Apocalypse Never? | Michael Shellenberger | EP 197
And blaming the victim, you know, you go right to that. You go, this is the most sinister introduction, you know, ideological introduction of this idea that some people are victims and essentially victims and only things should be given to them. Well, one of the real problems with that is, so imagine that you have a conception of pure victimization. Well, then you instantly have to posit a class of pure malevolent oppressors, because like where else who else could be possibly victimizing the pure victims? It has to be complete perpetrators. Well, that's unbalanced thinking, right? Because we're all victims in some sense, as you already know, of history, of death, of illness. And we're all perpetrators too. And you have to contend with that seriously, and that mucks up the clean categories, especially if you want to be pure, let's say easily. That's not an easy thing to manage. And you never will quite manage it.
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Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have talking with me Mr. Michael Schellenberger. He is the best-selling author of "Apocalypse Never." I read this book this morning; it's great. It was full of stories, so it was fun to read. Each chapter is extremely densely packed with information but embedded in a really compelling micro-narratives that make up a really nice narrative across the whole book. It's counterintuitive, it's full of information, and well, that is what counterintuitive means—full of information you wouldn't expect. It's very optimistic in its tone despite being realistic. It's practical, sensible; it's a hell of a thing to accomplish. He's also the author of the forthcoming book "San Francisco." He's a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and Green Book Award winner. He's also the founder and president of Environmental Progress, based in Berkeley, California. I thought today we'd probably center our discussion around this book, "Apocalypse Never," although I'd also like to talk a bit about "San Francisco."
So, what does it mean that you're a Time Magazine hero of the environment, and what's a Green Book Award winner?
Well, thanks for having me on, Jordan. Yeah, those awards were given in 2008 for the first book I did, which was co-authored, and it was a book called "Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility." There are parts of that book I still really agree with. One of the themes of my work is that environmentalism is depressing. It's actually bad for mental health. I think that's now being proven quite dramatically with rising levels of anxiety and depression and reports by school children around the world that they're having nightmares about climate change. You may know that half of all people surveyed say that they think climate change could result in the extinction of humankind. My views have evolved over the years, but I've always viewed apocalyptic environmentalism as a problem for people that care about saving nature and for everybody. Those awards came from that prior book.
Yeah, well, the environmental activism issue is interesting, at least in part because it also interferes with sensible policymaking, so it's actually self-defeating in a profound sense. I mean, first of all, it gets people hyper worried about extremely regulated, vaguely formulated problems, distracts them from what the prior prioritized issues might be. It's hard to think clearly about what steps to take to move forward when you're panicking in a vague and unpleasant manner. You do not do that in "Apocalypse Never." That's one of the things I really liked about it was that in each sub-chapter you drill down at least to some degree to the level of actually implementable policy. So you start with a story about this group, and now I should ask you first, who are you exactly to write such a book? Like, why do you know this? Why should people listen to you?
Sure, so I've been an environmental activist for 25 years. I've also been an environmental journalist. I write a column for Forbes. This is, that's my "Apocalypse Never" is my second book. You know, I don't have any formal qualifications; I was a cultural anthropologist. I quit my PhD program in the 1990s because the program had become too postmodern and abstruse. The first big essay I wrote was called "The Death of Environmentalism," and then I mentioned the book "Breakthrough." I mean, you may find it interesting that, you know, my father is a very humanistic psychologist in the same tradition of work that you are in, or I see us in. And I knew that environmentalism was making me depressed; like climate change was depressing me. And that, and so one of the famous lines from "The Death of Environmentalism," which was an essay in 2004, was, Martin Luther King didn't give the “I have a nightmare” speech; he gave the “I have a dream” speech. And we wrote that because I was reading… I would read books about the Civil Rights Movement and I would feel inspired by these stories of heroic overcoming. And then I would read books by Bill McKibben and other environmentalists and I would feel depressed. And I thought, you know, something that makes you feel depressed is probably not very motivating to make positive social change.
Yeah, you kind of wonder. You kind of wonder too, and this is, since we're talking about psychological issues, is that it's possible too that that kind of apocalyptic thinking is much more difficult for people to escape when they are, in fact, depressed. And so it's very difficult to separate out political beliefs from, let's say, emotional states. And so that's an interesting issue in and of itself.
Yeah, you know people might object, well, you know the crisis is so gloomy if you're a realist that of course you're depressed, and it should be the case because, you know, look how depressing the facts are. But that strikes me as, well, it kind of puts the cart before the horse in some sense. It's like are you sure the crisis is of that proportion? And then are you sure that depressing people is precisely the way to go about it? And then the last thing there may be is, I couldn't shake the suspicion, especially in relationship to environmentalism, that it's contaminated quite badly with like historical shame and guilt and a certain kind of profound anti-humanism. So, and I mean contaminated by that. You know, I've heard environmentalists say something like, well, the planet would be better off as if it was a being in some sense if there were no people on it. It's like, yeah, well, I'm not so sure I trust people who say things like that and then don't notice.
So, yeah, I mean, I was… one of the things I stumbled, I mean, at the end of "Apocalypse Never," in the False Gods for Lost Souls chapter, I talk about how I myself was depressed at a period when I was drawn towards apocalyptic environmentalism. So, I think there's an interesting question of: is apocalyptic environmentalism depressing or are depressed people attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism, or both? Of course. I stumbled across the work of Aaron Beck, who, you know, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, and I was struck that the three structures of depressed people that he identified are: I'm a terrible person, the world is a terrible place, and the future is bleak. That’s the exact same three structures of the environmental narrative. So every environmental narrative is that humans are terrible, a cancer on the planet. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the future is not… you know, the end is nigh. And that's struggling. So that's a very interesting observation, especially in relationship to your comments about school children. And so perhaps driving those three axioms home emphatically and forcefully isn't the wisest thing to be doing to young children.
And the fact of that overlap with depressive thinking—I mean, Beck's no small figure in the history of psychological thinking. He's also extraordinarily practical as his cognitive behavioral therapy and it also as a, what would you say, as a psychological philosophy or as a branch of medicine even. One of the things the cognitive behaviorists are really, really good at—and I did this in my clinical practice—is to take those vague depressive apprehensions and then break them down into micro-problems that can actually be addressed. And that's much less depressing. It's like, well exactly why is the future so depressing as far as you're concerned? Like, in some detail, not vague. Look, if you're going to run away from something because it hurts and it's dangerous, it doesn't really matter if you have a vague conception of it, right? But if you're going to face it and confront it and solve it, let’s say, then you can't be vague about it. And that's also good for your mental health. That approach—orientation is directly linked biochemically and neurophysiologically to positive emotions. So the process of decomposing these terrible abstract problems into solvable micro-problems actually facilitates positive emotion and suppresses anxiety. And so it is very interesting overlap there, and it's worth thinking about. I viewed writing "Apocalypse Never" as cognitive behavioral therapy, both for myself and for other people. And in fact, the highest praise I received from people is people who told me that they were very depressed about the environment, and then they read "Apocalypse Never" and they felt much better.
And so I think you have to do both things; like, as you pointed out, cognitive behavioral therapy requires, you know, Beck's therapy was, you have to be very concrete about why you're a good person, why the world is a good place and why the future is bright. You have to be very specific about it; it has to be very, it has to be evidence-based. It can't be, yeah, fantasy land—it has to be actionable as well.
Yeah, oh, that's so interesting, because I wouldn't have... I certainly didn't get that sense reading the book, you know, that it... that although you could also, although illuminating the fact that the problems that beset us globally and individually are actually actionable and aren't so dismal when you look at them in detail and are also complex in weirdly interesting ways. It's not surprising that it has positive psychological consequences. I mean, I certainly was pleased, for example, by your discussion of plastics. You know, I've been following the work of this Dutch kid—I don't remember his name—but he's built this gadget for gathering plastic, which is quite cool. And I didn't know that the evidence for the decomposition of plastics was as robust as you described in the book. So I thought, hey, isn't that good? That's a positive thing to see, and I saw many examples of that in the book that things aren't as bad as we think.
So, let's go through that. Let’s start—you start talking about this group, I think it's a UK group, Extinction Rebellion, and I kind of see them in some sense as the forerunners of where we might go if we regard the impending climate catastrophe as a doom and gloom-laden existential crisis. It's like, man, half the people on the planet are going to die; no solution is too drastic, okay? So that's Extinction Rebellion in some sense. So maybe you could tell the story about that?
I was going to say they say no, no solution is too drastic unless it's nuclear energy, in which case they're against it or in case it's fracking, in which case they're against that too. And I get it, right away, which is that why are the people who are the most apocalyptic the most dead set against the things that have reduced carbon emissions? Natural gas and nuclear, by far, the two things that have reduced carbon emissions the most. Instead, they're in favor of things that don't work: adding a lot of unreliable renewables onto your grid, making electricity expensive, making societies less resilient to climate change. Those are all high priorities for the apocalyptic environmental movement. So, it's not just that. Why? Why? What's going on?
Well, I mean, it was so interesting. Yeah, well, I mean, you were on my mind a bit when I was working particularly towards the last chapter. I go through three core motivations. One is there's certainly powerful financial interests that work renewable energy companies. I document how fossil energy companies have financed anti-nuclear campaigns for 50 years. I also have a… the third—that's chapter 10, 11, 12, the last three chapters of the book look at the motivations. Chapter 11 is more on kind of will to power, a desire for status, for feeling important, particularly places like Europe, which are becoming irrelevant with the rise of China, wanting to assert their power over the developing world. You know, it's no coincidence, I think, that as Europe's power has faded, they've become more demanding to take control of the international economy in the name of climate change.
And then the third chapter kind of says, you know, those are both important motivations, but there's something else going on, which is that apocalyptic environmentalism is clearly a religious movement. Everything about it—every—the guilt, the original sin, the apocalypse, the obsession with food, you know, various things about it are clearly a religion. And I'm hardly the first to make that observation. I document, in fact, there's actually good empirical work documenting that. And so I see the, you know, rising secularization—what Nietzsche called the death of God—and the nihilistic vacuum that would be created in its wake as really the underlying engine for apocalyptic environmentalism. It's a way to give meaning to the world. So, you know, I'm writing a new book which is going to be called “We Who Wrestle With God,” and it's, it obviously we’re thinking along the same lines and for some of the same reasons.
And there's this adage in the New Testament that warns people that they should deliver unto God that which is God and unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. And of course, that on that statement is built the notion that separation of church and state is actually appropriate. But I also think that's true psychologically, and this is part of the problem I have with the New Atheist movement, or that if you don't have a domain that's sacred and rituals and some understanding that there are deepest values, and that's the domain of the sacred, whether you like it or not, you obliterate that in the name of rationality, and all that happens is that things that are Caesar's now become contaminated with the religious. And that's really not a good thing. It's a seriously not a good thing. So, it's interesting to see you close the book with that kind of thinking that's along the same sort of line.
And so did you see that working in you personally?
That, yes? Okay, how?
Yeah, I mean when I was apocalyptic about climate change, you mean, yes for sure. And I came back to my Christianity in writing "Apocalypse Never." But it was also… I also became convinced that by Jonathan Haidt and others that having faith was rational. So, you know, that it’s actually psychologically healthy to have a faith. And so I had to get over my own demonization of spirituality or demonization of faith, and that unlocked the… I couldn't finish “Apocalypse Never” actually until I had done that.
No, I wouldn't have guessed that again from reading the book because it—that isn’t obvious just as the psychological issue wasn't obvious. And that I think that's a really good thing, by the way; that should all be implicit in the book rather than explicit. It makes for a better, a less cluttered book, let's say.
I wanted—yeah, I mean, some of my best allies, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, are in the New Atheist movement, and I really regard them as friends. I love them. And Steve also blurbed my new book "San Francisco." And so, "San Francisco"—and I'm doing a third book afterwards—and all three books are basically about the threats to civilization from within, and they all conclude. "San Francisco" looks at the religious… this is, you know, religious, the secular religion of compassion and how it's gone completely crazy to basically result in greater victimization in the name of rescuing victims.
And so I'm definitely after—I think we're after the same big prey here, which is, you know, the threats to civilization are coming from the most civilized members of society who are also the most secular members, or they think they're the most secular members of society, and they're projecting their needs for… they're constructing new religions.
Yeah, well, they're also—so, you know, with the death of God—and this is Nietzsche through Jung, I suppose, because Jung was a great student of Nietzsche as much as Freud, for sure, as much as he was a student of Freud's. Jung was really trying to solve the problem that Nietzsche posed, and that was his life's work. And I think in many ways, he actually managed that, pointing out, first of all, that we cannot create our own values. That's actually not possible. We're not wise enough, smart enough. We don't live long enough. We just don't have that much intellectual/spiritual capacity. We have to depend, at least to some degree, on tradition, and that brings up all sorts of problems.
And that guilt you talked about—like that religious guilt. I was watching Guy Ritchie's King Arthur the other day, and when the new—to-be King Arthur puts his hands on the sword, he has this unbearable vision of his uncle killing his father—the evil uncle. And the evil uncle is a very standard archetypal trope; you see it in The Lion King, for example, with Scar. And the evil uncle is often the tyrannical aspect of the patriarchy, let's say. And, you know, we all exist in relationship to that because we all exist in relationship to this patriarchal social structure, history—because we're historical creatures.
And then we all do have this guilt that overwhelms us about the blood and gore and catastrophe that got us to where we are—our unearned privilege, you know, to take a phrase from the radical leftist. It's part of our existential burden, and the existential psychologists, who were followers mostly of—can't remember the philosopher's name momentarily—wrote "Being and Time"—Heidegger. You know, Heidegger talked about being thrown into the world, so you're arbitrarily put somewhere. Your parents are arbitrary. You're subject to society. You have these existential concerns that will never go away, and one of them is the terrible corrupt weight of history, and how are you related to that as an ethical being.
And the radical leftists are definitely wrestling with that, you know, but in their depression, let's say, they can only see the negative aspects of the patriarchal figure and not the positive aspect, and that's a real catastrophe because, well, it makes you ungrateful for one thing, which is not a good idea in a modern state.
So, okay, well let's go back to Extinction Rebellion. And so you talk about this activist group that's highly motivated to point out the crisis and to take whatever steps are necessary, but they won’t do practical things. Nuclear energy, for example—that's a really interesting one. And so why not? Is that part of the contamination of the environmentalist movement with anti-capitalism, per se? Or what's going on there? It's like—
Well, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think you… yes, so, and this is also in my new book, which is why are the main advocates for action on the issue, opposed to the obvious solutions—the solutions that have worked. And so yes, for sure, they're because their motivation is to destroy the whole system. They view the system as the cause of the problem, and they view anything that distracts attention from destroying what they view as an evil system as in some ways participating in the system. So that's definitely right.
Right, yeah. Yeah, I’ve seen that sort of thinking really destroy people too; I’ve seen people literally take their own lives because they thought that way. They felt they were so corrupt that any ambitious achievement whatsoever in the service of this evil structure was ethically forbidden. And so it’s kind of—it’s like the ultimate in pessimistic nihilistic Buddhism, and it’s also another example of that global thinking, vague thinking, that does, in fact, characterize clinical depression.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, one of the things I talked about, how Greta Thunberg, the Swedish youth climate activist, condemned nuclear power as dangerous, unnecessary, and too expensive. Well, since when does she care about too expensive? I mean, her… she's demanding basically that we, you know, grind economic growth to a halt in order to reduce carbon emissions. You know, she condemns basically any modest progress as inadequate, and yet she comes out against the source of power, the zero-carbon source of power that provides 40 percent of the electricity in her own country.
When our allies in Germany have been speaking out to stop Germany from shutting down its last six nuclear reactors, she reached out to her to get her to say something—she wouldn't do it. So, the problem is solving the problem gets in the way of the alarmism. The alarmism isn't just, I think, journalists and others misunderstand the alarmism; they think it's a tactic to achieve some end.
And so one of the things I would get from journalists is they would say, come on, Michael, don't you think that it's important to exaggerate climate change a little bit in order to get action? Well, first of all, there's no evidence that exaggerating the problem gets more action. Yeah, the answer to that is, no, let’s not lie, okay? I don't care what the reason is here—no lying, especially about something important.
I mean, it's notable that it comes from journalists who have become propagandists, effectively. And so the alarmism is the goal. Like, the goal is the alarm.
Yeah, well, it... okay, so let's dig down here a little bit. So part of what Nietzsche predicted was that the death of God—what the death of God meant, what he described and predicted, was that the death of God meant the collapse of the highest unifying value. Okay? So it's become pretty evident to me that we literally perceive the world through a hierarchy of value, and we certainly organize our social communities inside a hierarchy of value, and there has to be something at the top to unite us.
Now, it isn't obvious what should be at the top; in fact, it's so not obvious that we probably can only think about that in images; we're not philosophically astute enough to actually conceptualize it. And a lot of the religious enterprise is the attempt to conceptualize that thing at the top. Now let’s say it dies because it’s God and it got too abstract. Eliade, the historian of religion, said that that happened many times in our history, that the top value got so abstract, it got disembodied, and people didn't know what it was anymore, how they acted out or what it meant, and so it floated away and then collapsed into competing claims about what should be the highest value.
Well, let's say diversity, equity, compassion—well, why shouldn't compassion be the highest value? Well, you know, that's a reasonable thing to argue about. I think there’s some credibility in the claim that love should be the highest value—perhaps truth and beauty, many other issues. Okay, so the highest value collapse; we're not united anymore. Well, then we're motivated to argue about what the highest value should be. And since it's about the highest value, now I have an idea—it's saving the environment—that's the highest value.
Well, when you attack that, then you attack my claim to embody the highest ideal. And so you threaten me psychologically, because that's where I found some refuge and some ethical guidance, and so I'm not going to listen to your practical solutions either. And then I haven't examined what other motivations I might have—like, well, this anti-capitalism issue—it's a terrible contamination for the environmentalist movement because you’re just not going to solve both of those problems at the same time. You want to dispense with capitalism, invent an entire new economic system, and save the planet.
Okay, part of the problem is, they're not actually sincere about it. So they would suggest nature is the highest value, but when you say, okay, well, here's what you could do to save nature: fertilizer, irrigation, and tractors for poor countries, right? Take the pressure off the forest, which is where the gorillas—and nature is using oil rather than whale oil to save the whales—and using nuclear power and natural gas? No, no, they don't want to do any of those things.
So there is a nihilism there in the sense that the goal is power itself. There’s also no such thing as nature. Like you think about that; it's like when you refer to France as an entity, as a person, so you're personifying it or maybe you're deifying it to some degree? Well, that's what happens with nature. It's like, nature? What is that exactly? Well, everyone knows it’s like an old-growth forest or something. There's some vague set of images, but nature conceptualized in that manner is actually a deity of sorts—an unexamined deity. And who God only knows what it means. I mean, you look at what happened in Nazi Germany before the Nazis took power because they were allied pretty tightly with certain kinds of environmentalist thinking—purity, for example—a very big pushback against invasive species, for example.
It's quite interesting. It's like, well, there is this worship of whatever it is that nature signifies and symbolically it signifies something like, well, the maternal as put against the patriarchal. So that’s in there—the warm embrace of mother—that's all in that symbolic realm. There's a great book about that called "The Great Mother" by Eric Neumann—best book ever written on that in the 1950s—an absolute classic, and it outlines the entire domain of symbolism of the positive feminine.
And so you do see this religious struggle between those who are now advocates of the positive feminine and detractors of the negative masculine, but it's very unbalanced, you know, because there's a negative feminine and there's a positive masculine as well. So we're all tangled up in that; we don't understand it.
I mean, one of the interesting shifts that's occurred even in my own career as an environmentalist is that all of the stuff from, like, the ecotopia, the utopianism, the green utopianism, the renewal—I mean, the harmony with nature—that kind of, we're all going to live in these small self-sustaining kind of anarchist communities, the Ewok village sort of picture—that's gone now. I mean, Greta Thunberg actively says that that's not… they literally will say now we’re just trying to prevent it from being as terrible—we’re trying to make it less terrible.
So the utopianism—it's still there; I'm not saying it's totally gone. You certainly see it with renewables; the picture of renewables is somehow harmonizing us with the natural world, but it's nothing like what it was in the ‘70s—nothing like Earth Day was actually mostly positive. I have a lot of criticism of Earth Day, but it was a mostly positive picture.
So what's striking to me is the disappearance of even that positive picture from apocalyptic environmentalism. I wouldn't have predicted that apocalyptic environmentalism could sustain itself with such a singular polarity without this much more positive romantic utopianism, which was really even there— it was there 15 years ago, 20 years ago—but it's somehow gone.
So you don't get that picture from Greta Thunberg.
Well, depression can be all-consuming, you know. And, you know, what another thing Jung pointed out very blatantly—he said, well what's really going to threaten us? He wrote about this in the 1950s—is unexamined psychic epidemics—and he meant psychological epidemics—and their effect on the political structure because he thought, well, we've become the most powerful force on the planet, and now our unrecognized psychological, what would you call them? our illnesses are going to manifest themselves in all sorts of ways that are going to be extraordinarily dangerous given our power.
And so, okay, so you were attracted to just a quick note on that. You're attracted to the plastics chapter? I don't think I—I didn't quite get there; I didn't—my thinking hadn't quite advanced enough. But I kept finding behaviors that seemed very similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder, orienting around plastic waste—cases of people who were like just—they had to go out and clean up the waste; they had to sort the waste; they had to separate the waste out. You know, it's an obsession where it's like the waste has to be in the right containers, and people get very upset when you don't have it in the right containers. And this insistence, of course, also there's something around sustainability as a denial of death, you know. I rely on Ernest Becker's great work in "Denial of Death" here, where it's that we got to have sustainability—sustainability creating an immortality project for people.
And then I show, of course, that the problem is these efforts to recycle plastic waste have completely backfired because we don't—it doesn't make sense economically to recycle plastics. You should recycle aluminum, paper, tin cans, aluminum cans, but plastics should go in the landfill or be incinerated because they're already a byproduct of the petrochemical industry; they're already downcycled. The effort to recycle those plastics meant that because it didn't make sense economically, the recycling companies would ship all of that plastic waste to poor countries where they would end up in the oceans.
I mean, this is one of the most tragic, and almost I wish I could say tragic comic, but it's like we—it's not just like, like, plastic is really interesting in relationship to OCD. You know, I had clients who were particularly obsessive about plastic containers, you know, yogurt containers and that sort of thing. Because when you have OCD—and this also often happens to people as they age as well—they can't make the difficult decisions about when something is no longer useful, you know, so their house gets cluttered up with things that hypothetically you could use. And the one person I’m thinking of, he had great ethical inability. He had an inability on ethical grounds to throw out yogurt containers, for example, because, well, you could use them to store something in your fridge.
And there’s an OCD element to that—that's interesting. It's an orderliness, which is an element of conscientiousness that’s gone astray, and that is associated with disgust sensitivity. So that's interesting because you also talked about disgust sensitivity in relationship to vegetarianism, which is also something that nobody has really examined, interestingly enough.
So one of the fun parts of "Apocalypse Never" is that I had never worked on plastics or meat, and they were totally brand new subjects for me, and they are the chapters that people have responded most strongly towards, and they were the most fun for me to write. You know, and so on the meat chapter I discovered this paper by these Italian psychologists and who I interviewed where they said, look, they said, what's going on with vegetarians? Not all of them, but a lot of them is that they view eating meat as the contamination of their bodily purity with the essence of death. And I was just like, well that just… I mean, there you go. I mean, that has it all right—all the denial of death stuff.
Well, it is death too. Those animals die, you know? I mean, it's more than a mere symbolic association, and it's part—again, part of that existential guilt that we all suffer with from too, because our life is based on death. I heard a comedian the other day—I don't remember who it was, someone harsh like Bill Burr, probably—he said, you know, I realized the other day that every day something has to die just so I can live, you know?
And, yeah, exactly! And that's a non-trivial—and that's part of the horror of nature that Ernest Becker is actually quite good at detailing. And that's a great book, although I think it's profoundly flawed, but it's still a great book.
I'm curious; I'd love to know how you think it's flawed because he thought that every reaction to the reality of death was, in some sense, neurotic. There was no non-neurotic way of responding. And these hero projects were all failures in some sense. And so he’s a real Freudian, interestingly enough. In the introduction to Becker's book, which I read very carefully, he attempted to bring closure to the psychology of religion, so that's what Becker was up to. And he said you might be—the reader might be surprised that I don't discuss any of Jung's work on alchemy in a book that attempts to bring closure to the psychology of religion. But then he says, well, he couldn't understand what Jung was getting at and just didn't go there.
And I thought, well, you made a huge mistake because the solution to the problem that you've so eloquently described is actually in all of that work, and that has something to do with—well, it's too complicated to get into. But Eric Neumann wrote a book called "The Origins and History of Consciousness," which is his other great work, which is a real antidote to Becker, and I say that with all due respect because Becker's book was great. So it's really worth knowing about that other book because it’s a pathway out of the darkness. And Camille Paglia mentioned to me at one point that she thought that if English literature departments would have followed Neumann, who she was very much aware of, instead of Derrida and Foucault, that the whole history of the development of universities in the West would have been altered.
So, yeah, it's very interesting. I was going to say—I mean, I think that the Becker reading of the Italian psychologist, finding that people fear the contamination abides with death is that it's triggering their own fear of death—that you could say it's guilt that, you know, all of this prosperity and our including meat eating is all resting on bloody horror and death and destruction, and that life itself depends on death. But I think Becker would say maybe he's wrong, I don't know, but it's interesting to sort of say, really, it's reminding people that they too will die. It's not just that you feel guilty for having killed something; it's a reminder that you too will die.
And thus it's actually triggering anxiety that you're not living your life in the way up to your body. It's also, you know, it’s also a revivification of the religious instinct in a very primordial manner. So let's say, you know, it became too spiritualized and then subject to intellectual critique, which was really successful in some sense. And so, okay, bang—the highest ideals blow apart, God’s dead. Where does the religious instinct re-emerge? Well, it goes down into the body, and we start to become concerned about such things as what foods are pure and what foods aren't. And that’s a re-—it's the lowest level reemergence of the religious instinct, and so the cycle starts all over again.
So there’s no chasing away that. Yeah, I thought you were going to say something else, which is sort of like, you know, traditionally or, you know, at least at some point in history when you kill an animal, it's a sacrifice that you are doing for the gods. Or a more modern version of that is that you’ve killed this animal and you thank God for the animal—a more pagan version is that you’d thank the animal. But nonetheless, it's like, I mean, grace—which I’ve introduced to some amount of resistance in my own family but has become this incredibly important ritual for me—is to say, is to express some gratitude.
I mean, one interesting question would be, you know, it's like, that’s all gone. But it's like if it—would young people in particular who become vegetarian feel better about it?
Yeah, well, you can atone with grace, right? It’s like, well, you’ve had to kill something here. We killed something, you know, that had a life and it wasn’t without value. And so we can survive. It’s like, well, what justifies that? Well, we should at least recognize it; you atone for it too, which is at one—that means to bring yourself into a form of union. And what you're hoping is that the sacrifice of that creature's life is made justifiable by the power of the ethical actions that you're undertaking. And that's supposed to be something non-trivial. You know, it's like you have to kill things to live. Well, is your life worth that, or should you just put an end to it? You know, so you stop doing terrible things. That’s a real question that really bothers people, like it bothers people to the point of suicidality. These aren’t trivial issues.
And grace is a very interesting ritual; at least it unites you in gratitude.
Yeah, I was going to say. So it's communion—taking the body of Christ, taking the blood of Christ. It's a really important ritual. And so if that's gone and now you just eat what you want, doesn't matter, right? And then kids raised in that with that sensibility, it doesn't matter, and then suddenly it's like, wait a second—this meat was a living creature, a living... they're not able to process it because we've removed the interpretive structure for them to be able to process it in a healthy way.
I mean, at this point, I'm—well, it's also not trivial that you eat the communion wafer, right?
Right, right. So that means to embody it, right? In the deepest possible sense—to bring the spirit into your body. And so, yeah, all that is symbolically tangled together in a very interesting way that needs to be taken apart very carefully.
So, okay, so we haven’t got very far into the book; we're still into the introduction with Extinction... okay, so mass extinction. Half of us are going to die like by 2070. So what have you got to say about that?
Yeah, so the claims that we're in a sixth mass extinction are just false—just full stop. Like sometimes I have a criticism of something where I'll be like, that's misleading or that's an exaggeration. No, the claims that we're in a mass extinction are false. Six percent of species identified by the main scientific body, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, six percent are labeled critically endangered. But even those six percent, by the way, and I care about the six percent, and I take actions to actually try to conserve more of those species, but there's no reason to think that any of those species need to go extinct. We can save those species from extinction.
But a mass extinction is over 75 percent of all species on Earth going extinct. Well, we're not anywhere close to that. And the main factor behind what kills endangered species is either killing them outright, often for food, or second, using their habitat mostly for agriculture, since humans use half of the ice-free surface of the Earth. And of that half, over 95 percent of it is for food production. Half of that half—one quarter of the ice-free surface—is just for meat production.
Well, here you have maybe the biggest piece of good news—that the amount of land that humans use for meat production has declined by an area 80 percent the size of Brazil. Well, that's a huge landmass. Over what period of time? Sorry, since the year 2000.
Since 2000? Yeah. Twenty years?
Yeah, and people say how have we done that? Well, it’s pretty darn easy. You can produce a hundred cows on an acre of land or one cow. So, you just concentrate your animal production. There are some ethical issues that you have to deal with, but mostly in terms of at least cattle production, which is the big use of pasture, it's been—there’s a win-win for cows—the treating cows humanely, as I document, thanks to Temple Grandin.
Yeah, she's really something, that woman.
She’s an incredible person, and shows what neuroatypical people are able to contribute to this world in a really lovely way that they don't need to become the negative side of that often.
Yeah, she said she thinks like an animal—she really believes she thinks like an animal.
Yeah, I heard her speak at a conference on consciousness. It was a great talk—a great talk. And she's so pragmatic, and she's done a tremendous amount for animal welfare. And in this practical sense of actually fixing something, right?
Yeah, absolutely. Good for her!
It turns out that cows—what they want to live a happy life is not the same thing as what we think we want cows to have. We think cows need to have a whole acre of land for him or herself; cows just need to not be terrified before they die and they need to be in clean stalls and stuff like that. So there's a win-win on humane animal treatment, land use—which is essential to protecting species—and human prosperity and development. And this is an incredible story! So the whole sixth extinction narrative is just false, and I debunk it the other way—it’s false, as you alluded to earlier. We have seen biodiversity in many parts of the world increase, but with the rise of invasive species—and you may not want that.
So in Hawaii, you know, if you agree with—look, this is a non-scientific issue: it’s just a question of what species do you want on the islands of Hawaii? Do you want the native species? Meaning, the species that were there? Underneath that is also this issue of purity and disgust and borders. It's like, well, that was nature before the invasive species, and that nature somehow allied in your mind with ethical purity, and these invasive species are somehow aligned in your mind with something disgusting and inappropriate. And there's an ethical element to that, and you haven't sorted any of that out in your thinking because, like, do the islands care? Life moves around, and that’s how it is.
And so there’s a weird unexamined projection of a religious issue onto what's hypothetically a scientific issue, and mucky thinking. What was defined as natural in Hawaii or in the Americas or anywhere is pre-European. So the purity is pre, so Europeans are the contaminators, right? As opposed to the indigenous people who are manipulating ecosystems at continent-wide levels, right through fire mostly, but also through hunting and extinctions, certainly in the Americas but also really around the world, you have this alteration of ecosystems by indigenous pure indigenous people.
So in any event, yeah, if you want to save the species that were in Hawaii before 1500 or 1700, that's fine, but you can make a case for that—not on purity grounds or spiritual grounds, just because you’re worried you like those species.
You know, there’s some cool bird species that could go extinct on the islands of Hawaii if you don't remove some of the invasives—it’s fine! You're just manipulating that environment, you're doing it—not out of sight; there’s no scientific basis for it. You’re doing it because we like those species, and that’s it. That's I—and that’s where I get to at the end of the book, where I kind of go, I can't—if I show you a picture of an endangered mountain gorilla of Rwanda or the Congo and I'm like I want to save that gorilla, and if you're like I don't care about that gorilla, that's a clash of values. There’s no scientific argument I can make to saving those mountain gorillas.
I think they're really beautiful and amazing, and they remind us of our common ancestors or whatever it may be, but there's no—that's not going to be solved by some scientific analysis. No. And we still have to—even if that is true, we still have to have a serious discussion at the policy and ethical level about what steps are being taken by, hypothetically, well-meaning ignorant Westerners who think in a low-resolution manner and whose thoughts are contaminated by unaddressed ethical concerns.
Asking poor people in developing countries to sacrifice their lives often to protect animals, it’s like, well, first of all that isn't going to work in the long run because they're just going to kill the damn animals, and that’s exactly what you would do if you were there as well. And you can't just ignore them, and that kind of gets shunted into the—well, you know, they're human beings contaminating the planet anyways, and so the animals should come first or something like that, and that's not helpful.
And I don't—and as you mentioned—I mean I—the—there's three main female characters in my book. My book, by the way, I was accused of white supremacy, which is now just kind of like whatever. It's just now everybody calls everybody white supremacy. But the three main characters in my book are Bernadette, who live in the Congo and is suffering these trade-offs; Suparti, who left the farm for working in factories in Indonesia; and my wife, Helen. They're all women of color, and they all sort of describe these stages of development and why economic development is good for them as individual human beings and is good in and of itself and, as it turns out, is actually good for the natural environment too.
Yeah, this chapter, "Sweatshops Saved the Planet," that subchapter, actually I figured that would make you a lot of friends. So how does sweatshops save the planet exactly? How do you justify a statement like that?
Well, I wrote this because in the late 1990s, I was working on an activist campaign to criticize Nike for its factory conditions in Indonesia. And I, as I... at 20 years later, I went back to Indonesia to see how things were, just to see what the impacts were, and my views totally changed. Factories—and this has been going on for 200 years, 250 years—women move from the farms where they are basically servants to their parents, you know, the serving class— their parents— they move to the cities, and it’s just liberation. Yes, the life and working in the factory is really hard. I mean, it’s terrible, not compared to subsistence living on a farm.
But not compared to living on the farm, and Suparti, who's the factory worker I profile here, you know, she has her own scooter, she has her own home, she's like in her early 20s. I mean, amazing, right? She's a Muslim, still Muslim, but she's left behind by coming to the city the traditional practice of arranged marriage.
Yeah, well, that’s part of that unconscious worship of those sort of Ewok villages that you described. And the only person who would think that subsistence farming is somehow like a utopian goal is only someone who’s so far removed from a farm that all they have in their head are images from children's books about like fairy tale villages, something like that, because it’s just so good! It’s like Elizabeth and I always joke that it’s always—the utopias are always like Elizabethan England. You know, there’s always like a renaissance fair going on at the same time and everyone's, you know, and now: you know, there's a kernel of truth in it in that when you go to Africa, when you go to really poor parts of Sub-Saharan Africa as I did, the day before I saw incredible endangered monkeys, you know, you're walking through villages that don't have any electricity, and there was a church service going on and they started singing. And it was—it was just like, oh, it is as romantic and beautiful.
And, you know, when there’s not electronic radios blaring and whatever. Now, in that same village, infant mortality is really high—in that same village the opportunities for women are very low—not to mention if you're gay. I mean, you can't—you can't be gay in those villages; you know, you could be killed. So, you know, there is something that does get lost with modernity, but absolutely the stuff that you gain has been completely forgotten and nobody remembers it!
I wouldn't have known it had I not been a radical socialist in my teenage years and went to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas. I worked in Brazil to help the anarchist landless workers’ movement, and you know, you would meet young people and you’d start talking to them and they’d be like, hey, how do I get to the city? Yeah, and it would be like, you’d be like, we’re trying to create a workers cooperative here, and they’d be like, yeah man, I just want to get to the university in the city. Can you figure out how I can do that? And that changed me!
And working alongside folks as they're clearing rainforest—oh, yeah, that's fun! I picked rocks when I was a kid. I've tried to take stumps out of the ground; you do that for a week or two and just see how far you get picking rocks out of the field. That's quite the entertaining work!
So, yeah, it makes you much more grateful for not just your own life but also for this incredible process that we call development and of which is really just urbanization and industrialization. So I wanted "Apocalypse Never" to sort of remind people, introduce that reality to people, and also to see that it’s not the case where you industrialize and then you destroy nature. No! No, no, it’s subsistence culture at the forest frontier which is driving the destruction of critical health.
And that means poverty—Isn't that so cool though? Isn't that so cool when you step back and look at it? It's like, oh, poverty is causing a tremendous amount of environmental damage! So if we could make people rich and make things better biologically, let's say more sustainable, and actually the way to do the latter is to do the former—make people rich as fast as you possibly can, then they start to care! Absolutely! And then you say that to people; it's like resistance! It’s like, oh, I see you don’t want people to be rich on a healthy planet! So what's up with you? Exactly! If that's bugging you, what's going on?
Because that's a good goal, and all the smart environmentalists I've talked to, Lomborg is like at the pinnacle of that in many ways, they all come to that conclusion. And Marion too, and it's like, well, no, no, if you look at what happens, you educate women, birth rate plummets, and that'll actually be a problem in 100 years because there won't be enough people rather than too many. But that happens instantly, even in one generation!
And so that's the solution to population control, assuming we needed that, and so that's in alignment with every feminist school. And then as you get people out of this slash and burn agricultural cycle, well, they start to be more efficient in their use of resources and they’re not living hand to mouth, and so you make people rich and they become environmentalists, and it's like, okay, that isn't what we've been told, but that's how it works.
I wanted "Apocalypse Never" to sort of build on the work that Bjorn and others have done. I feel like sometimes what people hear when they read those analyses is they hear, well you're saying we should just get rich and then with our wealth we can buy environmental quality. And I wanted to paint a better picture of it, unpack it. I think cost-benefit analyses have a lot of good, but they hide a lot of assumptions. And I think those assumptions need to be unpacked for people.
So the issue is how is it that becoming rich saves the environment? Well, it’s because Bernadette in the Congo gets to move to the city. And when you ask Bernadette, hey, would you like to live in the city and have a job at a factory, she's like, hell yes! Is there one? No, that’s the problem in Congo. But it’s not like the picture that people have, which comes apart from Marx—you know, it's in Capital—the tragedy; they're not—the tragedy of the commons, the dark satanic mills.
Yes, exactly! This picture that these happy subsistence farmers have been forced into slave-like conditions in the factories? Women! Nine times out of ten it’s the opposite! They would like to go to the cities; they’re wanting to go to the cities to get those opportunities! And then when they leave their frankly low productive, crappy little farm behind much of the time, it just reverts to grassland and forests.
So they’re like—so stop crying about the loss of the family farm! I say this because I'm going to break my mom's heart because, you know, we lost the family farm in our generation. But for many people, losing the family farm is fine! Like, they're just like, it was terrible! For much of the world, losing the family farm is just fine! Like, they’re just like, it was terrible!
You know, and then it reverts to grasslands and forests just like it has in North America. I mean so much marginal farmland—I know—I don't remember how many more percentage-wise trees there are in the northern hemisphere since 100 years ago, but it's like 40 percent. And then, that's another thing that's really interesting is that a huge chunk of the planet has greened over the last 20 years too!
I think it's an area the size of the U.S.; it’s some staggering, staggering amount of land. Anyway, that just never comes up. It’s like—and the idea—I didn’t know as well until about six or seven years ago that we're in all likelihood going to peak at about nine billion people and then it’s like that’s going to plummet real fast, like really fast, by all appearances.
And so—and we can certainly sustain a population of nine billion as far as I can tell without wreaking environmental havoc, especially as we get smarter technologically—and that’s happening so fast that we can't even keep up with it! You talk about fish farming in relationship to that, for example.
Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, we produce so much food—I mean, Jordan, it's crazy, right? We have 25 food surpluses. I mean, we produce 25 percent more food than we need! We've never had surpluses that large of sheer total food production or the total size, and during the same period when we're using less and less land, so we're producing more and more food on less and less land. This is like one of the greatest human success stories of all times! We struggle with overweight; we struggle with obesity; we struggle with having too much food! In the future, we're gonna struggle with not having enough people in some countries—we already are!
I mean, that gives me some hope. Is that, you know, the New York Times had a front page story a few weeks ago about how, you know, the problems related to not having to—excuse me—to negative population growth, right? To population declines. You know, we knew really in the late ’60s, at the time when hysteria over overpopulation was the highest, we knew that the rate of increase had peaked and declined, so we really had to put up with another 20 years of just this apocalyptic nonsense around too many people.
My hope is that the same thing will happen with climate change. I mean, it's already happening! Carbon emissions, as you pointed out, have declined in the United States by 22 percent since 2004.
And why is that? What we should have a little chat about that. Why is that? Because no one predicted this.
So, yeah, I mean, natural gas in the short version, right? Fracking. I was very familiar with that because the fracking was everywhere in northern Alberta, which is saturated with hydrocarbons everywhere, you know? So it was a big part of the economy and fracking was par for the course there 40 years ago.
But it’s so—and this is so interesting too from an economic perspective when you're thinking about environmental policy. It's like these environmental breakthroughs did not come where we expected them to come! And you cite an MIT scientist on page 105. I wanted to read this because it’s so unlikely. I think—that’s—I hope I've got it in the right place here.
Oh, I won't read it; I'll just say it. He says if you really wanted to decrease carbon in the atmosphere, you might want to accelerate the rate at which coal is being burned in India.
So let’s unpack that. Because you think coal and India and lower carbon—what’s that about?
That’s Kerry Emanuel from MIT, and he points out that rising prosperity, coal-powered prosperity now, will result in people choosing to have fewer kids and therefore you'll have fewer people in the future producing more pollution.
The specifics of how that works, I mean that’s basically the whole story, is that prosperity—we should view prosperity as essential to protecting the natural environment, in part because of declines in population but also because we end up moving towards cleaner sources of energy, right? Once you get away from wood—so wood's really bad. Then coal—well, coal's got a lot cleaner—way cleaner, as you point out in your book.
And so that’s really—that's a really good thing. And so, but coal isn't as good, let's say, as natural gas, and maybe natural gas isn't as good as nuclear. Now, who knows? Because that’s complicated, but it’s a possibility.
And so, you want to get people away from wood as fast as possible. That’s part of that getting away from zero too, right, in terms of economic growth, is when you're at a subsistence level, you don't have enough time to be making the future better; you're just trying to survive today. You can't get off the ground and for the first time in human history, we could get everyone off the ground! No one would have to be at zero!
Then to give the radical leftist types credit, at least hypothetically, they’re concerned with all those people that are stuck at zero. Well, but the unexamined environmentalism is interfering with that in very complicated ways. And so it’s hard to sort this all out. Obviously, nobody part of what I wanted to do to go beyond I think some of the traditional criticisms of apocalyptic environmentalism was to sort of say look, there's a truly benevolent process of energy progress from wood and dung to coal and hydroelectric dams to oil and natural gas to nuclear.
So we can talk about nuclear, but basically what you're doing is you're shrinking the footprint, the land footprint required to produce those fuels to basically zero, you know? So to give you a sense of it, you know, coal has at least twice as much energy as a lump of wood. You go to oil and gas, you get significant increases; plus it’s coming from underground rather than above ground or having to destroy whole mountains, as you do for coal. You get to nuclear—uranium mining! I mean, you know, this amount, less than this amount of uranium, that amount of uranium provides me with all the power I need for my entire life—a whole high-energy life is completely available to you.
Yeah, one—we should have a bit of a chat about energy. It's like, okay, what’s wealth that you want to deliver to poor people? Okay, what's wealth? Energy! Make energy cheap; there are no poor people! Why? Well, because work requires energy, and work produces everything. And so if energy is dirt cheap, there aren't poor people! And so do you not want to have no poor people? It's like cheap energy, man—that’s your savior! And as you said, if we do this halfway intelligently, it’s always also extremely good for the planet.
So well—but the whole system has to come down because I'm depressed. So that's not a very good argument. And you know that depression issue is interesting too because I thought about depression technically in terms of hierarchy of values for a long time. So the serotonin system, when it becomes depleted, it takes less punishment to stop someone—an animal or a human being. And so you could imagine that if you're depressed, let’s say—I don't know, you forget to pick something up for your wife, eh? And if you're not depressed, you think, oh, I forgot to pick something up for my wife. I shouldn't do that again; maybe apologize.
But if you're depressed, you think, well, I forgot to pick up something for my wife; only a selfish person would do that. So that's one level up. I think I do selfish things all the time; I'm a bad person, and people are not good, and the future's bleak. And then every single negative issue cascades up the entire hierarchy until it becomes apocalyptic. That's what happens in depression. You can't buttress yourself against punishment, well, and anxiety as well—but technically.
And that's low serotonin! That’s partly why people hate to have their status challenged, because the higher you are in status, the better the serotonin system is at dampening the response to punishment, because it assumes the environment's safer. So those are all necessary things to know when you're thinking about your own thinking, you know, and so there’s there's another part of that depression sequence which is also like somehow the world is to blame for me failing to get my wife something for her birthday. There's some sort of external—like, why—I should have had…
You know something—you know, when you're... you can see the depression in a person. It’s evident, but then for those who might be well off, it's like a fine balance.
Right, right, exactly, yes! That’s so right!
Yes, it just is a question of accountability, and it comes down to it.
Yeah, absolutely! And you know, and I would just add too, you know, it was like the—when the Cold War ends, and the threat of nuclear war goes to very much lower than what it had been, the people who wanted something to see apocalypse in shifted from nuclear weapons to climate change; that’s when it occurred! And it’s only amazing—it’s difficult to prove but it is notable that climate emerges as the new apocalyptic threat when the threat of nuclear war declined significantly. And it also—yeah, well, there is something deep about that too. I mean, it's not accidental that the Bible has an apocalyptic book at the end of it. It’s like this idea that everything could end and that everything could fall apart—I mean that’s true in life—you have apocalypses in your life all the time.
And, and it’s very daunting to think about that! And so we do have to have a serious discussion about how to protect ourselves against unwarranted apocalyptic thinking. That's all playing out too with the COVID issue at the moment, so human psychological frailties we have to take them seriously because we're a planetary force, so absolutely, yeah.
And I mean, and there’s—I cited this incredible book by Vosslav Smil, who’s one of Bill Gates’ advisers, where he actually does look at the different apocalyptic threats and what he comes up with as the biggest ones. And I changed my mind too; I think he's right. He's like, much more worried about asteroids, wars, influenzas, and super volcanoes than climate change when you look at both probability and severity. So I totally agree; we should take—yeah, we should take those seriously.
But, yeah, we should also guard against clearly unwarranted apocalyptic thinking. I mean, you know, the truth of the matter is when you really look at the science of climate change, there isn't—in the IPCC, to its credit, does not include any apocalyptic scenarios. There isn't a good scientific scenario for how the world would end from climate change. Like you just have a hard time coming up with one.
So you should say that again because that's quite a striking statement—the “I” in the IPCC reports—there’s no apocalyptic vision.
Right! They don’t even—they don’t even say, when they say more people could die from climate change, what they are actually saying is they say, if all else were equal—meaning, if you didn’t have climate change and you had the same high levels of economic growth, but natural disasters have declined over 90 percent of the last 100 years—they’ve declined 99 percent in places like Bangladesh, just through better storm warning systems and storm shelters. There is no prediction in the IPCC that more people will die in the future from natural disasters than die today; that doesn’t exist!
There is no scientific body that has predicted an increase of deaths from natural disasters or an increase of deaths from disease or the other things that people worry about with climate change. It's all based on some idea that, yes, in a warmer world you could get more deaths than you would get if you didn’t have any warming at all.
But that’s first of all not even an option, and it doesn't account for the fact that the additional warming is a byproduct of higher levels of growth, which would, right, which is going to mitigate all of that damage and hopefully have positive environmental consequences.
And so, okay, so let's tackle another hard question—another hard question. So one of the pitfalls I suppose of apocalyptic thinking—and this is true perhaps practically as well as psychologically—is the notion of a runaway positive feedback loop, right? And so while the green, green land ice pack melts and then the currents in the oceans change because of that, especially the warming current that keeps England from not being arctic—that disappears and that happens like in two weeks and the whole damn thing freezes, and we’re all dead.
And so runaway positive feedback loops do happen! That—I mean, that's not inconceivable! So how do we know when—how do we deal with that, say, practically and psychologically?
Well, let's look at the ice first of all. So, it’s the West Antarctic ice shelf that we worry about or Greenland. So when they worry about losing those ice sheets, it's not in two weeks; it's in 700 years to over a thousand years. That's the period of which they're worried about us losing those ice sheets.
So you’re talking about an incredibly long period of time. Now, in terms of the Gulf Stream, which is how I initially became apocalyptic about climate change in the late 1990s, was reports that the Gulf Stream would shut down or that you would stop having the warm air being brought from, you know, the warm water and air being brought from the south to the north. And that was how I originally got fearful of it.
Well, the first thing you realize when you read those reports is that to the extent to which there's been changes in the Gulf Stream over history, they've occurred just on their own. Like it’s just as a natural cycle. So it’s not even caused by humans, but there is no evidence that that’s being caused by climate change—that we’re at some risk of shutting down the Gulf Stream. I just debunked it recently, and some of the reporters just—they—it's like a meme that these reporters will repeat every ten years or so.
And they end up trying to confuse people about it. Then I called—the most recent tipping point study published in Nature as an opinion piece must have been in 2019. I interviewed the lead author of it, and it’s just a kind of a bunch of speculation. I mean, they—this is why IPCC does not include it; that's why it's actually not science; it's not something that they call science or include in their predictions.
And I interviewed him about—he goes… and they had this whole scenario of ice sheets and the Gulf Stream and the Amazon, and I was trying to figure out how it would work exactly. And then he kind of goes, well, you know, he goes, look, the real problem is that at first they thought that there would be more—that greater warming would bring more rainfall to the Amazon. And then the scientists changed their minds, and now they think it’ll bring less. So you have these so-called feedback loops that we don’t even understand which direction much of the time they would go in.
So it's not to say that you shouldn't worry. I mean, you know, Bjorn—okay, so one of the things I always told my clinical clients when they were worried about something was, well, you’re hyper worried about that, but you’re not worried about a bunch of other things—like you’re hyper worried about taking action, but you’re not worried at all about not taking action. It’s like, well, where there might be a disaster lurking there too! It’s like there’s this notion, an unexamined notion, that there is some safe route, right?
Right, right.
And so that’s generally not the case. And so there is a small probability of an unexpected positive feedback loop, and perhaps that might even be heightened with climate change. Who knows? There's a small probability of that. But then there’s also the danger of panicking unnecessarily about hypothetical positive feedback loops and then spending a tremendous amount of money and demolishing things counterproductively, and are you so sure that’s not a bigger danger?
And so, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so that's right. So if you take it out of the climate economics, you do asteroids and you go, we should really be spending much more on asteroids. What's the right amount to spend on asteroid detection? Because we could spend a lot more on asteroid detection. Well, you could devote the whole GDP to asteroid detection, and then there might be a super volcano—and well, we didn’t spend all the money on investigating the super volcanoes. Or the same thing to be said for climate change, or an electromagnetic pulse from the sun, which is like a really high probability event once every hundred years, basically.
And one took out the Quebec power grid in like 1986, right? Knocked the whole northeast out! It’s like, that could really happen!
Yeah, so, yeah, there are epochs. The problem is with apocalypses is they're everywhere. It’s like—so, you know, what do we do about that? And that’s a hard question, but panicking and producing a panic apocalypse is not a good—certainly a panic apocalypse, right? That’s not a good answer.
I actually worked for a while with a group of astronauts who were attempting to produce this gadget way out in space that would nudge asteroids a tiny fraction of using a huge metal plate just to deflect them a tiny bit so they would miss the Earth, and it was a very well thought out proposal, but it never—you know, it didn’t capture the popular imagination, let’s say.
So, and that's also one of the things I kind of like about Lomborg's approach too is he tries to rank order catastrophes in some sense, right? And cost-benefit analysis does have the flaws that you describe, but you know, until we come up with a better method, or I see someone with a better method, I’m pretty attracted to what he’s doing. It’s practical.
And I haven't seen anything better, so you know, maybe you know of something better?
Yeah, I would just say the—one other positive way to say it is, you say we need to be resilient to many different kinds of catastrophes, right? That means that we need to embrace economic growth and resiliency because often the things that you're doing are the same things that you would do for a lot of different—so you want to have a robust security system, a robust detection system; you want to have a good scientific and technical class in your country.
Yeah, well, maybe you stop terrifying your young people into depressive neurosis too, because the best way to have a resilient society is to have people who are, you know, stalwart in the face of the unknown! Yeah, that's the kind of the bottom of things.
I just wrote an essay called "Why I Am Not a Progressive," where I was pushing back against the recent UN report which said, "No one is safe!"
Yeah, I know! It’s like "We're all gonna die!" You know, like, right?
And I was pushing back into… because you kind of—the opposite mentality of how you deal with any crisis—any—the way you deal with any crisis or any threat is we can do it! That’s the only thing that we know that works! The idea that, "Oh my God, we’re all going to die!” That's the opposite! Nobody… why bother if you think everybody’s going to die?
So that alone is a shift—I feel like in my generation, I mean, I grew up with the heroes being Nelson Mandela, you know, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, you know, and we might—you know, or even the socialist revolutionaries, who I have significant concerns with. But their attitude was not, "We're all going to die." It was not where no one is safe. The attitude was "We can do it!"
Now, we might not agree with their utopian projects in many situations, but that's a real shift, I think in the last 20 years is this shift.
And isn't it a funny thing that that shift has taken place?
Well, things have got so dramatically better!
Yeah, I mean, the degree to which we've been able to, as a species, to eradicate poverty essentially all throughout the world except for when it's caused by political stupidity is actually is absolutely beyond comprehension, right?
And a lot of that’s taken place in the last 15 years, and the speed at which that is occurring appears to be accelerating, right? And so the anxieties coming from Europeans, let's say, and elites in the United States and Canada who are saying we don’t know our place in the world, we used to be at the top of the pecking order, and now China is!
Right!
And the United States isn’t so sure where it stands, but you kind of go, it’s hard not to see that—for me, I see that as the connection, as it’s like really the rise of China, the eclipsing of Europe’s power.
And so why does Europe elevate Greta Thunberg, you know? A child saying—right?
Because they’re insecure about their place in the world!
Exactly! They’re looking!
They think they’re also wrestling with something we all are going to wrestle with is like, "Well, what do we do with our prosperity?" Like we’re not scrabbling around the dirt anymore, and thank God for that because, you know, our kids all died, and it was really hard. And so now we can sit back and think, "Okay, well, what is it we're up to?" Well, we don’t know exactly what to do with all this pro… we should eat a bunch—that’s kind of part of the solution for the last 40 years—eat more! And fair enough!
You know, God, wouldn't it take us like three generations to adapt to a surplus of food? When has that ever been a possibility? And so we’re waking up in some ways trying to figure out what to do with this.
I mean, Europe could have had the attitude, now we get to help Africa become rich! Now Africa gets to become rich, and in the process, they get to have parks with wildlife; they get to have both—that it’s actually not a trade-off! They get to have cities, and they get to liberate their women, and gays and lesbians can be free in big African cities as opposed to being persecuted in places like Uganda. Like, that could have been a project!
In fact, for a minute there, it seemed like it was going to be. You might remember Bono had this program called “Make Poverty History” in the early 2000s. It was this idea that we’re going to forgive jubilee; we’re going to forgive the debts of the poor countries, and Europe can become developed.
Well, and part of the—sorry, African American developed.
Yeah, yeah, well, Europe too, eh?
I mean, part of what happened to produce this economic miracle of the last two—since 2000; what’s really since 1989—because what happened was the collapse of communism, and the incredibly horrible consequences of having so many of those so-called developing countries fall under the sway of these, you know, completely pathological economic ideas, and that just went away.
And so part of the reason people got richer is because we just stopped doing so many stupid things, and even in Sub-Saharan Africa the rate of economic development has been magnificent over the last 20 years compared to, well, in some sense, the entire history of mankind before that.
And so that project is still well within our grasp, and it’s hard for people to actually imagine this, and it was for me too because I grew up under the shadow of that nuclear threat. I mean, all my friends were apocalyptic to the core, and there was real danger there!
I mean, the keys were in the silos in 1962 at least once! So, like, we were on the edge, man!
Absolutely!
And so a lot of us didn't feel we had a future, and you know, some of that was rationalization and depression, but some of it was, well, a real existential problem. And now we could wake up and say—and this is