A Thriving Planet
People on the left think that people on the right don’t care about the climate. Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords, he wants to allow fracking, and the right are climate change deniers who just don’t give a damn about our future!
People on the right believe politicians are using climate change as an excuse to grab more power and levy more taxes. If they truly believed in climate change, they wouldn’t fly private to their fancy conferences and buy beachfront property, and banks wouldn’t finance those properties.
People on the left believe that “the science is settled” because 97% of scientists agree.
People on the right don’t “trust the science”, especially when it’s being confused with groupthink.
People on the left believe that we can accurately measure the temperature of the earth over time.
People on the right are not so sure.
People on the left want more windmills and solar panels and electric cars.
People on the right point out that windmills, solar panels, and batteries use a lot of rare earth elements and other elements, the mining of which causes considerable harm to the environment.
People on the left tend to be scared of nuclear power because of the fear of meltdowns like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
People on the right are excited about fourth generation nuclear which cannot melt down, and which can use waste from previous generations of nuclear reactors as fuel.
People on the left feel there are too many humans and if only there were fewer of us, the planet would be in better shape. And meanwhile, those of us that do live here need to conserve water and energy, fly less, drive less, eat less meat, and take other measures to reduce our carbon footprint.
People on the right think there’s a fine number of humans, although the birth rate across the West is too low, and the planet can easily sustain more humans, so long as we’re smart about how we use it. As for carbon footprint, since we’ve got all of India, China, Brazil, and other countries that want to catch up to the living standard of the West, reducing our carbon footprint is not going to do much. Innovation is the only way out.
People on the left fear that we’re a few years away from a climate catastrophe where irreversible damage will be done and humanity is doomed. Since it doesn’t look like the right is willing to act on this, it might not be worth having children, because they’d be born into a terrible world.
People on the right think that’s nonsense. They point out that all models are flawed and easily manipulated, and that just a few decades ago climate alarmists warned of a new ice age, before it became global warming and now climate change because they just don’t know what they’re talking about.
The bottom line is that we all care, and we need to have honest conversation and research and learn from each other. Name calling and fear mongering is not helping.
Trusting Ourselves with the Truth
Here’s my take.
I too want a planet that can sustain life forever. A planet that gets healthier and healthier every year. That’s clean and beautiful. Where animals and plants can thrive right alongside humans. Where we work in harmony with nature and its ecology, not against it.
I remember 25 years ago when my fellow countryman Bjørn Lomborg hit the global news with his research on climate change.
His research concluded that the fears were way overblown, that there were both good things and bad consequences to global warming, and that the vast sums of money in expenses and lost productivity that it would cost to reduce our carbon footprint enough to make a difference could be much better spent on mitigating the consequences or unrelated efforts to combat poverty, disease, and death.
One of my good friends who worked for McKinsey at the time told me that while he agreed with Lomborg’s conclusions, it was dangerous to say out loud, because if you didn’t scare people, they’d never act to make changes.
I thought that was a morally wrong argument then, and I still do.
It reminds me of this quote from JFK:
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
We must trust the public and each other with the truth. We cannot accept living by lies.
That means not shutting down viewpoints and facts we disagree with by labeling.
We need to bring together the very best minds to solve whatever problems there are.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time listening to different voices and thinking about this, and to me certain things are clear.
Human beings are resilient, creative, innovative, and when their backs are against the wall and the smartest among us are allowed to come together and innovate, we can solve anything.
The best instrument for doing that is private business. Set the incentives right, and the private sector will deliver.
Good Data
Measuring the temperature of the earth is remarkably complicated. We’ve been using direct measurements since the 1800s, satellites since the 1970s, and proxies like ice cores and tree rings for older data.
All of these are flawed, and in order to get to the actual numbers we have to make a bunch of assumptions, all of which are just our best misconceptions so far. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, but we should recognize that the numbers are not “the truth”.
How reliable is a time series of temperature since the 1800s, even if you measured the temperature in the exact same spot? Cities are hotter than rural areas, so as a city grows nearer the location of the measuring station, that’s going to cause the temperature to go up, even though it’s not the temperature of the planet as such that rose, just the heat glow from the city.
How do you aggregate temperature data from all these different spots across the globe to arrive at a global temperature? A lot of assumptions go into that.
Satellites don’t actually measure the temperature directly, they look at other signals to arrive at a number. How accurate are those?
I’m not saying we cannot know at all, I’m just saying that it’s way more complicated than we think, and I don’t trust the media or scientists who believe that consensus is science.
I trust the scientific method.
Science vs Scientists vs Scientism
The scientific method is a way of learning about the world. It’s awesome.
We observe, we formulate a question, we establish a hypothesis, which must be falsifiable, we conduct experiments, then gather data and analyze the data in order to draw conclusions about our hypothesis. Then others replicate the same experiment to see if it holds up, and if it does, then this becomes the prevailing theory, or misconception. It’s not true. It’s just our best theory or misconception, until a better one comes along. Science is never settled.
(I’d believe that when it comes to paranormal phenomena, we need a different process, but that’s a story for another book. If you’re curious, read Extraordinary Knowing by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer.)
Scientists are people. Like any human, they’re flawed. Humans are susceptible to social pressure and confirmation bias. Most people don’t want to rock the boat, cause a ruckus, or do something that might jeopardize their way of life. They just want to fit in, provide for themselves and their families, and have a good life.
Scientism is the term I use for the dogma of Science. You could also call it “The Church of Science.” It’s the belief in Science as our new God, as a source of unassailable dogma, a mysterious entity that tells us The Truth, never to be questioned, so we mere mortals don’t have to hurt our pretty little brains with these complicated matters. Trust the Science. Whatever you do, do not do your own independent research or thinking. You’re not qualified, mere mortal.
But thinking is hard, integrity is in short supply, the desire to comply is strong, and people everywhere fall prey to it.
There’s a crisis in science right now. From Google:
A 2015 study found that fewer than half of 100 psychology studies could be replicated. The average effect size in the replicated studies was also only half of the original studies.
A 2012 study found that researchers could only replicate six out of 53 cancer biology studies. A separate study found that reproducibility rates in cancer biology were as low as 11%.
A 2018 study found that only about 62% of 21 social and behavioral science papers could be replicated.
Most scientific activity right now is being funded by organizations that have an interest in a particular outcome. If they don’t get the outcome they want, the study won’t get published, and neither will the data. There’s a lot of pressure to provide the “correct” answer.
This isn’t science. This is just abusing the veneer of a white lab coat to defraud people. It’s no better than the snake oil salesmen. And it’s rampant, especially in medicine, psychology, and social studies.
And personally, given how much money is at stake, I wouldn’t trust climate science much either. The combination of all the reporting feeling like activism, and past predictions having failed, makes me very skeptical. It’s just the way my brain is wired.
You won’t make me believe stuff by exaggerating and obfuscating and fear mongering, like my McKinsey friend recommended. Only by telling the truth, like JFK advocated. I think there are quite a few others out there like me.
A really important principle in real science is to celebrate the outliers, the contrarians.
It takes guts and critical thinking to go against the mainstream consensus.
You might never get another grant. You might never get another job. It can be career ending to go against what the higher-ups want.
So just like we need to celebrate and protect whistleblowers, we need to do the same for scientific contrarians and muckrakers.
We’re doing the opposite. That’s concerning.
CO2
CO2 is the big villain in climate change. It’s a bit more complicated than we’ve led to believe, though.
Historically, temperatures rise first, then CO2 rises. The claim is that the temperature rise triggers release of CO2, which then triggers the greenhouse effect, causing temperatures to rise even more. It compounds.
If the release of CO2 causes a compounding effect, why don’t temperatures spiral out of control?
The answer is because of counteracting processes: orbital changes, enhanced carbon uptake by oceans and ecosystems, and negative feedback loops like ice-albedo effects. These eventually slow and reverse warming, leading to cooling phases like ice ages.
The climate is always changing due to forces way beyond our control.
Some but not all of the changes we’ve seen are most likely due to human activity. How much we can’t know for sure, we can only model and estimate.
CO2 also has benefits. It’s plant food. Vegetation thrives or more CO2. And that vegetation becomes a carbon sink, absorbing more CO2, still. It’s not likely to be able to absorb all the CO2 we’ve added, but it needs to be included in the calculation.
CO2 is currently at 420 ppm. Before the industrial revolution it was up to 280 ppm. At 10,000 ppm, people get headaches, so we obviously don’t want to get there.
There are also lots of technologies being developed that suck CO2 out of the air. There’s a lot more that can be done here.
I’m not saying CO2 isn’t a problem to deal with. I’m just pointing out things aren’t as black and white. We need to move past our childish desire to Disneyfy everything into heroes and villains, finger pointing and blame.
And any mitigation effort will have costs. Sometimes they’re crazy high, not just in direct costs, but also in lost productivity gains.
Most of the increase in CO2 comes from our need for energy like heat and electricity that we use to not freeze to death, not get too hot, keep the lights on, and power all of the machines that do all the amazing things we’ve gotten accustomed to.
Alex Epstein makes the moral case for fossil fuels in his books The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future. I find his arguments quite convincing. The essence is that burning fossil fuels is by far a net good, in the way it raises the standard of living and saves lives. And with the extra productivity, we can easily afford to mitigate any downsides.
In fact, the only reason we have the luxury of worrying about climate change is because of the incredible progress thanks to fossil fuels.
Sources of Energy
Personally, I’m fine with burning fossil fuels for now, and I trust that humanity will find better sources of energy in the future.
I’m not a huge fan of wind and solar, for several reasons. The harmful environmental effects of mineral mining is one. The fact that the devices don’t last that long, and then need to be discarded. The fact that they’re not reliable—they only work when the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Which means we need fossil fuels or batteries as backup. If I had to pick one, I’d go with solar over wind.
But what I’m more excited about is fourth generation nuclear and zero point energy.
Nuclear
Fourth generation nuclear seems like a slam dunk. I think the fear of nuclear power has always been way overblown. I remember back in elementary school, probably around 1980, there was a demo against nuclear power in Denmark. I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t get it now. Nuclear releases no CO2, and produces energy around the clock.
Yes, there’s nuclear waste and the risk of meltdown. Nuclear waste is manageable, but a meltdown is obviously terrible. But I think if we hadn’t gotten scared and pulled back on nuclear power four decades ago, we’d long ago have innovated our way out of that. The technology is well known, it’s just been hobbled by way too much regulation.
I believe it’s time to get serious about nuclear energy again.
Potentially they could even be made small enough that every home and car could have its own nuclear reactor that would be safe and clear. Seems like a promise worth pursuing. Not by the government, thank you very much. But by getting rid of overly restrictive regulation so entrepreneurs and innovators can get after it. There’s a lot of money in energy.
Zero Point Energy
And then there’s zero point energy. I honestly cannot tell if it’s far fetched and not practical, or it’s a solved problem currently in use by our government, but hidden from all of us because of the massive implications it would have on our economy and power structures.
I lean towards the latter, as you’d probably expect given my worldview.
Zero point energy was first introduced by the German physicist Max Planck in 1911 as part of his work on blackbody radiation. He initially described it as “residual energy” present in a system even at absolute zero.
According to Richard Feynman, even in a seemingly empty vacuum, there is a constant fluctuation of virtual particles appearing and disappearing, representing a sea of energy that is present everywhere, even at absolute zero. He described this by saying that "one teacup of empty space contains enough energy to boil all the world's oceans." That’s a lot of energy.
The idea is that if we can figure out how to tap into that energy field, we can have all the energy we need, with no environmental harm, and at very low cost. It would completely turn our world upside down.
Ashton Forbes is an independent researcher who has dove deep into the mysterious disappearance of flight MH370 in 2014, and he believes there’s evidence there that it involves secret zero point energy capabilities that the US government has.
I’ve seen other stories of people who developed zero point energy technology, only to die under mysterious circumstances.
What’s the truth?
I believe that zero point energy is real. Max Planck and Einstein both said so.
I believe that having access to practically unlimited, free energy through the zero point field would completely upend the world. The blob would not want that.
I don’t know if zero point energy is practical as a source of energy today, anytime soon, or ever. That’s the big question.
But if it was, the implications would be massive.
Oil, coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuels would be worthless, as would all of the infrastructure built around them, like drilling platforms, refineries, gas stations, pipelines, and so on.
A lot of countries in the Middle East would find themselves a lot poorer and with a lot less power. The petrodollar would be worthless. I’m assuming that the US owes a lot of its stronghold over the entire world to its control of energy. If energy was freely available, would the empire collapse? I can’t tell, but it seems like it would shake up things quite a bit.
If it was indeed possible, you could see how the US government would want to keep it under wraps. Whether they’d be able to is another question.
I don’t know what the deal is, but the potential is massive.
What to Do About Climate Change?
Assuming that there is a real, human caused effect on the climate, I think we should continue full force on innovation and productivity growth through energy, even if it increases CO2 in the short term.
I trust in human ingenuity to solve any crisis we face. Always bet on humans.
Let’s go all-in on nuclear power and zero point energy technology and see how far we can get with those.
Let’s also leverage solar today, since it already exists.
And let’s develop cost-effective technologies to suck CO2 out of the air.
The important part is to find ways to do all of this without the government trying to run it. Anything the government runs turns into corruption, grift, and waste. This is too important for the government to fuck up.
We need to construct incentives so entrepreneurs and innovators can step in and solve the challenge.
The good news is that brilliant people like Elon Musk already are. That makes me very hopeful.
The answer is not to put limits on productivity growth. The answer is to have even more productivity growth so we have the extra bandwidth to innovate.
Let’s make new products that are so compelling that people desire them over the alternative. I own a Tesla. I don’t care that it’s electric. In fact, I’m a bit concerned about the EMF effect on my body when sitting on a massive battery. But I’m willing to live with it, because I don’t drive all that much, but more importantly, it’s the best car ever built. Driving a BMW or Mercedes feels so last century in comparison.
That’s how we solve climate change.
Ecology
But climate change isn’t the only part of a healthy planet.
Dan Barber is a chef in New York. In 2010 he did a TED talk about how he fell in love with a fish. It’s well worth watching.
In it he describes the difference between two worldviews when it comes to growing our food and our relationship with nature.
One is an industrial fish farm where the fish are crowded together and fed ground up industrial chicken waste like feathers, blood, and bone meal. Yikes!
The other is Veta la Palma in Spain: A sustainable fish farm that operates within a natural ecosystem. Instead of feeding the fish, the farm creates an environment where the fish feed themselves naturally by maintaining a balanced ecosystem. The fish are healthier, and the system supports a wide range of wildlife.
They taste a heck of a lot better too.
And I bet they’re a lot better for you.
I don’t understand how we don’t understand that humans and our environment evolved together.
Respect nature. Work with nature. Respect the plants and animals that we eat. Treat them with respect. Cook them with love. Eat them with calm and gratitude.
And take care of our local environment. Pick up the trash on the street.
Honor and respect the fragile ecology of mother Earth. Learn everything we can about it. But don’t ever assume you know everything or that you know better. We’re not Gods. Don’t play one on TV.
