March 16, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:16
3231 The Anti-Human Mindset Of Environmentalists | Robert Zubrin and Stefan Molyneux
The environmentalist movement wraps itself in images of trees, flowers and cute woodland creatures - but the results of their desired policies are often far more sinister in reality. Dr. Robert Zubrin joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the environmentalism movement's anti-humanist claims, including its modern tirades against pesticides, global warming, population growth, biotech foods, resource depletion, nuclear power and industrial development.Dr. Robert Zubrin is the founder and President of the Mars Society, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of “Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.” Get the book: http://www.fdrurl.com/robert-zubrinThe Mars Society: http://www.marssociety.orgCenter for Security Policy: http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.orgFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He's the founder and president of the Mars Society, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of a very, very good book I've just finished reading this morning, Merchants of Despair, Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudoscientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.
Dr.
Zubrin, thank you so much for taking the time today.
My pleasure.
So let's start with something contemporary that's in the news at the moment.
You recently wrote an article on how we could productively help alleviate any concerns about the Zika virus, but using the three letters considered to be pretty much Satan's signature in the modern environmental movement.
That is to say, DDT. Well, sure.
Zika is an insect-borne disease primarily born by mosquitoes, and mosquitoes can be killed by insecticides.
You know, prior to World War II, an enormous scourge worldwide was malaria.
It killed 2 million people a year in the United States.
Tens of millions in Africa, millions in Europe, Southern Europe in particular.
Of course, Asia.
Now, in World War II, the U.S. Army introduced DDT to fight malaria because, you know, the Marines lost more men to malaria on Guadalcanal than they did to the Japanese.
And this was highly successful.
And we suppressed...
The first use was to suppress an epidemic of typhus in Naples during the invasion of Italy, and then as we advanced and liberated Axis areas, we had people in camps that were dying of typhus and other insect-borne diseases, saving them.
And then after the war, it was put to use in a civil context, and first to wipe out malaria in the American South, and then in Southern Europe.
And then in many parts of Asia.
But this did not please everyone.
And in fact, the people in the population control movement started to object to this on the basis that we were causing the population explosion.
Now, this sort of agitation did not go over well with the American public, so they switched tacks and instead said that DDT had to be stopped Because of the harm it was doing the birds.
Now, this was entirely false.
In fact, bird populations in the United States in the 1950s and 60s were increasing rapidly precisely because of the use of DDT. Because the largest source of bird mortality in the wild is insect-borne diseases.
Not many birds fall victim to cats.
A lot more fall victim to insect-borne diseases.
And so, Rachel Carson wrote her bestseller, A Silent Spring, and so forth.
And then, when the Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1971, they held hearings, and despite the fact that the overwhelming testimony at the hearings was that DDT was safe, William Ruckelshaus, who was an advocate of population control, he was a member of the board of the Draper Fund Population Crisis Committee, ruled that DDT was to be banned.
In the United States, the effects of that were not that serious because we could afford more expensive pesticides.
But as a result of Ruckelhaus's band, DD exports to the Third World from the United States were banned, and foreign aid was banned to Third World projects that make use of DDT, which meant that these countries had to not use DDT. And as a result,
for instance, in Ceylon, malaria, which had been reduced from a scourge down to an incidental aspect of life, returned with a vengeance.
And in several other Asian countries and in Africa, the malaria was never wiped out.
And the best estimates are that today, And in the four decades since DDT was banned, about 3 million Africans a year have died because of the ban on DDT, which is over 100 million people.
The ban on DDT has killed more people than Hitler did.
And that is really an astonishing thing when you understand the degree to which some of the literary skills that the environmentalists have, which you point out, that what Ehrlich and what Carson did from a language standpoint was very compelling.
They sort of painted pictures that really were emotionally moving to people, but the science behind what they're talking about is very, very shaky, if not downright contradictory to their pronouncements.
And you talk about, in the book at the very beginning, Malthus, who, of course, is something that, or a theory, which has one of these bulletproof biospheres around it.
Like, no matter how much data there is that contradicts what Malthus predicted, he still seems to be someone who is compelling for a lot of people.
Yes.
It's hard to think of, in the history of science, a theory more counterfactual than Malthus's theory.
You know, Malthus, writing around the year 1800, He said, look, population expands geometrically, food supply at most arithmetically, and therefore, as time moves forward, there'll be less and less to go around, and so forth.
And so we were headed towards endless and increasing misery.
And he wrote this at a time when Europe was beginning the Industrial Revolution and the largest advance in the human condition ever seen in history, which has only accelerated since that time.
When Malthus wrote, the average per capita income in the world in today's dollars was $180 a year, 50 cents a day.
This is the world described in the novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo where there are people actually starving to death in the streets of London and Paris, the capitals of the two most advanced countries in the world.
Well, today The population of the world is 7 billion people, which is 7 times as much as it was in Malthus' time, and the average per capita income is about $9,000 worldwide, which is to say 50 times what it was in Malthus' day.
So the population has gone up 7 times, the per capita income has gone up 50 times, 7 squared, and the total product has gone up 350 times.
Okay, 7 times 50.
So, not only did product go up with population, it went up as population cubed, and well-being went up as population squared.
And this is true not only since Malthus, but in every time since Malthus.
For example, if you take Paul Ehrlich himself.
Who wrote his bestseller, The Population Bomb, in 1968.
He said, here it is, 1968.
The world has 3.5 billion people.
Average per capita income is $3,500 a year.
It's actually a lower number, but in today's dollars, that's what the figure would have been.
And in the year 2000, there's going to be 7 billion people.
There are hungry people today.
They will be starving in the streets in the year 2000.
And not just in India and China.
They are absolutely hopeless.
They should be allowed to go down the drain.
But even in the United States, we have to have population control.
We have to have government control of who can have children and who cannot.
And this and that.
Okay, well, here we are.
It is the year 2016, and the world population has doubled.
It took a little longer than Ehrlich said, but he was in the ballpark there.
That is, the population did double a bit longer, but so it has.
However, the per capita income Instead of being cut in half has tripled.
Okay, so now here's the thing.
Well, anybody can be wrong about the future, but Ehrlich was also wrong in predicting the past because Ehrlich was born in 1931 when the world population was a little more than half of what it was in 1968.
Now, if his theory was correct, the average standard of living in 1931 should have been twice that of 1968.
And he would have been there to see it.
But of course, we all know that the world of the 1930s was much poorer than the world of the 1960s.
Just as the world in the 1960s is much poorer than the world today.
So, it wouldn't even have taken research of any kind for Ehrlich to know that his theory was wrong.
He could just look at his own direct experience, but instead he said the opposite.
Now, why are people saying this and why are people promoting it?
The reason is that what the basic theory here is the following, is in the most general terms.
There isn't enough of X to go around, whether that is food, or living space, as Hitler put it, or today, or the Club of Rome, natural resources, or today, the carbon use permits.
Okay, so there isn't enough of X to go around, and therefore human aspirations must be severely curtailed, and therefore someone must be empowered to do the curtailing.
And so therefore tyranny is necessary.
And this is why people who advocate this theory have never lacked for sponsors.
Now, after Malthus, of course, came Darwin, and in particular, the descent of man.
I wonder if you can help people understand the degree to which Malthus plus Darwin, just two examples that you cite in your book, was the famine in Ireland, as well as the repeated famines in India, that seemed to be a socially engineered process of attempting to wipe out what were considered to be inferior families.
Groups or races, because the combination of Malthus plus Darwin plus state power seem to be particularly lethal.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, look, so basically, you know, Malthus is saying, you know, there isn't enough to go around, so human aspirations must be crushed.
And then the next question is, well, whose?
And well, obviously, the people we don't like.
And therefore, it is scientifically necessary to So you have the Irish in the 1940s and people actually use the Irish mass starvation as a justification of Malthus and in fact the Irish mass starvation of the 1840s was directly supervised by administrators who themselves were students,
I mean personally students of Malthus himself and they Now, there was no famine in Ireland.
During the whole mass starvation, Ireland was exporting beef and grain and all sorts of other foods.
Why were the Irish starving?
Well, the potato crop did fail.
So did the Irish starve because they were stupid and only wanted to eat potatoes and there were no potatoes?
No.
They were starving because they had no money because of the dominant policies, the British policies of rack renting, And suppression of manufacturers and taxation.
And, I mean, they starved because they had no money.
I mean, we're not talking about the Bronze Age.
We're talking about the 1840s, a world of steamships and telegraphs and railroads and mass circulation newspapers.
Anybody who had money had food.
Okay?
They had no money.
That's why they starved.
Then you have India.
Where in the 1870s, once again, people who had personally been students of Malthus were in administrative positions, and they were taxing India into starvation.
And Florence Nightingale actually went to the governor and said, look, these people are starving, you've got to lift these taxes.
And he said, no, no, no, that would be completely inhumane.
If we lifted the taxes, they would just multiply more, and more of them would be starving.
Okay?
So that's how this goes.
Now, Darwin, you know, what he said was, okay, well, there's a bright side here.
There isn't enough to go around, so some people are going to have to die, but who are they?
They're the unfit.
And it is thus, through the elimination of the unfit, That human progress occurs.
Darwin was a real biologist, and his theory was a significant contribution to explaining the evolution of animal species.
But, as a method of explaining human social evolution, that it was completely wrong.
Well, there's a number of scientific reasons for this.
The most basic is that humans are capable of inheriting acquired traits, unlike animals.
And furthermore, they can inherit acquired traits from people to whom they are not related in any way whatsoever, i.e.
technologies, for example, or beneficial customs, and so forth.
So, you know, the Darwin thing is completely counterfactual.
Why were the Mongols just a despised tribe of nomads for thousands of years, and all of a sudden in the 1200s they burst out and conquer half the world, And they rule it for three or four hundred years and then they fall apart and now they're nobody again.
Their genetic composition did not change, you know, and one could identify any number of nations who made a tremendous military splash at one time or another and are now of no particular geopolitical significance.
And it wasn't because of genetic superiorities, it was because at one time or another They had some composition of advantages of technology or generalship or statecraft or diplomacy or whatever, and they succeeded.
And in fact, here's the thing.
This idea of national social Darwinism...
Became very popular in Germany because it justified militarism.
And Darwin's German followers, starting with Haeckel and many others after him, were very successful in popularizing this theory.
It was very appealing to the German militarists.
And basically what they said was war is necessary because it eliminates the weak, in particular weak nations.
And thus Germany's Holy National Mission was to help rid the world of inferior nations.
And if you look at the writings, what you will see is that these ideas were already popular in Germany in the 1870s.
In 1913, the head of the German General Staff wrote a book called Germany and the Next War in which he laid all this out It was entitled Germany and the Next War.
Churchill read the book.
He said, you know, we read this with horror.
This was a statement that these people wanted to have a war in order to have a war.
And indeed they did.
And then Hitler just raised this to a more hysterical and extreme level.
But Hitler didn't invent Nazism.
He just took it to the next level.
And I can to some degree see where Malthus was coming from as far as writing in the 1800s.
So the revolution in agriculture, the agricultural revolution which produced the excess food and capital that allowed for a sort of urban proletariat to man the factories, that had occurred 100 or 200 years before where they got sort of winter crops and they improved the harnesses so that the horses could pull more and so on.
But it seems to me that given how little excess there had ever been Throughout human history, at least the human history that didn't involve slavery, like massive slavery, like the ancient Greek and Roman world, I can sort of see how you might think that society is like a family.
In other words, if I have a small farm and I have a wife and I have four kids, we have a certain amount of food that we can grow, and if I have a bunch more kids, then we're all going to get hungry.
I think that not knowing what huge bounty was just around the corner as far as Western civilization goes, plus this general mistake which people make as a whole, which is mistaking society as a whole for their own personal tribe or family or group, I can sort of see how they could come up with that idea.
The fact that it got enacted in state policy is reprehensible and immoral.
But the people who've come after the 19th century, when you saw a massive explosion, and you've got some great graphs in the book, which I'd appreciate it if you could talk a little bit about, the people who came after, who still held to this notion that the population is going to grow exponentially, but the food supply is only going to grow in a linear fashion, how is it possible for them to maintain this in the face of such overwhelming evidence of the contrary?
Well, on one level, the argument has a superficial, common-sense grounding.
Well, there's only so much to go around, and therefore, the more people there are, the less there will be for me.
But this is an entirely static view of economics, because...
Why is there anything to go around?
Where do resources come from?
Resources are defined by human technology.
Land was not a resource until people invented agriculture, and the value of that resource has been multiplied successfully over time as people improved agriculture with.
Irrigation, even in ancient times, and crop weeding, and later crop breeding, and so forth.
Frankly, if you look at the history of agriculture, starting from Neolithic, there's major advances in agriculture in the Middle Ages.
But then everything else.
Coal was not a resource until people really learned how to put it to use, and this was happening in a big way in Malthus' own time.
And a generation later, people developed oil as a resource, which it was not before.
And So, where do resources come from?
They come from people.
It is people who are resourceful.
And the more people there are, the more inventors there are.
And this is why Malthus has been wrong.
It's not just that every mouth comes with a pair of hands.
If that was so, then it would be a wash.
Every mouth comes with a pair of hands and a mind.
The more people there are, the more inventors there are, and inventions are cumulative.
I mean, just imagine if there had been half as many people in the 19th century as there actually were.
If somehow Malthus' ideas had been truly implemented globally.
So you have half as many people in the 19th century.
Would we be better off today or worse off today?
Well, they would have used somewhat less coal.
But we're not hurting at all for the coal that they used.
But half as many people?
Well, you can get rid of either Thomas Edison or Louis Pasteur.
Take your pick.
Either give up electricity or give up modern medicine.
Which would you prefer?
We would be immensely poor if there had been fewer people.
And the future generations will be immensely poor if there are less people today.
Well, and I would argue that the degree to which more people equals more productivity is the degree to which sort of free market principles are allowed to operate, where you have the incentive and you have the freedom and you have the property rights, you have the rule of law, you have a relatively uncorrupt government, all of the things that are necessary For human innovation to really flourish.
So it would seem to me that if you are worried about more people, then you would really want to implement as much free market reforms as possible.
But the environmentalists, and you point out the switch in the 60s where environmentalism and the left began to unite, but environmentalism plus leftist policies interfering with free market operations would seem to combine to create the kind of disaster that they claim they wish to avoid.
Sure.
Look, yes.
The more people there are, and the freer they are, the more innovations will occur.
And also, the more capable they are, the more educated they are.
It's not just the numbers of people, but the numbers of free people, both politically free, but also enabled through education in particular, access to knowledge, the more innovations you get.
It's not an accident that The vast majority of useful innovations in the past 500 years have come from the West.
It is not an accident that within the Western countries the largest number of innovations, including the Industrial Revolution, has come from the so-called Anglosphere because these are the Western countries that have the most individual rights and therefore are the most Creative,
that have patent systems, that have trial by jury, that has property rights and so forth to a greater degree than, for instance, continental nations, though they also contributed.
But, you know, I was at a globalization conference in Moscow in October 2013.
And I gave a talk where I outlined some of these same ideas that are in Merchants of Despair.
But then a Professor got up from Moscow State University, and I can talk a little bit more about that university, because there's a leading anti-freedom ideologue that operates there, Alexander Dugan, and this is one of his acolytes who got up to speak.
But what he said is, no, there are limited resources, and it's America that is using up the world's resources.
There's 4% of the world's population using 25% of the world's oil, and 25% of this and that And, in fact, he even said we were using up the world's oxygen supply.
Now, I responded...
I mean, very strongly, I said, what are you talking about?
Okay, if it wasn't for America, you'd be much poorer.
I mean, where do you think you got this?
Okay, I held up one of these, and then I pointed to the laptop on the podium, and where did this come from?
And to the microphone at the podium, and where'd that come from?
And to the light bulbs on the ceiling, where did they come from?
Okay, if America was poorer, the Russians would be much poorer.
Okay?
Yes, we are using 25% of the world's resources at the moment, but we're responsible for 50% of the world's inventions in the past century, which enabled most of the world's gross national product in the rest of the world, as well as our own direct product.
America, you know, we produce a lot of food.
We export food.
We've helped feed the world with our food exports, but we've done much more to help feed the world by exporting our agricultural technology.
That's actually how America has fed the world.
That's why, instead of Paul Ehrlich's prediction of 1968 coming true, It was the exact opposite and people are eating much better in India and China today than they were in 1968 because of the so-called Green Revolution, not to be confused with the Green Movement, but of agricultural technology that was developed by the United States and secondarily by other Western nations.
This is the fundamental issue.
There's two views of looking at this.
If you view humans as fundamentally consumers, as vermin consuming the goods of creation, then human numbers, activities, and liberties must be severely constrained.
And the only answer is tyranny.
And also war, because every nation is your enemy because they are consuming what you could consume.
But if you view humans as fundamentally creators, then every new person In the world is potentially a gift and the fundamental role of government needs not to be constrained human liberty but to protect it at all costs.
So that's the fundamental issue involved in this whole discussion.
The argument of whether humans are vermin or humans are creators is an argument of whether there should be tyranny or whether there should be liberty.
Right.
And it does seem a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you only focus, you know, the real challenge with economics is to look at the hidden costs as well as the visible benefits and vice versa.
So if you only look at human beings as consumers, then yeah, you're just throwing groceries down a well that will never be filled and it's just a huge waste.
If you view them as producers, and of course they're both consumers and producers, if you view them as producers, then yes, you welcome new life as a new opportunity for people to write great music or create great companies or simply contribute to their own community in the best way that they can, depending on their level of creativity and intelligence and ambition and drive and depending on their level of creativity and intelligence and ambition and drive But if you view people fundamentally as consumers, then you are driven towards tyranny.
But under tyranny, which is why the socialist systems tend to collapse and why the national socialist systems tend to collapse, Under tyranny, human beings do become largely consumers rather than producers because human beings always have to consume in order to survive, but without the incentives to produce, they generally don't.
Well, that's true.
The freedom creates resources.
Freedom creates the potential for more freedom.
The You know, one thing that is really interesting about the left's embrace of environmentalism and embrace of Malthusianism, which has really only been the case since the 1960s.
You know, Frederick Engels wrote brilliant polemics against Malthus, which still stands scrutiny today, and he understood what the implications of Malthus were.
The left has embraced this.
Well, think about this for a minute.
Okay, because the left is also, in general, and this is a positive feature of the left, they are against war.
They despise war.
Okay, well, that's good, right?
But limited resource theory Mandates war.
Okay?
Limited resource theory sets all nations against all other nations.
I mean, look, here was this guy in Moscow saying the America is the enemy of the world.
Basically saying we all need to war against America.
And if people in China, for example, were to believe this, they would say America's our enemy.
They're consuming up the world's oil that we're going to need.
Blah, blah, blah.
Okay, similarly, National security fanatics who embrace limited resource theory.
And by the way, there are such people, and I've read their papers here in the United States, say this is a horrible thing that China is now industrializing.
They are now going to start using up the world's oil that we need for ourselves.
But this is wrong.
We should not want to keep China down.
It is a wonderful thing that the sons and daughters of Chinese peasants are now going to college because now they can become scientists and engineers and start contributing inventions to the progress of the world.
Look, as an American, and I am also an American inventor, I am a real prototype.
I'm very proud of America's history of invention.
Yes, we're 4% of the world's population responsible for half the inventions.
That really says something for us.
But frankly, we'd be better off if the rest of the world were doing their share.
We'd be much better off.
If the Chinese were inventing at the same per capita rate as we are, think of what the world would look like.
Think how wonderful it would be.
Okay, so just as the Chinese are much better off because we've given, made possible all these technologies that they're running around, you know, they're driving around on their scooters instead of trudging on the streets, hauling, you know, water on sticks on their backs, we'd be you know, water on sticks on their backs, we'd be much better off if they would be making inventions.
Who knows all the great things we could all have.
So yes, we're in this together.
And yes, precisely because humans can inherit...
Acquired traits, i.e., inventions made by others, we can all benefit each other.
And the unaccounted for externality, okay, the environmentalists only talk about negative externality of human activity.
They never talk about the positive externalities, which are massive.
And, I mean, look, ultimately, The demonstration that humans are creators and not destroyers on net is proven by the fact that there's stuff here.
If the average person created more than they destroyed, there would be no civilization, there would be no cities, there would be nothing.
Sorry, I think you mean created less than they destroyed?
If they destroyed more than they created, there would be nothing here.
Yes, because there would be no net creation.
We would still be in the Stone Age.
In fact, we would be extinct.
But the fact that all this stuff, this whole apparatus of civilization and cities and universities and used bookstores and culture and everything, this shows that the average person creates more than they destroy.
Now, when it comes to surprising positive effects of human activity on the planet, and I hesitate to bring this up mostly because I'm afraid of Leonardo DiCaprio coming through my wall and beating me to death with hair gel, but you do point out some of the positive aspects of global warming.
I wonder if you could help people understand what they could be.
Okay.
Well, I am not a global warming denier.
I am a global warming supporter.
The I do believe that the evidence is clear that there's been some warming, about six-tenths of a degree centigrade since the 1960s or 50s.
And it's very clear that there's been some significant global warming in the past 200 years.
I mean, Charles Dickens, if you read his books, he talks about snowy winters in London.
That's clearly no longer the case.
But is the world worse off because the climate has warmed?
Since Dickens' time, the average per capita income in the world has risen 50 times, but we don't have smelly winters in London.
I'll take the trade.
In the past 100 years, human carbon use has risen 10 times.
But GDP per capita has risen 10 times.
Okay, I'll take my own personal life.
I was born in 1952.
I have memories going back to about 1957.
I can remember Sputnik.
It was the first major, you know, big-time world event that I can actually remember as part of my own life.
And, well, when Sputnik flew, The average per capita income in the world in today's money was about $2,400 a year.
So, since that time, what has happened?
The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere since 1957, and we do have good measurements since just about that time, has risen about 20%.
This has had the following consequences.
We've had 6 tenths of a degree Kelvin rise in temperature, which is a 0.2 degree rise in temperature.
The average rate of plant growth on the planet has increased by 15%, that is in almost direct proportion to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
Now, I'm not talking about agriculture.
That's done much better.
I'm talking about wild plants.
That are just benefiting from increased CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
And this is a very easy to prove result.
The theory of photosynthesis is very well established.
When you talk about established science, the theory of photosynthesis is actually much better established than the theory of global warming.
It's about as well established as the theory of the round earth.
So we've had a 15% growth in the rate of plants, which means that There's 15% more plant production in the world, which means there's 15% more animal life in the world, because they live on the plants.
And human per capita income has risen 400%.
Now, when you're talking about 15% increase in The productivity of nature and a 400% increase in the productivity of civilization.
To set that off against a climate change, you would have to have experienced a climate catastrophe to say that it was in any way comparable to these benefits.
But, I mean, I have to tell you, I got memories going back 60 years now, and I have to tell you what the climate in the 1950s was like.
It was about the same as it is now.
And as you point out, there have been significantly warmer trends.
What blows my mind, I grew up in England, and what blows my mind is the idea that in England you could grow wine all the way up into Yorkshire in the past.
Sure.
The world about the year 1000 or 1100 was significantly warmer than it is today, and it was quite beneficial.
The High Middle Ages, it was called, And population grew, crops grew, yet not only were they growing wine in Northern England and even Scotland, they were growing wheat in Iceland.
This is what made possible the Viking colonization of Iceland and Greenland.
This was a more productive world.
It was a milder climate.
This is good.
Now, of course, if you were to say, well, if the climate keeps getting warm, a thousand years from now it'll be too hot.
Yeah, that's true.
But let me tell you something.
It is by advancing the economy, increasing population, increasing the number of people who are well-off and well-educated and free, fully free, both politically and materially, you advance the rate of technological innovation.
Now you take solar energy.
Solar energy's got great potential.
It's not yet.
And I am totally against people Who would impose regressive taxes on fossil fuels in order to make solar energy competitive by making everything else more expensive.
That's crazy.
What they're doing in Germany, where they have tripled the cost of electricity in order to try to make wind and solar more competitive.
I mean, that's insane.
And a very regressive tax, of course.
It tends to hit the poor the hardest.
Yes, absolutely.
Imagine poor pensioners who are trying to heat their apartments and pay their electric bills, and they're being hit with triple because of this fixation.
No, but if you have economic advance...
You're going to have technical advance and solar energy will become cheaper over time.
It absolutely will.
But the way to make solar energy cheaper is not to throw the world into a depression but to create a worldwide economic boom in which all technologies advance including energy technologies and energy will become cheaper and I believe solar energy is one of those that We'll become very much cheaper.
And then we'll have that.
And other things.
Fusion power, you know, we don't have it yet.
I think we can have it.
But it's a richer world that is going to create these things.
And so, yes, at that point, we will move to less carbon intensive sources.
It will happen as a matter of course.
There's no rush on this.
There's absolutely no rush.
You know, based on current projections, if we keep going the way we're going right now, 50 years from now, world sea level will be five inches higher, which is not material.
But 50 years from now, if we keep going the way we are now, if we can do in the next 50 years what we have done in the last 50 years, which is triple worldwide standard of living, we basically lift You know, 90% of the world out of poverty.
We'll have done something incredible, and we will have so many more advanced technology, so much more capable of dealing not only with climate, but with every other material problem that we have.
And one of those people is going to come up with teleportation or some kind of nonsense that's going to completely change the world in ways that computers have in the past.
And, you know, we wouldn't have been able to have this conversation with video 20 years ago without having to fly out, be in the same room.
So just think of all of the energy that's been saved.
And so technology is, of course, our solution, but very few people are.
On the left seem to accept that, which is weird because the left is all about secular, scientific, all this.
Now, you've also talked about nuclear power.
And of course, that's a very dirty word after Fukuyama and Three Mile Island and so on.
But I think you had some more optimism than a lot of people did about the potentials for nuclear power.
Well, it's interesting.
You know, I am originally a nuclear engineer.
I'm a doctorate in nuclear engineering.
My first engineering job was in the nuclear industry.
Later on, I switched into aerospace.
But it was very interesting.
You know, I used to have debates with the Sierra Club.
And I'd say, look, you're against pollution.
And you say, we can't use fossil fuels because it's smoking up the world and we're going to run out.
And here's nuclear power, doesn't make any smoke, and we're never going to run out.
And they say, well, that's why we hate it.
And I said, I didn't get it.
And then finally, I realized the reason why they were so passionately against nuclear power.
And this is very important.
It is because it threatened to solve a problem they needed to have.
They want power, and if the problem is solved, they can't get the power.
Right.
And that is why the global warmest today remain adamantly against nuclear power.
Okay, now a few of them who actually...
We're believing that this argument was about global warming and not about political power.
We're dismayed by this.
For instance, Patrick Moore, the head of one of the founders of Greenpeace, has broken with the rest of the moment.
I don't understand.
You're saying global warming is a problem.
Here's nuclear power.
We should do it.
But he doesn't get it.
Global warming isn't about weather.
It is about power.
Carbon taxes aren't about weather.
They are about money.
This other stuff is all just nonsense.
In the 1970s, we actually had a cooling trend.
Ecologists said, this is being caused by pollution, particulate pollution caused by industry.
We have too much industrial growth.
There's too much economic growth, too much population growth.
It's causing global cooling.
It's got to be stopped.
It's got to be put under control, put us in control.
Later on, it switched to warming.
This is global warming.
It's being caused by industry and population growth.
It's out of control.
It's got to be put under control, put us in control.
The problem is always different.
The solution is always the same.
Now, in terms of nuclear power, I mean, what we're talking about is creating a resource that is of immense value to mankind.
I go through the book, I don't have the numbers in front of me right now, but if you took all the fossil fuels in the world and you price them at today's prices and divided it up among every person on earth...
The amount of money that you would have from that would be a few tens of thousands of dollars.
So that's your share of the common heritage of mankind.
As measured in fossil fuels.
If you took the same energy as nuclear power and you priced it at today's rates and divided it up among all the people of the earth, it's millions of dollars.
That is, your share of the common heritage of mankind priced at current rates If you include nuclear power, it's millions.
So they're taking millions of dollars away from every person on Earth if you abolish nuclear power.
Now, of course, it's more than that because nuclear power is only the current next step.
If we're talking about fusion power, then it's billions of dollars.
But also, I mean, really, you know, there really is such a thing as pollution.
And I'm not talking about carbon dioxide.
Carbon dioxide is not pollution.
Carbon dioxide is a vital element for the biosphere.
But particulate pollution, things that injure human health.
And this is caused by more primitive methods of producing energy, such as burning biomass and coal.
And millions of people die in Asia every year, in particular.
If you've ever been to China, you know the severe pollution that is over there.
And it's quite tangible.
In order to have as many casualties from nuclear accidents as you get from biomass and coal-fired pollution, you'd have to have a Chernobyl every day.
Every day.
There'd have to be Chernobyl.
Now, at Fukushima, there were no nuclear casualties.
28,000 people died at Fukushima from the tidal wave and the earthquake and falling buildings and shock and fire and exposure.
Not one No one died from radiological exposures.
No one outside the plant gate got even a health impacting dose of radiation.
So the idea that Japan should shut down its nuclear power plants because of Fukushima, let alone Germany shut down its nuclear power plants because of Fukushima, because they're worried about tidal waves sweeping into Germany.
I mean, this is hysteria, and it has no rational basis.
No, and people also don't understand the degree to which deforestation has been alleviated by people having access to coal, because people got to burn stuff to stay warm in the winter or to cook.
And if they can't get coal, then what they'll do is go and cut down the local forests.
And the fact that forests have increased since the introduction of coal, which has, of course, created more foliage to absorb CO2, it's just one of these, it's very, very complex.
And as you point out in the book, the world is a very self-balancing ecosphere.
Well, it's balancing at any moment.
I think it is a progressive ecosphere.
I think that human beings are making the world a more fertile place.
We are quickening the biosphere.
I mean, look, carbons deposited in the ground is like money stuffed under your mattress.
And any economist would tell you that if everybody takes all their savings and stuffs it under a mattress and doesn't put it in a bank where it can be invested, I mean, what banks actually do is they take the collective savings of a community and they mobilize it behind projects that promise to be the most productive.
At least that's what a bank that conducts its business properly does.
But if people wouldn't put their money in banks and not let it be invested, you'd have complete economic stagnation.
It would be very bad for the economy if that happened.
Well, the carbons that have been sequestered by the biosphere over millions of years as oil and coal have been taken out of circulation.
It is tremendous benefit to the biosphere that we put these back into circulation.
We have raised the productivity.
I mean, global warming through CO2 First of all, it makes CO2 more plentiful, and CO2 is a limiting ingredient on photosynthesis.
Also, the warming itself.
CO2 warming, it creates most of its warming in the coldest parts of the world.
It does not create much warming in the equatorial parts of the world because they already have very strong greenhouse effects from water vapor, whereas the Arctic and the sub-Arctic have very low water vapor concentrations, and thus the CO2 warming That's where it has an effect.
If you're already wearing a parka, putting on a flannel shirt over the parka, assuming you can get a flannel shirt over the parka, doesn't add much.
But if you're naked and you put on a flannel shirt, that does something for you.
CO2 global warming is going to make larger areas of the world agriculturally and biospherically productive, and it also increases net rainfall worldwide.
Now it is true that climate change will cause some areas to have less rainfall and some to have more, but on net you will have more because the warmer the ocean is, the more water vapor gets into the atmosphere and what goes up has to come down.
Right, right.
And it lengthens the growing season, too.
And it lengthens the growing season, that's right.
Because the idea, to me at least, I mean, there's sort of a bunch of major dominoes that need to fall down in order for us to accept government power as the only solution.
Of course, there has to be global warming, and I think you're making the case that there is.
It has to be based on human activity, which I think you're making the case, at least to some degree.
that it is.
And it has to be catastrophic, which I think you're pulling back from.
And even if we accept all these three, we then have to assume that government power is the only and the best way to solve this.
And of course, as I've made the case for years, if governments were really interested in the long-term effects of their policies on the future, there'd be no such thing as accumulating government debts and deficits.
Because if they really cared about the weather a hundred years from now, it would Wouldn't they care about the economy five years from now when there are hundreds of trillions of dollars of unfunded liabilities?
And also, of course, if people really want to limit environmental depredations, then they should have governments not be able to borrow or print money because that stimulates demand in the here and now while costing demand in the future.
But what would you say we should try to bring to people who are obviously a lot of people very emotionally invested In these situations, in these arguments, in these perspectives, what should we bring to them to help try and break them out of the matrix?
Well, there's two things, or three.
One is the truth.
Let them know that these catastrophes that they are being told about are mythical, and that they should not be panicked by them and allow themselves to be manipulated by them, by those who, you know, just for starters, want to rig up the price of energy at their expanse, but also curtail their freedoms and curtail their futures and their children's futures by panicking them with these hysteria.
Okay, that's the first thing.
The second thing is they need to be enlightened as to what the effects have been of people falling for this in the past.
Okay?
And what the possible effects will be if they fall for it.
I mean, look, Nobody has ever been killed because there have been too many people in the world.
But millions of people have been killed by people who think there are too many people in the world.
The menace is not there being too many people in the world.
The menace is that there could be people who think there are too many people in the world and are prepared to do something serious about it.
We're not in danger of running out of resources.
We're in danger from people who think that we're running out of resources and therefore want to make a move to deny other people resources so they can be assured of their own share.
This is what it is, that acceptance of these ideas Lead to tyranny, lead to war, will lead to war.
And believe me, there are already people today in Washington, in Moscow, and I'm sure in Beijing as well, and any other place where there's people who are thinking about justification for military Force being used strenuously to exert dominance internationally,
who are framing it in terms of this argument, the resource war.
There's books about this, the coming resource war.
This is the mentality of war and it's also the mentality of genocide.
And what I do in my book, Merchants of Despair, Which I hope you'll show a better picture of.
I go through the history of this and how practically every major human cause catastrophe of the past 200 years has been caused by people who believed in this idea of limited resources in one form or another.
From the Irish Famine, to the Indian Famine, to the eugenics movement, to the Nazis, to the population control movement, To the Chinese population control program and right now we are having the basis for World War III set up by the propagation of these anti-human beliefs.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it is basically the idea of do you grow the pie or is there a fixed amount of pie?
I mean, that sounds like it's a very reductionist thing, but if you've ever seen two siblings fighting over one piece of pie, it's a pretty vicious fight.
But if you give them two pieces of pie, suddenly you have peace.
And this idea that...
If we believe it's a zero-sum game, with usually some loss, you know, that the people are rich in the world because there are other people who are poor, and that's the only reason.
It's just a transfer rather than a creation that does set you up for interminable conflict, I mean, with the somewhat important difference that siblings usually don't have armies.
That's right.
The fundamental question, is wealth something that you make or something that you take?
You know, nobody is talking about having a war over shoe supplies because it is apparent to everyone that shoes are something that you make.
But there are people who talk about having wars over energy supplies because they think that energy is something that you have to take.
In the past 16 years, we've seen a partial refutation of this, in particular with oil.
That is, oil, you know, is created underground in rock formations called shale.
That's where the oil is born.
And it's born in tiny little droplets scattered throughout the shale rock.
And...
And there's vast amounts of oil in that shale rock around the world.
But until 1998, there was no practical way of getting it out.
And all the oil that we had access to was oil that had escaped from the shale through cracks in the shale, making it up above the shale to form pockets in the looser rocks above the shale.
Now, of course, If it's in loose rock, water goes down and water is heavier than oil and it pushes oil up.
So once the oil has escaped from the shale, it will slowly start migrating towards the surface as water can get below it.
And so all the oil that we have had access to is the oil which had escaped from the shale but hadn't yet reached the surface to be destroyed by the environment.
Only the oil in transit has been the oil that we've been having.
Okay?
Now, but 1998, Small oil company in Texas, Mitchell, perfected a means of using hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling to get the oil out of the shell.
And then this was done experimentally several times in the early 2000s, starting in a serious way around 2007.
And since 2007, the American oil production has doubled based on this technique.
And American oil Gas reserves have tripled.
How can American gas reserves triple in 10 years when we're using so much gas?
Well, it's because gas and oil that wasn't a resource before has become a resource because of this new technology.
And as this new technology propagates worldwide, The world's gas and oil resources are going to multiply, as in fact they have multiplied.
I mean, even before there was shale, just advances in drilling technique created more and more oil resources.
There were vastly more oil resources in the world in 1998 than there were in 1972 when the Club of Rome predicted that we would run out of oil by 1998.
Instead, we had three times as much oil.
And now we have three times as much as we had then, because of human creativity.
Now, so, we are not running out of resources.
We are creating resources at an accelerating rate.
Okay?
Human beings are the resource.
And the more of us there are, and the freer that they are, you know, now, I mean, look, Russia's taking a step backward, but Eastern Europe is a lot freer than it was During the Cold War, so I think we're going to start to see significant contributions to world technology coming out of Poland.
I know people in Poland working on robotics doing incredible stuff, in particular, and I'm sure these other places, Czechoslovakia, and so forth.
And even Russia is freer than it was, and they'll start making more contributions than they did, though not as much as they could if they had secure property rights and personal freedom.
But, yes.
And of course, if the left who claims so much to care about the poor really did care about the poor, they would be celebrating the free market reforms taking place since the 90s in China and in India, which have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
Well, thank you very, very much for your time, Dr.
Zubrin.
I really wanted to remind people, we'll put a link to this book below.
It's well, well worth picking up.
It's a really well written and fascinating book.
Traipsed through history.
I knew about Malthusian doctrines.
I didn't know how pernicious they were in their application, but then pretty much any time the government gets hold of science, bad things happen.
So the book is called Merchants of Despair, Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudoscientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.
