April 23, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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[Outro] | |
| Alright, we are live on the YouTube I'm Dave Rubin and we've got another Friday panel extravaganza for you. | ||
| Today we're going to be talking about how to fix the environment without anointing AOC Queen of the Universe. | ||
| I think there's a chance. | ||
| And joining me are founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, Alex Epstein, Author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus, Bjorn Lomberg, and president of the American Conservation Coalition, not Conservative Coalition, Benji Backer. | ||
| Guys, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm glad to be doing this because Earth Day was this week and it sort of got kind of shelved a little bit because there's just such chaos happening in the world. | ||
| But before we get into sort of the big issues, I thought I could just ask each one of you briefly to kind of describe How and why you got into the environmental conversation and do what you do for a living, because I feel like everybody's always sort of impugning motives when it comes to this. | ||
| So Alex, I know you the longest, I'll start with you. | ||
| All right, yeah, sounds good. | ||
| So you can probably see behind, or you can see I have my I Love Fossil Fuels t-shirt. | ||
| I have Moral Case for Fossil Fuels is my book. | ||
| And so yeah, my background is actually as a philosopher. | ||
| I had no interest in energy, no knowledge of energy, certainly no payoffs by the fossil fuel industry or anything like that. | ||
| Um, and long story short, like what I learned that I didn't know was how valuable energy is to human life one. | ||
| And then two, how hard it is to produce cost effectively by which I mean low cost, reliable for all types of machines. | ||
| And then for billions of people. | ||
| In thousands of places. | ||
| I just didn't have an appreciation of either of those and we'll get into why I think they're so important. | ||
| And I noticed that when people were talking about climate impacts, which I was concerned about, certainly, and I do believe we impact climate, they were ignoring the benefits and they were only focusing on those climate side effects. | ||
| And so my view is you can't make an intelligent decision about something without looking at both the benefits and the side effects. | ||
| And I found that when I did that, my own analysis was that the benefits of fossil fuels going forward far outweigh the side effects. | ||
| And as we'll talk about, I actually believe fossil fuels have made us safer from climate. | ||
| So I'll just leave that as a teaser, but it'll probably come up. | ||
| But I think empirically, nobody has ever refuted that. | ||
| So we will get to that. | ||
| And I should note, Alex, that the first time that the mob ever went after me, now it's like old hat, but it was when I had you on, that was the first time that I ever just got endless, endless assault, hate, and trying to take me out and the whole thing. | ||
| So I credit you with my first mob attack. | ||
| Benji, how'd you get into this game? | ||
| Well, thanks for having me, Dave. | ||
| It's great to be here again. | ||
| And I got into this because I've been a lifelong conservative activist and realized that our side of the aisle had not been engaging in climate, energy, and environmental conversations in a pragmatic way for a long time. | ||
| And we have a heritage as conservatives and as Republicans for doing the right thing when it comes to the environment. | ||
| So I felt like we had lost our way a little bit, and I'm really worried about some of the environmental challenges we face. | ||
| Carbon emissions are up 47% since the Industrial Revolution. | ||
| And, you know, the vast majority of scientists do agree that we have some serious concerns to tackle when it comes to climate change. | ||
| So I believe that we've got a lot. | ||
| And then on top of that, we have conservation problems and other issues related to wildlife. | ||
| So I decided that there needed to be a right of center environmental movement. | ||
| I founded the American Conservation Coalition, which is a millennial and Gen Z led organization. | ||
| I happen to be a Gen Z myself, focused on bringing a market-based, | ||
| smart, pragmatic approach to the environmental conversation. | ||
| Bjorn, you've been doing this a while. | ||
| I have. | ||
| Yeah, so look, I was really just an academic and I like to challenge my students on thinking differently. | ||
| And one of the things I saw was an interview in Wired Magazine with Julian Simon, an American economist, who said, look, things are actually getting better, not worse. | ||
| And that ended up in over three years of me writing a book called The Skeptical Environmentalist. | ||
| Which was really a way of saying, look, you think everything is going to hell. | ||
| You think everything is getting worse. | ||
| That's certainly the impression we get from media. | ||
| But the reality is, for most things, most places, things actually getting a lot better. | ||
| We've seen a dramatic decline just on poverty, for instance, over the last 200 years from 95% of everyone on the planet being poor. | ||
| to less than 10% today and that's also true in almost all other areas as Alex was pointing out because we've gotten richer and more resilient and so we need to have that understanding not to be scared witless which I think a lot of people are when it comes to climate But realizing, look, this is a real problem. | ||
| There are many real problems out there in the world. | ||
| The world is not great. | ||
| It's just doing much, much better. | ||
| And what we have to do is to make sure we do the right things, we make the right policies, and don't just end up throwing lots and lots of money on things that will do almost no good. | ||
| And unfortunately, I just described what happened with climate also this week. | ||
| Well, just one question, Bjorn. | ||
| So when did skeptical environmentalists come out? | ||
| It was in the 90s, right? | ||
| Yeah, so I would just say Bjorn has really been vindicated and one thing we can talk about is the track record of catastrophists versus people who think the world is getting better and so Bjorn I think has the longest track record of us and so if you look at what he said back then he's really been vindicated. | ||
| And many people that were designating as experts today have been totally wrong. | ||
| And yet we still think of them as experts, which is a whole interesting issue. | ||
| Yeah, so actually what Bjorn just said is exactly where I wanted to start with this, | ||
| because I think so much of what you guys are fighting from slightly different perspectives | ||
| is that the catastrophization of all of this, the way that they tell us in 12 years, | ||
| the world is going to end, unless you let us rejigger the entire economy | ||
| and have complete takeovers of industry and all of that. | ||
| And that seemingly the way the news operates on everything, you know, it was just one catastrophe to the next, | ||
| that basically makes sort of sensible solutions hard. | ||
| Would you say that's fair, Alex? | ||
| Yeah, so I have a thing I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is I don't trust people to predict the future unless they can acknowledge the present. | ||
| And I posted at one of my most recent posts on Twitter, twitter.com slash Alex Epstein, you'll see these four graphs, which I think are the most important graphs. | ||
| I call them the human flourishing hockey sticks. | ||
| And what you see Is that the different metrics of human flourishing? | ||
| So how, and that's humans living to their fullest potential, how many of us there are, how long we live, how much income we have, which really means how much resource and opportunity we have. | ||
| All of those are like this flat for history. | ||
| And then they jump up, like they go vertical. | ||
| And then they go up vertically exactly the same way that CO2 emissions do. | ||
| So interestingly, so we can talk about CO2 emissions in the future, but so far CO2 emissions correlate to an amazing improvement in the livability of the planet for human beings. | ||
| Now it's not the CO2 emissions, it's the energy that generated the CO2 emissions, because the energy powers machines, and machines allow us to take this deficient and dangerous planet and make it into a very abundant and safe planet, because machines can produce so much value for us that we can't do Using manual labor. | ||
| So anyone talking about the future first needs to acknowledge the present is better than anyone has ever had. | ||
| The earth is in the best state it's ever been. | ||
| And we have 50 years of catastrophists saying it's going to get worse. | ||
| So the burden on them is to really explain, OK, it's getting so much better. | ||
| How is it going to invert and everything's going to go to hell? | ||
| You could say, yeah, I'm concerned about certain things. | ||
| I'm concerned about CO2. | ||
| But if you don't acknowledge how amazing the present is, I do not trust you to predict the future and it shows that you have some sort of big bias that's not causing you to see how good the world is for humans. | ||
| Benji, do you find that just that right there, just telling young people like, oh, things are actually pretty good and here's data to show that humans are flourishing and living longer and all of the things that both of these guys have just laid out, like, do you find that just getting that hurdle is basically the hardest part? | ||
| Well, I would say that most young people Do not acknowledge the present when it comes to where we are in the climate change conversation. | ||
| But I will say what I think is the most difficult part for younger generations that they do understand is that the Earth is a finite resource. | ||
| We only have so much Earth to tap into. | ||
| We can only take so much from our planet. | ||
| We can only pollute so much in our planet and into the atmosphere. | ||
| And I think that that's what our generation is really worried about. | ||
| It's the worry that we are taking too much from our planet and that we are overdeveloping and growing so quickly that we're basically putting the environment last. | ||
| And so while I think that there's a lot of truth behind that we are where we are because of fossil fuels and we are where we are because of industrialization, we also have to look at the future at the same time. | ||
| And so to Alex's point, I think I do agree that we have to acknowledge the present, which is something that younger generations have a hard time doing. | ||
| But I also do think that we have to think about the future in a pretty substantial way. | ||
| But to your question, Dave, just really quickly, it is very obvious that we need action on climate change in my eyes. | ||
| It is also very obvious that we will not get any action if we allow people like AOC and others to perpetuate some terrible, terrible ideas that ultimately harm the planet, harm the economy and stall any progress. | ||
| So I do think that it makes it harder to take action. | ||
| And I do think that we should be looking at the present as well as the future. | ||
| Yeah, Bjorn, as the sort of original skeptic on this, let's say, why is it that the scientific community seems to just not allow any skepticism related to any of this? | ||
| Well, it's certainly a question of saying groupthink, and we've had that for a very long time, as Alex also pointed out. | ||
| Think back to the 1970s. | ||
| People were telling us that we were running out of everything, that we wouldn't be able to feed the planet. | ||
| In the 80s, we were told that acid rain would eliminate almost all forests around the world. | ||
| The point here is to say they were all grounded in something that's real, and that's also what Benjamin is now talking about. | ||
| There are some real concerns, but then if you start studying it And you insist on saying everybody's got to be on the same team. | ||
| You end up in a place where you sort of go off on a tangent and just, you know, predict worse and worse things. | ||
| So you went already in what was in 82, predicted that if we didn't get climate change and acid rain and desertification under control, by the year 2000, it'd be like nuclear war. | ||
| No, and we know that. | ||
| We've already established that didn't happen, and we've had lots of those predictions beforehand. | ||
| So we need to look at the evidence, but it's really, really hard. | ||
| You know, you show people this graph. | ||
| I haven't seen your four graphs, but one of them certainly should be. | ||
| We know how many people die from climate-related disasters. | ||
| Across the world, we have pretty good data, at least for the last 100 years. | ||
| In the 1920s, about half a million people died every year from floods, droughts, storms, and extreme temperatures. | ||
| Today, that number is down below 20,000 people every year. | ||
| We have seen a reduction of 96% in catastrophes from hurricanes and so on. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's not because climate is not a problem. | ||
| It's because we have become much, much more resilient. | ||
| When you show people that graph, they're like, no, I don't want to see it. | ||
| And that's not a good way to think. | ||
| And that's of course because this climate conversation, I worry that this is not about actually fixing the climate. | ||
| But it's about identifying with something that's bigger than yourself. | ||
| And oh, you know, just like the grand generation had with the Second World War, you were fighting for something real. | ||
| You want to feel like you're fighting for something, but come on, don't we want to fight for something that actually does good? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can I just jump in? | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, just one thing. | ||
| So my view on what's causing the catastrophism Is actually, I think, part of the view that Benji is espousing as kind of common sense and that he knows and everyone knows. | ||
| And I would call this the delicate nurturer premise. | ||
| And the idea is basically that the earth is a really great place and then we have to worry about impacting it. | ||
| And in general, you hear a lot about, okay, the world has a lot of resources and it seems to have very few threats. | ||
| That's sort of what we get. | ||
| And then what we do is we deplete the resources and then we create all these threats. | ||
| But Bjorn pointed out on the threat side, We're way less endangered by climate than we used to be. | ||
| And so it points out the world is not wild. | ||
| It's not a delicate nurture. | ||
| It's wild potential. | ||
| And actually it gives us just the raw material for resources. | ||
| It doesn't give us many resources and it gives us a ton of threats. | ||
| And so the number one priority for the earth being livable is us being highly productive. | ||
| And that means using machines, which means using cost effective energy. | ||
| And I think this false mental model that people have of the earth as a delicate nurture causes us to be afraid of running out of things. | ||
| And to be afraid of the Earth is going to bite us in the ass, it's going to punish us. | ||
| And I think, you know, with what Benji's talking about, I pointed out how much better the world is getting. | ||
| And sort of his assumption is, oh, but now we've had too much development. | ||
| My view is 6 billion people in the world use way less energy than we do in America. | ||
| I think the world needs way more development. | ||
| Whether it's fossil fuels, nuclear, you need more cost-effective energy. | ||
| And it's interesting, nobody points out, say, 3 billion people have almost no energy. | ||
| That doesn't enter the conversation. | ||
| People are obsessed if a polar bear moves from one piece of ice to another. | ||
| So, philosophically, I think we have this assumption the Earth is a delicate nurturer. | ||
| We also have this moral assumption that it's bad for us to impact nature. | ||
| And my view is it's good for us to impact nature. | ||
| We should focus on human flourishing. | ||
| And we wouldn't be focusing on climate as a top priority at all. | ||
| We'd be focused on energizing the world. | ||
| Benji, I want to give you a chance to respond. | ||
| Yeah, I frankly just really disagree. | ||
| I think anybody who's spent time in nature knows that it's incredibly delicate and that small changes can have a very massive impact. | ||
| I just toured the Everglades this past week, where one inch of sea level rise can equate to numerous miles of the Everglades being completely destroyed because of that just one inch of sea level rise. | ||
| How much sea level rise have we had in the last 20,000 years? | ||
| How about since the industrial revolution? We've had a very tiny amount. We have hundreds of feet | ||
| since the last 20. So I mean one thing I would say, and I don't mean to be combative, I would just say | ||
| the point here is Dave is going to give me a chance to respond. | ||
| I'd like to have an opportunity to do that. | ||
| We just said something that was, I think, incorrect. | ||
| Let Benji finish up. | ||
| You said you aren't a scientist. | ||
| I just toured it with scientists who happen to be conservative. | ||
| And so I think I can speak with some validity here. | ||
| And I was actually down there. | ||
| So, you know, take that for what you will. | ||
| I'm also in Charleston, South Carolina, right now, where they've seen eight inches of sea level rise just in the past couple of decades. | ||
| These changes make up for very big differences. | ||
| And regardless of whether or not you think that sea levels rose in the past, which they obviously did, we are accelerating those changes. | ||
| And so while there is a lot that isn't in our control when it comes to climate change, there is a sliver of it and a large enough sliver that it makes a really big impact in a glacier area. | ||
| To go from 32 degrees on average in a winter to 32.5 degrees, that makes a really big difference on whether or not that glacier melts. | ||
| So this is an incredibly delicate resource that we live on. | ||
| And we are intertwined with the environment. | ||
| We are one with the environment. | ||
| We rely on the environment for everything that we do every single day. | ||
| And so if we destroy our environment, we destroy humanity. | ||
| And there needs to be a balance, which I think is something you and I can agree on, that there needs to be a balance. | ||
| But at the end of the day, we don't just have unlimited resources on this planet. | ||
| Let me just let Bjorn chime in on this, because Bjorn, do you see this type of discussion, which is exactly what I wanted to have, and we don't all have to exactly agree on everything, that this is sort of just like tactical in nature and sort of where certain people's, where their sensitivities lie in a way? | ||
| Well, I think it's a lot about our mental models. | ||
| You know, what is it that we're predicting? | ||
| And it's probably true to say Our mental models, all of them, are likely much, much worse than the best models that we can come up with. | ||
| And so in some sense, I think the right question and conversation is really, what is it that the science is telling us? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| And Benji is absolutely right to say, look, there is global warming. | ||
| It's made by man and it will have increases. | ||
| For instance, sea levels will rise and that will constitute challenges. | ||
| On the other hand, Climate economics also tells us a sense of how well can we deal with this. | ||
| And perhaps the most obvious argument is to say, well, we have a country named Holland, or they want to be called the Netherlands, right? | ||
| But Holland, that has actually dealt with this really, really well. | ||
| 40% is underwater. | ||
| And when you walk around there, you don't get that impression. | ||
| It's not like this is rocket science. | ||
| So just to give you a sense of proportion, all of Holland's protection up till now, Yeah. | ||
| has cost somewhere between $5 and $10 billion. | ||
| So over the last 50 years. | ||
| That's not nothing, but certainly compared to the Dutch GDP and certainly over 50 years, it's virtually nothing. | ||
| And what that tells us is the main challenge for most things, but not for the Everglades, | ||
| so sorry, where did you go? | ||
| Yeah, Southern Florida. | ||
| Sorry, yes, Everglades. | ||
| But not necessarily for natural places, but certainly for all human places. | ||
| What matters is that you don't live under corrugated roof and are really, really poor. | ||
| If you're really, really poor, you can't afford to tackle these problems. | ||
| But if you're a rich Dutch person, or if you're a rich Bangladeshi, as they will be by the end of the century, you can afford this. | ||
| And so what we have to be really careful about is that we don't focus so much on helping people through cutting carbon emissions that we forget that there are much more effective ways. | ||
| I'm always blown in my mind when people see really poor people and say, oh my god, these guys are going to be impacted in 100 years by climate change. | ||
| So you know what I'm going to do for them? | ||
| I'm not going to drive to work tomorrow. | ||
| No! | ||
| These guys need, you know, their kids immunized. | ||
| They need better food. | ||
| They need better education. | ||
| They need more productivity. | ||
| As Alex says, much, much more electricity and power. | ||
| That will make them rich. | ||
| That will also make them part of the solution eventually, because they will want to fix the planet rather than just caring about their kids surviving. | ||
| So Benji, I can see you nodding a lot there. | ||
| So what are some of the things? | ||
| I mean, really what I try to do with all my shows is give people some solutions, whether they're political or in this case, climate or whatever, like what are some of the things that we can do? | ||
| Well, I absolutely agree with what Bjorn just said. | ||
| And I think one of the most crucial parts of that is that we can start to fix this challenge while also Increasing GDP in countries that need it while increasing productivity and efficiency and growing the economy. | ||
| I think that that's the balance that we need to strike. | ||
| That's not the balance that the Green New Deal has. | ||
| And I think a perfect example of this is this week, conservatives released a climate plan in Congress. | ||
| Leader McCarthy did. | ||
| About 30 bills were introduced by Republicans, many of which had Democratic co-sponsors, to fight climate change. | ||
| No airtime in the media, no airtime on any shows. | ||
| It actually takes substantial steps to reduce emissions while not picking winners and losers in the energy sector, trying to innovate all over the place, plant more trees, restore more wetlands. | ||
| Nothing was covered in the media. | ||
| The left of center side introduced their Green New Deal again, and it got a ton of media attention. | ||
| But guess what the Green New Deal is? | ||
| It's a resolution that has zero policy substance. | ||
| It doesn't actually ask for anything to be done. | ||
| So not only is it just terrible and unfeasible to begin with, but there's actually a real plan out there to start taking some tangible steps and also keep growing the economy and invest in innovation. | ||
| and that's not being talked about. So I think that we as people who want a different climate | ||
| movement, who agree that we need to do something about it, but that it can't outweigh the benefits | ||
| of trying to increase human quality of life, we need to start looking at what Leader McCarthy is | ||
| proposing, what Senator Braun in Indiana is proposing, what these companies are doing to | ||
| innovate, because it's going to be innovation and markets that fix the climate challenge, | ||
| not government regulation. | ||
| Yeah, so speaking of the Green New Deal, since it was reintroduced this week, this line that was in there, quote, more than 350 million more people will be exposed globally to deadly heat stress by 2050. | ||
| Bjorn, that sort of sounds like what you were talking before, that we look at these very distant things. | ||
| I mean, 2050 is not that far off, but we look at things 30 years from now, as opposed to kind of looking at now. | ||
| But Alex, You're more on the libertarian side of this. | ||
| Do you think the government has any role in doing anything related to climate? | ||
| Well, I think it has to depend on the magnitude of the threat and then your options for dealing with it. | ||
| So I just want to make one point. | ||
| So I've really stressed that I think fossil fuels are fundamental to human flourishing and that the kind of energy we get from fossil fuels, low cost, reliable, versatile, global scale, like that's needed vastly. | ||
| So that has to be part of the context. | ||
| I think billions of people just lack energy They need much more to live. | ||
| And so when we're considering CO2 as a side effect, that has to be the context. | ||
| So people think of like CO2 is going to cause a catastrophe. | ||
| I think like most people's lives today are a catastrophe when they're poor. | ||
| So that's, that's my starting perspective. | ||
| Um, I think with CO2, you have to decide is there's a big difference between you think it has a cataclysmic, uh, impact. | ||
| You think it has some negative impact. | ||
| You think it's pretty much neutral. | ||
| Like I sort of go between, it could be somewhat positive. | ||
| It could be neutral. | ||
| It could be somewhat negative. | ||
| I think the benefits far outweigh it. | ||
| And I think if you look realistically going forward, look at what China's doing, increasing emissions, record oil imports, you know, building three Texas's worth of coal plants around the world. | ||
| They're doubling down on fossil fuels, 85% fossil fuel economy. | ||
| Producing our unreliable wind turbines and solar panels like the world. | ||
| It is a fossil future to invoke the title of my next book in many, many ways. | ||
| If you want to address that, I think Bjorn has been great on this point. | ||
| The only way to address CO2 emissions, whatever you think of them, unless you want to go to war with China, unless you think it's a cataclysm where we need to get in toward China that we might lose. | ||
| at this point, you have to realize the only way to do it is truly cost-effective alternatives, | ||
| and that requires innovation, and to the libertarian point, it requires liberation. | ||
| The number one form of energy that has promised to globally scale is nuclear energy. | ||
| Nuclear has been demonized, criminalized, and defunded. | ||
| And you've had certain people like Biden say, "Oh, I'm okay with nuclear." | ||
| That is not enough. | ||
| It has been criminalized. | ||
| You need to total reform to decriminalize it. | ||
| Plus it gets defunded by all these subsidies to solar and wind, like the wind production tax credit, | ||
| which the new Clean Future Act wants to extend for 10 years. | ||
| We're shutting down record amounts of, nuclear has more shutdowns this year, think about this, | ||
| than every other power source. | ||
| More nuclear plants, the only reliable, scalable, no-carbon source of electricity. | ||
| We're shutting down more of that in the U.S. | ||
| than anything else. | ||
| That shows you how screwed up our policy is. | ||
| So I'm for liberating everything. | ||
| If I did believe that CO2 was going to bring an end to the world, yeah, I'd say we have to have a world war. | ||
| But I don't believe that. | ||
| Fortunately, we don't have that kind of tragedy. | ||
| And fortunately, climate is getting safer. | ||
| So whatever's happening negatively with CO2, We're outweighing it just by our ability to adapt, so we should be focused on more energy and liberate nuclear. | ||
| Yeah, Bjorn, I want to let you jump in on that. | ||
| So Dave, and this really also goes to Alex, Alex tells us that China gets 85% of its energy from fossil fuels, but let's just remember the rich world gets 79% of its energy from fossil fuels. | ||
| We're so virtue-seeking and we're, you know, signaling with all our wind turbines and solar panels, but most people would not want to live in a world where they can't get a lot of cheap power very quickly. | ||
| And so the reality is, unless you face up to this, that not only are we not willing to have this, but the vast amount of the world wants to have what we have. | ||
| That is only possible through innovation. | ||
| If I can just give you sort of a quick metaphor, we've been running on metaphors, right? | ||
| But if you look back in the 1950s in Los Angeles, it was a terribly polluted place, mostly because of cars. | ||
| And, you know, this sort of standard approach to dealing with climate change today would have tried to deal with the Los Angeles air pollution by saying to everyone, I'm sorry, could you could you stop that car thing? | ||
| Could you, you know, go running or biking instead? | ||
| And of course, they would have had zero success. | ||
| What did solve much of the problem, not all of it, but much of it, Was the catalytic converter. | ||
| Somebody innovated the catalytic converter in 1974. | ||
| You put it on your tailpipe. | ||
| Yeah, it cost a couple hundred dollars. | ||
| It has real cost. | ||
| But then you have almost clean air. | ||
| You can drive much longer, pollute much less. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| And nobody is focusing on what will actually work. | ||
| You know, Biden had this big summit this week. | ||
| And it was basically just the same thing as what we've tried the last 30 years. | ||
| Lots of leaders get together, they say all these beautiful things about what they're going to promise in 10, 15, 50 years from now, and then they don't do it. | ||
| That's surprisingly not the way to fix the climate. | ||
| The way to fix the climate is to find green technology that's so cheap. | ||
| That could be nuclear power, fourth-generation nuclear that's so cheap. | ||
| It could be fusion. | ||
| It could be lots of other ways. | ||
| It could be solar and wind with batteries. | ||
| But the whole point is, if it's so cheap that it's cheaper than fossil fuels, Everyone will switch. | ||
| Everyone will do it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Benji, do you find that young people are kind of open to that? | ||
| They're like, oh yeah, like Joe Biden is probably not going to solve this. | ||
| And AOC is probably not going to solve this. | ||
| Like maybe a guy like Elon Musk might have a little more to do with it. | ||
| Or just that, like there's some cool things out there that are different ways of thinking about solutions. | ||
| Look, that's the biggest missing link in American politics, in my opinion, right now, is the lack of knowledge within younger generations of what it will take to solve what they perceive as a climate crisis and what we know of as climate change. | ||
| If you believe in science, and I believe in science, the science says that we don't have all the technologies to fight climate change. | ||
| So what does that mean? | ||
| We are going to have to create. | ||
| We are going to have to innovate. | ||
| We are going to have to, as Bjorn pointed out, make energy production and other climate solutions cheaper than the alternative. | ||
| And the only way to do that is in a competitive marketplace, in a capitalist marketplace, with a limited government outlook. | ||
| So I think Young people need to be exposed to that because they care about this issue and they care about it with good faith. | ||
| They do want to protect this planet. | ||
| They do want a brighter future. | ||
| They do want green jobs, clean jobs, and they want to fight for the future generations and their generation. | ||
| But we need to connect with them about what it will take to do that. | ||
| And if you trust the science, it says that we need to innovate. | ||
| So let's innovate. | ||
| Benji, I'm gonna let that be your closing statement. | ||
| Alex, give me something positive on the innovation side, because I know you want machines to do things, you want human innovation to do things. | ||
| Like, what can we look at? | ||
| I mean, the thing I'm really working on is coming up with a nuclear decriminalization platform. | ||
| So I would just say positively, it's a focus of mine. | ||
| I think that's really the missing link. | ||
| I mean, you can talk about all sorts of things could do things, but if you look at why are fossil fuels successful, they're naturally stored, naturally concentrated, naturally abundant. | ||
| The only other source with those attributes even more so is nuclear material. | ||
| So I think nuclear is uniquely promising. | ||
| We have a lot of promise from the past before it's criminalized. | ||
| I'm in favor of that, and if people wanna know more, go to energytalkingpoints.com. | ||
| I have a lot of info on that and other issues. | ||
| Yeah, and we're gonna link to all of your stuff down below. | ||
| Don't worry, we're a professional operation over here. | ||
| Bjorn, give us some hope. | ||
| Give us some hope, because you've still got a smile on your face after doing this for a while, and being a skeptic, and being called mean things, and all that stuff. | ||
| So I wrote a period article for last year that tried to summarize a lot of this argument. | ||
| And if you look at what is the best knowledge of what the future impact of global warming will be, it will be slightly negative. | ||
| So the climate economics, you know, the only guy who won the Nobel Prize in climate economics, William Nordhaus, estimate that by the end of the century, global warming will cost us somewhere between 3% and 4% of GDP. | ||
| Wow, that's not a trivial number. | ||
| But, and here is the hopeful bit, the UN also has to plot out, so how well is the world going to be? | ||
| You know, because that depends on how much emissions we're going to have. | ||
| What they tell us is in their most likely outcome, each person in the world will be 450% as rich | ||
| as he or she is today. | ||
| So what global warming means is instead of us being 450% as rich, we will only be 436% as rich. | ||
| Yes, it's a problem. | ||
| No, it's not the end of the world. | ||
| This underscores the point here. | ||
| Let's be sure to fix this. | ||
| is I would love to leave the world 450% instead of 436%, but we have to be very careful not to undercut that | ||
| by making solution cell costs of 10, 20, 30% instead. | ||
| So, you know, don't cut off your arm to cure your wrist ache, | ||
| make sure you make smart decisions, and that's all about investment in research | ||
| and development of the green energy. | ||
| Well, listen guys, it was a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| And you know, this is just, I want to do more on the environment in general. | ||
| I felt like this was kind of the right week to do it, not only because of Earth Day, but also because there's just such political chaos. | ||
| And I didn't want to only focus on that. | ||
| So I'd love to have you guys all back. | ||
| We'll do solo, we'll do... | ||
| We'll do together and you're all doing great stuff. | ||
| And again, the links will be down below. | ||
| So I thank you guys and I'm going to finish up solo. | ||
| So have a great weekend, guys. | ||
| And for everybody watching, if you're hearing a little bit of hoarseness in my voice, we did a live meetup last night for the Rubin Report Locals community. | ||
| In Orange County, actually our guest this week, Andrew Gruhl, who's the owner and operator of Slapfish Restaurant Group, he hooked us up and we had about 70 people come and we drank a lot of, well I drank a lot of tequila, people were drinking all sorts of other stuff, but we went around the room. | ||
| It really was like one of the most enjoyable nights I've had probably. | ||
| In a year or so, we went around the room, about 60, 70 people, just introducing themselves, saying just one or two things about themselves very briefly, and people were exchanging phone numbers, and people were talking to each other, and breaking bread with each other, and realizing that things aren't so crazy, and you're gonna not believe this. | ||
| This one, you just won't believe this. | ||
| There were gay people, there were straight people, there were men, there were women, there were black people, there were Asian people, there were white people. | ||
| Nobody punched anybody. | ||
| We all agreed to disagree on some things. | ||
| I mean, people were getting into political arguments, and it wasn't even political. | ||
| People were just having a blast. | ||
| It really was an absolute pleasure. | ||
| So to any of you that were there last night, I thank you. | ||
| It was really a true joy, but truly, you can hear it. | ||
| The voice is hurting, but I only have one more show that I have to do today, so I'll be okay. | ||
| Anyway, the reason I mention all of that is get out there and see real people. | ||
| I think one of the things that's happening right now This has nothing to do with the environmental conversation we just had, but like the way we are cutting ourselves off from people and just doing it online, just chatting with somebody and just zooming with somebody and FaceTime with somebody, it ain't enough. | ||
| We're social creatures and social media has somehow made us less social. | ||
| So get out there and don't be afraid of people. | ||
| I think that's gonna be the next psychological hurdle that we're all gonna have to get over. | ||
| I think people are really afraid of Of people now, and right before we started the show, I showed my guys, somebody tweeted out, I think it was Robert Barnes tweeted out a picture of a woman at a supermarket, and she's wearing a mask, okay, but then she's got two dogs in her cart, and the dogs are wearing masks. | ||
| You see what we're doing to people? | ||
| We're making everybody crazy, man. | ||
| It's just nutty. | ||
| So anyway, I hope you have a great weekend. | ||
| I hope you see some people you like, maybe even some people you love. | ||
| I hope you don't spend too much time online. | ||
| We'll be back at it Monday, and man, I really, I gotta, I gotta take it easy from talking for a little bit. |
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