The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 213. Don't Climate Panic - An Investigation into The Proposed Solutions to Climate Change

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Over the past few weeks, we have been looking at the reality of the state of the world; not what the corporate media says, not what the politicians are saying, but a new voice - the voice of data. In the previous two episodes, we looked at the Progress of the Human Race. Today, we are tackling the topic of Climate Change. Are we experiencing an increasingly worsening climate? Is it possible that rising temperatures and tides will kill us all?Thankfully, there are a growing number of reputable scientists and authors that are presenting a much more optimistic story than the narrative we typically hear. Using the same data sets as many of the climate alarmists, people like Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shellenberger, Marian Tupy, and Matt Ridley have been speaking to the idea that climate change is real, it’s just not the apocalyptic threat that we’ve been told it is.

Welcome to the Jordan B Peterson podcast season four episode 70. In the previous compilation episodes, we looked at the progress of the human race. Today, we're tackling the topic of climate change. Are we experiencing an increasingly worsening climate? Is it possible that rising temperatures and ties will kill us all? What's the truth? Thankfully, there are a growing number of reputable scientists and authors that are presenting a much more optimistic story.

Using the same data set as many of the climate alarmists, people like Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Schellenberger, and Matt Ridley explain that while climate change is real, it's not the threat that we've been told it is. This episode is brought to you by Schwank Grills, hands down the best grill I've ever used. As you probably know, my family's very experienced at cooking meat. Very. So I would say I'm a trustworthy source of information about how to do that well, and Schwank Grilling is up there. Schwank Grills are made in America. They're portable infrared grills that heat up to a whopping 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Being able to do that at home is something that you can't usually do. That exceptional quality and taste where the stakes crispy on the outside but rare or medium rare juicy on the inside, a mired reaction. This girl does all that, but in your backyard or patio or even out camping. It doesn't smoke, it's super easy to clean,

and it gets you high quality steakhouse where these stakes like you get at Mortons, cut for three, two, capital grill, etc. These girls are the best I've seen in the market. Steaks take around 3 minutes depending on thickness or you can do chicken wings, fish, hamburger or vegetable lamb chops, my favorite. It even comes with a pizza stone if you're a pizza eater. I know that most people are pizza eater so I thought I'd throw that in there. Try their special offer by heading to schwankgrills.com right now. That's

SCHWANK for $150 off an American made a Schwank 1500 degree grill when using promo code JP150 at checkout. Important note, you must have the Swank Grill and Grill cover in your cart for the code to work. Again, that's $150 off. Swank Grill's with promo code JP150 at checkout. Enjoy the episode. Making poor people richer is an extremely intelligent environmental move for a variety of reasons. I mean, the first is perhaps that once you get people above a certain level of income, they can start buying fuels that are cleaner than the fuels they use now, done and would, and that kind of thing. But also that as people move up the economic hierarchy, they have time to be concerned about things that are more abstract like what the environment is

going to be like for their children, which they're not going to be, or when they go on holiday, for example, or even where they live as they have some options to choose where to live. And so it could be, we often construe the relationship between the economy and the environment as a zero sum game, right?

And the biologists in particular, broadly speaking, have the political biologists have a proclivity to do that, that as the economy grows, we sacrifice the environment to it. But it could be the case that we get the best environmental bang for the buck by making the poor rich as fast as we possibly can around the world. And if we make poor economic decisions because we're catastrophizing a certain kind of environmental

calamity, we're inviting, we're actually increasing the risk of environmental degradation in the medium and the long term. Do you think that's reasonable? Yes, absolutely so, in a number of different ways. So I think it's funny how we don't recognize how terrible it is to be poor. If you're poor, you're vulnerable in all kinds of ways. You've very clearly, incredibly vulnerable to global warming. So, you know, if you remember, there was a big hurricane hitting high on the Philippines and back in 2013., there was a big hurricane hitting Hayan, the Philippines, and back in 2013, it was made a big deal out of global warming. It hit this very, very poor city, where most of their citizens live on the corrugated roof.

Not surprisingly, having a hurricane five is terrible when you live on a corrugated roof. The best way to help these people obviously would be to lift them out of poverty, what actually, as we can see, back in the early part of last century, a similar hurricane hit. And eradicated about half the city, uh, this time it was only about a 20th of the city. So much, much better because the city was much richer. But if we focused on making them even richer, they would be much better off just simply from the point of view of being more protected from hurricanes. So, you know, fundamentally, there's something weird about us saying, all those poor people and the Philippines, we should help them by not driving our car today. What? No, we should help them by not driving our car today.

What? No, you should help them by becoming rich, becoming part of the integrated global economy, making sure that their kids would be better, better educated, not die from easily curable infectious diseases and so on. So not only would it be better environmentally, but it would obviously also be better for them educationally, for them health wise and all these other things It would simply generate much much better lives in the fill in the Philippines But and as you also pointed out as you get richer You're actually cleaner in almost all ways. You don't use Dung and cardboard and wood to cook inside

But also you stop cutting down forests. You move to the city instead. You become a web designer or something else that very, very little related to actually clearing up forest land. You do a lot of things in cities that are much more ecologically sustainable. And of course, in the long run, you will actually also say,

I would like to make sure that we have better regulations. So we have less air pollution. So we have many of the other things that drive environmental benefits. So absolutely by getting people out of poverty, we fix most environmental problems. But, and this is the important, but yeah, we don't fix global warming. As you get richer, you just simply emit more and more CO2 because these guys will then start flying around the world. They'll start, you know, consuming a lot more meat. They'll be doing a lot of other things because they're richer. That's wonderful for them, but it will mean higher emissions of CO2. So we do need to have a conversation about how we're going to fix that problem.

Okay, so why do you lead us down that path? Okay, well, let me, let me comment a bit on what you just said. And then let's go down that pathway. Okay, so To swallow what you just said and to believe it, you, you, there's a set of beliefs that you have to have already in place. You have to believe that the current economic system isn't fatally flawed and basically works or at least works better than any hypothetical alternatives that have been tried or that we can dream up. So it basically works and works means as it runs it tends to lift people out of absolute poverty. There's still a maintenance of relative poverty, but absolute poverty tends to disappear. And there seems to be really good evidence for that, especially across, well, since the Industrial Revolution,

but it's really taken off in the last 30 years, maybe non-coincidentally with the demise of communism, which was a competing, you know, a competing economic theory and produced all sorts of bad economic decisions. In any case, you have to buy the hypothesis that the current system works and that extending it is going to be better. And so you don't get to adopt revolutionary,

a stance of revolutionary criticism of the Western capitalist hierarchy. So that's a big sacrifice if you're thinking is oriented in that direction. Now, I don't know really what to make of that because you'd think the evidence that the poor has been lifted out of poverty at an unbelievable, like an astonishing rate since the year 2000, not just in China, but all over the world, would be essentially irrefutable evidence that the current system works.

And then if you look at China after they adopted free market policies, compared to before they adopted free market policies, there's absolutely no comparison with regard to growth. And so it isn't obvious to me how if you were truly concerned with the poor, you'd be able to deny the sorts of propositions that you put forward, I don't understand that. Maybe it's partly because people just don't know how much better things have gone in

the last 20 years and why, you know, because it has been difficult news to bring forward and it's difficult to market. If I can just, yes, yes. So one of the things I think people don't recognize if you look at it at a graph of the last 200 years, 200 years ago almost everyone in the world were absolutely poor in the sense of less than a dollar a day. Yeah, 95% of humanity was below that level. And we've just seen a dramatic decline. As you mentioned, we're now down below 10%. Even despite of COVID, which a lot of people have pointed out have actually made more poor people, we've gone from seven up to about 9%. And so we've delayed the benefit for a couple of years.

That's terrible and I would rather not have had that happen, but it doesn't change the long-term trajectory that's amazingly downwards in the sense that we have many, many fewer people that are poor. One of my favorite guys who runs the world in data, website, he points out that every year for the last 25 years, the headline of every newspaper around the world could have been over the last 24 hours, 138,000 people have lifted, been lifted out of poverty. 138,000 people every day for the last 25 years. But of course, it's not news because it happened every day. It was not, you know, some, oh, this day, it happened. We don't get these good news.

And I think we need to get them in order to be able to understand the magnitude of what we were talking about. Well, you know, the problem with accepting that good news or a problem with it is that it pretty much eradicates the romantic rebel. You know, because it all of a sudden makes it very difficult for you to be cool, to find something cool, to stand up against and to resist. You know, you have a benevolent, relatively benevolent society that's getting incrementally better. It's not a villain that you can heroically resist. And that's, that is, I'm not being cynical about that. That is actually a problem because resisting arbitrary authority is a good story. And it served people well for a very long time. And if you don't have that to catalyze your identity,

you have to search for something perhaps equally grand. And that's difficult, especially when you also don't have to go out and contend with the brute force of Mother Nature to anywhere near the degree that you once had to. But if you look at it, there's plenty of other things you could stand up to, and that was what we were talking to. Instead of you look at it, there's plenty of other things you could stand up to. And that was what we were talking to. Instead of being the romantic hero that stands up against society, why aren't you the romantic hero that stands up against tuberculosis, or the one that stands up

against maternal death, or the one that stands up for free trade, or the ones that stand up, for all these other things, where we know for very very little money we can make a tremendous benefit. So again, I get why it's not a sex question. I mean, I think it might have something to do also with the inability to utilize your resentment. You know, if you're resentful about things and you oppose the capitalist state, you can easily identify an enemy. But if you stand up against tuberculosis, you can easily identify an enemy. But if you stand up against tuberculosis, like obviously tuberculosis is bad, it doesn't make you look good by comparison. Environmentalism is depressing. It's actually bad for mental health. I think that's now being proven quite dramatically with rising levels of anxiety and depression and reports

despite school children around the world that they're having nightmares about climate change. You may know that half of all people surveyed say that they think climate change could result in the extinction of humankind. My views have evolved over the years, but I've always viewed apocalyptic environmentalism as a problem for people that care about saving nature, for people that for everybody. And so those awards came from that prior book. Yeah, well, the environmental activism issue is interesting because at least in part, because it also,

it seems to me, interferes with sensible policy making. So it's actually self-defeating in a profound sense. But first of all, it gets people hyper-worried about extremely vaguely formulated problems, self-defeating in a profound sense. First of all, it gets people hyper-worried about extremely vaguely formulated problems, distracts them from what the prioritized issues might be. And well, it's hard to think clearly about what steps to take to move forward when you're panicking

in a vague and unpleasant manner. So, and you do not do that in apocalypse, never. That's one of the things I really liked about it was that in each sub-chapter, you drill down, at least to some degree, to the level of actually actually implementable policy. So you start with the story about this group, and no, I should ask you first,

who are you exactly to write such a book? Like, why do you know this? Why should people listen to you? Sure. So I've been an environmental activist for 25 years. I've also been, I'm also an environmental journalist. I read a column for Forbes. This is, that's my apagos numbers, my second book. You know, I don't have any formal qualifications. I was a cultural anthropologist. I quit my PhD program in the

1990s because the program had become two-postmodern and abstract. The first big essay I wrote was called the Death of Environmentalism, and then I mentioned the book Breakthrough. I mean, you may find interesting that, you know, my father is a very humanistic psychologist in the same tradition of work that you are in, or I see us in.

And I knew that environmentalism was making me depressed. Like climate change was depressing me. And so one of the famous lines from the death of environmentalism, which was an essay in 2004, was Martin Luther King didn't give the I Have a Nightmare speech. He gave the I Have a Dream speech. And we wrote that because I was reading, I would read books about the Solar Rights movement, and I would feel inspired by these stories of heroic overcoming. And then I would read books by Bill McKibbin and other environmentalists and I would feel depressed. And I thought, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating

to make positive social change. Yeah, you kind of wonder, you kind of wonder too. I mean, this is, since we're talking about psychological issues, is that it's possible too that that kind of apocalyptic thinking is much more difficult for people to escape when they are in fact depressed. And so it's very difficult to separate out political beliefs from, let's say, emotional state. And so that's an interesting issue in and of itself. You know, people might object,

well, you know, the crisis is so gloomy. If you're a realist, of course you're depressed, and it should be the case because, you know, look how depressing the facts are, but that strikes me as, well, it kind of puts the cart before the horse in some sense, is like, are you sure the crisis is of that proportion? And then are you sure that depressing people is precisely the way to go about it? And then last thing there maybe is, I couldn't shake the suspicion, especially in relationship to environmentalism, that it's contaminated quite badly with like historical shame and guilt and a certain kind of profound anti-humanism.

So, and I mean contaminated by that, you know, I've heard the environment, so let's say something like, well, the planet would be better off as if it was a being in some sense, if there were no people on it. It's like, yeah, well, I'm not so sure I trust people who say say things like that. And then don't notice. So. Yeah, I mean, I was I one of the things I stumbled. I mean, at the end of the apocalypse never in the false gods for last soul chapter, I talk about how I myself was depressed at a

period when I was drawn towards apocalyptic environmentalism. So I think there's an interesting question of is apocalyptic environmentalism depressing or is or are depressed people attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism or both, of course? I stumbled across the work of Aaron Beck, who you know, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the founders. And I was struck that the three structures of depressed people that he identified, I'm a terrible person, the world is a terrible place and the future structures of depressed people that he identified, I'm a terrible person, the world is a terrible place and the future is bleak,

that that's the exact same three structures of the every environmental narrative. So every environmental narrative is that humans are terrible cancer on the planet, the world is going to hell on a high and basket, and the future is not, you know, the end is not. And that's a very interesting observation, especially in relationship to your comments

about school children. And so perhaps driving those three axioms home, emphatically and forcefully, isn't the wisest thing to be doing to young children. And the fact of that overlap with depressive thinking, I mean, Bex no small figure in the history of psychological thinking. He's also extraordinarily practical

as his cognitive behavioral therapy. And it also, as a, what would you say, as a psychological philosophy, or as a branch of medicine, even one of the things the cognitive behavior is so really, really good at. And I did this in my clinical practice, is to take those vague, depressive apprehensions and then break them down into

micro problems that can actually be addressed, and that's much less, that's much less depressing. It's like, well, exactly why is the future so depressing as far as you're concerned? Like, in some detail, not vague. Look, if you're going to run away from something because it hurts and it's dangerous, it doesn't really matter if you have a vague conception of it, right? But if you're going to face it and confront it and solve it, let's say then you can't be vague about it. And that's also good for your mental health. That approach, orientation is directly linked biochemically and neurophysiologically to positive emotions. So the process of decomposing these terrible abstract problems into solvable

micro problems actually facilitates positive emotion and suppresses anxiety. And so it is very interesting overlap there. And it's worth thinking about. I've viewed writing, I've viewed apocalypse never as cognitive behavioral therapy, both for myself and for other people. And viewed writing, I viewed Apocalypse Never as cognitive behavioral therapy, both for myself for other people. And in fact, the highest praise I received from people is to who's told me that they were very depressed about the environment. And then they read Apocalypse Never and they felt much better. And so I think you have to do both things like, as you pointed it out, cognitive behavioral therapy require his, you know, back therapy was, you have to be very concrete about why you're a good person, why the world is a good place and why the future is bright. You have to be very specific

about it. It has to be very, it has to be evidence-based. It can't be fantasy land. Has to be actionable as well. Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting because I wouldn't have, I certainly didn't get that sense reading the book, you know, that it, although you could also, although illuminating the fact that the problems that be set us globally and individually are actually actionable and aren't so dismal when you look at them in detail and are also complex and weirdly interesting ways, it's not surprising that has positive psychological consequences. I mean, I certainly was pleased, for example, by your discussion of plastics. I've been following the work of this Dutch kid.

I don't remember his name, but he's built this gadget for gathering plastic, which is quite cool. And I didn't know that the evidence for the decomposition of plastics was as robust as you described in the book. So I thought, hey, isn't that good? That's a positive thing to see. And I saw many examples of that in the book that things aren't as bad as we think. So let's go through that. Let's start. You start talking about this group.

I think it's a UK group, extinction rebellion. And I kind of see them in some sense as the four runners of where we might go if we regard the impending climate catastrophe as a doom and gloom-laden existential crisis. It's like, man, half the people on the planet are going to die. No solution is too drastic. OK, so that's extinction rebellion in some sense. So maybe you could tell the story about that.

I was going to say they say no, no solution is too drastic unless it's nuclear energy in which case they're against it. Or in case it's fracking in which case they're against that too. And I get it that right away, which is a wire that people who are the most apocalyptic, the most dead set against the things that have reduced carbon emissions, natural gas and nuclear. By far, the two things that have reduced carbon emissions the most, instead they're in favor of things that don't work, adding a lot of unreliable renewables onto your grid, making electricity expensive, making societies less zillion climate change. Those are all high priorities for the apocalyptic environmental movement. So it's not just that. Why? Why? Why? What's going on? Like, well,

I mean, it was so interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, I you were on my mind a bit when I was working, particularly towards the last chapter, I go through three core motivations. One is there's certainly a powerful financial interest that work, renewable energy companies. I document how fossil energy companies have financed anti-nuclear campaigns for 50 years. I also have the third chapter, there's chapters 10, 11, 12, the last three chapters of the book, look at the motivations. Chapter 11 is more on kind of will to power, a desire for status, for feeling important, particularly places like Europe, which are becoming irrelevant with the rise of China, wanting to assert their power over the developing

world. It's no coincidence, I think, that as Europe's power has faded, they've become more demanding to take control of the international economy in the name of climate change. And then the third chapter kind of says, those are both important motivations, but there's something else going on, which is that apocalyptic environmentalism is clearly a religious movement, everything about it, every, every the guilt, the original sin,

the apocalypse, the obsession with food, you know, various things about it are clearly a religion, and I'm hardly the first to make that observation. I document, in fact, there's actually good empirical work documenting that. And so I see the rising secularization, what Nietzsche called the death of God and the nihilistic vacuum that would be created in its wake as really the underlying engine for apocalyptic environmentalism. It's a way to give meaning to the world. So, you know, I'm writing a new book, which is going to be called We Who Ressel with God. And it obviously, we're thinking along

the same lines and for some of the same reasons. And there's this adage in the New Testament that warns people that they should deliver unto God, that which is God and unto Caesar, that which is Caesars. And of course, that on that statement is built the notion that separation of church and state is actually appropriate. But I also think that's true psychologically. And this is part of the problem I have with the New Atheist movement, or that if you don't have a domain that's sacred and rituals and to deal and some understanding that there

are deepest values and that's the domain of the sacred, whether you like it or not, you obliterate that in the name of rationality and all that happens is that things that are seas are now contaminated with the religious and that's really not a good thing. It's a seriously not a good thing. So it's interesting to see you close the book with that kind of, you know, with thinking that's along the same sort of line. And so did you see that working in you personally? That?

Yes. Okay, how? Yeah, I mean, when I was a pock elliptic about climate change, you mean? Yes, for sure. And I came back to my Christianity in writing Apocalypse Never. But it was also, I also became convinced

that by Jonathan Hayden, others that having faith was rational. So, you know, that it's actually psychologically healthy to have a faith. And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith. And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith. And that unlocked the, I couldn't finish apocalypse never actually until I had done that. No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't guess that again from reading the book because it, that isn't

obvious just as the psychological issue wasn't obvious. And that, I think that's a really good thing by the way. That should all be implicit in the book rather than explicit. explicit. It makes for a better, a less cluttered book, let's say. I wanted, yeah, I mean, I, some of my best allies, Stephen Pinker, Michael Schumer, are in the New Atheist movement, and I really remember them as friends, if I love them. And, and Steve also blurred my new book, San Francisco. And so San Francisco, and then I'm doing a third book afterwards,

and all three books are basically about the threats to civilization from within, and that they're on their all-conclude, San Francisco looks at the religious, this religious, the secular religion of compassion, and how it's gone completely crazy to basically result in greater victimization in the name of rescuing victims. And so I'm definitely after, I think we're after the same big prey here, which is, you know, the threats to civilization are coming from the most civilized members of society who are also the most secular members of, or they think they're the most secular members of society,

and they're projecting their needs for constructing new religions. Yeah, well, they're also, so, you know, with the death of God, and this is Nietzsche, through Jung, I suppose, because Jung was a great student of Nietzsche, and as much as Freud, for sure, as much as he was a student of Freud, and Jung was really trying to solve the problem

that Nietzsche posed, and that was his life's work. And I think in many ways he actually managed that, pointing out, first of all, that we cannot create our own values, that's actually not possible. We're not wise enough, smart enough, we don't live long enough. We just don't have that much intellectual, spiritual capacity, we have to depend at least to some degree on tradition.

And that brings up all sorts of problems. And that guilt you talked about, like that religious guilt. I was watching Guy Richie's King Arthur the other day. And when the King, the to be King Arthur puts his hands on the sword, he has this unbearable vision of his uncle killing his father, the evil uncle. And the evil uncle is a very standard archetypal trope. You see it in the Lion King, for example, with Scar. And the evil uncle is often the tyrannical aspect of the patriarchy, let's say.

And, you know, we all exist in relationship to that, because we all exist in relationship to this patriarchal social structure, history, because we're historical creatures. And then we all do have this guilt that overwhelms us about the blood and gourd and catastrophe that got us to where we are, an unarmed privilege, you know, to take a phrase from the radical leftists. It's part of our existential burden. And the existential psychologists who were followers mostly of

Can't remember the philosopher's name momentarily wrote being in time Heidegger Heidegger You know Heidegger talked about being thrown into the world So you're arbitrarily put somewhere parents are arbitrary Your subject to society and this and you have these existential concerns that will never go away And one of them is the terrible corrupt weight of history. And how are you related to that as an ethical being? And the radical leftists are definitely wrestling with that. But in their depression, let's say they can only see the negative aspect of the patriarchal figure and not the positive aspect. And that's a real catastrophe because, well, it makes you ungrateful for one thing, which is not a good idea in a modern state. So, okay, well, let's go back to extinction rebellion. And so, you talk about this activist group

that's highly motivated to point out the crisis and to take whatever steps are necessary, but they won't do practical things, nuclear energy, for example, that's a really interesting one. And so why not? It is that part of the contamination of the environmentalist movement with anti-capitalism per se or what's going on there? It's like, well, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you, yes.

So, and this is also an, so is also in my new book, which is why are the main advocates for action on the issue opposed to the obvious solutions, the solutions that have worked that are proven to work? And so, yes, for sure, there, because their motivation is to destroy the whole system. They view this system as the cause of the problem, and they view anything that distracts attention from destroying what they view as an evil system

as in some ways participating in the system. So that's definitely right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen that sort of thinking really destroyed people too. Like I've I've seen people literally take take their own lives because they thought that way. They felt they were so corrupt that any ambitious achievement whatsoever in the service of this evil structure was ethically forbidden. And so it's kind of, it's like the ultimate impesomistic nihilistic Buddhism. And it's also another example of that global thinking, global vague thinking that does in fact characterize clinical depression.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, one of the things, I talked about how Greta Tunberg, the Swedish youth climate activist, condemned nuclear power as dangerous, unnecessary and too expensive. Well, since when does she care about too expensive? I mean, her, she's demanding basically that we, you know, grind economic growth to a halt in order to reduce carbon emissions. You know, she condemns basically any modest progress as inadequate, and yet she comes out against the source of power, the zero carbon source of power that provides 40% of the electricity in her own country. When our allies in Germany have been speaking out to stop Germany from shutting down its last six nuclear reactors,

reached out to her to get her to say something she wouldn't do it. So the problem is solving the problem gets in the way of the alarmism. The alarmism isn't just, I think journalists and others misunderstaffing the alarmism, they think it's a tactic to achieve some end. And so one of the things I would get from journalists is they would say, come on, Michael, don't you think that it's important to exaggerateate climate change a little bit in order to get action? Well, first of all, there's no evidence that exaggerating the problem gets more action. Yeah, the answer to that is no. Let's not lie. Okay. I don't care what the reason is here. No, no lying, especially about something

important. I mean, it's not that it comes from journalists who have become propagandists effectively. And so the alarmism is the goal. Like the goal is the alarmism. Yeah, well, it, okay, so let's, okay, so let's dig down here in a little bit. So part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God, what the death of God meant, what he described and predicted was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest unifying value. Okay, so it's become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value and we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value and there has to be something at the top to unite us. Now it isn't obvious what should be at the top.

In fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images. We're not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it. And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top. Now let's say it dies because it's God and he got to abstract. Marcella Elliott at the History and Religions said that that happened many times in our history, that the top value got so abstract, it got disembodied and people didn't know what it was anymore, how to act it out or what it meant. And so it floated away and then collapse into competing, competing claims about what should be the highest value.

Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion, well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value? Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about. I think there's some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value. Perhaps there's truth and beauty, many other issues. Okay, so the highest value collapse, we're not united anymore. Well, then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be. And since it's about the highest value, now, now I have an idea at saving the environment,

that's the highest value. Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal. And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance. And so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either.

And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have. Like, well, this anti-capitalism issue, that's a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement. So because you're just not gonna solve both of those problems at the same time, you wanna dispense with capitalism, invent an entire new economic system

and save the planet. Okay. The part of the problem is that they're not actually sincere about it, so they would suggest nature as the highest value, but when you say, okay, well, here's what you could do to save nature, fertilize our irrigation attractors for poor countries. So they make the pressure off the forests, which is where the where the gorillas and the nature is, using oil rather than whale oil to save the whales,

and using nuclear power and natural gas. No, no, they don't want to do any of those things. So there is a nihilism there in the sense that the goal is power itself. Now, there's also no such thing as nature. Like, think about that. It's like when you refer to France as an entity, as a person. So you're personifying it, or maybe you're defying it to some degree. Well, that's what happens with nature.

It's like, what nature, what is that exactly? Well, everyone knows it's like an old-growth forest or something. There's some vague set of images, but nature conceptualized in that matter is actually a deity of sorts, and an unexamined deity, and who God only knows what it means. I mean, you look at what happened in Nazi Germany before the Nazis took power, because they were allied pretty tightly with certain kinds of environmentalist thinking, purity, for example. relied pretty tightly with certain kinds of environmentalist thinking, purity, for example,

very big pushback against invasive species, for example, it's quite interesting. It's like, well, there is this worship of whatever it is that nature signifies. And symbolically, it signifies something like, well, the maternal as put against the patriarchal. So that's in there, the warm embrace of mother. That's all in that symbolic realm. There's a great book about that called The Great Mother by Eric Neumann, best book ever written on that in the 1950s, an absolute classic. And it outlines the entire domain of symbolism of the positive feminine. And so you do see this religious struggle between those who are now advocates of the positive feminine

and detractors of the negative masculine, but it's very unbalanced, you know, because there's a negative feminine and there's a positive masculine as well. So we're all tangled up in that, we don't understand it. I mean, one of the interesting shifts that's occurred even in my own career as an environmentalist is that all of the stuff

from like the ecaotopia, the utopianism, the green utopianism, the renewal, I mean, the harmony with nature, the kind of role going to live in these small self-sustaining kind of anarchist communities, the Ewok village sort of picture. That's gone now. I mean, Greta Tumberg actively says that they're just, they literally will say now, we're just trying to prevent it from being as terrible.

We're trying to make it less terrible. So the utopianism, it's still there. I'm not saying it's totally gone. You certainly see it with renewables. The picture of renewables is somehow harmonizing us with the natural world, but it's nothing like what it was in the 70s. Nothing like Earth Day was actually mostly positive. I have a lot of criticism at Earth Day, but it was a mostly positive picture. So what's striking to me, but it was a mostly positive picture. So what's striking to me is the disappearance of even that positive picture from apocalyptic environmentalism. I wouldn't have predicted that apocalyptic environmentalism

could sustain itself with such a single polarity without this much more positive, romantic utopianism, which was really even there, it was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago, but it's somehow gone. So you don't get that picture from from Greta Tunberg. You will depression, depression can be all consuming, you know, and and you know, one another thing Jung pointed out very blatantly, he said, well, what's really going to threaten us, he wrote about this in the 1950s, is unexamined psychic epidemics,

and he met psychological epidemics, and their effect on the political structure, because he thought, well, we've become the most powerful force on the planet, and now our unrecognized psychological, what would you call them? Illness is good enough. They're going to manifest themselves in all sorts of ways that are going to be extraordinarily dangerous given our power. So, you grow crops, you use up land for a year to grow crops and then to process them and then to turn them into fuel, when you can just get fuel straight out of the earth and much

cheaper, much more and much better quality that doesn't degrade the car and that doesn't destroy the soil. And as I was studying that, on the one hand, I was struck by the impossible complexity of the question. And then on the other hand, I was noticing the inescapable conclusion that everything that they're trying to do here is just making things worse. In fact, you know, the idea was that we're trying to do here is just making things worse. In fact, the idea was that we're going to save the Earth from climate change by replacing fossil fuels with ethanol and biodiesel. But the reality was that you were chopping down the Amazon and Indonesian palm forests and to turn them into sterile farming land, the Midwest and the Mississippi

Valley over the US was essentially degraded from all of its soil and then the fertilizer that is just running off from the Mississippi is causing all these enormous damage to the Gulf of Mexico. It's insane how much damage is being done from this attempt to sort of centrally plant things from above. And Hayek has the same way, he says, you know, we used to suffer from problems, we now suffer from solutions. And this is... Let me ask you about that. Like, look, I've been struck by exactly this problem, right? This is the problem of unintended consequences and the irreducible complexity of things.

So like we can talk about climate change, the problem of climate change, but there isn't those words are unbelievably deceiving. Because there isn't a problem of climate change. There is 150,000 problems of climate change. And every single one of those is an unbelievably different problem and the solutions to those problems could well exist in terrible contradiction to one another. And so but you get deluded, you think, well climate change, well I can understand that, the climate, that's easy to say, I must be able to conceptualize that, of course you can't. And then and then

it hides the fact that it hides this understructure of complexity. Now you got a glimpse of that and that instilled in you this resistance to this fatal conceit, and instilled in you some humility. Why doesn't that happen to other people? And you know, there's lots of things that we're not doing that we could do that you also touch on. There's lots of things that we're not doing that we could do that you also touch on. One of the things that strikes me as somewhat catastrophic is the tragic underdevelopment of nuclear power. I've spoken with a number of people about the possibilities of nuclear power and you point out, and I think it's in how innovation works actually, that there are no shortage of plans for much

smaller nuclear reactors that don't use water as the primary coolant that use salt or some other substance like that, certain salts, and that if they fail, they actually shut down rather than melting down. And so that's another example I think of where the environmentalists, which are broad brush, but the environmentalists got things seriously wrong and are still doing so because as far as I can tell, if you wanted, the question is what do you want? Like, if you want cheap power of the sort that would make people rich enough to start caring about the environment, it seems to me that you would be a nuclear power supporter rather than a supporter of solar or wind power, which I think only still accounts for about 3% of total energy needs. That's true. People say, oh no, no, that's wrong, it's more than

10%. You find that referring to electricity, but electricity is only about 25% of energy at the moment. So it's around 3% comes from solar and wind. But the the real problem with solar and wind versus new clear, you can still horribly expensive because of the way we've regulated it and driven up its price. So that our problem is how to get the price down. But the real problem is the amount of land that solar and wind use because they're very low density sources of energy. So you have to have a lot of land and you need more land than there is. I mean, even Canada's hardly gone enough land to produce renewable energy for its population. And frankly, that's going back to a medieval

economy where you had to use the landscape to produce energy. You had to dam the rivers and use the landscape to produce energy. You had to dam the rivers and grow the crops that you then and cut down the forests, you know, to to burn the water. Well, it's not obvious either that wind farms aren't a blight on the landscape. I'm afraid they are. They're terrible for birds. I'm a keen bird watcher. I don't like the idea of these these birds being devastated by onshore and offshore wind. And you know, a wind farm spends the first seven, eight years of its life earning back the energy that went into building the wind turbine. You know, and only after that is it net positive. And even then, it's a huge investment of capital that could be doing something else. You know, the point about energy is that it's the master resource.

It's the thing that everybody else needs to use. So you want to make it as cheap and as reliable as possible. Yes, exactly. That should be said over and over that if you were, it seems to me that if you were truly concerned about the planetary fate, let's say, or even more precisely the fate of the people on the planet, that you would do everything you could to drive the cost of energy. Including the externalized costs to something as low as possible because it's the prerequisite for everything else and starving people aren't we already talked about this but starving people aren't good planetary stewards. So even if you, you'll notice, Jordan, you and I have now slipped into a slightly pessimistic mood in that we're

finding the energy policies of our countries rather stupid. Yeah, it's probably because we're old enough so that the 90 minute discussion starts to become tiring. Well, does that? You do promote CO2 emission, amelioration strategies in false alarm. And you did just point out that, although we should be striving to make the poor around the world as much less poor as we possibly can as quickly as we can. So everyone wins, including us, just like Henry Ford won when he paid his workers enough to buy his cars, the cars they made, they are going to increase the rate of carbon dioxide emission. And for some people, that would be enough reason to scrap the whole enrichment process. But you have

some strategies that you think are wise to ameliorate the problems that would be associated with that. Yes, so I talk about five different solutions in the book. So the first one is a carbon tax. Any economist would say, you know, look, you have a problem, you emit CO2, but you don't actually take it into consideration because it's free to admit. So that's how we think about the polluted pays. You put a price on carbon. In principle, you should do this across the world, you should do it so that it slowly rises with time. It's the most efficient way to deal with it.

There's two things we need to recognize with it. One is it turns out to be very, very hard because it makes it very explicit to people that tackling global warming is actually costly. Secondly, we know that politicians are just really, really bad at doing something for a long time, very consistently, across all areas. What politicians typically end up doing is they'll put it on something. So, you know, in many places in Europe, for instance, you have enormously high taxes on cars, and you have enormously low taxes on people who are good at lobbying their governments for

their particular interests. So, you know, greenhouse gardeners, greenhouse growers don't have to pay the carbon tax, because that would make it really hard for them to grow their tomatoes or whatever. tax because that would make it really hard for them to grow their tomatoes or whatever. And you can see how this happens across a wide range of areas. So that's one part of the problem. The other part is that even if you do this really, really well, it'll only solve a smaller part of the problem. So you should do this. We should focus on a carbon tax, but we should also be realistic.

This is not what's going to fix climate change. This will fix a smaller part of climate change. So it's part of the solution, but it's not the most important part. The second part, and that's where I think we actually have the biggest opportunity, is innovation. So if you talk to Matt Ridley, this is certainly also his ballpark, but it's basically recognizing that most things that we've solved in this world are about innovation. So you rarely get people to to solve a problem by saying I'm sorry

Could you please not do all that cool stuff that you like? Could you please stop feeling good about all of that? That rarely works out as a political strategy on Unfortunately, that's typically what we say. Could you please not fly, not eat meat, not do all these things? Could you please have it a little hotter in the summer and a little cooler in the winter? That's really, really hard to sell to most people. What you need is innovation.

And let me just give you an example. Back in the 1950s, the Los Angeles was one of the most polluted places on the planet because there are lots and lots of cars and they have this special sort of geographical notion that just leaves all of the pollution inside this little basin of Los Angeles. So it's terrible to live there in many ways. And obviously the simple answer is to tell people, most of this came from cars. So the simple answer would be to say, stop driving your car. Of course, if you've ever met someone from Los Angeles, you know that that's not a solution

that's actually viable to them. Well, there aren't any sidewalks. No, it's not really viable for anyone in any city. What did solve the problem was the innovation of the catalytic converter. This little thing that cost money, you put on the exhaust pipe, and then basically you have much, much cleaner cars. That made it possible for people to keep their cars, drive a lot, and have much, much cleaner air and Los Angeles. Now, I'm not saying everything is perfect in Los Angeles and the still air pollution problems, but it made it a lot better for very little money. That's the way that we need to solve global warming.

If we could innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels, and this green energy could be nuclear, it could be fusion energy, it could be solar or wind with batteries, it could be lots and other possible solutions. If we could innovate one or a few of these solutions down below fossil fuels, everyone would switch. You wouldn't need sort of a Paris Accord where you have to twist everybody's arm.

Let me ask you about that for a minute. So it's not a straightforward matter to set up the governmental policy to support innovation. I mean, innovation is a very abstract idea. And I've seen much evidence of failure at the governmental level here in Canada when governments have set out to foster entrepreneurship and to seed the development of high tech industry,

for example, generally it's a cataclysmic failure. I mean, obviously, it's self-evident in some sense that a good idea is good because it solves a complicated problem and the more good ideas we have, the better. But do you think that it seems on the face of it, unless you dig down into the details, it seems like hand-waving. Obviously, we should have better ideas to solve our problems. But what do you think constitute concrete realistic evidence-based solutions to the problem of fostering innovation?

Do you think it's actually possible to set up policy that does that? Yes. So the short answer is yes. And the reason is that what's lacking is mostly long-term investment. So investment that will only generate the solutions in 20, 30, 40 years. Remember, this is why we invest a lot of money in health care, Remember, this is why we invest a lot of money in healthcare, basic research, that then eventually becomes research that, you know, for instance, pharmaceuticals can make into products that they can make money off of. There's always a too little investment, societally, in things that you can't monetize right away.

So it's very hard to invest in things that you can't monetize right away. So it's very hard to invest in things that you can't monetize right away. Yes, if I make an innovation that then in 20 years say will help us generate this enormously beneficial breakthrough. Unfortunately, I won't get any money because my partners are on out. That's why most companies will not be investing in these long-term development.

What happens is that you then have a doth of investment into these terms, these sorts of long-term innovations, unless you have the public invest in them, and I'll get back to how we do that smartly. Okay. But we do that in medical research. For many reasons, people recognize this is part of the place where we need to, you know, produce lots of professors, lots of medical Nobel laureates, and then, you know, eventually the pharmaceuticals will take over and actually make products out of this.

That's a great setup. We don't do this in energy. For a variety of reasons, it is one of the places where we spend very, very little money, partly because it doesn't feel like you're solving global warming, because you're not solving it right now. You're only solving it in 20 or 40 years. That feels like you didn't really care. But the reality is, this is the only way that we're going to get these sorts of long-term breakthroughs. Now, one reason why politicians often screw this up is because they are not willing to invest in these long-term investments.

They'll say, we want a Silicon Valley in Canada in three years. Yeah. That makes sense if you need to get reelected in four, but you can't do that. And so you shouldn't be trying to do this in a very short-term way. Another way is that you end up giving this away to companies and companies, of course, are just going to spend it on the product that they were going to do next year anyway. But hey, thanks for the money.

So the point here is you need to do this carefully in a way that will generate long-term innovation. This is not easy. You are going to waste a lot of money. But we know that governments around the world has done this in a variety of different ways. We know, for instance, the internet, the transistor, the fracking in the US. There's a number of places where you have been successful. And all we have to do is to spend lots of money. And I'd love to talk more about specifically how we should set this up, how we should evaluate,

and we should be careful about it. But fundamentally, we should do this in a way that we say we want to generate a lot of knowledge that we believe in the long run can deliver benefits that will actually help companies produce energy that will be viable. But we are not going to try and do this for the next three or five years. So we've got to stop that panic mode and start this long-term thinking. We do have realistic knowledge about both that we're investing very little compared to typically almost all other areas. And that more investment here would make it more plausible that we would faster get cheaper green energy. So, okay, so in Canada, there's a medical research council and a social sciences research council

and natural sciences and engineering research council. That might be a bit dated that information, but essentially that's how it's being set up. But there isn't an energy innovation research council. And, you know, I'm thinking that way because I'm an academic and I've seen these granting agencies, I've seen how they work and they're set up

to provide funds for basic research. And something like that doesn't exist. So, why aren't we funding research into energy into the generation of cheap and clean energy? What's gotten away? Every year we want to spend it on solar panels that makes us feel like we're doing something right now. The surprising thing is, in 2015, when all countries signed the Paris climate agreement, on the sidelines of that event, Obama and 20 other global leaders, Bill Gates and lots of billionaires actually signed another agreement that I'm happy to say we were a tiny part of pushing, which was we're going to

double our investment into green energy research and development. So all countries both promised the thing that you heard about namely we're going to cut our carbon emissions but they also promised to double their green energy investment in five years so in 2020. They did quite a bit of the cutting carbon emissions. They did nothing of the increased spending in green energy on D. And I think fundamentally because it doesn't feel like a solution. It doesn't feel like something urgent. It feels like something you can do next year. It feels like something that's nice to have, but this, you know, putting up the solar panel is urgent and we need to do it. The reality is the over worry about global warming that we have, because we're, you know, we have this existential feel that this could be the end of the world.

Surprisingly, also not only is wrong, but it also leads us down the wrong path, namely the path where we say, let's do anything that just makes it look like we're doing something next year rather than actually laying the groundwork for fixing this problem. Now obviously and some people will say, well, we should've done this 20 years ago and yes, that would be wonderful. We should have done that, but we didn't. You know, it's sort of too late to do something about what we should have done 20 years ago, but we can do something about what we're going to spend our money on in 20 years ago, but we can do something about what we're going to spend our money on in 2021. And if you look for instance, the Biden's proposal to fix climate change, he's thinking about spending $2 trillion, you'll probably not get to spend all that money on a vast array of things, many of which are not going to be very effective, but he's also saying he wants

to dramatically increase, actually, I think probably too much, but certainly a very, very large amount of increase in American spending on R&D. This is what he should be focusing on, but I do worry that he's gonna end up having much more success with all his other much less effective proposals, simply because they are more glamorous. All right, so you don't seem to be an admirer

of the Paris Accords. And so my sense of your argument is that the proposals that are part of that Accord are extremely expensive, and they're not cost effective, especially when viewed in this larger framework that encompasses a whole host of problems instead of focusing just on climate change. And so maybe if you don't mind, you could summarize your, could you lay out your critique of the Paris Accords for us?

Yes. So two things. The Paris Agreement is really just an extension of what we've been trying for the last 30 years and failed to do the last 30 years, namely, let's try to do something that's really hard, that costs a lot of money, that will have a little bit of impact in 100 years, and try and see if we can't get everybody to do it. Not surprisingly, that's a really, really hard thing to get to. And to do what? And to do what exactly. So, so basically get Canada, get the US, get Denmark, get everybody else

to cut their carbon emissions, which privately for them is going to be costly. They have to reduce their use of cheap energy and use a little bit more expensive energy, sometimes less reliable energy. Basically, it puts a slight slower dampener on their economic growth. That's always going to be hard. That's always going to be unpopular. You're basically asking people, could you please pay some more and use a little bit less? That's a hard sell. Not surprisingly, you do a little bit of it.

You typically don't do a lot of it. You don't live up to all of your promises. But even if you do, so let's just take the power agreement, even if everyone did everything they promised to 2030, that would cut as much CO2 that if you run it through a climate model, it would cut temperatures by 0.025 degrees centigrade by the end of the century. So literally nothing we would be able to measure it. Magnitude of increase. So it's about four degrees of temperature rise. We've already seen one. So about three three degrees more. So this would be a trivial part of reduction. Now it would be a reduction. It would mean we would have less problems because global warming is a problem. So we estimate there would be benefits.

But there would also be huge costs because you'd actually have to pay for this. So if you look at how much you're going to pay, which is in the order of one to two trillion US dollars per year in 2030, for every dollar spent, you will avoid climate damages across the centuries worth about 11 cents. That's a very poor way of spending money, paying a dollar and actually achieving 11 cents. You could just have paid out the dollar and done almost 10 times as much good in the world. So the reality here is the Paris Agreement is a really well-intentioned agreement, but it will fail just like all the other agreements, so, you know, Rio, Kyoto, and all the other national policies that we've done.

It will mostly fail, but even if it succeeded, it would be a very expensive way of achieving very little. And this, of course, is the big problem of the climate conversation that because we're so worried, we've decided, yeah, we're not going to spend all that much money on all these other problems in the world, to bear colossus, all this other stuff. But we are going to spend one to two trillion dollars. Remember, it's not going to bring us to the poor house, but it's a lot of money.

It's one to two percent of global GDP on something that will basically not bias any measurable impact in a hundred years. That's a bad deal. That's why we need to do better. You know, every action has a cost. This isn't the thing about it. You learn from economics. Everything has a cost. Everything has an opportunity cost. And people like to present this idea as if, you know, there's an evil cabal of oil producers that are out there forcing our governments to make our lives dependent on these oils. And what we need to do is just have the political will to transition to these more advanced forms of energy that are going to

save the planet. And it's just completely ridiculous. Well, people, people don't understand, like people don't understand things as simple as the fact that there's a finite amount of solar energy that falls on a square yard of of territory. That, that, that basic level of physics, it's just, well, the sun is an inexhaustible source of energy. It's like, well, that's true. But practically speaking, that's not exactly the issue. Exactly. Because what you need is the power, what you want us to convert that high quantity of energy into high power, which is a lot of energy over a

small short period of time. And to do that, this is really understanding that what humans look for is not energy because energy is everywhere. You know, there's sun and there's wind and all of that stuff. But being able to channel that in order to use it in high power applications, that's what makes everything that we value possible. That's what makes surviving the winter a breeze for the vast majority of us. This is why we have our modern life. This is why we have transportation, it's because we have high power.

And the way that we've managed to secure high power, the way that we've built our world is modern hydrocarbons. And so the thing that carbon people who are afraid of carbon dioxide need to present is, they need to make the case that, you know, stopping hydrocarbons is going to have such a noticeable effect on the climate that it outweighs the benefits of taking back the future. Yeah, they're not going to do that because you look at how this works out is that, you know, we're trying to calculate the economic consequences of climate change and the economic consequences of our interventions over this has to do with the time preference, over say 50 to 100 years, but the errors in your measurements and your predictions grow and grow and grow as you move out decades into the future,

it's that those justifications will never be forthcoming, they're technically impossible. We talk about carbon tax and innovation. Innovation is crucial. You should also focus on adaptation. It's sort of a naughty word in much of the conversation and global warming, but very clearly adaptation is going to be one of the big ways that we're going to fix many of the problems. It's going to happen to a large extent simply

because people do that. If you're a farmer, you're going to plant later or earlier, depending on the climate changes and eventually you might plant something else. You should also look at georeengineering. We talked about that very briefly, but basically the idea of saying, if there were to be a really catastrophic impact, georeengineering is basically a way of making sure that you can restore the temperature of the earth very quickly at fairly low cost. We should not just go ahead with it, but we should certainly be thinking about it.

And that's all I'm going to say about this right now. The last bit, and we also talked extensively about that, is to make sure that prosperity is also a big solution to climate change. Most of the things you're impacted with, you're impacted with because you're poor. If you're really poor, everything hits you hard, but climate hits you hard as well. If you're rich, you're much, much less impacted.

And so very clearly, the question is, do we want to help Bangladesh a little bit by cutting carbon emissions and basically then leaving them poor, but hey, at least sea levels rose this much less by the end of the century. Oh, we rather make sure that we actually leave Bangladesh much richer, which means that they'll be much better able to handle hurricanes that they'll be much better able to handle sea level rise and so on. hurricanes that there'll be much better able to handle seal of rice and so on. There is a very strong basis of evidence that shows that prosperity is actually much better for most countries, not just because it's wonderful and all kinds of other ways you can avoid your kids dying and make get the better education and all these other things, but also for climate. So those were the five points and innovation is by far the most important thing. I just want to say one last thing about,

you know, because my book is very much, we've talked a lot about all the big problems in the world. The reason why I talk about global warming is because it is the one thing that I experience. Most people actually talking about all the time is this existential threat. This is the big thing that we should all be concerned about. Certainly a lot of people, the UN Secretary General, many others are telling us, this is the top priority for humanity. Because if this is gonna eradicate all of us,

surely this should be the thing that we focus on. I think that makes intellectual sense if it was true, but that's not what the UN climate panel was true, but that's not what the UN climate panel is telling us. It's not what the science is telling us. It tells us this is a problem by no means the end of the world. And that is not only important because you can't really get to all the other things we were talking about unless you stop believing this is the end of the world.

If this is the end of the world, you are gonna set everything else aside. But also, of course, it's the only way that you can actually get a better life. When you see all these kids being really worried about, am I gonna have a future when I grow up? People believing literally that humanity is gonna end, that must be terrible. Now, if it was true, we should be telling people,

but it's not true. And therefore, being able to relieve yourself from that scare is also really, really valuable on a personal level. So this book was written not just to make sure that you can get rid of this scare, but also that you can start realizing this is a problem among many others. Now let's think about how do we prioritize? And that's what I'm hoping this conversation will help us. So in a sense, you could say the false alarm book is stepping stone to be able to have that, you know, more general conversation, namely, what is it that the world should be prioritizing if we're not scared, whittlest about global warming, but actually see it as it is a problem among many problems. list about global warming, who actually sees it as it is, a problem among many problems.