How do we end the emotionally charged division around the subject of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming? What is the Climate Change solution that nobody is talking about? What factors are overlooked when it comes to reducing waste and eliminating damage to the environment?
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| Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope you're doing well. | |
| I would like to offer up to you fine denizens of the net a third way of looking at the challenges of climate change, particularly anthropogenic or man-made catastrophic Climate change. | |
| Because there's this dichotomy that has bothered me for quite a while, and hopefully I can provide you another way of looking at it that I think will be really helpful. | |
| So the traditional division in this debate is that, in general, people on the right say that it's all a hoax, that there's no science behind it, it's all made up, and it's all statistical mumbo-jumbo, and it's paid for by big government and all that kind of stuff. | |
| And I think that is not a very helpful position in many ways. | |
| There's no question that CO2 in a closed system contributes to increased temperatures, and there's certainly no doubt that human beings are emitting increased amounts of CO2 over time. | |
| So that perspective, I think, is a challenge. | |
| On the left, there is this perspective that it's absolutely settled science, it's totally true, it's catastrophic, and governments must vastly expand their powers. | |
| To deal with the issue. | |
| And I think that is a challenging perspective to take. | |
| And I'm going to hopefully try and, you know, hands across the water, I'm going to try and unite these two things into something which I think a lot of people, hopefully yourself, can really get behind. | |
| So, first of all, as I said before, CO2, we're producing more of it, and in a fixed system it's going to Contribute to increased heat. | |
| The degree of catastrophe, the sea in anthropogenic, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, the sea part is not fully settled as yet. | |
| There's challenges of people working back and forth with their models. | |
| But if we accept that it is catastrophic, that what could happen through CO2 emissions from human beings is catastrophic, then We get to how do we solve it? | |
| How do we solve this problem? | |
| Of course, governments have had years and years and years and years, and are we any closer to any kind of effective solution? | |
| Somewhat debatable, but I think we all, everyone who thinks that or who accepts that it's going to be catastrophic, global warming, really wants things to be moving more quickly. | |
| So let me put forward just a couple of perspectives that hopefully can shake some of the cobwebs loose from these Somewhat hardened battle lines. | |
| What if the science is valid, it is catastrophic, and the worst solution of all is the government? | |
| Now that will certainly appeal. | |
| To people on the right who tend to be skeptical of government power. | |
| I think it will also appeal to people on the left once I sort of explain what it is that I'm trying to get at and hopefully we can unite in a way that is going to be positive and productive for human liberty, for the future, for the planet, for nature and so on. | |
| So, let me give you an example. | |
| Governments create a huge amount of money pretty much out of thin air. | |
| Governments in conjunction with central banks, but the central banks are controlled by the governments in many ways, and the governments are in some ways controlled by the central banks. | |
| But this capacity to create money out of thin air drives materialism and thus predation upon The environment in truly staggering ways. | |
| I mean, just think about, oh, the economy isn't doing that well. | |
| Let's have a massive stimulus package and get, you know, shovel-ready projects to build bridges and do this, that, and the other. | |
| Who knows how necessary all of these things are? | |
| But what we do know is that all of these stimulus packages, all of this debt and borrowing and money printing is driving a huge fever pitch of material consumerism. | |
| So think, 10% of the housing stock in the United States is vacant. | |
| Think of how much environmental use or damage was inflicted. | |
| You know, the wood, the copper piping, the electrical wiring, the roof, the basements, the concrete, the shipping everything everywhere. | |
| I mean, just crazy amounts of laying of sewage pipes and phone lines and cables. | |
| It's crazy just how much Environmental destruction was wrought in the creation and building of all of these homes, 10% of which in the entire housing stock now lies empty. | |
| Think of these giant empty cities in China. | |
| Think of just how much energy and environmental destruction is brought about. | |
| Energy use, environmental, is consumed to create These unused structures, environments, neighbourhoods, cities. | |
| Well, of course, a lot of the housing boom in the United States was caused by excessive government policies, manipulating the mortgage market, manipulating the housing market, manipulating the amount of currency in circulation, manipulating interest rates and so on. | |
| I mean, this really had a lot to do with government intervention that drove all of this excess creation of housing. | |
| Goods which are going to be consumed that aren't necessarily, they're not capital investments into producing more worker efficiency or anything. | |
| So think of that. | |
| Think of the Iraq War, 2003. | |
| The US military is the single largest institutional consumer of oil. | |
| The Iraq War, and to some degree the Afghanistan War, Consumed more oil in a day than the entire population of India did in one day. | |
| A staggering consumption of natural resources. | |
| Now, if the government didn't have access to just borrow and print money and manipulate interest rates, what would have happened to people's enthusiasm for the war? | |
| It's one thing to say, I stand behind the flag, let's go get them, when there's no bill. | |
| And it's empty cheering for endless destruction. | |
| But if the government says, well, we want to start this war against Saddam Hussein, by the way, your taxes are going to go up $20,000 this year to pay for it. | |
| People are like, whoa, what's that, blessed are the peacemakers? | |
| If I'm getting a bill, I feel kind of differently about it. | |
| And so if the government didn't have the power to create money out of thin air, to borrow and to run these massive deficits, the war would most likely have been stopped by In its tracks. | |
| So without the power of central banking, environmental degradation and destruction is much, much lower. | |
| Now that, to me, is a way of lowering CO2 emissions, lowering human beings' environmental footprint, which is sort of like a fascist boot to Mother Nature's boobs. | |
| That is a way of reducing environmental predation. | |
| By reducing the size and power of the state. | |
| And I think that's the kind of thing that we want to start looking into. | |
| There are some significant solutions that have been put forward, like cloud whitening, where you get about 17 or 1800 unmanned vessels floating around, spraying seawater up into the air so that the seawater merges with the clouds and a huge amount of Light and heat is reflected back into space. | |
| And you can turn this on and turn this off. | |
| It doesn't do any atmospheric damage or anything, according to most reports. | |
| That costs about $6 billion. | |
| Well, currently, America is spending $22 billion a year on global warming initiatives. | |
| So this would be about three months and change of that budget for this cloud whitening, which, according to many experts, would completely reverse even the worst potential effects of climate change or global warming. | |
| Why is this solution not being talked about? | |
| It's not that expensive compared to the amount of money that's been spending. | |
| One commentator has estimated that $1.75 trillion is the cost, the overall ripple cost of fighting global warming in America. | |
| I mean, that's like three times the federal deficit. | |
| Even the current budget, $22 billion a year, over $40,000 a minute. | |
| So, what if, instead of saying, well, I need to fight expansion of state power by pretending that science is not science, which I don't think is valid and I think discredits people, what if we said, | |
| well, look, we accept, if we accept all of these things, you know, the CO2, anthropogenic, catastrophic, the whole thing, but the solution to it, is a reduction in the size and power of the state, a reduction in the military-industrial complex, a reduction or an elimination of the power of the government to create money at will and to run deficits ad infinitum. | |
| That is a way where we can say, look, we accept all of these dangers, but the way to solve these problems It's to reduce the size and power of the state. | |
| I think the Republicans will like that. | |
| I think people who look at from the left or from the environmental movement, which are not synonymous, of course, will look at and feel frustrated that governments are not solving these problems in a way that is even remotely timely. | |
| But maybe, just maybe, we can look at this as an opportunity to scale back the size and power of the state to reduce The heavily subsidized and indebted footprint that we're currently leaving on the face of Mother Nature and find a way to really get the best of all worlds and acceptance of the empirical evidence and rational methodology of science, | |
| a reduction in the size and power of the state, and the resulting Far less harm to our planet as a whole. | |
| I really think that is an approach that we can mull over and I think we can all get behind that because it solves the problems and it also extends and expands human freedoms. | |
| So this is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio. |