The Ricochet Podcast - Seven

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

It’s a better-late-than-never show. We’ve got galavanting hosts (James is out this week), a Supreme Court steeped in overdue contemplation (John Yoo fills in for James to keep fill us in and even makes a prediction!) and our guest, Bjørn Lomborg is here to talk COP26. Lomborg —author of False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet—takes us... Source

I know this is a low bar, but Bjorn is the most glamorous environmentalist. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. The New York City mayor just today says he's requiring everybody by the middle of December need to start getting everybody vaccinated. Listen to the mayor. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It is the Ricochet podcast. James Lilacs is off this week. I'm Rob Long and our guests, Bjorn Lomborg, and our favorite law professor, John Yoo. Let's have a podcast. I can hear you! 572 if then my voice sounds different it's because i am not james lilacs and i don't talk like this on the radio i'm just rob long doing the podcast as we used to do old school og with my og co-founder ricochet peter robinson in palo alto peter how are you i'm fine you just named my location you're in

milan italy i'm in milan italy well you'm in Milan, Italy. You had some explaining to do. Well, you know, I had a free ticket, and I was going to do – I spent a week in Budapest, and I just sort of, like, had this gap between Budapest and my free ticket. So I thought, oh, you know, just – well, I'll just head on over to Milan. And it's pretty cool. Like, it's like – same thing with Budapest. I mean, Europe seems like it's pretty cool. It's like the same thing with Budapest. Europe seems like it's Christmas here. Everybody's out. Stores are open on Sundays.

And people are shopping. And things are crowded. And everybody's wearing a mask. But everybody seems to be carrying big shopping bags. So maybe the world isn't doomed. So you've spent a month now in Europe? It's close. Three weeks. So it's like a week in france and a uh

and then a week with the family in spain and then five six days uh in budapest and now three or four days in milana and i fly home tomorrow i mean i'm sorry i fly home wednesday i see now do you want to introduce our lurking guest or she'll yeah we have a lurking guest like i want to hear about budapest too by the way yeah okay uh that's how it's gonna go uh john you're second to budapest uh we are joined our co-host today uh and also i you know he's gonna start explaining some stuff to me especially since i've been reading the newspaper uh john you he is ricochet's senior supreme court analyst uh and he's obviously the uh the connoisseur of the mcrib he's the emmanuel heller professor of law at the university of california at berkeley and i guarantee you there

are probably 100 other faculty members at that law school trying to get him out and he is here to talk about i think probably i mean i don't know my overstating it Peter, the most consequential Supreme Court decision in 20, 30 years? Well, it could be, depending on how they decide. That's my view. We'll let John tell it. But hold on. We'll get to Dobbs. We'll get to Dobbs.

But first, Rob, you know that Hungary is a fascist regime, that the right-wing Prime, Victor Orban, who suppressed freedom of speech, captured the entire country's electoral system. What were you doing in such a bad place? I was trying to convince them. The press on Victor Orban is so uniformly negative that I suspect it's all wrong. Well, look, it's hard to know when it's all wrong. I have a rule when I go to somebody else's country. I have that rule in Cuba, too, which is I don't, you know, it's a very American thing. You arrive in the country and say, please denounce your government. And no one's really going to do that.

And even in Cuba, I talked to a dissident there who is famously a dissident. And even he was like, he didn't really want to run down his country in front of other people. I get that. Look, Victor Orban is a crook. Oh, he is. Almost surely a crook. I'm not sure if it goes beyond that or not. I think there are probably...

When you say crook, do you mean right-wing authoritarian or petty chiseler who's trying to make himself rich? I mean, he's a petty chiseler crook. He's on the grift. He's a grafter.'s on the grift he's a grafter he's no somehow he and his family own a lot more than they ever owned you know he sort of like makes lbj would lbj would blush um that said it is a country that remembers communism on without any fondness and so they are i i never spoke to more ardent, sincere conservatives in my life. Maybe in the Reagan days, but it really felt like I was talking to people, young people and middle-aged people and even old people who were just actually kind of excited

about conservatism um and um and so i didn't really push them on the orban things i think that's like um that wasn't really what i wanted to do but i did ask him about conservatism and they were very very open uh and really interested and it's refreshing because i think a lot of you know i think a lot of conservatism in in United States has been tainted or in some way distorted by politics, almost toxified by partisan politics. And that isn't the case there, or at least wasn't the case there when I was talking, because I didn't mention the O word. And I hope that they can maintain their, I hope they maintain their loyalty to the conservative ideals and not get distracted by, you know,

loyalties to people, I guess is when. So, so conservatism, just to John, dive in with questions of your own here. We'll get to Dobbs in a second, So conservatism, just to, John, dive in with questions of your own here. We'll get to Dobbs in a second. But conservatism, what form does this take when you're having conversations in Budapest?

They're Hayek free marketeers or they're national conservatives? There's a little of that. They want to reassert the Hungarian consciousness? There are all kinds of things it might mean, right? There's a little of that. There's a little of the, look, I'm trying to thread the needle here, because the rap on Orban is that he is just a nationalist, a conservative nationalist, and with all of the weird penumbra,

to use a word that I know john loves uh that that that that entails don't emanate into my penumbra oh i won't emanate anywhere near you trust me i mean in the sense of like uh you know the last popular nationalist figure in central europe was adolf hitler and then the most recent one just to the east is uh vladimir putin so there's there's that there's also the sense that hungarians are um you know they have this incredibly proud ancient culture uh they've always been poor hungarians they've always been like kind of you know they had that brief moment where there was just so they've always been over the austro-hungary empire there's a reason Austria came first.

It wasn't just alphabetical. It wasn't just alphabetical. So they are sort of experiencing a certain kind of, I don't know, cultural awakening, maybe. And they do, I think, share with some members of the politics of the region the idea that maybe the west is decadent um by the way i share that myself yeah and i don't but but they but i'll robber the west is fantastic the west is great but on the other hand i have one word for you

yeah they are engaging uh in the argument and they are engaging in the argument and they are engaging in the argument. And I had this incredibly spirited, fun couple of hours talking to students at this the Hillsdale of Hungary called the Matthias Cravinus College, which is more interesting and has a more interesting and committed program program than any uh american university and i think if you were a conservative philanthropist you would do you could do um you could not do any better than just patterning your giving around building something like that in the united states anyway that's what i so that so i i thought i was really kind of energizing and kind of fun and also these are people who are really these are engaged in culture and culture conversations that I really thought were great. Isn't the answer to Peter's question is that Orban really is a nationalist, a conservative of the nationalist stripe. Hungary is not a free market paradise or libertarian paradise.

It's got a rather strong central government and you know but it's now that's you know national conservatism is better than national socialism which they tried in central for a few years ago true true the question really is uh if victor orban is a politician then all politicians lose elections even ones that you think shouldn't. They lose elections. You know, your political mandate is fleeting. You could be a great president, and you just kind of just don't make it. The question is whether he, you know, he's a Democratic conservative nationalist if he leaves. If he doesn't leave he's not and that is a real problem i think a real a real a real problem for them i don't know whether it's going to happen

or not but i think it's a problem my default position is a certain sympathy i don't know about victor orban but for the hungarians yeah absorbed in the austro-hungarian empire after the first world war they lose two-thirds of their territory to Romania for reasons that still don't make much sense to me. But the Transylvania Mountains are still populated by people who speak Hungarian. Then along comes the Second World War. Well, in the interim, there is a genuinely fascist government in Romania. I beg your pardon, in Hungary. Then comes 45 years of communism it's a small country it's only six million as I recall the population how you preserve your own sense of

Nationality how you preserve your own language and culture when you're dominated by Russia and one side the German economy it's it's a trick it's a trick and you're surrounded by that culture it's a beautiful city it has incredible wines it's as a at least i think two great music schools obviously a history of insanely beautiful music the danube this is it's the most beautiful city on the danube i think it is the hillside where the buddha side is and this beautiful city where the pest side is um the parliament holding is a staggering right and they know they're being um they know that people in the west sort of the the you know the the academic left and the media left um will pay them no respect and the problem ultimately is is sometimes everything's true sometimes it's true that they are not paid any respect and sometimes it's true that

uh they are decent conservatives and sometimes it's true that they are not paid any respect and sometimes it's true that uh they are decent conservatives and sometimes it's true that they have every right to be uh a little bit ornery if they want but it's also possibly true that victor orban's a crook and will be voted out and won't leave um that and that will be a that will be a shame that will be a shame if it happens by the way his his closest rival i think he is no socialist i think his closest rival is saying things like hey listen i'm just like victor man i'm uh i'm as tough as it as it comes but i'm not a crook and i think um that's that'll be a that'll be a sign i think anyway all right from hung from budapest to washington to the supreme court to the supreme court john finally what's up i mean you know rob's in milan he's in one of the great cities

of western europe he's going on and how great the danube river is in the budapest when he's in milan well i'll tell you i'll i'll tell you two things about the dobbs case that surprised me you can tell me whether i was right or wrong to be surprised, or you can just ignore me and go on and tell us what it all means. You mean like usual? Neither the lawyers making the case against Dobbs, against the Mississippi law, nor Justice Sotomayor, nor Justice Kagan, nor just granted by failing to make any argument on its constitutional argument on its behalf, that Roe was a botched decision and Casey wasn't much better. Their entire argument, as far as I could see, rested on stare decisis. It's settled law. People have made their life decisions according to this law. Okay, let's not talk about the constitutional problems with it, but we've had it for almost half a century. We're stuck with it. And that

didn't strike me as a very compelling argument. Second surprise, that the press immediately, both sides, immediately said, oh, clearly they're going to uphold Dobbs. The court has at least five votes to uphold Dodds or at least six votes to uphold Dobbs and five votes to overturn Roe and everybody. New York Times. Linda Greenhouse wrote a furious article in The New York Times, assuming on the basis of two hours of oral arguments that the court would uphold Dobbs. I've never heard people rely so heavily on oral arguments in predicting

the court's decision. Okay, so those two were surprises to me. You're right, Peter, about the media. I think they're grasping for any bits of information you can get, but you're quite right. Oral arguments can give you a hint about what's going to happen, but often they won't. I mean, if you listen to the oral arguments from Casey, which was the decision in 92 that upheld Roe, still the framework we're living under today, you would not have thought that three justices would come together who were appointed by Republican presidents and say they were healing the land and standing up against politics and upholding Roe. That just didn't come through in oral arguments. So it's a good caution to always say

what happens behind closed doors with the justices, that might be completely different than what you saw in public last week. We should say that Stari Decisis is not a Greek stripper's name. Don't be so sure about that. You're the one

who's hanging out in Europe. Who knows what you're going to see in Milan tonight. It's not only a Greekreek stripper's name i should say um it's about precedent and the idea being it's i mean to me i'm sure the i'm sure there's a better legal definition that you might give as a somewhat esteemed law professor um it feels to me like it's a it's kind of the the the the escape hatch when you don't want to make an argument you say well it's been decided and then you kind of run the other direction and you do that when you're worried that if you say that if you decide a case that upsets people it upsets enough people and with enough intensity, they're going to start to ask themselves why we have.

Unelected nine people in black negligence sitting in a fancy building in. D.C. making big decisions without any consequences consequences to them is that is that fair well you don't so your point ties in well with the peter's first point which is after 50 years of liberal judges and liberal theorists coming up with ways to defend roe this was the best you could do weren't you surprised john yes i was very surprised no one defended roe on abortion right to abortion on the merits now you could say uh the constitution decisis is the only argument that's going to appeal to conservatives right now that would allow uh roe to survive but this is the answer if you're relying on stare decisis you have you are conceding

that the earlier decision was wrong right because if you right your decision's right then you don't need stare decisis it's just correct right so the only reason you actually obey stare decisis is when you think the earlier case was wrong so i so i can i pitch a a reason to you that you tell me if i'm full of it right that it was easier in the early in 1971 i guess 71 72 to make an argument about viability and fetal development and to make all of those kind of credulous arguments in 1971 that are we we all know are impossible to make 50 years later well one thing that people have often pointed out, including many people right after Roe,

even Justice O'Connor pointed this out too, and she eventually upheld Roe. She famously said Roe is on a collision course with technology, right? Because medical technology, it's two things. It has made the point of viability earlier, doesn't align with this trimester system anymore. Viability is now around maybe as low as 22 weeks into a pregnancy. But I

think it's even more important culturally. Medical technology has allowed us to see the development of a fetus using sonograms, where it's harder and harder to say even before viability, that's not a human being. Right. When you see the outlines of the baby, you see the baby moving around, reacting. Once that sonogram grows on the grand expectant parents in 2021 have seen a sonogram of their baby and it seems to me that the the latter number for 2021 is almost 100 percent yeah and 1971 must be nothing so it's i think senator day economy is correct um we're going to come back to this because we're talking about technology and you know using the internet without express vpn is

like leaving your laptop exposed to the coffee shop table when you run to the bathroom yeah i know it's the worst segue ever but we're just going to keep we're going to move forward it's better than lilacs as a fan of the show better than oh wow you're gonna hear about that most of the time you're probably fine without using an express express VPN, but if you come out one day to find it's gone, you can only be so surprised. The same is true of the data on your laptop, not just your laptop yourself, but your data. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network at all of those public places, we jump online, cafes, hotels, me, airports, me, any hacker on the same network can gain access to your personal data, passwords, financial details, and more. And it doesn't take a genius with a lot of technical

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We thank them for an amazing product. We are joining now with another guest. We desperately needed another guest because all we had was John, you, and who knows how that's going to go. But we're lucky to get Bjorn Lomborg back. He is the president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is False Alarm, How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet. And he is also Ricochet's top advisor on climate policy. He's here.

Hey, Bjorn, where are you right now? I'm in southern Sweden. Southern Sweden. So did you go? Were you in Glasgow a couple weeks ago? Did they let you in? No, they probably wouldn't either. No.

So I've tried to go to several of these events uh and uh and the guy who runs the media there uh actually actively discourages uh people from allowing me to get in there are you serious i managed to get there in uh in 2015 but i mean look covet at least have made it possible for all of us to be virtually anywhere, right? Well, there you are in Sweden. Rob happens to be in Milan at the moment, Bjorn. There you go. Yeah.

So it feels like a whole lot of noise. Nothing happened except what we already knew was going to happen. To me, it felt like a middle east peace summit where there's a lot of noise and then at the end there's only one issue that matters and that issue is not resolved if india and china say we ain't gonna play the game what's the point it's a very little point at least uh so i I think there's two important facts one need to recognize. You know, we've been doing this for a good 30 years. There's a reason why it was called COP26. We've done this 25 times before. And we basically achieved almost nothing. very underreported report from the UN Environment Program that did a survey of the last 10 years of climate policy. So from late 2019, just before COVID hit. And what they basically find is, for the last 10 years, despite all the promises, despite all these summits, despite we had a Paris agreement, they cannot tell the difference

between a world where we had done nothing about climate since 2005 and the actual world we live in. And that, I think, tells you everything you need to know, that sure, you have lots of people talking, lots of great game, but we've actually not seen any significant change for the last 15 years. Now, what they're talking about is obviously, oh, but we're going to do all this amazing stuff in 2030 and 2050. And Biden is promising that he will go make the U.S. go carbon neutral in what amounts to what, seven more presidents or potentially seven more presidents after him? Of course, you can't make these sorts of promises. And so in some sense, we're just making theater to make everyone feel like we're doing something and it feels good.

Even if the whole of the US went carbon neutral, not in 30 years, but today. Even then, it would reduce temperatures by the end of the century by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.16 degrees Celsius. You would almost not be able to notice it. And that gets back to your point, Rob, on the idea of saying, unless China and India and Africa and Latin America and all the people in the world, you know, so some six and ending up at eight or more billion people who actually want to get out of poverty, unless they're also on board with us, it's not going to happen. And I'll tell you one amazing thing that happened in COP26. I don't know if you noticed, you probably heard the first part of this. So the Chinese PM, Modi, came to Glasgow

and promised, the Indian prime minister promised to go net zero in 2070. And obviously a lot of people, oh, but that's too late and all that stuff. But of course, it's amazingly fast if he's actually promising that. But what most people didn't report was he's only going to do that if the West is going to pay him a trillion dollars over the next 10 years, a trillion dollars. So I don't know, have you seen Biden or anyone else put aside a couple of hundred billion dollars in the budgets for the next couple of years

to make that happen? So essentially, I mean, I think it was great theater play and he got exactly what COP26 was about. He said, I'm going to promise us if you guys are going to give me a ton of money. But the reality, of course, is nobody's actually going to come up with that amount of money. That's what we promised to give to the entire developing world, and we're not managing to do that. So you have this situation where everybody in the West says, oh, we absolutely want to do this, but then realize very quickly that their voters actually don't like to be cold and poor. And so, you know, you have the ironic situation that Biden is calling OPEC as he's flying over to Europe for the climate summit and asking them to pump more oil to keep the oil price down.

And you have the vast majority of emitters who just say, no, we're not actually going to do this. Can I ask a question about whether COVID came up much during COP26? Because all these grandiose plans require a high level of cooperation between countries that don't trust each other, even if they wanted to do something about it. We're in the middle of a pandemic where China has still not told anybody about how did the virus get out, where you see rich countries arguably keeping a lot of the vaccine to themselves and not sending it off to developing countries. So we're in the middle of a pandemic where people are dying by the thousands every day. It's much more real than global warming.

And still you don't see any of these countries, India, China, any of them cooperating. So why do people sit there in the middle of this pandemic and say, how can we think these countries will trust and cooperate to cure some far off terrible future when they won't even solve the future, the terrible present where people are dying right now? John, it's a great point no it didn't come up for the exact reason you might imagine that nobody wants to acknowledge that another way of thinking about covid did come up and has come up a lot in the last uh year so if you actually want to cut the world's emissions as most people promise and most politicians pretend that they're going to do it is equivalent to having one more lockdown like we had in 2020 every year so remember in 2020 because the whole world locked down we actually reduced emissions we didn't reduce

emissions all that much uh so we probably reduced emissions about 6% or so. And remember, this is something that most people absolutely didn't like. But yeah, that's pretty outstanding, 6%. But that's what you have to keep additional reducing every year. So in 2021, we have to do twice that. So we have to actually have twice as many lockdowns as we had or the reduction equivalent of twice as many lockdowns as we had in 2020. Of course, we have no such thing. We'll probably end up very close to the record level. In 2022, we have to have three times as much. By 2030, we have to have lockdowns equivalent to 11 times what we had in 2020. I don't know if anyone can actually realistically imagine that, but the UN on their webpage still says,

you know, on climate, they still say, you know what? The world almost made its promise to cut emissions in 2020, but we'll have to keep that up and keep doing more and more of it every year until 2030. And again, I think it just shows you how this year until 2030. And again, I think it just shows

you how this is not plausible. Bjorn, I am trying to read the zeitgeist. First of all, I can't even pronounce the word correctly. So you should take all this with a grain of salt. But I feel, as you know, I'm at the Hoover Institution where you're a colleague of mine. We're right in the middle of the Stanford campus. There are smart kids around. I feel that a couple of things have happened. And one of them is that COP26 demonstrated that this, the environmental game as it is now being played which begins cop the first of these conference of parties i just looked it up the first meeting took place in 1992 that's almost 30 years ago this is the old generation the kids now the kids don't view that you you cannot work

an environmental or economic revolution you can't work a revolution of any kind on the basis of old men. And John Kerry and Joe Biden and a lot of the other figures who were trotting up to the trotting, hobbling up to the lectern to speak in Glasgow are just the other generation. I just have the feeling that the smart kids here just don't take it seriously, item one. Item two, the other piece of it that I felt in the coverage, there was far more emphasis on research, and in particular on nuclear research. Bill Gates popped up. There were a number of interviews with him around the time of COP26. It almost feels as though the press has figured out that these big, boring, hypocritical events aren't much of a story anymore. Even the press is figuring out that the interesting action is going to be research, technology, maybe nuclear. Now,

that's me just sitting here in Palo Alto trying to figure out what's going on. But do you have any feeling? Did you sense those two changes yourself? I would love to say yes to that question, because obviously, research is what's going to fix this problem. Look, we've never solved a global big problem by immiserating everyone. We've never solved it by telling everyone, I'm sorry, could you eat a little less meat and drive a little less and be a little colder and be poor? Would that be okay for you? And especially, and we're also hoping everybody else will do this and we need to do that for the next 50 years and then maybe we can solve part of it. Not surprisingly, that's not actually going to win any votes. So you need research, you need innovation. That's how you're going to fix this. Unfortunately, my sense is that actually everybody is doubling down on this.

My read, and again, look, I think if you look at some of the research that I've looked at, a lot of young people, they find that very, very many of them feel like Greta Thunberg, that this is the end of the world, that there's a real risk that they won't make it into adulthood or old age. And you can't blame them. If you read most of the mainstream press, the census, it's one catastrophe after another, and it's just going to get worse and worse. So you're telling me I'm wrong again as usual? i'm happy to blame them i'm blaming them i can blame them yeah but i guess i guess where i guess i see uh where some of the pressure is coming from i mean you know you read magazines and newspapers and it seems like it's a big crisis but politically where is it coming from whenever american voters are polled you know what is it what did you care the most about the environment's way down there number 10 um if you add the people in india and the people in china and the people united states who don't really think this is an issue or they don't think it's a really big issue or they think

it's a good you a good lever to use against your business your financial competitors where where it sometimes it seems to me that all the people who believe that the world is ending we're in glasgow right yeah that's probably true uh but on the other hand there's a lot of people that stand to make a lot of money there you go right wow so okay so yeah uh when carney the uh ex-governor of the uh bank of england and also i believe believe, the Bank of Canada, told everyone, you know what? Finance is going to find $130 trillion for you. That's probably true if you can offer higher yields than those $130 trillion. I think they would actually love to be able to invest in certain returns guaranteed by states for solar and wind and other kind of

stuff. So there's a lot of people who are seeing this as an immense opportunity. At the same time, I honestly think that when you talk to a lot of these young people, the feeling is, I remember, I saw some billionaire giving away lots of money to exactly to climate change because his kids were really worried. I think it gives you a lot of street credit. Just feels it feels like the right thing to do, which, of course, is why I keep saying, look, you can't just read all these stories and say, oh, my God, it's just one catastrophe after another. You actually need to do the numbers. And we do have good numbers. So if you look at the number of people that die from climate-related disasters, so that's floods, droughts, storms, wildfire,

and extreme temperatures, we have good data for that for the world for the last 100 years. It used to be about half a million people that died every year in the 1920s. This year, in 2021, it'll be less than 7,000 people. So a reduction of almost 99%. Remember, at the same time, we quadruple global population. The world is not becoming a more dangerous place because global warming is just taking over. The world has become an incredibly more safe place, mostly because we've become richer, more resilient, more technologically able. And so anything that climate has thrown at us has certainly been thwarted in a grand way by our abilities. And what that tells you is the kids shouldn't be scared. They should actually be pretty optimistic. Yes, there's a problem with global warming.

Yes, it's something we need to tackle along with a lot of other problems for this world. But it's not fundamentally a world that's sort of headed towards doom and end of world. It's a problem like many others, but a world that's going in the right direction. How do we get that way? I mean, people are holding in their hands the most extraordinarily complicated technological device, their phone. And the richest guy in the world is Elon Musk, who basically invented an electric car. He had a little help from the government, but really not as much as people say. A lot of it was the negative help that the government gave the big automakers that benefited him. Where does the blindness come from? Where does the pessimism come from, especially among

younger people? I see that. I see the young people, they are terrified of COVID. Young people, I mean, it's crazy how scared they are of COVID. Where does that come from? Whose fault is that? Fix that. We've always been worried about the future. So there's, I did a piece for New York Post and a lot of other papers on on how we've always heard you know the world is just about to end uh remember uh uh peter you mentioned uh how we almost started climate negotiations 30 years ago in 1992 we had the first un environment conference 50 years ago, or almost 50 years ago, in 1972 in Stockholm. It's always the Scandinavian countries.

I know, I know. It's always Sweden and Stockholm. The organizer who went on to be the first head of the UN Environment Program back then said, we only have 10 years to avoid the catastrophe. And we've heard that ever since. And I'm sure, you know, there are these wonderful stories about how old Babylonians worried about, you know, the end of the world just around the corner.

So it's possible that it's just, you know, it's in our genes. Partly, we're the guys who worried about saber-toothed tigers, right? And we're the ones who survived. And so in some sense, it makes sense. It's also why we love to watch those movies where they blow up the White House, right? I mean, it's where aliens blow up the White House. It's just so much fun to watch the end of the world. And it's no fun to just watch the world slightly getting richer over the next hundred years and doing well. Where's the drama in that? So in some sense, we're conditioned to think this way. But of course,

it makes us make really, really bad decisions. Because what really will help future generations is that we invest it in technology, in ability, in learning. Of course, they should go back to school, these kids that are striking, and then that we actually have capital so that they can help themselves. I don't know if you saw, the UN has been promoting this very, very strongly, that Madagascar was the first climate-induced drought and hunger catastrophe in the world. They've had a huge drought over the last couple of years. And now a new study actually came out and said, no, no, it wasn't. It had nothing to do with climate. It does have a lot to do with poverty. Not surprising. It's terrible to be in Madagascar

because you're really poor. And then whenever a drought happens, which sometimes it will, it's really, really hard. And what it tells you is if you constantly hear this is climate, you're likely to say, OK, the way I'm going to help these poor Madagascans is by not taking my car to work tomorrow, which, of course, is going to help them nothing at all. But what you should do is to say, I'm actually going to help them get out of poverty. Maybe we should make sure that they can sell stuff in the US and Europe at cheaper rates. That's the way to make them richer, make their kids better off, make sure they don't die from easily curable infectious

diseases, get food and all the other stuff. This is not rocket science, but we forget this if we worry about the wrong things. Can I say just a small joke that we shouldn't be surprised millennials are millennial, right? They're millennials because they're born in the turn of the millennium. But millennials, right, what's the original root of the term? It was people who thought the end of the world was coming, right, in the old Christian calendar. You know, one of those days, like a broken clock, they're going to be right. But it's because, but that's, isn't it because, the deeper point is that it's because they don't have a religion.

So they've replaced it with environmentalism. And environmentalism has all the, it's the same attributes, right? The world is ending. You must live a certain strict way to prove your virtue to survive the end of the world, and on and on, and it has this

kind of it's apocalyptic it doesn't have rationality to it yeah i think we just need to recognize that it's not like the older guys have been better at this we've also you know fallen entirely for that religion and and fallen very very hard since you remember uh uh you know running out of everything in uh in 1972 and on from there on. The world is just simply easy victims for this idea. Take any trend, extrapolate it out 80 years and then say, see, that's not going to go well. We're all going to die. It's also a sign of how wealthy our societies are because if you're in the middle of World War Two or the Great Depression, you're not worrying about climate change.

But when you have a very wealthy, affluent society and, you know, in a network world where we can all talk. COP26. And we've actually been somewhat happy about people starting to realize that if you prevent especially poor countries access to cheap and available energy, and, you know, Museveni, the president from Uganda, wrote an op-ed in Wall Street Journal saying, look, we need lots of energy in order to pull our populations out of poverty. If we start doing that, if we're so rich that we say, no, no, no, everybody else can't be rich, that could be the real tragedy. And I think that's where we need to really be careful that our virtue doesn't actually impede other people's opportunity of getting out of poverty. How do liberals harmonize all their conflicting commitments? So what happens when, I think there's a suggestion here last week,

what happens when global warming runs into racial inequality? Or what happens when global warming has the effect of oppressing, in their minds, underdeveloped countries? Which value wins? Well, I think wishful thinking wins, because what you end up with, and I see this all the time, people will say, look at the cell phone revolution. We just skipped over the whole idea of having landlines, right? And they've done that in the developing world. So they can do that with fossil fuels and just skip right over fossil fuels and go to solar and wind. But there's a reason why almost every country in the world wants solar and wind.

And I can tell you right now we're realizing that in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, because we're suddenly realizing when you don't have enough wind, you don't have enough power and you really risk having to shut down your companies and, of course, pay huge costs for the backup power that's still there. Imagine if this has happened 10 years later when we had much less fossil fuel backup. We would basically be freezing and nobody wants that. So the reality is, sure, you can have some solar and wind and some of it actually a good idea. But having too much of it means that you are either incredibly rich or that you don't care about having a secure supply. Well, I wish I could believe you that nobody wants us all to freeze. Sometimes sometimes it seems to me that a lot of people who were in Scotland a few weeks ago would love for us to freeze.

All right,jorn before you go the the book is false alarm how climate change panic costs us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet we'll put a link in the show notes also uh your wall street journal column uh the most recent one brilliant as always and um i you are my i here here's how i you here's the utility you provide for my life i read it and then i'm i have ammunition to use in the arguments that i end up having about this and so for that alone you deserve the nobel peace prize um thank you for joining us we'll see you we'll see you soon absolutely it is true isn't it like don't you know when you you when here's somebody who knows something about something you like i memorize this stuff so that I can throw it back.

No, the point is that everyone can win the Nobel Peace Prize. There's no qualifications. Okay. What I found is that when I quote a Scandinavian, Bjorn, when I quote a Scandinavian approvingly, that alone throws people off. Oh, yeah, because they don't really. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. That's good. Photoscan and avian approvingly, that alone throws people off. Oh, yeah, because they don't really, yeah. It's wonderful. It's wonderful.

That's good. Before we continue with our discussion with John Yoo, let me just remind you that it's the holidays. So that's all the sort of, you know, the sweets they're eating and the celebratory libations, all the sugary treats. Your mouth is going to put up with a lot this time of year. Treat yours to Quip's line of sleek, sustainable oral care products when you bundle and save up to 40% online through the holidays. Plus, by encouraging good habits, Quip products really are the gifts that keep on giving. The Quip electric toothbrush is loved by over 7 million mouths and has time sonic vibration with 30-second pulses to guide a dentist-recommended

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going to say something about think about all the time we spend on our teeth versus any other body part it's amazing but anyway where we were before was we just talked about what star decisis was and so we're making the point that well right you both are completely right the amazing maybe the dog that didn't bark right the sherlock holmes thing the dog that didn't bark at the oral arguments was that no one put on a substantive defense of whether a woman has a right to abortion under the constitution and this might be because over the last 50 years, even very liberal scholars have come to recognize, and even liberal judges have come to recognize, there's no there there.

And you could say the court has, in a way, turned its back on that logic of Roe. If Roe were right, then why don't we also give people the right to commit suicide why don't we recognize the right to euthanasia right and on we are comfortable and this gets to your other point rob we are comfortable leaving to the political process most decisions about life and death the death penalty itself is decided by the political process state by state and so that's the effect there's this i say this is a second other message i think comes out of the oral argument i hope people realized is that if roe gets overturned it doesn't mean abortion is banned throughout the country it just mean it goes back to the states

for political decision by the people we elect to our state legislatures just like most every life and death issue in our lives hey john, John, so oral arguments took place on December 1st, five days ago. As I understand it, the decision is expected in June. The court tends to hold the big decisions for relatively late. And I want to ask you what the process is, what happens between now and then with one little note. And the little note is that a few years ago, as you know, John Roberts and I were friends in the Reagan White House a thousand years ago.

You still admit that in public. I'm still willing to admit that in public. And I took the kids to Washington. John happened to be, the chief happened to be out of town. But when you get a tour of the Supreme Court through the chief justice's office, you get a pretty good tour. And so we were shown the conference room and the conference table. And here's what stayed in my mind. By contrast with the president who's isolated in the White House, members of the Senate show up

on the floor, they give their speeches, then they go back to their offices. Even in committees, they come in late. They sit there for a while. Republicans sit on one side, Democrats sit on the other. In the Senate and the House, people who disagree with each other can avoid each other. But that conference table is like a small dining room table. I know they all have their own chambers and that the Supreme Court is a big building, but when they come together in conference, it's just the justices and they're just seated around an ordinary table. They can't avoid each other. Okay, so what's the process? What happens? There's a lot of things to say in response to your point, but the first one is my giving tours at the Supreme Court. It's one of the best jobs of being a clerk i got to give tours this i gave a tour to quincy jones

wow jack but what's he a musician right and then oh but the best way you don't even know who quincy jones is i mean i don't listen to that stuff it's in the it's in the 20th century i don't i don't listen to anything literally is like 50 years of the 20th century oh yeah but they use electric instruments don't they it's not for me anyway i also but the best one the best one was charles barkley oh it's so great i got so you saw him the basketball court of course i i shot hoops with him at the court that's above the courthouse and it was pretty good even though i was talking a lot of smack you know because he was a 76er and i'm from philly so this was like a dream this is a dream come true it's like if i got to run the philly special play with falls over and

over again uh so anyway so this is great so uh back then you could give you could show people a lot more than you can show them now on the behind the scenes tour so uh i had charles sit in the chief justice's chair uh you know in the courtroom i have to say he felt very comfortable in that chair so anyway he says this very he says i have a question for you i'm really curious about a legal question so i said sure you know sir charles that's how everyone in Philadelphia addresses him. And what is it? He goes, well, can you explain the death penalty to me? So being the geeky young lawyer, I was like, well, even if you're convicted of murder, then there's only a few who get subject to death penalty. And there's this complicated second jury trial,

let's say, blah, blah, blah. I go on for about 10 minutes. He goes, no, you don't understand me. Why don't we give the death penalty to more people? Then I said, sir, you ought to run for governor of Alabama. You should sit in the Scalia chair. But yeah, so then I took him on a tour. And here's another, this just tells you a little bit about the court as justices. So Charles Barkley, you know, he came to see Justice Thomas. The amazing thing is that somehow Justice O'Connor learned who Charles Barkley was going to be in the building. Charles Barkley at this time played for the Phoenix Suns. Somehow Charles Barkley ended up not coming to Justice Thomas's chambers, but was diverted to Justice O'Connor's chambers,

where a photographer from the Washington Post miraculously appeared and took a picture of Charles Barkley putting the star on top of Justice O'Connor's Christmas tree, which he didn't need a chair or a ladder to do, which somehow then appeared on the front page of the Arizona Republic the next day. Okay, this is a segue into my next question. Wait a minute, I didn't answer Peter's question. So let me answer Peter's question really quickly. So oral arguments take place on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Then the justices meet around that little conference table

on that Friday of that week. The amazing no aides, the justices of all the major they've already met in washington yeah they they have not talked about the decision yet amongst themselves yes they've already met they would have just the decisions been made already three days ago we just don't know what it is so um what happened the justices are i think of all the major players in washington are people who do their own work, right? They show up, no aides, no staff. They go in order of seniority. And they say, so the Chief Justice goes first. And I mean, I wish I could see this. And then Justice Thomas goes second. And they say to explain what they're thinking about the cases and how they're going to vote. And then when you get around to the end,

I guess Amy Coney Barrett would be last. Then the chief justice, if he's in the majority, he assigns the opinion. If he's not, then Justice Thomas, who's the senior justice, assigns the opinion. The reason, it's not that the court holds the opinion all the way till the end of July, it's that the most controversial cases involve a lot of give and take because then the suppose justice thomas decides to write the opinion for five justices and roberts is the majority minority he will write a decision then he circulates it to the other four in his majority to the whole court but he wants his other four to sign on right and there's give and take and bargaining a justice can say so can i oh go ahead sorry i just gonna look here's what i would

say were i on the uh the if you're one of the justices in the little row yeah upholding row i would say i would be really super super honest and blunt to the to the uh the anti-row faction i would say if you do this, you'll bring it all down. That the court's going to be expanded, that we're going to remind people that this all goes back. The court itself goes back to a decision made by the court. Marbury v. Madison, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that the court should be the last word. It decided it was going to be the last word. That we have a very delicate balance here, and if you do this, you're going to mess it up for everybody.

And this is the Justice Sotomayor gave kind of a speech saying this, the oral argument. And isn't that their only argument? Yeah, well, I would have thought you could make a stronger argument, but they don't. You know, you could say, well, we upheld gay marriage. You know, we've been on this progression of reading certain unenumerated rights in the Constitution. Your side does it, too, with gun rights or money and campaign speed. You can always make accusations. The other side does it, too, if you want. But the problem with this stare decisis argument, I think, that Justice Sotomayor made is, how the hell would a justice of the Supreme Court know? How are they going to know what the politics are really going to be in reaction to the decision? 1973, the justices said, eh, we'll just decide this Roe thing. No big deal. No one will pay attention.

How could they have predicted it would become maybe the defining issue of our domestic politics for 50 years? You can see they are not good at politics. They should not be good at politics. They're judges. I was going to say, isn't that the argument right there? That is the argument.

Which is that you don't know the politics. You're not supposed to know what the politics are so just that's what that's what the so that's what politics are for yeah so just call it the way you see it this is i think this is the justice thomas approach you know this is just give your best answer on what the constitution means and let the everybody let the politicians take care of the politics because and here's the this is and then this is your buddy your classmate brett kavanaugh's point from oral argument right he said well let me give you a list of cases where the court was concerned or not about overturning precedent were they good ideas or bad ideas right well we upheld segregation for a long time right a good use of precedent or and the same argument i got i gotta think the arguments echoed defending uh not overturning plessy uh sounded like today because oh we need

it for social stability we don't want to upset politics we've got to keep the law stable that's the same argument you would make for uh if you were dissenting from Brown versus Board of Education. Right. Kavanaugh made that point quite well. And then he what about Miranda? Why? Where did the court get Miranda from? A lot of people love Miranda now, but it meant overturning decades and decades of Supreme Court cases which said there was no Miranda.

So I think his deeper point was that your point. How could justices know what the political reaction is going to be? And even if they did know, do we really want them to remind people that if they have ever wondered how their favorite restaurant consistently makes such delicious food, the short answer is they have access to the right kitchen tools. Made In. With Made In's professional quality cookware and kitchenware, anyone is capable of making restaurant-quality food at home. Made In produces professional quality cookware for those who love to cook. They source the finest materials and partner with a renowned craftsman to make premium kitchen tools available directly to you without the markup. I actually know a bunch of chefs who use this stuff. I use this stuff. It's great.

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code RICOCHET. This is the best discount available anywhere online for Made In products. They make great gifts. So go to madeincookware.com slash ricochet and use promo code ricochet for 15% off your first order. That's madeincookware.com, M-A-D-E-I-N-C-O-o-k-w-a-r-e dot com slash ricochet use promo code ricochet we thank made in for sponsoring the ricochet uh ricochet podcast but we also thank them for making a terrific terrific saucepan john in the last law talk podcast you and and Richard Epstein both predicted that the court would not overturn Roe, but would uphold Dobbs by adjusting what viability means. That is to say that the chief would hold together a majority. Chief Justice would hold together a majority for an incremental decision that split the difference, upholding roe and dobbs is that still your

prediction or did the oral arguments change it nah it's wrong unlike unlike richard epstein i'm willing to admit i'm wrong wow i can often be wrong well Well, you know, I thought that what would happen is that Kavanaugh is really the fifth. He's the controlling vote, I think. I think you've got four sure votes to say Roe has no basis in the Constitution. So Kavanaugh, you know, if he goes along with the Chief Justice, Chief Justice Roberts was floating this proposal to harmonize the Mississippi law with Roe. Essentially, it would throw Roe out, but still preserve some right to an abortion. The funny thing, this goes to Rob's point about why they keep pressing on stare decisis all the time. The liberals should have rushed to embrace this compromise, and they wouldn't.

They would not. They just kept saying stare decisis. They were absolutists. They said, you have to preserve Roe. What Roberts did is he said, well, what's this viability line anyway? He sounded to me like George Costanza. There's this episode about George Costanza and Seinfeld where he wants to name his kid seven. Do you remember? This is so funny. I thought he's like, I don't want to name a kid a normal name. I'm just going to name him seven. Seven. It's great. Roberts kept going, why 20? Why not 15?

15 is a good number. Let's make it 15 weeks. Why? So his point is, let's just toss out viability and just pick a week. 15 weeks sounds good. Just like seven sounded good to George Costanza. It has no principle. Again, easier to do in 1971 than it is in 2021.

Well, you know, he could make a claim that states should be allowed to find that even before viability, there's humanity in the fetus. And so how do we find that? Well, states draw the line. They think it's around 15 weeks now. So before 15 weeks, Roberts was saying, then we'll still keep Roe and Casey. After 15 weeks, states can start to regulate more and more. He mentioned this at least two times, if not three times, an oral argument. You would have thought Kig and Breyer, Sotomayor would have looked for that life preserver. But no, instead, there was

this like, you can't overturn roe it's precedent it's star decisis so nobody so nobody it's just sort of died in court didn't it nobody yeah so the thing that was remarked so the if there's two remarkable things from the oral argument one is no one defended roe on the merits the second one was kavanaugh came out pretty much saying i don't really believe in star decisis that much, at least not for really important issues. He said it wasn't really a question. He just said, here's a list of opinions that we overturned. And everyone knew and realized it was great, starting with Brown versus Board of Education, overturning Plessy.

That's the big news. That's what changes my view about how the court will come out. So you think, so your money is now, of course, the opposite after you were humiliated by your wrong prediction. Your prediction right now is? I think Roe's going to be overturned. I think it'll be five to four. And I think either Justice Thomas or Justice justice cavanaugh write the opinion and i think you'll have chief justice roberts probably going along with the three liberal justices and dissent

that's i i expect a much more radical uh outcome than i did before the oral argument just from what i was hearing amazing all right well listen we well i mean it's a long way we gotta wait for it's like the worst christmas present ever gotta wait till june last week of june and and uh you know what this means and then this means we're gonna have to have me back we're gonna have to have you back special edition a special edition of ricochet recorded that day well we also have to do the gun you know there's a new york gun cases case yeah come out that week that's like all right maybe a couple weeks i don't know you this was fun let's think Yeah, it's like, all right, maybe a couple of weeks. I don't know.

This was fun. Let's think it over. It's good to have a Russian driver. Well, yeah, I'm emotional right now. I'm overseas. I want to be the fourth wheel on your tricycle. This podcast was brought to you by ExpressVPN, Quip, and Made In. So please support them for supporting us.

They really do support us. And you could support us by joining Ricochet today. You'll love it. It's the club that wants you to join, and you will be happily a member. I promise you, Ricochet. In fact, I think we're doing a free thing, so I think it's even free. If you join it, you get 30 days free. You can check it out.

You can kick the tires. And if you like it, you can sign up. Take a minute, if you would, to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That helps us keep our ranking, which is important for new listeners. That is the way the media world goes. If you like what we do here, that is a very, very, very good way to help keep us in business. John, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. You know it's my great ambition to nudge one of you aside and take over. Yeah, I don't think you're going to have to nudge that hard. Just nudge me. We'll see you, I know we'll see you very soon. We'll see James in a

week. And Peter, you and I will see each other in a week. Well, where will you be? Are you ever going to Dane to return to America? I am Daney i'm returning uh on wednesday on wednesday can he can he pass the one day covid test that put in place when you were out of the country i had to organize all that i had to organize all that today i'm like oh my god so what is i thought three days was the pcr so clearly it's a antigen test for one day i haven't been in milan myself a month ago and also understanding the italian bureaucracy you could hand write on a piece of paper that you passed the vaccine test and everyone yep they have so far they passed it across my crinkled pack of cigarettes

and a tiny little cup of coffee um all right bella see you soon okay boys next week next week soon. Okay, boys. Bye. Next week. Take a look at these hands The hand speaks The hand of a government man While I'm a tumbler Falling to punches

I'm so thin. All I want is to breathe. I'm too thin. Oh, I want you to breathe with me I'm in a space so we move in between and keep on separate

of yourself don't you miss it don't you miss it some of you people just about missed it Don't you miss it? Don't you miss it? Some of you people just about missed it. Last time we made plans. I'm a tomboy. I'm a government man. Never seen anything like that before And the heat goes on

And the heat goes on And the heat goes on And the heat goes on And the heat goes on Where the hand has been And the heat goes on And the heat goes on And the heat goes on And the heat goes on Oh, no, no, no.

No, of course not. I got a great name for our kids. A real original. You want to hear what it is? You ready? Yeah. Seven. Seven Costanza.

You're serious Yeah It's a beautiful name for a boy or a girl Especially girl or a boy I don't think so Well, you don't like the name? It's not a name It's a number I know

It's Mickey Mantle's number So not only is it an all-around beautiful name It is also a living tribute It's awful I hate it Well, that's the name Oh, no, it is also a living tribute. It's awful. I hate it. Well, that's the name. Oh, no, it is not.

No child of mine is ever going to be named Seven. Alright, let's just stay calm here. Don't get all crazy on me. Ricochet. Join the conversation.