How to Make the World a Better Place | Bjørn Lomborg and Ralph Schoellhammer | EP 285

That's what we're going to see this winter when we run out of sufficient fossil fuels, and some people are gonna start freezing. We will be much more worried about cold waves than heat waves, but that's not how the media presented it. That's why we're in trouble. Is it really the focus on global warming as global warming, or is it also a little bit to focus on global warming as kind of this ideological struggle that fulfills almost an emotional need for many people much more than an environmental need? Why is there no Manhattan-like project into nuclear fusion or into nuclear energy in general? There are many tools at our disposal that could really help with global warming, but sometimes, I'm exaggerating here slightly, but sometimes I almost feel like some might not want to go global warming fully away because they kind of poured all their heart and soul into it. But now, by the way, something I think we partially also see with COVID, it kind of bleeds over into a cultural moral problem, and these strike me as much more difficult to overcome.

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Hello everyone! I'm extremely pleased today and privileged, I would say, to sit down with Bjorn Lomborg, who I regard as the world's foremost commentator on environmental and sustainability matters in the best possible sense, and Ralph Schollhammer, a journalist who's been working in Europe diligently covering such ill-covered topics as the Dutch farmers' protest. I recorded a video earlier this week with Michael Yawn, who is a war correspondent and journalist who's also been covering the farmers' protests, and he made a variety of prognostications about the dismal prospects of the coming fall. I thought I would talk to Bjorn and Ralph in some detail about global issues, particularly with Bjorn, because, as I said, he's incredibly well-versed in such matters, and then with Ralph more particularly about the rising wave of protest around the world, Canada, the U.S., Europe, while in other countries as well, and see if we can bring some clarity to the issue.

So I'll start with a bio of Bjorn and Ralph so that people know who I'm talking to, and then we'll jump right into the discussion. Ralph Schollhammer is an assistant professor in political science and economics at Webster University. In addition to his teaching and research commitments, he is a regular contributor to the public discourse and has been published in Newsweek, The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, and The Wall Street Journal. He also hosts his own podcast called The 1020, in which he talks to guests about a wide range of issues from Roman history to contemporary culture in the Western world, as well as global geopolitics.

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, one of the world's foremost political thinkers, researches—and this is the truth—the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world's top economists and seven Nobel laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world's greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education. If you're genuinely concerned about doing your duty to your culture and the planet, Bjorn is a great person to know about, to read about, and to follow. I think that might be more true of him than of any thinker on the policy front that I've ever encountered. For his work, Lomborg was named one of Time magazine's hundred most influential people in the world. He's a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media for outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, Fox, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents. He is also a best-selling author whose books include "False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet." Bjorn has discussed that book at some length on my podcasts, among many other places. He's also written "The Skeptical Environmentalist," "Cool It: How to Spend 75 Billion Dollars to Make the World a Better Place," which is a fascinating read, "The Nobel Laureate's Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030," and "Prioritizing Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals."

So welcome to you, Bjorn and Ralph. I'm very much looking forward to our discussion today and hope that it will enlighten people as to the sorry state of European politics, let's say, and bring some clarity to the discussion of the apocalyptic nightmare that seems to be plaguing us above all else at the moment. Bjorn, no doubt you've been watching what's happening on the European protest front and with the manufactured energy crisis, and now with the manufactured food and fertilizer crisis. So what do you see happening now, and what do you see coming?

It's very hard. Yes, I have been watching, as I think Ralph has. I mean, we both live here in Europe, and I think the fundamental point is it's really hard to see what is gonna happen. I'm gonna give you a little bit of background because I think it's important to sort of look at why it is we're so dependent on Russian gas. The simple answer is because we have lots of renewables. What do you get when you have lots of renewables? You get lots of power when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but you have none when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, and then you need backup power. In past times, we would get this from coal. Now, coal emits a lot of CO2, so a lot of the continent has simply got rid of coal. Coal-fired power plants, that's all overall a good thing, partly because they pollute a lot; they actually kill people through pollutants, but also because they emit a lot of CO2, which obviously is also bad. We've gone to gas, but we have not delivered our own gas. So Europe has lots and lots of shale gas potential—shale gas just like the U.S.—but we have not used it. We have to a large extent been incredibly worried about shale gas. Oh, shale gas is probably gonna create a lot of earthquakes or it's gonna pollute the drinking water—all those kinds of stories that you also heard in the U.S. And again, remember it's not that it was entirely untrue. There are some problems with fracking in the U.S. But fundamentally, fracking has made the U.S. both much more energy independent, and it has actually reduced dramatically the emissions of the U.S. The U.S. has reduced its emissions more than any other country in the world over the last 10 years. Europe did not do that because we had cheap Russian gas, and now we're in this pickle.

So fundamentally, it's because we don't like coal, we love renewables, and then we need lots of gas, and there we are right now. And of course, that is going to make us very, very vulnerable to pressure from Putin. Everybody has been pointing that out before.

Well, let's dig into that a bit. First of all, it was completely obvious that unidimensional dependence on the Russians for vital energy sources was a bad strategic idea—not, and that's even the case I would say in some sense if Russia was a clear ally and we weren't in a war with them, because you don't want your entire economy so unresilient that you're dependent on a single source for your fundamental resource. Everyone who had any sense whatsoever could see that, just as clearly as they could see the daylight sun.

Then the second issue here, and I don't think people do understand this, is that every energy source has risks. For example, if you put solar panels on your roof, you pose a risk to the workmen who install it because they fall off the roof. You might think, well that's trivial danger, but way more people are killed installing solar panels every year than are killed by nuclear power, for example. So every energy source has its risks. And you know, I grew up in northern Alberta, and people had fracked there for decades—no one was concerned about it in the least. And so then when everyone started to shout about the dangers of fracking, we all knew people that I knew knew that that was just rubbish. But even more importantly, if you are concerned environmentally, and there are some reasons to be concerned environmentally, you would have to point to the fact that the Americans and their success with fracking drove their carbon emissions down 15%, I believe, and as you pointed out, they are the only industrialized country that has managed this. And so if you were really concerned about the environment and not just an idiot communist anti-capitalist, you would note that, and you'd think, well this is a lot better than the alternative, which is high energy prices, which are hard on the poor, hyperdependence on the Russians as a single source of energy, and then, well, and then the fact that if you fracked—if you did—not frack, you have to turn to alternate energy sources that are going to pollute or leave you vulnerable.

Now, is there anything wrong with that analysis even from the pro-environmental front?

So I think the fundamental point here is that we were so worried about global warming that we forgot to realize we need to be worried about a lot of other things, like for instance being security-dependent on Russian gas. So look, if we had a wonderful, you know peacefully coexisting world, there’s nothing wrong with getting your power from other places because actually, you know where they can do it most effectively is probably a better idea. But obviously we don’t live in that world, and I think it's been clear for most people at least for, you know, a decade or two that Putin was probably not our best ally. And so clearly, we should have been more concerned. This is what happens, I think this is sort of the step back we need to take. This is what happens when you only worry about global warming. If global warming is the only thing on your radar, you obviously forget all the other things. There’s a new survey from OECD that showed, of all the OECD countries, they asked adults—a representative segment of adults for all OECD countries—sixty percent of them believe that it’s likely global warming will lead to the end of mankind. If you think this is the end of the world, then obviously nothing else matters. Global warming is a problem, yes, but it's not by any means the end of the world.

And one way to look at that is, you know we've just seen a lot of heat waves, and those are horrible. And remember, heat waves are damaging, and they will kill some people. They're definitely dangerous, but after all, they will probably kill, you know, in the order of a couple of thousand people. Remember, every winter we probably see about three to six hundred thousand people die from cold in Europe. We don't have a good sense of proportion if we're only focused on the—and it's actually a lot more—so 100, 200,000 people actually die from heat across the year, but forget the many, many more that die from cold. And that's what we're going to—sorry that's what we're going to see this winter when we run out of sufficient fossil fuels and some people are going to start freezing. We will be much, much more worried about cold waves than heat waves, but that's not how the media present it, and that's why we're in trouble.

Can I jump in real quick here because I think what Bronzer was saying was so interesting, and because you mentioned kind of there is this focus on global warming, and I think you're right, but could you maybe dissect a little bit more? Is it really the focus on global warming as global warming, or is it also a little bit of the focus on global warming as kind of this ideological struggle that fulfills almost an emotional need for many people much more than an environmental need? What I mean by this is, for example, why is there no, you know, Manhattan-like project into nuclear fusion or into nuclear energy in general? I think we have—and you mentioned this in your writing so many times—there are many tools that would have our disposal that could really help with global warming, but sometimes, I'm exaggerating here slightly, but sometimes I almost feel like that some might not want to go global warming fully away because they kind of poured all the heart and soul into it. I mean, you know, in the past, right with acid rain, we had the ozone layer, and there was kind of global action taken to address this because it was seen as a technical problem, but now, by the way, something I think we partially also see with COVID—it kind of bleeds over into a, you know, a cultural moral problem, and this strikes me as much more difficult to overcome.

Ralph, it might be that to some degree we're wired to apprehend the apocalypse, and part of the chronic psychological problem of mankind is where to put hell in the apocalypse and Satan, for that matter, properly. I think we're apocalyptic because everybody knows in their heart of hearts that everything comes to an end, and we have to contend with that—our lives come to an end, the lives of those we love come to an end, civilizations come to an end—and we also know that there’s an association between the morality of our actions and the likelihood of a cataclysmic end. And part of the utility of a functioning religious enterprise is to help us manage those apocalyptic visions without them contaminating everything we do because it is hard.

As Bjorn pointed to this, if COVID is a disaster, then it’s the only thing you should focus on. And if environmental degradation is a disaster, then it’s the only thing you should focus on. But it isn’t the only thing you should focus on, and one of the great advantages of Bjorn's books and works and his institute is that he's done what politicians are supposed to do, which is to take a look at the broader context and to say, well, what’s the complete list of our problems, and how do we intelligently wade our way through the whole set?

I mean, when we panicked about COVID, we blew our supply chains apart, and however many millions of people we might have saved with the COVID reaction—and I'm very dubious about any of those claims—God only knows how many people we're going to doom now because of supply chain disruptions and communication disruptions between, say, Putin and the rest of the world because of COVID lockdowns.

Bjorn?

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think it’s incredibly hard to imagine that. I think, Ralph, you're absolutely right. There are a lot of people who feel that recycling and all these things sort of make sense in their life; it's part of the thing that you do to feel like, I’m a good citizen. And in some ways, I constantly try to argue, well, shouldn’t we talk about how effective this is? And I think there is some part of this that we really need to confront. I’m glad we can do that in this conversation.

Just one example that I think is so spot on—and you’ll probably love this, Jordan—a couple of weeks ago, as you well know, about a billion people are likely to be starving, and this winter will probably be even more because we don’t have enough food. One of the ways you produce food in this world is through fertilizer. Fertilizer is what drives it. But of course, most fertilizer—most synthetic fertilizer—is made with gas. And so when the EU was approached, should we not make more fertilizer for the world? They go, oh, but that’s going to make us use more gas. No, I think we’ll not do that.

There’s something morally wrong about this of saying, yeah, you know what, a couple hundred million people are gonna starve, but at least we didn’t use extra gas. You know, the same way as much of the rich world is saying to the poor world, you guys, you know, we got rich from using lots of fossil fuels, but you guys, you don’t really need that, which of course to a very large extent means leaving them in poverty. And of course they don’t accept to do that.

And so I think there's a point to, Ralph, your argument of saying this is also a religion. But on the other hand, I think if you’re going to converse with people, if you’re actually going to have a reasonable conversation with them, I think it has to be about the facts. So basically talking about what can you do, how much good will cutting a ton of CO2 do, how much good will recycling a bottle do, how much good will it do if you get more fertilizer for poor people? And it turns out, not surprisingly, that most of the things that we focus a lot on are basically feel-good things. They'll do very little even for poor people, and even in 100 years, whereas many of the obvious things are these slightly boring things, like getting, you know, people with tuberculosis addressed.

Remember, again, tuberculosis is the world's leading infectious disease killer when there's not COVID, but we don’t care about it because we fixed it 100 years ago in the rich West. But there are still lots of these issues. And likewise, just to put out one more thing—about a billion people, so about a billion school kids have lost, on average, nine months because of lockdowns of schools during COVID. This is probably the biggest loss. So the World Bank estimates that by 2040, when these kids are now out and actually being productive, their world will be 1.4 trillion dollars less rich every year because these kids are less well-educated.

How is that not our biggest challenge?

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Well, let's answer that. Why is that not our biggest challenge? And so, going back to the religious issue, if you configure the apocalypse and hell properly, then you take it upon yourself to carry a very heavy moral burden, and that burden is to put your life together. And that means to be productive and generous and honest and concerned with life more abundant for everyone.

And you have to retool your whole psyche, in some sense, to aim toward that, and that takes—that’s 100% dedication and a lifetime of effort. But if you're worshipping at the altar of a false god, let's say, what you’re looking for is shortcuts to put yourself, to put yourself in a position where you have the moral advantage and where you can claim reputation stakes because of that.

And all of this false moral posturing that comes along with these shallow analyses is, in my psychological estimation, nothing but a narcissistic trip to replace competence with the false competence of the Machiavellians and the psychopaths. Because, I mean, your work struck me so hard, Bjorn, because I worked on the UN report on sustainable development for the Secretary-General. I worked on that for a couple of years, and one of the things that really came to the forefront for me were two things.

One is we stupidly overfished and destroyed the oceans—that's a really nasty thing, and we didn't have to do that. The second was, oh, all the data shows that if you make poor people rich as fast as possible, they stop polluting and start caring about the environment. So isn't that something we could make everyone rich, and the planet would be better off?

And then the next thing was, well, what’s the rank order of importance of our problems? And I went back to the UN's central agencies, authorities, a couple of times, to the other people who were working on the report. There were many of them, and said, well, you guys have 200 goals here, or whatever it is, 400 or 169—it's like that's not any goals; goals have to be prioritized because you can't do 200 things at the same time, and all 200 things aren't of equal importance. And they said, well, there’s a constituency for each of these goals. And if we prioritize them, we'll annoy someone. It’s like that's not a good reason, and then next we don't have a methodology for prioritization.

I thought, well that's a big problem. Does anyone? And the only one I came across—and maybe you could explain this a little bit, the only one I came across was you. And so you tackled this problem, which I thought was—I really thought that was a stroke of genius, Bjorn. And if the Nobel Prize committee had any sense, you would have been a recipient of the Peace Prize for this work because it's signally important.

So, you want to outline what you do and what you've concluded?

So, thank you very much. I mean, I should just say what we're doing is not rocket science, and as you point out, it’s kind of obvious. If you have 169 targets, which is what the UN had, you have no priorities. And so we simply try to work with some of the best economists across the world to look at where can you spend an extra dollar or an extra rupee or an extra shilling or whatever your currency is and do the most good?

This is an objective question, and of course you can have a lot of conversations about how do you value different things, because remember you need to include everything. So there are both going to be economic costs, there are also going to be social costs. For instance, if you vaccinate someone, not only has a cost from the hospital part of the thing, but you also need to take people's time to get vaccinated—maybe they need to get off work. And there will also be environmental costs—for instance, if you put up a new power plant, not only does it have cost, but it will also add to more pollution and more CO2 emissions.

You need to include all of that. And likewise, there are going to be lots of benefits, both economic, social, and environmental benefits. Now, what we try to do is to include all of the costs and all of the benefits and account them in dollars. This is something economists have done for 30 years, and obviously, it feels a little sort of, "Really, can you do that? You know, how many lives are you going to lose?"

But remember, we do that, you know, uncontroversially in many different contexts. One obvious place is when you put out roads. You decide what kind of security are you gonna have on a road? Are we gonna have, you know, a hard center line so people can't run into each other? It's more costly, but it also saves more lives.

Governments around the world make those trade-offs depending on how many lives you're going to save and how costly is it going to be. That kind of consequence thinking we put into all of these issues. And then we basically came out with a list of saying these are the very best things to do; these are the so-so-good things to do; and these are actually the dumb things to do.

And so we simply tried to say, do the smart stuff. And I appreciate you saying that this is something that the Nobel committee should be looking at, but I think, you know, in some sense it’s so obvious, it’s not rocket science, but we don’t do it. Exactly as you say, because nobody wants to offend anyone.

So we just say everything is important, and we also end up worrying about the stuff that makes the headlines, which very often is global warming and other, you know, yes problems but perhaps not the most important ones.

Well, we also do it because we’re lazy and ill-informed and treacherous, because we want to take the easy moral path instead of plowing through, like, let’s say your work. And I’d like to point out, by the way, to those who are listening, you can argue about the accuracy of cost-benefit analysis because it’s hard to price everything and to value everything, and you can debate about how you might do that, but Bjorn, who is doing something closer to rocket science in some sense than he admits, he got teams of economists together—multiple teams—to independently produce lists of costs and benefits by problem, and then he averaged across the ratings.

And I know, as a diagnostician and as a researcher, that’s how you come up with reliable calculations. And so those are calculations that could be replicated, and valid calculations, and a valid calculation is one that actually bears some resemblance to the real world. And so what you did is in some sense, in retrospect, self-evident, but it’s also very, very sophisticated conceptually.

But what is also so remarkable is that it’s a singular attempt. Despite the fact that we’re jumping up and down about the coming apocalypse, and everyone's got their panties in a knot as a consequence of it, no one has sat down and done the hard-edged economic analysis that you have done. And then you've taken a hell of a lot of flack for it too because you end up prioritizing things like, well, stopping tuberculosis and feeding children instead of shutting off Europe's energy supply so that we can reduce carbon dioxide and pat ourselves on the back for saving the planet.

And you faced an awful lot of vitriol as a consequence of this too, which I also find unbelievably appalling because all of your work is devoted clearly toward specifying the most good that can be done in the most efficient possible manner. And why someone would be attacked for that is—that’s really a great mystery where you're obviously undermining this very shallow religious commitment people have to their apocalyptic pretensions, and that's the primary reason, but it’s also unbelievably appalling.

Well, but I think it makes a lot of sense because you’re a heretic, right? I mean, in previous times, it's like, you know, imagine you’re in like a fictional island culture, and what they do is every year they throw a virgin into a volcano in order to get a good harvest, and then you come along and say, "Wait a moment! You actually could get the good harvest without throwing the virgin into a volcano." There will be many people who would say, "But we are used to throwing that virgin into the volcano." Right?

I think it’s technically a problem, but I think a lot of it—and this has been, I would argue, fostered since the 1960s—but it’s a cultural problem, so much, right? This has been kind of instituted in education, or this idea, you know, in the 70s it was the new ice age, it was all these kind of things. I think the consciousness for doom—for environmental doom—has kind of been, you know, inflicted upon the younger generations now for at least two generations. And again, I think technically everything you say is right, but maybe you could also speak a little bit to—I mean, William Nordhaus did get a Nobel Prize, right? Kind of talking in a similar direction, and I wonder why he’s never in a talk show. I don't know, maybe he's reclusive, I don’t know, but he's never in a talk show like he's barely ever quoted.

So I wonder why it is, and I think it’s because he is less outspoken than you are, but I think he would probably also be seen as a heretic. So it’s why you see more Toonbergs and less Lomborgs and less Nordhouses.

Yeah, why we see Greta Thunberg instead of you on the international stage is just—that's just—maybe she’s the virgin we’re sacrificing to the volcano. You know, so I think it’s, you know, you’re both right, and in a very specific sense, I think what you just mentioned about the UN, that they didn’t want to offend anyone. Remember, we basically come out and say, as you said, you know, we should be focusing on free trade, contraception for women, vaccinations for a lot of rotaviruses, you know, a lot of these very, very simple things that you can do a lot about tuberculosis, food for kids.

It’s also a way to get better schooling, better schooling—All these kinds of very, very simple things. And the reason why they didn’t want to prioritize it was because they did not want to offend anyone. But, as you point out, who gets offended? Well, when we put down some of the, you know, solutions that people argue for climate change, they’re not bad; they’re just not very effective. Some of them are actually bad, and, you know, the thing that we’ve just done in Europe, we’ll probably end up seeing in half a year was very bad.

But fundamentally, that pisses off a much bigger segment than, you know, everybody who does tuberculosis thinks we’re the smartest thing since sliced bread. So it’s not that there are not constituents out there that like what we do; all the ones that get up on top think it’s amazing—not surprisingly. But there are just so many more people who are advocating for the bottom things. In that sense, I think it’s more a question of saying, well, this is almost a poll of saying what is it that makes sense for people? What is it the religion that we make makes us feel like we’re doing something for the world?

And for most people, it feels much better to be saving the planet, which you unfortunately are not actually doing instead of saving some kids' lives, which just feels like, yeah, you know? Our prime minister in Canada has just decided to do the same thing to Canadian farmers that the Netherlands has done to the Dutch farmers. He’s going to force them—because he likes to use force because he’s saving the planet—even though he’s not—he’s going to force them to reduce their nitrous oxide output.

And here, get this, man, this is something he decided that he’s going to do that without calculating the ratio of pollution produced to food produced. And so the provinces and the farmers are pushing back and saying, well, how about you judge our polluting use on the basis of how much food we produce? Wouldn’t that be, like, vaguely reasonable? And the answer from the feds has been, no, we want an absolute reduction, and that’s exactly an example of this low-resolution narcissistic moralism that is substituting both for genuine religious conviction and for genuine knowledge.

And I would say our prime minister in Canada, he’s definitely—if it isn’t Jacinda Ardern and Kamala Harris, it’s definitely Justin Trudeau who are the poster people for this sort of thinking.

So, just on a very, very briefly, it’s a great example of how economists would approach this conversation. It’s basically saying, look, there’s something nice about this idea of reducing nitrogen deposits. It actually, you know, especially biologists, but also other people like the fact that there are low fertilizer areas, you know, where different kinds of sparse plantations live, and that can be a nice sort of ecosystem. But if you ask most people how much are you willing to pay for that?

So, you know, the other scent said is we can’t produce as much food; we can’t keep our culture. A lot of farmers are going to go bankrupt, and of course, also that you’re just going to move this nitrogen deposit to, for instance, developing countries instead.

Exactly. Then you have to ask, so what’s the weighing of these two things? We do that all the time. And let me just give you this one. Obviously, when you talk about the speed limit, most people, you know, if you don’t—so in the U.S. about, what, 40,000 people die on the roads every year mostly because people drive too fast, and the simple question is, well, shouldn’t you do something about it? If you don’t reflect very much, people will just say, yeah, that number should be zero.

Well, there’s a very obvious way to get it to zero. It is to put the speed limit at five kilometers or three miles an hour. Now, nobody would get killed but nobody would get anywhere either. So that’s, of course, why we don’t actually do it. Every year and every day, we decide all of us, yes, I would like to go at a reasonable speed, and that will end up meaning some people will die.

There’s a trade-off here, now we can have a sensible conversation: do we want to have, you know, like—sorry I’m a little unsure where I should use miles or a kilometer; I’m just going to go with miles.

Right? So, okay, can we use 55 kilometers? I didn’t do that, did I? 55 miles or you know, 85 miles? And that’s a fine conversation, but nobody suggests it should be zero or three miles an hour, and that’s the conversation that we need to have in all these other things. So when we’re talking about nitrogen deposits, of course we all want to have less rather than more, but we also have lots of other things we want to do, and we need to recognize those likely.

So, okay, so I want to return to something you said and then I want to talk about economists versus biologists, let's say. So when I had calculated—and this is a rough calculation and I knew it was wrong—I figured that we’d be facing a world in the fall, in the winter, where 150 million people would be starving. But Michael Yawn mentioned that it was going to be 1.2 billion; that was his estimate. And I thought, oh my god, not only is that famine on a level that we haven't seen probably since the early 60s; and then he talked about how famine multiplies because once a famine hits, the governments tend to take centralized control over food production and basically appropriate farmers' crops, and then the farmers quit growing crops, which is exactly what you’d expect.

So not only do you have one billion, you have the stage set for an expansion of famine, and then I thought, well—and Yawn commented on this as well—what happens when 1.2 billion people go hungry? And that's going to be, well, in the poorest countries throughout the countries that are most likely as well to push desperate immigrants towards Europe’s borders and the same on the American front.

And so not in the fall, you know, you tell me again if I'm wrong, if you are right and Yawn is right, not only are we going to see a seventh of the world go hungry in a serious way—like it’s already happening in Sri Lanka—but we’re going to see immigration pressure, human movement pressure on the flanks of Europe and the United States on a scale that maybe we’ve never seen. Is—and how sure are you that that’s what we’re looking at in the fall and winter?

So I think there are a couple of things. First of all, we’re starting out in a world where there are already some seven or eight hundred million people that are starving, and this has fairly little to do with the current energy crisis or fertilizer crisis, but it’s just the fact of people being poor. So again, that goes to your general point of saying, look, maybe we should get people out of poverty first. But the second part of this is, it actually turns out that when people are really, really poor and really damaged in many ways—for instance, through starvation—they will not flee because they can’t.

So I’m not sure that we’re going to see huge immigration streams; we might, and I think it’s useful to start thinking about, but I don’t have the data on whether. So there’s an actual— it’s actually you see more refugee streams when people get richer because then they can start to afford to get, you know, on trucks or buses or even flights and go to Europe in the U.S.

But if you’re really poor, you’re just, you know, stuck. This is more of a moral problem than I think it’s going to be a political problem. But I think fundamentally this is about our priorities, and it’s about saying what kind of moral person do you want? Do you want to be the moral person that said, I want to save the world from climate change, so I’m going to make sure we don’t use gas to make fertilizer that could save millions of people?

Or are you actually going to be a person who says no, I actually think saving people’s lives is a little more important?

But isn’t it even almost worse, right? Because I think in many instances, particularly in Africa, right, it was European politics in particular who hampered and in some cases really sabotaged their ability to feed themselves, right? By not allowing them access to energy. I mean, if you look at, for example, global maps about electricity supplies, there’s a huge gap in most of Africa, which also has the highest number of birth rates.

So the population that’s growing fastest is the one with the most limited access to energy, and as you know, right, whether it’s high temperatures or low temperatures or whether food production, energy is key. And I think, in many ways, it was kind of deliberate policies—go, kind of the idea that you can all of a sudden run, I don’t know, the Democratic Republic of Congo or these areas that you can run them on wind and solar.

So it seems that it’s not just, yeah, that we don’t help them to get rich. If somebody would be a cynic, but I think it’s true in some cases, we kept them poor particularly when it came to energy and food production.

I know, I think you’re absolutely right. First of all, remember this is a European crisis; that’s why we’re talking about it. If it was a crisis in Africa, almost nobody would care, right? The second part of this is that the reason why Africa and many other places are poor is not just because of this crisis that we’re seeing right now; it’s much, much broader.

I made the comparison last year that all of the energy in Uganda, which is a bigger nation than California’s, they’re like 43 million versus 39 million—all of the electricity in Uganda is less than the electricity Californians used to heat their pools.

I also read, Bjorn, that Uganda is fertile enough so that if it was properly harnessed, it could feed all of Africa, and that they have a water supply that’s very close to the surface in most of the country, and that it would be a relatively simple matter to sink pumps all over the country to get enough water to produce the place fertile enough to feed the entire continent. That’s just Uganda.

Yeah, and again, remember, it’s not just about getting food; it’s about becoming rich. Why is it we got rich? We got rich because 100 years ago, so the average of industrial work in the U.S. in the last part of the 1800s used most of industrial production—was just his workforce. It was typically a he. Today, you know, 6% or 7% of the energy that goes in is actually muscle power; the rest of it we get from fossil fuels, mostly from fossil fuels.

That’s what’s made us rich because we can suddenly do, you know, ten times as much. If you translate the energy that every person has into what would that be in equivalent human terms, each one of us in the rich world has the equivalent of slaves—about 100 slaves that, you know, help us hand and foot 24/7. These are the guys who drive us around, the roads that deliver us food that gets us heat and cool in our houses and all the other things that we love. And somehow we’re telling the rest of the world, you guys can’t have that.

Well, okay, so that’s part of this argument between economists and biologists, Malthusian biologists and maybe Malthusian Marxist biologists as well that has been raging for, well, since Malthus. And that idea is that the only way forward to planetary salvation is to accept excessive restrictions on flourishing and growth. Is that there’s no way the planet can support us if we’re all rich, especially if we have first-world living standards.

And so the only thing we can do is cut back dramatically, well, in the first world, but the problem with that means that if you cut back the economy so that rich people get poorer, you doom poor people to starvation; that’s absolutely clear. And the economists say instead, well, no, look, we can get more bang for the buck continually. We can drive towards an efficiency that overcomes the Malthusian problem, and that would be the problem of overpopulation, let’s say.

And we can have more of what we need for less cost with less mess. And furthermore, that the best way out of environmental catastrophe and wood-burning and indoor pollution and all of that early life cessation and high levels of child mortality, all that catastrophe, is to make people rich, not poor.

And that’s such a positive idea. It’s like, well, why wouldn’t you aim at that? Man, we could make—especially think about, man, you’re on the left—don’t you care about poor people? Well, we care about them as long as they’re suffering in a way that boosts our moral sense of ourselves, but once they start to get rich and have opinions, they're nothing but annoying.

I think it’s right on multiple levels. First of all, remember, you know, there are people—there’s a substantial sort of academic minority still arguing that we should have deep growth because of global warming—yeah, so they’re basically telling us we should become less rich, especially in the rich world. First of all, I think, yes, it’s a bad idea and we’ll get back to that in a second, but also it’s just never going to happen. How would you ever get people to vote for this? It’s just impossible to imagine.

The second part of it, of course, is to say, do we really think it’s great to let most poor people stay about the same level as where they are? They talk about maybe they should be a slight bit better off. I think most of them, as you point out, want much better than this. The third point, of course, is, as you point out, most economists will tell you we know that when people get richer, most environmental indicators get much better.

People stop cutting down their forests when they become web designers instead. You know, they actually care about the environment, and they pay some of their newfound richness to make sure that we pollute less, and we have less air pollution. And as you pointed out, indoor air pollution—we stop burning coal or wood or dung inside our homes.

Remember, this is not a trivial issue: about three billion people cook and keep warm with really dirty fuels, which means that these three billion die a year because of that. Yes, and it’s equivalent, according to the World Health Organization, to each one of these people smoking two packs of cigarettes every day. We have no sense of this. You know, it’s clean inside our homes, but it’s not clean inside a very large minority of the world’s population because they’re poor and cook and keep warm with indoor air pollution.

So we will fix many of these problems, but it is important to say we are not likely to just fix climate change because we get richer. So far we’ve seen, as you get richer, you emit more CO2, not less CO2. So we also need to fix this, but again I think you’ve got to be honest and say you’re never going to fix climate change by just saying, let’s all be poor—that’s just never going to work.

And also, it’s destructive in all kinds of other ways.

Well, yeah, I mean, well, it’s going to make it worse because if you exaggerate poverty at the low end of the distribution and tip people into desperation, they’re going to decimate their environment. I mean, as soon as people are starving in any given country, the first thing they do is cut down all the trees and eat all the animals.

Well, of course, that’s what they’re going to do, and so that’s a complete cataclysmic catastrophe. And so even if getting wealthier does produce an increment in CO2 production—and we can talk about the consequences of that—making people poorer is going to produce a way bigger increment in CO2 production and produce all sorts of other cataclysmic consequences.

So it’s not like there’s an easy one; it’s not as if that if we made people poorer that would, in fact, address the CO2 problem, because it clearly wouldn’t. In fact, it’s more likely to make it worse.

I think we need to keep those separate; it would make all other environmental indicators worse. Who would decimate the Amazon forest? It would decimate a lot of animal species, and a lot of—and would dramatically drive up air pollution, but it might actually reduce CO2 emissions.

So much of the CO2 that we’re worried about is the CO2 that will come from a rich India and a rich Africa because they would be emitting, you know, sort of ten times as much as what they’re doing today. So there is some sense to this, but I think it’s important to say it’s incredibly morally irresponsible. It is impossible to imagine that people are going to say, yeah, you know what, you’ve just convinced me, I want to stay poor. That’s just not going to happen, and it’s a bad way to fix the world, you know, just sort of morally the right way to do this, of course.

And that was what Ralph also pointed out—investment, for instance, in researching nuclear or fusion. And that we actually get these technologies that will save us. Now, it could also be, you know, wind or solar with lots and lots of batteries. That’s not competitive right now; most of these things are not competitive right now.

But we should invest in research and development to make sure at least one of these technologies become rich and cheap enough; and remember, that’s how we’ve saved all the other issues in the world. If we think back in the 1970s or 60s when we worried about the world running out of food, we didn’t save the world by telling everyone, “I’m sorry, could you eat a little less and then we’ll send it down to Africa and Southeast Asia.”

We did it through the green revolution, through science and technology that basically made every seed produce twice or three times as much food per hectare. That’s how you save the world—through technology and innovation.

Can I throw in something real quick, though? Because I think you said so many important things, and particularly what you mentioned also before. I mean, one of the numbers I always find particularly fascinating is in the 1960s, up to the 1960s, Great Britain had as many inhabitants as Nigeria. Now Nigeria has three times as many as Great Britain, so these people need to be fed. And what they need mostly for it—and you mention it, right? It’s going to be innovation; it’s going to be access to higher crop yields.

And how do you get this? Well, this brings us a little bit back to the question of the Netherlands, right? In many ways, the Netherlands are the Silicon Valley of agriculture. But if you kind of undermine their agricultural sector, knowledge is going to be lost.

Let me give you two very quick examples. One from my home country of Austria: they are now trying to kind of reopen coal power plants. They need to get people out of retirement because there’s nobody around anymore who knows how to run them, right? Germany has similar problems in the nuclear sector. It is absolutely astounding, right? We had the first nuclear fission happen in 1938 and the first nuclear bomb in 1945. That was seven years. Nowadays, it takes more than ten years to build a nuclear power plant because, in many ways, that knowledge has been neglected, right?

People, companies don't invest in it; students don’t study it because there was no interest in it. And I think this is what we completely underestimate as a side effect of many of these environmental issues. If you tell people in the Netherlands, we’re going to crack down on agriculture, their agriculture and universities will have less students, will have less innovation, and then we have less ideas, right? Than to give to these countries, whether it’s Nigeria or others, in order for them to feed their populations.

So this is not just kind of, this is also a war against the future. If you undermine the conditions for future innovation, you’re going to end up, maybe in this Malthusian trap of your own making because you hampered the one thing that would have allowed you to get out of it, and that would be innovation and growth.

Yeah, well, on that, on the Dutch farmer front, let’s say, it seems to me that the people in the world that you should be most ashamed of persecuting might in fact be the Dutch farmers because that little country, which is just a postage stamp, which has been scraped out of the ocean by unbelievable diligent conscientious effort, is the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products.

And so, to Ralph’s point, these farmers are stunningly efficient, and of course they do pollute because we don’t do anything perfectly. And if you demolish them, which seems to be the current Dutch government’s plan, pressured in large part by judicial decision rather than legislative decision, which is also worth thinking about, then not only do you demoralize the very people that you should be celebrating, but you risk demolishing, well, the food supply and the knowledge necessary to farm at that kind of level of efficiency.

And so it’s at points where people like the Dutch farmers are being persecuted that makes me think that this is not just ignorance—that there’s real malevolence here too because at some point you’re so damn blind with regards to your moral pretensions and your insistence that you’re the one that’s saving the world with your foolishness that you’ve crossed the line from someone who just doesn’t know what they’re talking about to someone who’s actively inflicting carnage and catastrophe on the world.

And I would think that some of that is motivated by a kind of deep nihilism about human existence in general—the idea that we’re a cancer on the planet—that the idea that there are, in fact, too many of us, and as the president of Greenpeace said in relation to the Dutch farmers, he said something like, well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, which is really bloody convenient if you don’t happen to be one of the eggs that’s being broken.

So you’ve had a lot of resistance to your work, Bjorn, and I know a lot of that’s rooted in people’s ignorance, but what other motivations do you think there might be for rejecting out of hand the kind of, well, you say it’s not rocket science; it’s not that hard to read your book which is "How to Spend 75 Billion Dollars to Make the World a Better Place." It’s actually a pretty straightforward read, and hey, it's published and you can buy it, so it's also not that difficult.

I mean, and you’ve faced all this vitriol, which is—and that’s as someone who’s actually environmentally oriented, right? Because you basically accept the IPCC’s prognostications with regards to climate change and so what—let’s focus on this—you talk about the fact that we’ll be less rich in 100 years, assuming our current rate of economic growth than we would be if we weren’t dumping carbon into the atmosphere.

And so you are in favor of certain approaches that might be appropriate to amelioration. How big a problem do you think carbon dioxide accumulation is, and what should—and what are we actually doing about it that works?

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So let me just back up, and then I'll answer your question. I tend to believe that most people are actually well-intended, and so I tend to think that when people are free—as you pointed out in the Dutch case—when they’re pursuing a court case to force the Dutch government, they care about this one thing that’s what I want you to do, and I don’t think there’s something wrong about a world where you have different NGOs and different ground NGOs and green organizations working for different things, but we need to recognize that you have to prioritize all of these things.

And politicians are not normally stupid enough to say I promise to give jobs to everyone, or I promise nobody will die on the road, or I promise that all kids are gonna get to university or something like that because we recognize that would actually have a huge cost impact if I was forced by a court to do so. But we’ve somehow allowed ourselves to make stupid proclamations in the environmental space.

I promise to you, you know, basically get Europe back to pre-human nature status. That's just impossible to have. I promise to get us to net zero by 2050. That’s going to be happening, basically.

So, and then I’ll answer your question. There’s been a lot of economists looking at what will be the cost, and as Ralph mentioned, perhaps the most prominent person was Richard—no, Dick Nordhaus. Yes, sorry—who got the Nobel Prize in 2018, the only climate economist to get the Nobel Prize exactly for his climate economics. He estimates, and this is broadly validated by many, but there are outlier studies, that the cost of if we do nothing about climate will mean that by the end of the century, we’ll be about 4% less rich than we otherwise would be.

As you point out, we’re likely to be much, much richer for a variety of reasons and hopefully because we’re also smart and don’t actually stop our innovation—all that stuff. The UN estimates that on the sort of middle-of-the-road path—which is sort of a bumbling through as we normally do in the world—each person on the planet will be 450 times as rich as he or she is today. That’s an astounding opportunity that of course will have lifted out most people out of poverty.

It will be a wonderful planet in so many ways. Remember, most people actually don’t believe this, but this is likely where we're headed with global warming. And if we do nothing about it, I’m not suggesting we should, it will instead of being this 450%, it will only be 434.

I’m sorry I can’t show the difference; it’s very, very tiny, right? Yeah, it’s important to get a sense of proportion. Yes, climate change is a problem; yes, it would be better if we were at 450 rather than 434 percent, but this is not the end of the world.

It’s important 434—434 better—that's quite a bit better, we can—it’s important to say, it’s percent of what we are today, so it’s 334 better.

Yes, right, right, fair enough. Well, I am willing to settle for that.

And so, you know, you said that you think that people are mostly motivated by positive inclinations, and I’m inclined to agree with that, but I do think, and I think we really have to come to terms with this, is that we are being enticed into taking the easy moral route forward. So there isn’t anything more important to someone economically, practically, socially, biologically than their reputation because their reputation is a marker of their deserved standing in the social community and their viability as a trading and playing partner.

And the pro—and the way that you accrue reputation points is through diligent effort and generosity, fundamentally, but you can game that, and you game that by taking shortcuts to ethical prowess when you’re offered them in a tempting manner. It’s like, well, instead of getting up at eight o’clock in the morning, I'll give you an example, Bjorn. This is a good example.

You know how I stopped being faced by protests at universities when I went to talk there? I have my talks at eight o’clock in the morning. Yeah? And you know why? That’s funny because none of the bloody protesters will haul themselves out of bed to come and, you know, agitate about the magical super-nazi because it’s eight in the morning.

Yeah, it is funny, but it’s also exactly right. It’s like, well, yeah, you’re once you shake off your hangover days, you can haul yourself out of bed by six in the afternoon to go and protest and wave a sign about all the evil people who are destroying the world, but if your commitment requires getting up in the morning once, well that’s a bit too much for you.

And so this enticement of laziness, and it’s this weird nexus between narcissism and willful blindness and ignorance because they foment and reinforce each other. And as I said, it’s just not that hard to read your book, especially if you’ve devoted your life to saving the environment, and I’ve done what I could to bring hammer and tongs to your theories because your books are pretty damn optimistic.

And I think, well, could that possibly be real? And I haven’t been able to break—well, what I haven’t been able to do about your approach is to think of a better one.

Thank you! As error-prone as it might be because who can do cost-benefit analysis? Of course it’s like, okay, but right, right. And again, the amazing things— you know, the best things we can do in the world are not just, you know, twice as good, they’re more like a hundred times or a thousand times better than the really dumb things that we very often do.

And that’s of course why we feel much more comfortable about it, but if it was just a fact of two, sure, you know, that could be all kinds of calculations and stuff, but when you’re a thousand times off, maybe we should start paying attention on where we could do good.

And it gets back to your point of what happened, for instance, in Holland, which was driven by a court case. So if you take politicians on their words and they’ll make a lot of different promises, imagine if people took them to court for all of those promises. Imagine what would happen when courts say, well, you’ve said this, so we—you have to spend that much money if you actually did that for all the different things politicians have said.

I think it’s plausible that you would actually have a total account that would be higher than the entire national budget, quite possibly by a large amount. Imagine if we allow the courts to say, oh, in this case you promised this, so you got to do that. Oh, in this case you promised this, so you got to do that.

Imagine if the courts did all of that and then basically said I’m sorry you’ve got to spend all of your GDP so everybody has to pay, you know, close to 100% in taxes and we’re going to pay all of these things that politicians have promised. That’s ridiculous.

And it’s of course terrible. This is exactly why we have politics because politics is that very hard decision between a lot of different nice competing things that we would like. We both like to have less nitrogen deposits, we’d like to have better agriculture, we’d also like to have safer roads, and we’d like to have better schools and all these other things.

We can’t spend all of the money, you know, 10 times over, so that’s why we have politicians making these hard and complicated and not satisfying decisions. But we shouldn't allow ourselves to be run, you know into courts deciding, no, you have to do this because you promised it because if they did it across the whole area, we would probably be, you know, both bankrupt, but also we would not have that crucial conversation about where do you want to spend the next dollar.

Well, we would also seed all the legislative power that should be instantiated in the sovereign voice of the people to judicial overlords, which we seem to be doing at a very rapid rate.

That's happening in Canada partly because the legislatures are cowardly and they devolve decisions to the judiciary when they shouldn’t, but also because the judiciary has become increasingly activist and is perfectly willing to put their apocalyptic nightmare, what vision, at the pinnacle of the judicial process hierarchy and to start ruling in accordance with that instead of relying on precedent, rule of law.

I mean in Canada now, you know, you cannot be appointed a judge unless you swear fealty essentially to the die mantra. They’ve put—they’ve laid out what the personal requirements are that are necessary to be a judge, and one of them is sensitivity to all the racial, etc. issues that the DEI activists hypothetically believe are a necessary priority, and the second one is what would it say—it would say openness to the importance of social justice issues.

That they’ve actually documented this now in the steps necessary to become a judge in Canada.

Yeah, it’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable, and these activist judges do believe that, well, they’re way more efficient than that noisy parliamentary process, and that should scare us.

That is, you know, part of the reason why a lot of people are protesting simply because you can’t have a judiciary or anything that ends up making promises that will cost you at least a large part of your fortune just, perhaps, before I get going.

If you look at net-zero because I think, in some way, the Dutch thing that we’ve seen and even the European conversation—remember, I believe it was Citigroup that estimated that the total cost for Europe because of the increasing energy prices is going to be about half a trillion dollars higher than it normally is over the last ten years, which is a huge cost.

But let’s just remember, if Europe was actually serious about their net-zero goals, which of course is going to be incredibly hard—which basically means we’ll have to give up most of what’s so idiotic and wonderful in the world—according to a McKinsey study, that would cost more than a trillion dollars, so twice as much, but every year for the next 30 years.

So if we had courts going in and saying, no, you gotta, you know, cut down your nitrogen deposit costs, that will be terribly disruptive, but it’s much, much less than what you could actually imagine is gonna happen if people actually take our net-zero promises seriously.

And this is not just for the US; you know, in the US it’s likely that the cost of net-zero by mid-century would be in the order of $12,000 per person per year. And people are just not going to accept that, remember if you ask people, most people willing to spend, you know something on climate change, typically so somewhere between $25 and $200. But if you ask them, so would you be okay with spending $10,000? No, that’s not going to happen and you’re gonna have an uprising.

That’s I think why we need to say, well, we should be smart about this, but we shouldn’t be spending all of our money on one thing that’s both dumb, it’s also economically inefficient, but it also leaves all the other challenges unfixed.

Well, this is a good time, I think maybe to let you go. It’s always a pleasure talking to you, Bjorn, and a privilege to be able to bring your thoughts to as wide an audience as possible because, well, we would do a lot better off by following the guidelines that you and your teams have produced than by flailing about in this apocalyptic idiocy and trying to elevate our moral status with half measures and dimwittedness.

And all those trillions of dollars that you're talking about, we gotta understand people that when you pull a half a trillion dollars out of an economy, it’s the poor that you doom doing that because every economic cost is borne most heavily by the poorest people, always. That’s like a rule of iron, a rule of nature and civilization is that everything that’s expensive hurts the poor most.

And so I’m pretty tired of hearing the environmental activists sacrifice today’s real poor to the hypothetically thriving poor of their utopian future. It’s appalling morally, and I don’t—it’s not just ignorant, it’s darker than that, it’s darker than that as far as I’m concerned. You know, we have no right whatsoever to be telling Africans and Indians and Chinese for that matter that, well, you know, we’re rich and I don’t think we’ll give it up, rub, rub. But you guys, you know, you should be looking forward to a lot less prosperous future than you might otherwise be.

And there’s just absolutely no excuse for that whatsoever, especially when we know—we know—we know that if we help the world's poor or at least got out of their way while they’re trying to be rich, that the planet would actually be in much better shape. We could have our cake and eat it too. And your work is so signally important in that regard, you know, and hopefully people will wake up and pay more attention to the economists and less attention to the bloody Malthusian biologists.

So really good talking to you again, Bjorn, thanks a lot.

Wonderful to talk to both of you. Take care, Ralph. Take care, Jordan.

Alright, Ralph, on to the European protest front. So do you want to tell people what you've been up to, and why, and what you've seen?

Well, over the last couple of years, a couple of—actually it started a little bit earlier. But I was a little bit in touch with some of the farmers in the Netherlands and some of the people also involved in the protests over the last couple of weeks, and I think there's a few points that are very important to make and that tend to get lost in the entire debate. I mean, these protests go back to 2019, so this is kind of—they were a little bit glossed over due to COVID, right? There were stronger restrictions on the rights to demonstrate, so kind of the farmers didn’t really have the opportunity to voice themselves.

But there is one thing that is really important for me to make absolutely clear when what I use—when I describe them, I kind of very often use also the term "working class", but I think I really want also to put it into people's heads: working class is not the same as poor, right?

Many of those farmers in the Netherlands are economically very well off, but what I mean by working class is literally the people who make something work. So those are, right, can I? They are the backbone in many ways of the Dutch economy. So, you know, they are people that need affordable energy that produce, then, food that is affordable, right? So this is kind of what I mean by the working class, and this is also why there is a lot of sympathy towards them in the public.

I mean there was one poll taken, I think it was not 10 days ago, so I don’t know the exact numbers there, hasn’t been a poll since, but currently the so-called farmer citizens party, which is kind of the political representative of the farmers, has one seat in the Dutch parliament. If elections would have taken place, I think it was July 11th, they would have risen up to 20 seats. And, you know, Mark Rutte's party would have lost 14 out of 34 seats.

So there is sympathy from the Dutch for the farmers, and it’s not just about the farming; it’s more a general sense that this is an attack on kind of what makes us wealthy as a country, right? This is kind of—we are—and there’s a lot of pride for the Dutch that they feel in their agricultural sector, and they should be, right? You said it before, it’s a country the size of a post stamp, and they are an agricultural, animal livestock farming superpower. It’s outstanding if you look at the research they do.

It’s kind of what they export in know-how to Kenya to Indonesia, kind of what they do positive there, but this is all created domestically in this very strong agricultural sector. So just as a concluding point, to give you a good comparison, forcing 30% of Dutch livestock to be abandoned or to basically disappear is kind of similar to going to Silicon Valley and saying, so tomorrow you have to close down 30% of all startups.

Well, Silicon Valley would still be there, but it probably would be significantly less innovative. And I said this before; this really is my big point: if you start to hand-bind to sabotage an industry that is extremely innovative, at some point they’re going to stop innovating because they’re going to say, first of all, they try to ingratiate themselves with the political class to get exceptions so that they can continue farming and they will tell—this is what some Dutch farmers told me—they tell their children not to take over farms.

Well, this is the thing that we really should be aware of here. In large part, is that I've watched major companies, corporations, and other enterprises collapse and they can collapse precipitously. Because what happens is that when you pressure an industry, all the people that have options leave, and the people who have options are the most competent people. And so if you tell extremely competent and intelligent and sophisticated farmers—because high-producing farmers are all of those things—practical people with a wide range of knowledge and technical ability and mechanical ability and street smarts—all of that, if you say, oh, we’re going to make your lifestyle both uncomfortable and then fundamentally unviable, they’re going to think, oh, well guess what? I have better things to do with my time—see you later.

And then you lose the best people right away, and as soon as you do that, because a small proportion of people are responsible for almost all the productive effort, as soon as you lose that uppermost echelon, you lose the whole thing. So, if we force 30% of Silicon Valley startups to close or even 10, all that would happen is all the entrepreneurs would leave Silicon Valley like they’re leaving California now, for example. They’re moving out of California now to places like Tennessee and Texas and Florida. That happens extremely quickly; you cannot pressure competent people because they just tell you to screw off and go do something else, and it’s a catastrophe.

Okay, so tell me, to what’s happening on the ground? Like how many—do you have any idea what the true numbers of people are who are involved in these protests, and are they mounting, are they staying the same, are they shrinking?

It's still going on. I mean, I looked at kind of the most, let’s say, pessimistic or let’s say anti-farmer news outlets, and even they admit that it has been 25 to 30,000 people, right? That the protesters themselves say it's over 40,000, so I think the real number is going to be in between. But there is, again, something I think that’s very important for the listeners and the viewers. We’re talking about the Netherlands; the Netherlands are usually not a country with mass protests, right?

They’re very consensus-oriented, a political nation. This is why also they have many parties in parliament. There is always a need for consensus. So for them to go onto the streets and, you know, block streets or the fishermen have blocked harbors, that’s a huge thing!

For the Dutch to be driven to the point of protest, and then for Dutch farmers specifically to be protesting, if you don’t see this as a canary in a coal mine, then you’re an idiot. You’re willfully blind, fundamentally.

Yeah, there’s—and there’s more to it! I think this is so—the general conversation reporting talks a lot about the nitrogen issue, right? Kind of the environmental part of it. But I think this is something—and this is why you see more and more this all over Europe: it’s a little bit of a conflagration that over, at least, the ‘90s and early 2000s there was a growing discontent in the Dutch population, not just about environmental issues and environmental policies, but also about migration—all these issues.

And this comes now together because there’s—I’m not to be very clear—I’m not sure if that is true; I mean definitely some of the farmers also believe it, so I cannot speak to the validity of it. But it’s something that also raises them emotionally, which is this idea, right? That a lot of the land is good, that the government kind of wants to force them off the land, take the land, and then use the land to house a migrant.

So to what extent that is really true? The evidence is mixed, so there have been one or two cases where these plans are really—what these plans exist. But if it’s really the main motivation, I have my doubts about this. But the point is—and this goes back to what I said initially—there is a sense in the population that that more and more the group of people that is the most important to keep the economy going, to keep the country going, that also preserves the culture and these kind of things—that they’re constantly under attack and undermined by the political and particularly also by the cultural elite.

And I think this is part of the story of that anger that should not be underestimated. So this is not purely because many of my critics said, oh, Ralph, you know, this is just about nitrogen, and that comes from the EU. Yes, that was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back, but there is more going on underneath.

Well, well, we could say in regard to that, I would say, is that when you start to use compulsion on people—so compulsion is the sign of bad policy. And so when you start to use compulsion, the judiciary compels the legislative branch, and then the legislative branch compels the farmers, forces them—well, as soon as you use force on people, you undermine trust by definition, right? Because you don’t need to use force on people where there’s mutual consensus and trust.

So use force, and then you elicit paranoid reactions. It’s like if you’re going to operate in relationship to me as a tyrant, then just what sort of tyrant are you? And just exactly what you’re up to? What are you up to? And so that promotes the spread of these more conspiratorial ideas that might have a toehold in the truth on some fronts, but it’s part of a sign of a broader breakdown of communication and trust in society, and that’s an absolute catastrophe because you’ve got to understand this: people have to understand this—A guy named Landis wrote a great book called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations about this very factor.

He basically claimed, and I think with plenty justification, that the only real natural resource is trust, and that it’s—it almost requires a metaphysical miracle to set up a country where the default response from one stranger to another is, "Well, of course I can shop in your store, and you’re not going to rip me off. Of course, I can buy something online, and I’m going to get the product. Of course, I can send my kids to schools that the government runs, and that’ll be fine