Everyone is Lying About Climate Change: the Phony Politics of Crisis Management.

there were two schools of thought and
two only about politics one is that lack of life experience makes people bad at politics and the other is that life experience itself makes people bad at politics which do you think is worse sitting down and trying to come up with pragmatic solutions for climate change with a bunch of teenagers who really have no life experience yet or sitting down with 55 year old career computer programmers trying to talk politics with guys who've spent their whole lives working computer programming very frustrating very counterproductive what's going on in terms of the translation of climate science into political action it's partly so tragic and counterproductive because climate scientists have a lot more in common with computer programmers than they have in common with political philosophers or to be blunt people like myself who spent their whole lives obsessing over political philosophy political history the organization of social movements the way Parliament's and governments work so on and so forth we have the ultimate situation in which those who have the technical expertise to inform public policy are themselves the least able the least eloquent to do so they are even less eloquent than 16 year-old Greta tunberg who obviously is speaking with no life experience with no technical knowledge so on and so forth I'd like to start these videos by dealing with a very palpable tangible real-world example instead of abstract reasoning when you open a can of carbonated water fizzy water if you sip it it tastes different from flat water from water that came out of a bottle that never was carbonated set the two bottles to one side and wait while all of the bubbles disappear taste them both again they still taste it it's not just the bubbles it's not just the carbonation carbonated water is made more acidic through the process of carbonation through exposure to carbon even after the water has settled down even after the bubbles have left and evaporated the same thing happens to the oceans acid oceans or ocean acidification is one of the least discussed aspects of climate change today it's one of the most durable and insoluble and the reason why people aren't talking about it is because it's not easily manufactured into a civilization threatening crisis if humanity now sits by and does nothing and allows the oceans to become more and more acidic it will wipe out all of the coral reefs on planet earth that'll be the first thing to disappear it'll wipe out almost all of the large fish species as I understand it jellyfish will do ok tiny single-cell organisms will be ok there will be kind of winners and losers but marine life as we know it will cease to exist human civilization will be fine nobody will eat lobster ever again but human civilization can continue just fine without anyone eating lobster that presents a tragedy that's much closer to what the climate change crisis really confronts us with than what people at grete tunberg people like extinction rebellion are talking about there's an attempt to manufacture or misrepresent the nature of the threat so that humanity itself will cease to exist will be decimated so that civilized society will cease to exist to even pose the notion that democracy will cease to exist and we replace by fascism I've heard extinction rebellions say that again and again and I think Greta is influenced by their verbiage to some extent um I recently heard interview by a mainstream news source I'm going to choose not to say who and they said oh well you know rising ocean levels so you know this is the idea that the actual location of the ocean will change and certain cities and inhabited areas now will become submergent or rising ocean levels will entail so many trillions of dollars of damage a certain percentage loss in GDP global it's on the the other person being interviewed here said oh well here's the footnote on those projections it's true that if you just take a map of the world and color in the coastlines blue to represent the ocean coming in and then you calculate the damage you get these astronomical figures um however if you actually try to simulate the gradual series of stages whereby people would relocate whole cities might be abandoned sure but still happens gradually enough um new infrastructure gets built you know new types of crops are planted to replace old crops that don't exist when you compensate for the different types of infrastructure that can be built to help civilized countries cope with it so everyone put it will then the numbers are suddenly dramatically lower we're talking about a fraction of a percentage of GDP being lost and so on and so forth that really it no longer sounds good as a stir goal and you could hear it in the voice of the interviewer in response there was like oh and I would say both in terms of what he said and how he said it I felt that his concern was if he took this news and broadcast it he was eroding or undermining the rationale for sudden dramatic action in response to this as an emergency I used to live in Bangkok Thailand again I'm trying to keep these tangible palpable examples I worked in museums when I was there so historical research from museums and you know one day I was down at the the construction site where one of the museum's was gonna be built and you know he saw one of these machines digging into the earth scooping the earth and just when it was a few millimeters below ground level there was water you know this is semi saline ocean water mixing with river water you know in pain you know and I suddenly realize it's as if we're all standing on a lily pad this part of the city at least is a very very small distance above sea level and from that moment on I started joking with the other people involved in the planning and development this museum look guys we've got to be planning to make the world's greatest underwater art museum world's greatest submersibles rooms yet this is all gonna be underwater just a few decades okay it is true the odds that downtown Bangkok would be abandoned pretty solid they're pretty good odds that Bangkok has a specific examples of City I know and there may be all kinds of sentimental reasons why that would be a crushing blow to the culture and history of talent but let me ask you something do you actually think the statues the works of art that are in the National Museum in Bangkok would be destroyed or do you think that as temperatures rise in ocean levels live right there would be an organized response to that threat that the city would be evacuated that cultural heritage would be removed and relocated elsewhere that in fact it wouldn't be the end of life as we know it it would just be a reorganization of that's a few million people would move to the Northeast a few million moved to the northwest so on and so forth but it wouldn't be the type of crisis the type of threat that's being now manufactured and presented to the mainstream press so the problem with the sky is falling narrative with the crisis narrative of the threat of global warming the civilization ending humanity and ignorant it is twofold one it's gonna lead to people doing the wrong things but two this is the one that interests me more it's going to read lead to people doing the right things for the wrong reasons okay our motivations matter all right what are we gonna do about the tragedy of ocean acidification there's a sense in which it doesn't touch us but it's our moral responsibility wiping out the vast majority of ocean life it's a terrible thing it's a terrible stain on the the moral record of humanity however you want to think of it okay but to try to present the reason for that being self-preservation it's not self-preservation it's not defense it's not for us that we do it at some point we have to start making decisions morally we have to resolve ethically to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do okay to see that as being in our self-interest even though it is in all honesty not self-serving in a mention right now two of the open secrets of the climate change crisis two of the solutions that are staring us in the face and for which all the science has been done it's known they can be deployed okay one is very simply cold misting misting technology doesn't say on that scientifically complicated cause it's not and the second or reflective arrays of satellites okay very briefly misting the the fantasy form of this technology is to have boats skimming around on lakes and oceans and ideally there are solar powered boats but it can be done with a smokestack and a factory if you produce white puffy clouds of mist of almost any kind it can be water vapor but it could be a form of carefully intentionally manufacturing industrial smoke white puffy clouds reflect the sun's rays way pup puffy clouds do cause local and global cooling and it's entirely within our means to start generating in this sense mist or cloud cover yeah the numbers have been crunched on it a completely cynical solution number two deploying satellites that will reflect the sun's rays away from the surface of the earth this would be most effective if you had satellites along the edge of the Arctic ice mass and in South Africa along the edge of the Antarctic ice mass I've talked about this with to face to face two engineers in that line at work guys who work on things related to rockets and satellites about you and I remember both conversations at first they were they were kind of excited that oh well that would be tremendously complicated and I said no you know what's complicated having one satellite capable of launching a missile that will hit another satellite that's complicated and we can do that when you're talking about just putting a satellite in orbit and then having it basically unfold aluminum foil that's incredibly simple and it's already been done it's way it's not just past the experimental phase I know about experiments done by the Russians and they come up politically because whether weaponization is illegal under international treaties but they've done much more sophisticated things than just cooling through satellites so satellites in near-earth orbit it can be done and it's cheap and then basically the amount of solar radiation coming in is like a faucet you can turn it off and on with these two technologies all right there's a list of other solutions to start knocking off huge percentages of the problem and each of those solutions comes with a different kind of cost here in Taiwan I live on the island of Taiwan if you couldn't guess from the background of the video the government just committed to build a new train line that will be approximately 20 kilometres approximately 13 miles and that new train line is very short there's one extra stop on an existing training that new stop on the train will cost two billion US dollars two billion for countries like the United States of America and Canada to radically reduce the reliance on automobiles through building railroad networks world-class 21st century where Rodin works trillions trillions of dollars and Taiwan is a very fundamental advantage there that train line they're building they're building it in an economic context that's unbelievably vital to ask a question about Canada this will be easy for you guys to imagine even if you've never been to Canada what why isn't there a high-speed rail linking Saskatoon to Regina Saskatoon in the city in northern Saskatchewan to Regina the capital why not it seems like the most obvious and Noble thing it's because nobody nobody in Canada is really confident that the City of Saskatoon has an economic future nobody really believes nobody's cautious about Regina either no one's really sure that this see is gonna matter 50 years from now into the future so we don't want to spend two billion dollars we don't want to spend twenty billion dollars building a railroad that may lead from somewhere to nowhere or from nowhere to nowhere and here in Taiwan nobody doubts that the economy of Gaussian is going to be booming ten years from now 20 years from now 50 years from now gives them a very very unusual sort of certainty in the future when investing billions of dollars in that kind of infrastructure okay what will make a dramatic difference in transportation is not replacing one type of car with another slightly more efficient car do the math even if you replace a court model Gaskins human car with an idealized electrical car so an incredibly expensive car such as is made by Tesla for one thing the difference in efficiency it's it's much narrower than you'd like to imagine it is electrical car is still need electricity electricity comes from power plants the power plant may be built burning coal coal and the power plant may be burning oil the electrical cars we have in the road now they weigh 500 pounds more than a gas car they have that weight all the time the gas car is lighter and it gets even lighter and lighter as the gas tank gets closer to empty the differences in real-world efficiency are not so inspirational but moreover you can't just calculate how much pollution is generated by driving the car or 100 kilometers you have to do full life-cycle calculations and what you find is that there is no car in the world so efficient that the savings in pollution I say here pollution not just carbon emissions but in all pollution that the savings in pollution will compensate for the damage you're doing by manufacturing a new car and throwing another new car an old car in the landfill when you do the math the most ecological thing you can do is to keep the old car we already have on the road to keep repairing them for 50 years and to not replace them at all because it's such a polluting process to destroy one car and manufacture another okay depressing but here's the good news it's not a small difference in efficiency when you switch from car to bus when you switch from car to train okay that's a radical exponential gain in efficiency but for countries like the United States of America and Canada that's exactly what they're least able to do the city of Detroit is not able to transform itself to resemble a city in the South of France and it's tragic but they're now burdened with a legacy of several centuries of unbelievably terrible urban planning and infrastructure development the other issue with costs is that building infrastructure like trains to really get it to work with a city but whether it's Detroit or Saskatoon or anywhere else it's normally going to involve demolishing and rebuilding large parts of the city because you can't have the train just land know where it needs to land in a city that works as a pedestrian city in terms of other forms of transportation in terms of the whole way that shopping and housing and education other institutions work it's never enough to just build a new train line and by the same token it's never enough to just add a few more buses so that's a kind of fundamental social reform that even with an unlimited budget the countries that really matter are almost powerless to make so breaking our dependence on the car on the automobile is something we can do and it doesn't require a new technology it could be done entirely with the technology of the bus and the Train over a hundred years old but are we going to do it are we motivated to do it just because it's the right thing to do or do you think people are going to do it because of hysterical pseudo-scientific claims being advanced by credit berg and extension rebellion other would be edgy radicals screaming in the streets that all of humanity is going to be wiped out if we don't screaming in the street that civilization will end with a two degrees two degrees centigrade change in our climate I don't think political change is very often motivated by fear I think it tends to be motivated by a very clear positive vision of what's possible and what's practicable and more often than not it's motivated by a sense of dignity of honor of doing what's morally right not just what's economically expedient not just what's in your self-interest or what's necessary for self-defense or what-have-you so I think there's a challenge here and the type of people who work in climate science are very poorly suited to it just as computer programmers are very poorly suited to it there's a tremendous challenge here in developing and articulating a new political philosophy for the 21st century and it's probably not going to be the same philosophy in the South of France and in northern Canada and elsewhere so I've already said in this discussion that it doesn't just matter that we do the right thing but it also matters that we do the right thing for the right reasons and that's what I think makes veganism such a tremendously profoundly important example people have many times debated with me or challenged me would I prefer to have a world with a hundred million vegans but who are not ethical vegans people who become vegans for health reasons or maybe they only need a reduced Aryan diet or pescetarian diet or would I rather have a world where there are only three million vegans but they're all perfectly ethically pure and well noted people have people who confronted with this all the time and their point is they feel we better to live in a world with a larger number of highly imperfect flawed poorly motivated semi vegans rather than having organizations staffed by idealized ethical vegans veganism isn't just important as a diet okay veganism isn't just important for your health and it isn't just important for the impact that has on the animals and it isn't just important for the impact it has on the environment veganism is also important for its potential to instigate cultural change veganism is important for the discipline we take upon ourselves and the ways in which we start disciplining our society educating our society were forming our democracy in that spirit okay I don't see veganism as the final endpoint of social evolution I see it as a spark as a very delicate very weak spark and at the moment it doesn't even exist as a movement that instigates people to change not just individually but to change at a level of social organization the problem is if you build the world's greatest railroad which is what they're doing here in Taiwan if you build a two billion dollar railroad that only goes 13 miles fat it's great quality fabulous Claudie railroad okay people will get on and get off with absolutely no thought about the harm they're doing to the world in all the other things in their life whether that's eating pork every day or burning charcoal briquets in their backyard or whatever it may be okay there's no sense of participation in that there's no sense of personal responsibility there's no self discipline there's no education privately and personally nor in reaching out and doing public education for others okay the government builds a railroad and the rest of us we just come along for the ride veganism is of such unique importance not just because of the statistics and the statistics are true important 70% less land-use dramatically less carbon dioxide emitted most people say about 50% reduction you know mission amazing spectacular numbers land water air pollution enormous a positive way okay veganism is important because it's something you can do it's something I can do it's something we can do and it's not just that you can't do anything about building a railroad but that even if the government does start building new railroads because they're concerned about climate change they do that on your behalf and the culture remains unchanged what veganism leads to ultimately is a regeneration of democracy a transformation of our culture and it's a transformation that proceeds from personal ethical commitment a new sense of dignity a new sense of honor a new sense of obligation it's possible that a hundred years from now all the great cities of the world will have built fabulous new train systems new electric trains better public transportation it's possible that a hundred years from now governments around the world will have replaced coal burning power plants with solar and wind power it's possible but the problem is if the people don't care if they don't care personally if they don't connect with something like veganism and take on a new sense of responsibility then every fish in the ocean every whale in the ocean every lobster will go extinct as the oceans acidified right if we don't start creating a culture of personal responsibility take responsibility for the whole planet including its animals then all we'll get is a gray soulless technocratic solution to what is ultimately a merely scientific problem that's why I'm concerned not just about doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do but also doing it for the right