germany.
Through anomalies of history.
Through hydro and nuclear, but they're state-owned companies and much of the world has.
So basically you have large parts of the economy in the rich world that have been socialized.
Healthcare and electricity production.
Does it need to be that way everywhere?
Look, it's not a fight I would take on in the United States.
We have mostly private...
We have a fair number of publicly owned utilities, but some private...
On healthcare, I would like to see everybody have...
A very basic level of insurance, because I think it can be very expensive to have a full program.
But for me, just being like the question of like, are you pro-capitalism or anti-capitalism?
Are you pro-free markets?
It doesn't really illuminate anything.
So it's always like, what are we talking about?
Also, we need three other podcasts to discuss this thing, where we can talk about the Singapore healthcare funding model, et cetera, et cetera.
And we haven't got time for that.
I think, in a way, you answered my question By saying you want economic growth?
I want economic growth, absolutely.
Of course.
Because how could you not?
There seems to be a sort of woeful misunderstanding of the notion of prosperity.
I think every parent, you're a parent, I'm a parent, wants their children to have a better life.
If that is your base premise, then you cannot be against economic growth.
And afford a home, for example.
In the United States, home ownership is really important for wealth creation, right?
People that own their own homes order a magnitude more wealth than people that just rent.
So if you want that, you have to have economic growth.
Of course, of course.
How you achieve that sometimes, I think, involves some role of government that I think conservatives have been too quick to dismiss.
But that's for another time.
Yeah, there's going to be the most important moment of the Vidcast podcast soon, where I present you with this thing I'm sure you've been eyeing, which is the coveted red pill special friend badge, which goes out to all people who've appeared on this podcast, Vidcast.
But I wanted to ask you briefly about a, was it HBO? Yes.
A series that I loved with reservations.
No, no, come on.
Don't go, oh, like that.
That sort of thing, that's what Milo would have done if I'd said something.
Well, because...
I know you're going to ask about Chernobyl, right?
Chernobyl, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So here's what happens.
I write all these columns for Forbes, right?
For Forbes.
Yeah, yeah.
All these columns about Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Yeah.
And then they air HBO Chernobyl, and everybody says, Michael, are you going to write about HBO Chernobyl?
I'm like, come on, man.
I just wrote, like, all these columns about it.
I don't have to do it again.
But I finally was like, you know, fuck, I just got to do it.
So I sat down, watched the entire show...
Okay, I found it somewhat entertaining.
But they did like a horror movie, right?
Oh my god.
The scene where the workers, those volunteer workers, go into the bowels in the water and stuff.
And then you discover...
So-called Suicide Squad, which is bullshit, by the way.
Absolute bullshit.
Yeah.
Yeah, the whole premise was bullshit.
It was like a horror film.
It was like Alien.
It was just like Alien, in fact.
You can see all the tropes, all the pipes and stuff, everything.
But it was great.
It was great drama.
And they mention, almost in parenthesis at the end, that you get a white on black writing telling you, actually, they all survived.
Yeah.
And there was no Suicide Squad or whatever.
Yeah.
So there's that.
You pointed out some other things on Twitter.
The baby didn't die.
Right.
The helicopter was not zapped by radiation.
That was like a...
Well, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
I mean, I thought what was...
So first of all, I ended up doing write about it ten times more.
I mean, a million people read that article.
Ten times more people read it than my usual column.
So I was like, okay, fine.
When you write about pop culture, as you know, people read it more.
I thought the most interesting thing was that at bottom what it's about, the fear of nuclear, it's about fear of the bomb.
Yeah, yeah.
The bottom.
There's three issues people worry about.
The bomb, the waste, and the accidents.
But the waste and the accidents, if you really listen to how people talk about them, what they're really worried about is the bomb.
So when you watch the show, I'm sitting here watching it going, oh my god, I know where this is going.
And of course, sure enough, he goes, and at that moment, Chernobyl turns into a bomb.
And that's just the most ridiculous, offensive science illiteracy there is.
Yeah.
But I thought it was important because it reveals, and by the way, I think climate apocalypse is also reanimating fears of the bomb, right?
This idea that it's an apocalyptic threat comes out of these fears that we had of the bomb.
So I think there's a bunch of kind of repressed...
Trauma and anxiety that we never really dealt with.
Because remember, the Cold War kind of went away with a whimper, not a bang, right?
Suddenly it was like, oh, I guess we're not really going to have a war with the Russians anymore.
We're not going to have nuclear winter, which was the big scare.
Not going to have nuclear winter, right.
And that, by the way, then I think informed the framing of climate change, is that climate change would be like nuclear winter.
But so that sort of goes away, and I don't think the society ever resolved it.
Like, we didn't ever really quite go, hey...
It never will.
It may not.
That impulse is within us always.
Yes.
Aztecs sacrificing people to the gods because we have failed in some way.
It's all cleaned of our fault, and we must expiate our sins.
And this is the latest...
Well, I think that's a very interesting—this is where I think—this is a great—I think this is a really interesting question as sort of what in us wants to believe in the end of the world?
And so we used to have traditional religion that told a story about the end of the world.
In fact, it was—like you said, the Christians have one, the Mayans, various religions have a story about the end of the world.
Well, when the societies become secular and we don't believe in the traditional religions— That urge to believe in the end of the world continues and it finds new vessels to fill.
And so I think nuclear war became an obvious one because it would be quite catastrophic.
Climate change then is the newest one.
But you see it on everything.
You see these apocalyptic scenarios on GMOs.
You know, on ridiculous things.
And so, yeah, I think you're right.
Like, what is it in us that wants to have some...
Maybe it's just because it's exciting.
You want to believe that your life matters.
Because if you think that the end of the world is coming soon, that's saying something quite a bit for your life.
You're living during a really important time.
This is not an insignificant moment.
Yeah, it's almost extracting meaning from your existence by imagining that you are the one who's going to be witness to the end of everything.
And the hero!
And the hero that saves the world.
So the people you mentioned coming up from the subway.
To the Extinction Rebellion protest.
They want to feel...
And I think this is something quite beautiful, even if we think it's misplaced, which is a desire to feel powerful and heroic and doing something to contribute to some sort of revolutionary save-the-world activity.
It's sad that it's not channeled towards things that are more, I think, constructive and productive.
Totally.
Now, this is the moment you've been waiting for.
I'm going to present you with your badge.
There it is.
You can see the camera.
You are a special friend.
Do you want to put it on now?
Wait, do you want to put it on me?
Yes!
Like the Ritterkreutz.
Do you want a Ritterkreutz?
No, no.
I have no idea.
Don't ask.
It was the highest...
Hang on, have you got a look?
Oh, there we are.
There we are.
Yes.
Oh, my God.
Oh, you've got a little...
You've written something.
Should I read it while you're doing it?
Yeah, you can, yeah.
Freedom isn't free.
In fact, it can be bloody expensive.
Bloody is like a bad word here, right?
No, it's like a...
You can say it.
I imagine the Queen could say it.
Oh, the Queen can say it?
Yeah, probably, yeah.
So thank you for supporting the Delling...
Delling Pod?
Delling Pod, and for being a special friend, it's good to know you're among friends, and what better way to let people know you took the red pill by sporting the special friend badge.
Oh, isn't that touching?
That was Dick, my brother who read that.
So, Mike Schellenberger, environmental hero, as Time Magazine said?
Yeah, as one of my critics said, they put me on a list.
You're on the list.
Thank you very much for being a very special guest on the Darling Pod.
I hope to see you again, because you were great.
Oh, thanks, man.
Well, I hope to see you again, too.
Good.
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