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Aug. 8, 2017 - Andrew Klavan Show
44:25
Ep. 360 - Google: Be Evil

Google’s "Be Evil" shift—led by directors like Adolpha Hitlerian—marks a corporate rejection of truth, from firing engineer James Damore for questioning gender bias to censoring searches on "fascism" via animated bunnies. Andrew Clavin contrasts this with science (e.g., Pinker’s studies) proving innate differences in STEM gaps, while YouTube’s "trusted flagger" program—backed by groups like the ADL—silences dissent under "hate speech" rules. Meanwhile, Bjorn Lomborg dismantles the Paris Agreement as a $2 trillion "charade," exposing its 6,000-gigaton CO₂ fantasy while touting fracking and nuclear as pragmatic fixes, calling climate activism’s opposition to these solutions virtue-signaling over pragmatism. The episode reveals how tech and policy elites weaponize ideology against evidence, leaving truth—and progress—casualties. [Automatically generated summary]

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Be Evil Slogan Revealed 00:03:00
Google has announced its new corporate slogan, Be Evil.
The company said it was only a minor change from their former slogan, Don't Be Evil, which was abandoned in 2015 after it was found to put too large a burden of responsibility on Google Management.
In a statement issued to reporters, Jenny Turpitude, Google's director of moral diversity, said, quote, the company found our management was wasting too much time trying not to be evil, which required restraint, tolerance, and wisdom.
Being evil comes much more easily to us and should save the company countless millions in effort and man hours, unquote.
The company decided to make the change after firing an engineer who wrote a memo containing simple truths out of keeping with the political correct lies that made company brass seem virtuous when they actually weren't.
The engineer James Damor had suggested that there might be biological reasons why women prefer different jobs in tech than men do and why men rise to positions of higher power and responsibility within the company.
These biological differences include the facts that men are men and women are women, that politically correct lies are not actually the truth, and that reality is actually reality while unreality is not.
Molly B. Silent, Google's director of diversity through utter sameness, responded to Dammore's memo saying, quote, Damor's comments are unforgivable, not because they're sexist and hateful, but because they're true, and thereby burst the bubble of the leftist fantasy world in which we are good people and return us to the real world in which we are bad people.
This is intolerable, and Mr. Damor had to be fired quickly before we were forced to look into the mirror and see ourselves as we really are, unquote.
Mr. Damor further expressed the opinion that Google's corporate culture of diversity was really a corporate culture of sameness because it suppressed any opinion that opposed it.
Wendy Bootstomp, Google's director of diversity through thought policing, responded by saying, quote, Mr. Dammore is simply wrong and we will continue to prove our commitment to diversity by firing anyone who disagrees with us, unquote.
In announcing the new Be Evil slogan, Google also announced further changes.
From now on, Google's search results will be returned in order of how much Google management agrees with the opinions expressed within those results.
And people reading search results with opinions the management does not agree with will be forced offline, then hunted down and hounded from their homes.
Google also said that people searching for the term fascism will now find an adorable new Google logo with the letters formed by bunny rabbits and rainbows.
When you run the mouse over the logo, the bunnies will come to life and you'll be arrested for searching for a forbidden term.
Google's new director of diversity through overwhelming strength, Adolpha Hitlerian, says the Be Evil slogan reflects Google's commitment to fire every employee who dares to speak the truth and to censor search results until they reflect nothing that resembles reality.
Ms. Hitlerian said, quote, you've heard it said, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
Well, by golly, not on Google's watch, unquote.
Trigger Warnings Needed 00:15:37
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky donkey.
Life is ticky boom.
Birds are ringing, also singing hunky-dunky hunky.
Shipshape tipsy topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hoorah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoora.
All right, we're going to talk.
We can still talk about Google until they catch up with us, I guess.
We're going to talk more about Google.
We've got Bjorn Lumborg, the skeptical environmentalist.
He's going to discuss how to be an environmentalist while remaining sane, which is something that sometimes seems kind of hard to do.
It's the mailbag tomorrow, so you want to get your questions in today.
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And by the way, by the way, first of all, let me say an immense congratulations to Ben Shapiro, who I noticed was like number two on the news podcast.
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And he told me to tell you, he did say this just a minute ago.
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So Google fired this guy.
This is unbelievable.
This guy, James Damore, he writes a piece basically saying that women are different than men, and that may have something to do with why they don't get the same tech jobs that men get and why they don't rise to positions of power.
Women care more about, you know, it's an internal memo.
It's like 10 pages long.
He said he was in favor of diversity.
He didn't want to get in anybody's way.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to all women.
It doesn't apply to all men.
It's just a general statement about the general nature of men and women, that women tend to care more about people and men tend to care more about things, that men care a lot about status and have this drive to be high status that women don't have.
Women have more balanced views of life, I mean, if you ask me.
But the thing is, we have different views of life.
We're men and women.
That is one of the beauties of life, is one of the things that makes life beautiful for most of us.
I think that that is one of the consolations of living, the difference between men and women, as the French used to say, you know, vive la difference, they used to say.
And I don't, I have no, I think that means I surrender in French, but maybe that's something else.
But anyway, here is the thing that, you know, so they fire the guy.
They find the guy and they fire him.
What was it?
They have this wonderful line.
They fired him.
He violated our code of conduct and crossed the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.
Do not advance harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.
Unbelievable.
He also accused them, by the way, of silencing conservative opinions.
Silencing conservative opinions, you're fired.
I think that's kind of a dead giveaway that he had something to say.
Look, the thing is, men and women have been shown again and again to have different tendencies, different predilections.
And it's a bell curve, obviously.
There are women who are more like men, men who are more like women, but it's a bell curve.
In general, men have a better time manipulating objects in space, which sounds like a small thing, but it actually is a big thing when it comes to engineering in their minds.
Men are more capable to envision objects in space.
They are better at abstract reasoning than women are.
The hilarious part about this, Amanda Presto wrote a piece about this on the Daily Wire.
Some of the women were so upset.
Some of the women at Google were so upset by the memo that they stayed home.
It's like acting like women, you know?
It's not that big a deal.
The women are too upset to go in.
They just, you know, it just were too emotional to go in.
But the thing is, I mean, here's the thing.
You want to see, I'm going to, when I, at the end of this, at the end of this conversation, I'm going to, this is a pile of horse tongue.
But at the end of the conversation, I'm going to get to the pony underneath the horse tongue, because there is a pony underneath the horse tongue.
But if you want to see, you remember Jonah Goldberg's wonderful book, Liberal Fascism, had this cover.
Do we have the cover of his book with that image that he, yeah, there it is, the smiley face with Hitler.
You want to see this smiley Hitler face come to life, okay?
This woman, Megan Smith, who used to be Barack Obama's chief technology officer, okay?
Now, remember yesterday we were talking with Knowles about how NASA under Obama was directed for Muslim outreach, right?
This is a big deal.
It's like, and I believe, you know, if we could send a Muslim to the moon, we could send them all to the moon, right?
No, that's a terrible, terrible thing to say.
Don't laugh at that, Austin.
You only encourage me.
But here's the face.
So here is Barack Obama's chief technology officer.
You want to see that smiley fascist face come to life.
Here she is talking on Bloomberg TV about the evil of having opinions that disagree with her.
But it's there.
It's insidious.
And so many people, women of all races, men of color, experience what I call a death by a thousand paper cuts.
You know, this stuff is personal.
It sort of comes at you.
It's insidious and it's all around the culture.
And then when you're getting it, it's so personal and it's agile.
It's hard to understand it as a pattern, but it's almost class action if you can see the pattern.
It's a class action.
It's this class, damaging to have opinions.
To have opinions that are not the mainstream opinion, that are not the opinion that Google wants to sell you.
It's damaging to people.
People, they need their safe space.
They need their trigger warnings.
So just to continue on this smiley-faced fascist rampage, the interviewer Bloomberg, listen to the question she asks.
She says, set us straight.
Set the science straight here.
Look, you're an engineer yourself.
For anybody out there who believes that there are biological reasons for the underrepresentation of women in engineering, please put this to rest.
Yeah, it's a lot of mythology.
I was lucky to go to MIT and Mechanical Engineering, and Chuck Vest, who was president of the university, ran a study with a lot of the university in the 90s.
And one of the things he wrote at the intro of that is when they showed all the discrimination that was happening, both who gets recorded in history, who gets what promotions, who gets what lab sizes, who gets what kind of funding for their research, et cetera, he said, I always thought it was part myth and part reality.
I said, I've learned from this study that's almost all reality.
We really need to work on this and change this because, of course, we want all of our talent.
We want to play the whole American team.
The whole American team, that smiley face, they say, don't have opinions or you're off the American team.
We want the whole American team except for Damoir.
We want the whole American team except for conservatives.
We want the whole American team except for people who believe in what they see with their own eyes.
And in fact, what the real studies say, which is not what she says there at all.
And I'll talk about that in a minute.
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Going back to smiley face Hitler over here, you know, he's saying this stuff.
This is the way they always say this.
It's a complete myth.
It's total myth.
So Steven Pinker is a science writer that I really admire, really good science writer.
And he points out the fact that it just ain't so that the datum, as he calls them, the data that come out, show that women, you know, there's this thing called, they sometimes call it the Jackie Robinson effect.
There have been times when women were barred from doing things.
There have been times when people were barred from doing things because of their race, just like today through affirmative action, Asians are barred from getting into Ivy League schools.
They cut back on the number of Asians so they can let other minorities come in.
And when you take those bars away, the minute you open the door, the people come flooding in.
Sometimes it takes time for them to rise up to the level they need to rise up to, but they come flooding in.
The Jackie Robinson effect, let a black guy play baseball.
Suddenly, hey, you know, there are plenty of great black athletes and they should join the game.
And so that very quickly corrects itself.
With feminism, that doesn't happen because there's things that women like to do better than other things and things that men like to do better than other things.
It's that simple.
And things that men and women are better.
You know, it's insane that these people believe in evolution, which has one purpose.
It has one purpose, the reproduction of the race, right?
That's all evolution cares about, is who reproduces.
So you're not going to make women good at the things.
You know, how come women can tell if you've eaten a cookie when you're three blocks away?
You know, I mean, that's what they're good at.
They are good at doing things that are mother things, and guys are good at doing things that keep mother and child alive.
So Pinker points out that they're always talking like this.
There's absolutely no proof to set us straight.
Remember the interview on Bloomberg says, set us straight.
And Pinker says, you know, I've taken many controversial positions over the years.
And as a member of Homo sapiens, I think I'm right on all of them.
But I don't think that in any of them I would say there is not a shred of evidence for the other side, even if I think the evidence favors one side.
I would not say that the other side can't even make a case for their position, even if I think that their case is not as good as the one I favor.
And as for saying that a position is as conclusive as any finding in science, as this is what the women say, the feminists say, well, we're talking about social science here.
This statement would imply that the extreme nurture position on gender differences is more conclusive than, say, the evidence that the sun is at the center of the solar system.
So, in other words, what he's saying is, we're not sure about some of this stuff.
We're still finding it out.
But this attempt to shut people down shows, demonstrates fear.
And here's what Pinker says the data show.
The datum is a gender difference in the physical sciences, engineering, and mathematics.
And I think if you look at the range of professions, the size of the sex discrepancy is predicted by how much spatial cognition and how much abstract mathematical reasoning each of those jobs requires.
In terms of the effects of parents' expectations, I think there was a sense starting in the 1970s that the model for development is that as the twig is bent, so grows the branch.
That very subtle differences in parents' perceptions early in life can have a lasting effect.
You aim the child in a particular direction, and you'll see the effect years later.
I think now there's an enormous amount of research, spearheaded by the behavioral genetics revolution, that that is not true, that there are effects of parenting, parental expectations, parental treatment on young children when they're in the home, and that in every study short of outright abuse or neglect, those effects peter out.
In other words, you know, it's not nurture, it's not the society, it's not what you're being told, it's who you are.
It's a part of who you are.
I mean, there is no society on earth where men and women do the same thing.
It just doesn't exist.
So, here, back to smiley-faced Hitler.
Here's Megan Smith's answer to that.
Here's what we can do instead, though.
We need to have the priority up and directly address these kinds of challenges when they come and help these engineers evolve.
You know, they are misguided and they're destructive to their colleagues.
It causes people to leave the industry, and it's bad for shareholder value.
You know, we know that more diverse teams make better products, have better results.
So, we want the genetic flourishing of all humanity, all the Americans, all the people of the world, in on making these products, especially as we move to AI and data science.
Price of Climate Action 00:15:00
These are very powerful.
We don't want to write this discrimination, racism, ageism, sexism into our algorithms, which is what can happen very easily if we don't nip this stuff in the bud as it appears.
Nip it in the bud, fire.
The fascism is strong with this one.
She's like really something, and it's all with the smiley team, the American team, the American team.
But you're not on the American team if you disagree with her.
Just amazing.
And, you know, they're putting this into play in a wider range.
And I'll talk about that in a minute, and I will talk about why I feel there's some good news, a pony buried at the bottom of the horse tongue here.
But first, let me talk about this.
You know, the reason I stopped wearing contact lenses, which were really, I loved contact lenses.
They were so good to, you know, they made it so easy for me to play tennis and do all the stuff, the active outdoor stuff that I like to do, but it was just, hey, it was so expensive to get the good ones, the ones that, you know, stay in, then you can take them out each day and all this stuff.
And it was such a pain in the neck to constantly be hunting them down.
So now, and the reason for this was that four companies control 97% of the market.
Four companies control 97% of the market.
So there wasn't enough competition to make the market good for the consumer.
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These are quality daily lenses for half the price of the other guys.
Contacts are expensive because of this virtual monopoly these companies have had.
But Hubble sells directly to you so you can offer contacts for half the price.
They can send you to an optometrist if you don't have a prescription.
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We got to say goodbye to Facebook and YouTube, but we got Bjorn Lumborg coming up.
So come on over to thedailywire.com.
You can listen.
You could watch.
You could watch if you would just subscribe for a lousy 10 bucks a month.
You could also be in the mailbag.
And if you like this show, go on iTunes and give us a good review.
It apparently is very, very helpful.
So come on over dailywire.com.
So listen to this.
Google, as you know, owns YouTube.
I'm beginning to think it's time for a little bit of a monopoly investigation here.
This may be violating.
They own YouTube.
So it's not enough that they fire a guy, one of their own employees, because he expressed wrong think opinions, as Orwell would say.
Google has announced we'll soon be applying tougher treatment.
This is YouTube.
I'm sorry.
We'll soon be applying tougher treatment to videos that aren't illegal, but have been flagged by users as potential violations of our policies on hate speech and violent extremism.
That's us, folks.
If we find that these videos don't violate our policies but contain controversial religious or supremacist content, that will be placed in a limited state.
The videos will remain on YouTube behind an interstitial, won't be recommended, won't be monetized, and won't have key features, including comments, suggested videos, and likes.
YouTube has also rolled out a trusted flagger program who can flag things so they listen to them.
This is 15 expert NGOs and institutions to help them identify hate speech and extremism on their platform.
Guess who?
The no hate speech movement, a left-wing project pushed by the Council of Europe, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, an organization whose president has been accused of manufacturing outrage by the World Jewish Congress.
YouTube is also planning to artificially alter its search results so that searchers for sensitive topics on YouTube no longer return the most popular videos, but a playlist of curated YouTube videos that directly confront and debunk violent extremist messages.
That is me.
You know, I mean, here is why I say there's a pony under all this horse tongue.
They wouldn't have to do this.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to create an emperor's new clothes environment.
If nobody is allowed to speak, you may think that other people share your opinion, but you may feel like, no, maybe it's just you.
I mean, have you ever been in a room where everybody's sitting around saying, oh, that movie, I just saw Game of Thrones.
I love Game of Thrones.
And you think Game of Thrones is terrible, you know?
I mean, this is one of the things we all love about Shapiro is Shapiro will go like, I don't like that.
You know, he'll come out and say it.
I'll come out and say it.
But a lot of people won't.
They'll just keep their opinions to themselves, thinking they're the only one.
Where really, oftentimes, when you express your opinion, other people start to say, yeah, you know, I kind of agree with that.
So, what Google is trying to do and what all of the left is trying to do is they're trying to create an emperor's new clothes atmosphere where nobody is willing to say the emperor is naked.
They wouldn't have to do that if the emperor weren't naked.
They wouldn't have to do that if there were no such thing as truth and if truth didn't have an amazing power.
Now, listen, you can suppress the truth.
You can stomp on the human face forever, as George Orwell said.
You can stomp on the human face forever.
But at some point, if you don't have the ability to stomp, if you don't have the violent rights, if you are restrained by the First Amendment, if you are restrained by a free market where they can come out and compete with Google and compete with YouTube and break up monopolies, eventually the truth will out.
You know, when it comes to this thing about sexism, a growing number of millennial women are saying, forget about this.
Forget about it.
You know, and it's not that they don't want to be equal.
It's not that we want people to be equal and treated fairly, and we want people to have loving relationships and partnerships and all this.
But in 1994, in 1994, 42% of high school seniors felt that the best family was one where the man was the outside achiever and the woman took care of the home.
In 2014, that had gone up to 58%.
Almost 60% of millennials believe this.
In 1994, 48% of high school seniors said a mother who works cannot establish as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work.
In 2014, the shared disagreeing went up to about 60%.
The abandonment of the home.
Look, homemaker is the most important profession.
C.S. Lewis said this.
It is the profession that every other profession is designed to support and protect.
When you look around and you see obesity, when you see spreading depression, that is because mom is not around.
A lot of that, I think, is because mom is not around.
The truth will out.
Google would not have to fire people if they weren't afraid of the truth.
Google would not have to censor people if they weren't afraid of the truth.
YouTube would not have to censor people if the truth did not have power.
It is there.
It has power.
And on that note, let's bring on Bjorn Lumborg.
It's a good introduction for him.
Bjorn Lumborg, let me give you a real introduction.
He's president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and visiting professor at Copenhagen's Business School.
He was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.
He wrote a great book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, and another terrific one, Coolit.
You can find him at Bjorn Lumborg, B-J-O-R-N-L-O-M-B-O-R-G.
I always want to call you Bjorn Borg, you know, and ask you about your tennis game, but I won't do that.
You know, I first, welcome to the show.
I'm really glad you're here.
Thank you.
I first saw you speak at Andrew Breitbart's house.
He brought you to LA, I remember, and you gave a talk.
And I have noticed that you have taken the strategy, and I've read two of your books, and I've noticed that you have taken the strategy.
You kind of accept the assertions of the global warming people or the climate change people that there is some problem here.
That you accept that assertion.
Is that right?
Yes, and I've got to disappoint you a little bit.
It's not a strategy.
I think, you know, I've known a lot of these people, and definitely I have my disagreements with some of them, certainly with, as we'll probably get into, with some of their comments on the policy side.
But these are mostly good researchers.
And definitely there is an issue.
Humanity has developed for the last 10,000 years in a very stable climate.
And if we see temperatures increase, or if we saw them decrease towards an ice age, both of these would be problematic simply because we've built our houses to have the exact temperature and the exact climate as it is right now.
That's why, you know, Finland and Greece or Detroit and Miami both live good places.
But if they switched climates, they probably wouldn't.
But okay, I did want to ask you when I said it's a strategy.
That was actually my next question.
Because even though obviously the climate changes, I mean, the Great Lakes used to be glaciers, the climate always changes, is this due to the effect, or do we know how much it's due to the effect of human action?
So again, I'm a political scientist, so I'm looking at the social science part.
I'm looking at the economics part of this.
And so I mostly just, you know, I've read a lot of the stuff that they talk about in the science community.
And what they tell us is it's between half and 100%, so 50 and 100% of the change that we've seen over the past 50 years that is due to humans.
Again, remember, it's very often portrayed as entirely the 100%, but it's also possible it's 50%.
So it's a significant part.
And it's unlikely that we're not playing our part in this.
Okay, fair enough.
So that was what I wanted to check in with you because I've always wondered if it was just a strategy.
You're just saying you will accept the research.
You know them.
They're not bad guys.
You trust what they're saying.
And the fundamental point, the idea that if you put out more CO2, you'll see temperature rise.
That's a very, very both old theory.
It's a very well-established theory.
And there's absolutely no doubt about this.
The only question is how much?
So even very sort of skeptical people, skeptical scientists will say, sure, temperatures will rise.
The real question is how much?
And of course, the real, real question is, how much is that then going to affect us?
Because we get this sense that temperatures go up a couple of degrees Fahrenheit and humanity is wiped out.
That's just nowhere near true.
If you actually look, there's a wonderful study that look at what has Americans done by themselves.
And of course, Americans have actually moved towards warmer climates over the last 50 years.
If you get retired, you don't want to go to North Dakota, right?
You want to go to Miami or Florida or New Mexico or California.
And so the reality is that while temperatures have risen in the U.S., if you look at the average of what everyone has experienced because of their movement, it's risen much more.
So people have actually voted, I'd like some more heat.
Remember, that's true if you live in Detroit.
It may not be so cool if you already live in Ethiopia or somewhere.
Maybe you don't actually want it to get warmer.
Okay, so fair enough.
But now what we have is we have this incredible atmosphere of panic that Al Gore and the whole movement has really generated.
Recently, of course, President Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreements, and that was the end of the world.
The guy was an absolute troglodyte destroying mankind.
You wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal calling the Paris Accord a charade.
I mean, that's a pretty harsh word to use on what was Barack Obama saving us from extinction.
I know.
And this is surprising in so many ways.
Actually, I did the first period article on what's going to be the impact of Paris.
But let me tell you this in a different way, which I think is actually easier to comprehend.
So if you look at what will we need to do to dramatically cut carbon emissions towards what most people, so Obama and certainly Al Gore and Paris Agreement is telling us, which is the two degrees centigrade, which is this odd thing that came out from a, it's obscure, but it's not a good argument.
But, you know, it's the target that we all talk about.
So that's 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
We will not have humanity climb above that.
If we want to do that, we need to cut 6,000 gigatons of COT over the century.
Now, for most people, that means absolutely nothing.
Nobody knows what gigaton of CO2 is.
But to give you a sense of proportion, if you look at what the UN tells us it has established, if everyone did everything they promised in Paris from 2016 to 2030 when the last promises run out, we would cut 60 tons of CO2.
Wow.
So we are cutting 1% of what we need to achieve.
So literally, Paris leaves 99% of the problem still to be solved.
So there's no way Paris by itself is the solution, the savior.
And hence, of course, Trump pulling out is not going to destroy the planet.
At any time, this is only a matter of a fraction of 1%.
And now, of course, if this was really, really cheap, maybe it would still be, you know, 1% of something good might be a good thing.
But you need to know how much this will cost.
And the honest answer is this will be phenomenally expensive.
So if you look at the studies, there's been no official studies, but there's a lot of studies, period studies, and I've taken the average of all these studies from the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, which is typically considered the gold standard of these energy economic modeling, and of the Asia modeling experience for China.
So if you take the averages of all of those cost estimates to live up to what they have promised in Paris Agreement, the cost will be at least $1 trillion a year and very likely $2 trillion per year every year for the rest of the century starting in 2030.
That's a lot of money to achieve almost nothing.
And that's really the point that I'm trying to say.
Look, it's not that Paris doesn't have good intentions.
It's not that El Gore doesn't want to do good.
I think he does.
I met him a couple of times.
I mean, he has a lot of other things on his plate, but I think he wants to do good.
And I think most of these people want to do good.
But they're simply trying to do good incredibly inefficiently, incredibly expensively.
The Cost of Green Dreams 00:05:12
And that's not a good way.
Well, then, what would an efficient approach look like?
So fundamentally, if you want to cut carbon emissions, you need to switch from coal to gas.
That's what the U.S. shale revolution has done.
That's what we need to get China and India and everybody else to do.
So you're talking about fracking.
You're talking about fracking here.
Get a lot more fracking going.
The reason is that gas is a lot cleaner than coal.
And remember, not just because of CO2, but also in air pollution, in almost any aspect, gas is just much, much better than coal.
And this is something that we could very easily make happen.
This is something that we can envision over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
Then a lot of people argue we should also go more nuclear.
I actually have my reservations mostly, not because I'm afraid of it.
I think it's probably one of the safest things we can do, but just because so far, we have not actually seen it being very cost-effective.
In the long run, what we need to do is to dramatically drive innovation of green energy.
Imagine if solar and wind with batteries and lots of other opportunities were cheaper than fossil fuels.
We wouldn't have this conversation.
We wouldn't need Paris.
People would just switch.
And that's a matter of storage, right?
I mean, they can't store the energy that wind and solar create.
And a lot more than that, because the problem is that you can't just put in batteries, because what are you going to do for the wintertime when you need a lot more and there's very little sun, you can't store for half a year.
You need other ways.
Maybe it's hydrogen storage.
Maybe you need some other innovations to go along with that.
We're still a long ways away from being able to switch over.
But the fundamental point is if you dramatically increase investment in research and development, this is what Bill Gates has been arguing.
And this is also what our Nobels have pointed out, is by far the best investment.
It's fairly cheap to do, and you could basically help all humanity get cheaper and more effective energy.
This is the kind of thing that really drives the world.
But don't try to force it as long as it's this expensive.
So the obvious question, I mean, it's the question that always kind of drives me crazy as I'm reading the newspaper.
You're not saying it's a hoax.
You're not saying it's an evil plot.
You're not saying anything.
You're saying, okay, I accept the data.
Here's the facts about your solutions.
Here are some better solutions.
That all seems eminently sensible.
You're virtually alone.
I mean, you mentioned Bill Gates, and he has done a lot for research.
But what is the disconnect here?
Why?
I mean, all you hear from the environmentalists is no fracking, no nuclear, none of the things that would help.
Why are these people so hysterically in favor of solutions that clearly will not work?
What is the problem?
Well, I think there's two things.
First of all, you say, I'm virtually alone.
And I think it goes a little bit back to saying, maybe Games of Throne ain't so cool.
A lot of people and a lot of governments and a lot of nations are actually doing a lot of this.
So the U.S. has probably sort of inadvertently, it wasn't because Obama wanted it, but the U.S. ended up fracking a lot and actually cutting your CO2 mostly because you shift it from coal to gas.
And a lot of nations are thinking along those lines.
So in some way, you could say a lot of nations are already doing this.
Now, the speech, the thing that we talk about, how we want to exemplify what we want to do, of course, is very different, as you point out.
All these environmentalists are saying no nukes, no fracking, and so on.
And in some way, that only underlines the problem that what they're talking about is really not solving global warming.
It's about virtue signaling.
It's about saying, see how good I am.
And I'm always a little astounded.
If you really believe your own rhetoric and say, this is the end of the world, how come you would argue, let's do the same solution that has failed for the last 20 years and that will be phenomenally costly and hence will be very likely to elect leaders like Trump and everyone else to say, no, we don't want to do it.
So why would you want to do that?
Do you ever speak to environmentalists?
Can you ever have a rational conversation with them like this about some different solutions?
Well, look, I mean, a lot of people, I think, are environmentalists because they really feel very, very deeply this is the biggest problem in the world and we want to do something about it.
And the only way to do it is solar panels.
I don't think necessarily there's a good sort of way to connect.
I try sometimes, but this is not about convincing Al Gore and the other 5% and the extreme left.
And likewise, not about convincing the 5% who believe this is a total hoax.
But it's about convincing the 90% in the middle who are, quite frankly, more busy having to drive their kids to soccer and all the other stuff.
And so you have to talk to them for five minutes and tell, look, do you want to do this cheaply and effectively, or do you want to do it stupidly and very, very costly?
And when you put it like that, it's not quite as hard.
Rape Of Robots 00:05:33
Amazing.
Amazing stuff.
Bjorn Lumborg, thank you so much for coming on.
I hope you'll come back and talk about this again.
There's a lot more to say, but you're an eminently sane environmentalist, which sometimes seems like an oxymoron.
And I'm happy to talk to you.
Good to talk to you.
Thanks very much.
Speaking, you know, it always does get me that like they saw they talk about fracking and they go insane over fracking, which is like so clean and so safe and so helpful.
You know, nuclear energy, you know that they've shut down a lot of the nuclear programs in Europe, a lot of the nuclear generators in Europe, because of that disaster in Japan when they had that once-in-a-lifetime earthquake, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami.
I don't think anybody died.
Some people died from the tsunami, but nobody has died from radiation poisoning or anything like that.
It's an amazing fact.
It is an incredibly safe form of energy.
I have to end with this one story that just really caught my eye: that there is a man now, an activist, trying to stop robots from getting raped.
And I, you know, I think if you want to send your money to me here, put your cash in an envelope and send it here.
If you want to, this is a true story.
As the sale and use of lifelike sex robots that allow people to simulate rape continues to gain steam, one famed law professor is sounding the alarm.
John Bonshoff, a well-known activist professor of public interest law at George Washington University Law School, with apparently a lot of time on his hands, says experts disagree on the consequences of allowing people to engage in mock acts of rape with humanoid dolls.
And lawmakers should vet this issue as soon as possible, saying there's evidence that rape sex bots may significantly increase the chance of rape to real women.
The law should no longer stand by and blindly ignore a major potential problem by doing nothing, he said.
Sex bots, especially those which can be programmed to act as if they're being raped and those which act and appear to be young children are already here and in use, he said.
He said the obvious first step would be to have hearings and do studies to determine just how serious the threat is.
And this is a guy who does this, by the way.
He wrote a book called Sue the Bastards, you know, and he just says, like, this is what he should do.
You should always be suing people.
He helped drive cigarette commercials off the air and was one of the masterminds behind lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
You know, you can't rape a robot.
You can't rape a robot because a robot doesn't have will.
Rape is a violation of the will.
That is the whole point of rape.
One of the things about rape is it is proof.
It is proof of the human soul because the action you take in rape and the action you take in making love are the same actions.
The only thing you are violating is you are violating a woman's soul, her right to choose what she does with herself.
It's an amazing thing that we understand that this is the crime second only to murder, that is one of the worst crimes because it violates a person's soul.
Robots don't have a soul.
I'm sorry.
They just don't.
I don't care how many movies we make about it.
They just don't.
So, I mean, with all the things on people's minds, I really have to say that I'm glad that somebody is thinking about robot rape.
For all we know, for all we know, porn and rape porn and robot rape, maybe get it off people's minds so they don't actually turn on real human beings who are kind of important, real human beings, and deserve utter protection.
Stuff I like, Robert Mitchum's 100th birthday two days ago.
You know, it would have been his 100th birthday, one of the great tough guy actors of the screen and a conservative and a guy who just didn't follow the rest.
One of his films called Out of the Past, based on a novel called Build My Gallows High, which I have also read, 1947, terrific about a Mitchum is a private eye who is hired to find this woman who is supposed to have shot a man and stolen his money.
In this movie, he delivers one of the greatest single lines of dialogue from film noir ever.
And I believe his autobiography or somebody else's biography of him used this line as the title.
He's talking to the woman who is obviously a turn-on.
He's falling for her.
And she says to him, I didn't do it.
I didn't shoot this guy.
I didn't steal the money.
Here's Robert Mitchum's great reply.
It was a little business, about $40,000.
I didn't take it.
How did you know it was taken?
It's what you meant.
I don't want anything of his or any part of him.
Except his life.
I didn't know what I was doing.
I didn't know anything except how much I hate it.
But I didn't take anything.
I didn't, Jim.
Won't you believe it?
Baby, I don't care.
One of my favorite lines in all the movies.
I didn't kill him.
I didn't take his money, baby.
I don't care.
That's true love, folks.
Robert Mitchum, one of the great tough guy actors of the screen.
That's it.
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